New Arrivals
Can't Stop It! (Australian Post-Punk 1978-82)
Originally released in 2001. A long overdue compilation of Australia's incredible post-punk history, featuring the finest selection of bands from the period 1978-82, with many previously-unreleased tracks. This is a fantastically inventive and dynamic time in Australian music history, a time when Australia stepped out of the shadow of overseas influence and asserted its own musical identity for the first time. All of the bands on Can't Stop It! released their music independently, either t…
Destroying The Night Sky
A very special release with an unusual mix of sound: Using Cadaverous Condition's "To The Night Sky" album as source material for their tracks, all the aforementioned bands have created a unique new style of music. Call it metal ambient, drone metal or electronics metal, the result is something previously unknown and exciting. Hear Nurse With Wound doing one of their darkest tracks ever - listen to Controlled Bleeding's totally insane restructuring of a rock track, or be surprised by Nocturnal E…
The headlans
CD version housed in a Digipak following the immediate sell out of the LP version. Released to coincide with Ellen Fullman's new full length for Important titled "Through Glass anes." Full length collaboration between Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong, and Barn Owl produced by The Norman Conquest. Barn Owl's extended drones and Theresa and The Norman Conquest's strings are the perfect accompaniment to Fullman's Long Stringed Instrument; a product of her own invention. This is an album of deep mater…
For Tomasz Sikorski
This release then of three short pieces under ten minutes by the Pole; Autograph (1980), Rondo (1984) and Zertstreutes Hinausschauen (1971) clearly holds some emotional resonance for Tilbury as he reflects on the music of his deceased old friend, and he then adds a fourth track here, a thirteen minute long improvisation in Sikorski's memory. The composed pieces here are each a nice listen, with the opening Autograph possibly the pick, as small flurries of melodic fragment are rotated, so …
Devin & Gary Go Outside!
What’s this? A rockin’ new album by Devin Flynn and Gary Panter? Yes, it’s a breezy country/psych full length jam from Devin and Gary. Gary sings lead and guitar and Devin conjures forth ambitious, omnivorous and altogether ambidextrous soundscapes, not to mention some sweet harmonizing. The sound of this record is the sound of two dudes hanging out on a Spring day, having fun. Devin and Gary: they don’t just go outside, they go all the way. - Picture Box
Malaikat dan Singa
Arrington de Dionyso is a multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, synths and bass clarinet, does Tuvan throat singing and generally sings with the intensity of a madman. And despite being an America, on Malaikat dan singa he sings in Indonesian, which, thanks to his idiosynchratic singing style, makes him sound particularly demented. As it happens, the lyrics are adapted and translated lines from poems by William Blake. Not that you would understand a single one of them unless you know Indonesia…
The Minimalism Of Erik Satie
"[...] Satie, the original "Enfant Terrible", was a strange man with strange thoughts that produced strange music with strange titles that don't seem so shocking today ("Jack-in-the-Box", "Driveling Preludes for a Dog", "Dried Embryos"), but considering that he was born two centuries ago, this bad boy of classical music deserves a very close look.Satie lived an unconventional life and demanded the same from those who attempted to sneak a peek into it. For example, his notes to Vexations r…
Sounds Like Silence
In 2012 the world celebrates not only the centenary of John Cage’s birth, but also the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of his ”silent piece” 4’33”(four minutes, thirty-three seconds) on August 29, 1952. This composition in three movements without intentional sounds is the composer’s best-known work today. As an ”art without work” (John Cage), it takes up and renews the impulses of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, notably Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, which the artist h…
Bell Trove Spools
Northern Spy is proud to present two of John Butcher’s most recent experiments in moving sound waves through space. On Bell Trove Spools we hear Butcher in two distinct situations: Richmond Hall, a Houston art gallery housing a permanent Dan Flavin collection that has been compared to a bowling alley; and the high-ceilinged marble room in Brooklyn which is the new home to Issue Project Room. Butcher is heard on his two saxes of choice, the soprano and the tenor, and suspended in space, fluid, ch…
Regine Flory
Zak Boerger's combination of fuzz, acoustic guitar & extended downer ballads most immediately aligns him with the New Zealand scene centered around Peter Jefferies & Alastair Galbraith as well as associated international satellites like Flying Saucer Attack & the Twisted Village roster, but there's a lonesome edge to the music that would situate it ouside of any particular historical tradition & closer to the mystery school of regional private press obscurities. The acoustic tracks skirt the fri…
In Winter
One more new Gianluca Becuzzi release on Silentes, this time in collaboration with Luigi Turra. Composer of musique concrete and graphic designer whose main interest is the musical balance between silence and the tactile perception of sound, Turra’s works were published by labels such as and/OAR, Unfathomless, Non Visual Objects, Smallvoices and many others. A lot has already been written about Becuzzi, here we would just like to remember his historic Darkwave / Industrial project…
Perdition Hill Radio
2nd full-length from self-styled black ambient guitar overlord. Like Earth's seminal "Hex" before it, this invokes the ghosts of a lost America & drags the rotting carcass of country music through a swamp of noise & drone. The chugging, blown-out treble & isolated darkness of Xasthur is all present & correct, but there are also echoes of William Basinski & Deaf Center hidden amongst the clouds of radio static.
GYU
CD version. Tujiko Noriko returns to Editions Mego after a period of relative silence, this time in collaboration with Tyme. (aka Tatsuya Yamada, member of MAS). This album was developed from songs that the duo made once a year at the end and beginning of the new year, for a period of six years. These were sent to friends and people who asked. After six years, there were six tracks and they added five more tracks based on the illustrations of Kimura Toshiko to complete the album. A gaudy ta…
Rip
Recorded up and down the West Coast by JESSE JACKSON, CORYDON RONNAU, and JOHN WIESE and featuring appearances by YELLOW SWANS, PETER KOLOVOS (OPEN CITY) and PAUL COSTUROS (DEATH SENTENCE: PANDA!). Studio and live recordings with concrète witcery.
I Wish I Didn't Dream
Wish I Didn’t Dream, the new album of duets by guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Langille, was cut in just a few hours of studio time. But the pieces started falling into place 15 years earlier on the 10th floor of a nondescript building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was there, at the old location of the Brecht Forum, that Connors got to know writer and WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk, who was curating a concert series there. On occasion Tom Abbs (now President of Northern Sp…
Live at café Oto
The Ex guitars meet Nilssen-Love & Vandermark duo. Lean Left throws together two explosive duos - the sax-drums collision course of Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilsson-Love with the piledriving guitarists from The Ex - to make up a positively apocalyptic quartet: an elemental musical force featuring Grade A international players zoning in and scrambling together rock, jazz, noise and blistering free improv into a highly-charged onstage assault, each member taking their sounds and bodies to th…
Glass Armonica
In its two hundred year history, the glass armonica has played many roles. It was a serious attempt by Benjamin Franklin to create a new instrument for the classical repertoire; believed to cause insanity in its players, it gained traction as an object of superstition; a century or more in historical obscurity ensued, followed by its revival as a compositional curiosity for a handful of composers and as an exotic timbre in soundtracks and on pop records. More recently, Christina Kubisc…
Wireless
1st live album by Norway's Geir Jenssen - recorded in 2007 by Chris Watson & mastered by Touch stalwart BJNilsen. In the early 1990s, he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic & enduring. Here, he incorporates samples of field recordings by Jony Easterby & trumpet by Anders Karlskas, invoking a sparser, more arresting sound.
Silent Partner
There’s probably not much to say about punk’s continued existence. Like jazz or sitcoms or party politics, it just carries on eating and breathing and shitting and propogating. It’s only interesting when someone comes along trying to advance the form. Like “Arrested Development” or Dennis Kucinich, they’re usually forgotten. This would all be relevant if Neptune were a punk band, which we’re not at all sure is the case. They create a sense of undermining the status quo, which is pretty pun…
If You Want To Fuck The Sky, Teach Your Cock To Fly
Andy Bolus (Evil Moisture) armé d'électroniques maison et autres oscillateurs, Korg 800DV ou Revox (!) est accompagné de la voix de BB soit Brigitte Bordelle, qui crie quand on la chatouille et qui crie aussi quand on la cogne. If you want to fuck the sky, teach your cock to fly Ñou si tu veux un frère, dis à ton père de baiser ta mère Ñ ou quand les cons voleront, tu seras chef d'escadrille Ñ est un excellent disque de bruits divers et variés avec moults rebondissements dynamiques, cut-u…