★Superior Viaduct
Never Been In A Riot
No band captures the DIY punk ethos better than The Mekons. As one critic wrote of the group, "Those who couldn't play tried to learn and those who could tried to forget."Their debut EP first appeared on Fast Product in 1978, featuring the collective's original six-piece lineup and delivering three startlingly original songs – "Never Been In A Riot," "32 Weeks" and "Heart And Soul" – that never appeared on any of their albums. Like fellow Leeds misfits Gang of Four and Delta 5, The Mekons form a…
Where Were You / I'll Have To Dance Then (On My Own)
No band captures the DIY punk ethos better than The Mekons. As one critic wrote of the group, "Those who couldn't play tried to learn and those who could tried to forget."The Mekons' second 7-inch stands as a lasting monument to the punk era. "Where Were You," an anthem with chiming guitars, military-style drums and snotty lyrics, may be one of the most epic songs written with just two chords. The angular spasms and up-front bass thump of "I'll Have To Dance Then (On My Own)" would become tenets…
A Beard Of Bees
Originally self-released in 1984, A Beard Of Bees has been out of print for almost 25 years. Among This Kind Of Punishment's myriad recordings, A Beard Of Bees best outlines the collective vision of the Jefferies brothers. Their classic second album feels more meticulous than its predecessor, proffering a grey, near-Mancunian influence that serves as both touchstone and springboard for the proceedings. The unique maneuvering on "Trepidation" is a marvel: guitar sweetness shifting toward melancho…
This Kind Of Punishment
In the fertile terrain of New Zealand's 1980s post-punk scene, few figures loom as large as the Jefferies brothers. Graeme Jefferies and Peter Jefferies – the primary forces behind This Kind of Punishment – wrote some of the best music to come out on Flying Nun, Xpressway or elsewhere. A dizzying mix of pastoral ballads and DIY experimentation, TKP's songwriting was at once classic and acutely raw. On their self-titled debut, the Jefferies brothers and Chris Matthews eschew the punk-informed mod…
Worlds Within Worlds
Unwinding history - catching a glimpse of its truths, can be a near impossible task. There’s an understandable tendency to look in the obvious places, seeking generality and concise definition to guide the way. While this presents obvious paradoxes within the fields of avant-garde sound practice and experimental music - territories which, by their very nature, are resistant to genre, categorization, and definition, the impulse persists, allowing strange and singular free-standing efforts to slip…
Fetus, Pollution, Sulle corde di Aries
** 3 LP in bundle** There is no figure in Italian music, nor within the country’s shimmering, expansive avant-garde, who demands the respect and awe offered to Franco Battiato. He is the beginning and the end. An artist whose output, stretching across six decades, is so diverse and singular, that it defies any concrete definition - darting from psychedelic Prog, definitive gestures in the history of Minimalism, to the heights of explicit Pop. Fans of avant-garde and experimental music have long …
Sulle corde di Aries
1973’s Sulle Corde Di Aries was Franco Battiato's third release and showed his fascination for electronic, minimalist and systemic musics, as well as his third chapter in Battiato’s foray into esoteric pop. While the artist would venture further out into avant-garde terrain on subsequent releases, his early records enjoy a lyrical and playful spirit—eschewing traditional, song-based composition in favor of kosmische voyages. On Sulle Corde Di Aries, Battiato guides the labyrinthine structural ch…
Pollution
Pollution from 1972 is the captivating follow-up to Fetus. Like its predecessor, the album features Baroque textures, motorik rhythms, weird tape effects and Franco Battiato’s perfectly oblique vocals, with a minimalist sound mainly based on the use of a VCS3 synth, unusual lyrics, complex arrangements: upon hearing Pollution, Frank Zappa joyfully proclaimed it “genius.” While Battiato’s core group of collaborators remains largely the same as on his debut, this phenomenal band (joined by an eigh…
Fetus
"Fetus is an album beyond all definition. It's a masterpiece of daring and wild risks that work every single time. Battiato takes us through eight uniquely super-detailed songs that tug at the heart strings as no other experimental record ever could." Jim O' Rourke. Franco Battiato is often heralded as Italy's answer to Brian Eno. A quizzical composer/lyricist, Battiato turned pop music upside down in the early '70s with three classic LPs – Fetus, Pollution and Sulle Corde Di Aries – that for…
A Minute To Pray A Second To Die
CD version. Reissue issue of an album described by Byron Coley as “the best rock record ever recorded”. The Flesh Eaters is the name behind one Chris Desjardins a.k.a. Chris D. Taking his stage name from a 1964 cult film, Chris D. wrote for legendary fanzine Slash in the late ’70s and assembled the first of many Flesh Eaters lineups from heavyweights in the burgeoning L.A. punk scene. After releasing a ravenous EP and heart-ripping debut album, The Flesh Eaters unleashed their era-defining state…
You & You
DNA burst onto NYC's underground scene in the late '70s and recorded their lone single at Ultima Sound (the same studio where Suicide made their first album) in May 1978 just weeks prior to the pivotal No New York sessions with Brian Eno. Featuring the original lineup of Arto Lindsay (vocals/guitar), Robin Crutchfield (keyboards) and Ikue Mori (drums), You & You is DNA's indelible debut that perfectly captures the anti-movement of No Wave: clearly defined and purposely oblique with traditional r…
Cosmic Music
John Coltrane transformed the inner architecture of jazz throughout the mid-1950s and 1960s and long after his premature death at age 40 in 1967. No other American musician could be said to be at the spiritual center of the '60s musical universe as Trane influenced Albert Ayler, La Monte Young, Jimi Hendrix and everybody in between.Cosmic Music, originally self-released by Alice Coltrane in 1968 and later issued by Impulse!, features two tracks ("Manifestation" and "Rev. King") by John Coltrane'…
Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain
In the years following his reemergence into the world of music in the 1990’s, until his untimely death last year, Tony Conrad was a towering presence in American experimental music. He was it’s grand patriarch. A monolith. A beam of light shining on the future and past. Beginning with his efforts during the early 1960’s, Conrad set the terms for how experimental practice is currently understood and pursued, yet with a vision and being so completely focused on the present, it was often hard to re…
Go to Town
The Pin Group went back into the studio in January 1982 to record their third and final classic release. Featuring an expanded five-piece lineup with Mary Heney on guitar/vocals and Peter Fryer on viola, Go To Town is a work of taut perfection. Showcasing the band's dramatic chiaroscuro textures and arresting lyrics, "Long Night" and "When I Tell You" make staggeringly clear how much sonic ground The Pin Group covered in their unfortunately short tenure.
Rosemary Lane
Release Date on May 5th. By the time Rosemary Lane was released in 1971, Bert Jansch had covered a great deal of territory on numerous albums as a solo artist, collaborations with John Renbourn and records by the band in which he and Renbourn sang and played guitar, Pentangle. Returning to the intimate economy of his self-titled debut LP from a half-dozen or so years earlier, Rosemary Lane was recorded on portable equipment by engineer/producer Bill Leader and featured Jansch with no accompani…
Birthday Blues
Release Date on May 5th. Bert Jansch's freewheeling fifth album, Birthday Blues, occupies a unique place in his solo discography. Released in 1969, the same year Basket of Light propelled Pentangle into the UK pop charts, Birthday Blues almost sounds like a Pentangle LP missing John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee. Backed-up by bandmates Danny Thompson and Terry Cox, Jansch neither holds back his characteristic moodiness nor takes himself too seriously. What's more, Jansch is in love. Heather Rosem…
Coat
Wasting little time, The Pin Group released Coat in November 1981, merely two months after their first single. On the title track, Humphries' distant vocals call out as tense rhythms gradually push listeners over the edge. B-side track "Jim" could easily have been recorded in Manchester circa 1979, but remains a master class in NZ post-punk atmospherics, menacing from start to finish.
Ambivalence 7
Ambivalence was not only The Pin Group's hypnotic debut, but also the very first release on Flying Nun. While guitarist Roy Montgomery, bassist Ross Humphries and drummer Peter Stapleton build off each other's jittery riffs, Montgomery's uncanny baritone pierces the torrential clangor. Conjuring both Wire's Chairs Missing and VU's White Light/White Heat, the band captures a truly unique sound – evocative, yet austere.
Propellers In Love
Arnold Dreyblatt has been called "the most rock 'n' roll of all the composers to emerge from New York's downtown scene in the 1970s." Arnold Dreyblatt founded the Orchestra Of Excited Strings in 1979, harnessing unusual tuning intervals to an exuberant performance style. Propellers In Love, the Orchestra's second album – originally released in 1986 on the Stasch imprint, in conjunction with the contemporary art space Künstlerhaus Bethanien – develops Dreyblatt's rhythmically exacting exploration…
Two Solo Pieces
For his second album, Two Solo Pieces, Jon Gibson forgoes the dense, multi-layered timbres of Visitations in favor of simple textures and tone. While Two Solo Pieces serves up further evidence of Gibson's centrality to American minimalism – witness its inclusion in Alan Licht's famed Minimal Top Ten list – this profoundly intimate record also reveals the beauty of enclosed spaces and infinite harmonic vistas. As its unadorned title suggests, Two Solo Pieces consists of a pair of side-long track…