★Superior Viaduct
Transcendence
**2023 Much-needed Repress** Transcendence was not only Alice Coltrane's last studio album for Warner Bros., it would also be her last studio work for nearly three decades. While Eternity and Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana followed the composer's muse through an exciting range of musical styles and influences, Transcendence is perhaps the most fully realized of the three LPs, synthesizing the best elements of each into a monumental whole. Side one consists of intimate compositions with Alice's poin…
The Black Record
Necessary reissue of a truly seminal, minimalist totem
Grey Scale
David Cunningham was born in Ireland in 1954. His work ranges from pop music to gallery installations including several collaborations with visual artists. His first significant commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single "Money," an international hit in 1979.
Originally released in 1976, Cunningham's first solo album Grey Scale has become a landmark statement of DIY minimalist composition – continuing in the vein of the wild explosion of arthouse experimentation from the early '70s.…
Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo
2023 Repress. Of all the releases on Italy's legendary Cramps Records, Raul Lovisoni and Francesco Messina's seminal LP from 1979 has long remained among the most beloved. Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo not only introduced the world to the work of two gifted composers, but also is notable for being produced by electronic pioneer Franco Battiato. A sister album to Prati Bagnati would be Giusto Pio's breathtaking Motore Immobile, likewise graced with the maestro's gentle hand around the same time…
Zuckerzeit
Cluster was the pioneering German duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Formed on the cusp of the 1970s, they were a part of West Germany's nascent Kosmische Musik scene. The group would use restrained improvisational techniques similar to Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, working with both electric and acoustic instruments (organ, guitar, tone generators, cello, etc.) to create a singular sound that Julian Cope called "a huge beating heart, planet-sized and awesome."
Following the release of…
II
Cluster was the pioneering German duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Formed on the cusp of the 1970s, they were a part of West Germany's nascent Kosmische Musik scene. The group would use restrained improvisational techniques similar to Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, working with both electric and acoustic instruments (organ, guitar, tone generators, cello, etc.) to create a singular sound that Julian Cope called "a huge beating heart, planet-sized and awesome." Originally released in …
Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To
In the swirl of kaleidoscopic recordings that is Spacemen 3's discography, Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To occupies a pivotal position – one at the nexus between their garage beginnings and expansionist future. Spacemen 3 capture the inspired spark of mid-'80s psychedelia, offering a distinct variation on high pop through layered feedback, a formidable rhythm section and shining vocals. Taking Drugs features the legendary Northampton demos, which secured the band's first record deal …
Recurring
2022 Repress 1990's Recurring, the fourth and final studio album by Spacemen 3, is often considered the introduction of two brilliant solo projects (Spectrum and Spiritualized) rather than the work of a functioning band. While Spacemen 3's departing statement surely reveals a deep divide within the S3 camp -- each side of the LP was written by Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce separately and, unlike previous releases, the two do not play on each other's songs -- Recurring maintains a cohesive, dream…
Playing With Fire
Spacemen 3 began assembling their third album, 1988's Playing With Fire, at perhaps the freest, most confident point in their career. Recording began with the band road-tested and rugged, even amidst the functional volatility that famously motivated their course. The sessions' first offering came in the form of 'Revolution,' a single of heroic Stooges-devotion and the most commercially successful release the group had to date. High expectations for the album were soon exceeded, as Playing With …
Dreamweapon
"August 1988, Spacemen 3 embark on one of the strangest events in the band's already strange history. Billed as 'An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar Music' (although consciously omitting the sitar), the group would play in the foyer of Watermans Arts Centre in Brentford, Middlesex to a largely unsuspecting and unsympathetic audience waiting to take their seats for Wim Wenders' film Wings Of Desire. Spacemen 3's proceeding set, forty-five minutes of repetitive drone-like guitar riffs, could be seen …
Four Organs/Phase Patterns
** 2022 Repress ** Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in 20th century music. Though he studied at the prestigious arts institutions Julliard and Mills College, by the mid-1960s Reich set about dismantling the very orthodoxy that he had been trained in. Forming a new musical language based on repetitive processes, Reich became established as part of the so-called "Big Four" of New York minimalists (along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass). Reich's influence can …
Nation Time
2022 Repress. "Joe McPhee's solo album, Tenor literally changed my life. The recording (one of his first for Hat Hut, in September 1976) displayed his unique ability to integrate unconventional sounds and extended techniques with pure melodicism, and it permanently altered my perspective on what the saxophone could do and what music could be. Nation Time was recorded six years earlier, but ideas regarding the integration of means and methods were already at the forefront of McPhee's approach to …
Jackson C. Frank
2022 Repress Jackson C. Frank’s eponymous album is the embodiment of folk legend. Issued in late 1965 on the UK Columbia label, it was for many years more famous for its producer (Paul Simon) and the musicians who would go on to cover its songs (Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny) than for the hauntingly beautiful music contained inside. Frank’s backstory certainly adds to the legacy: born in Buffalo, New York, he used the settlement from a childhood accident to sail to London where he quickly…
The Sinking of The Titanic
Mega-Tip! Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint.
The Sinking of the Titanic, Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden voyage…
The Pavilion of Dreams
**Repress** For five decades, Harold Budd stood on the forefront of the West Coast avant-garde. Born in Los Angeles, he studied with Schoenberg-pupil Gerald Strang and began teaching at CalArts in 1970. While searching for his own voice, he was influenced as much by abstract expressionist painters as by John Cage and Morton Feldman. In his work, Budd brought delicate, slowing-moving melodies to the foreground – creating a new musical language based on “eternally pretty music” and smooth surfaces…
Since There Were Circles
Singer-songwriter Bob Lind will forever be immortalized by his 1965 hit, »Elusive Butterfly«, but his career is so much more interesting than the fading wonder of that one hit. Once a hard-partying buddy of Charles Bukowski, Lind was the inspiration for the character »Dinky Summers«, a down-on-his-luck folk singer in Bukowski's 1978 novel Women. Lind also doubled as a writer, penning a number of novels and plays as well as serving as a long-time staff writer at the lowbrow tabloid Weekly World N…
The Ascension
** 2022 Much-Needed repress ** Glenn Branca's first full-length album The Ascension is a colossal achievement. After touring much of 1980 with an all-star band featuring four guitarists (Banca, fellow composers Ned Sublette and David Rosenbloom, and future Sonic Youth member Lee Ranaldo) along with Jeffrey Glenn on bass and Stephan Wischerth on drums, Branca took his war-torn group into a studio in Hell's Kitchen to record five incendiary compositions.
Originally released in the summer of 1981, …
San Francisco’s Doomed
The legend of San Francisco’s Crime looms large among punk aficionados the world over. Formed in the mid-1970s, the band’s dual-guitar sound, confrontational image and sleazed methodology still serve as inspiration decades later. With only a handful of singles released during their active lifespan, Crime’s legacy grew significantly as archival recordings began to trickle out in the early 1990s. Of all these excavations, San Francisco’s Doomed was one of the first and certainly one of the most po…
Buy
Soon after their 1978 debut on the Brian Eno-produced No New York, a compilation that defined the No Wave scene, James Chance’s group Contortions had already evolved— getting sharper, tighter and just plain faster. Despite the loss of keyboardist Adele Bertei and bassist Geoge Scott (who refused to sign a new contract demanded by Chance and his then partner, band manager Anya Phillips) Contortions were firing on all cylinders, and their first full-length album, 1979’s Buy, is a marvel of hot-wir…
Teenage Rebel (7")
"Teenage Rebel" remains the anthem for every disaffected youth on the planet. Not included on The Avengers' infamous Pink album, this song is a two-minute package of pure adolescent vitriol. Backed with "Friends of Mine," a declaration of solidarity for the punks of San Francisco. Recorded in 1978 at the famed Iguana Studios on Folsom Street.