New Arrivals
It's You
Sydney, Australia's Holy Balm trio jack out a heat-warped LP of avant-dance songs for Not Not Fun. 'It's You' feels like dance music that's been made in a hot country. It's got a faded, sun-bleached quality and drunk-in-the-afternoon sloppiness that's entirely endearing to our tastes. Their synth melodies are always prone to slipping saltily off-key and the beats are basically functional - lumpy kicks and squirmy, acidic synth pop bass - ridden with alluring nonchalance by Anna John in a hybrid …
Turntable History: Spin Ensemble
Arnold Dreyblatt's Turntable History: Spin Ensemble was recorded March 12, 2011 by Ernst Karel at Boston's Goethe Institut. This performance version of the original piece (released on CD as IMPREC323) provides a different perspective on the original composition. From the original studio version of the piece: Arnold Dreyblatt (b.1953) is an American composer who has studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier. He is a member of the German Academy Of Art. He has released wo…
Grisp
Running the gamut of improv, concrète, industrial tape music, and cut-up sounds. Featuring appearances by MITCHELL BROWN (GASP), AARON HEMPHILL (LIARS), PETER KOLOVOS (OPEN CITY), RICK POTTS (LAFMS, SOLID EYE, AIRWAY), and source material by SMEGMA and the HATERS. Partially collects material from the Beat (777 Was 666), Grisp, and DDT (Chondritic Sound) cassettes. For those that say things like, "I don't really listen to CDs"—you're totally lame.
Very Urgent
Originally released on Polydor in 1968. During this year, The Chris McGregor Group were riding high on the London jazz scene, playing and hanging out with all the rising stars of British free jazz. Very Urgent, their eagerly-awaited debut recording, was a joyful call of intent. The album mixes simple but utterly unstoppable tunes and exhilarating horn charts -- immediately establishing a vitality and exuberance that would continue to define the group. Nevertheless, their evident preference f…
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.
Post
Post is the solo guise for James Wilkinson, who has gleefully cracked the ground between free jazz and punk in Bucketrider and made sonic cinema with the electro-dub-hip-hop fusion of High Pass Filter. He’s also provided innovative sound design as director for the internationally acclaimed Snuff Puppets, and his adventurous spirit runs free through Post’s pop persona. It’s the same ecstatic abandon shared by the likes of Mouse on Mars, Plaid and Caribou. Post’s playful but stirring sense of comp…
Protocol
Released October 2012. Chip Shop Music (Erik Carlsson, percussion, Martin Küchen, baritone & alto saxophones, radio, David Lacey, percussion, electronics, Paul Vogel: computer, clarinet) + Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board). Live 2009 in Ireland.
42 Vexations
16 page booklet including Cage's Place In the Reception of Satie by Matthew Shlomowitz. Erik Satie's 1893 Vexations is musique d'ameublement - literally, "furniture music", the phrase coined by Satie in 1917, where he identifies sound as drapes, tiling, wallpaper - items belonging to the environment and changing it simply by being in it, by actually becoming elements of the space. This recording is the second instalment in a series of furniture music (after Marcel Duchamp's Musical Erratum), and…
The Ominous
Jacob is the new project by David Cordero (Úrsula) and Marco Serrato (Orthodox). The duo first collaborated on the arrangements that would become the Emma soundtrack. With a mutual love for sci fi and horror films, Jacob push their dark sonics further on The Ominous, a piece for el cine de la mente. Atonal, dissonant string scrapes meld together in discomforting walls of noise, while hidden forces project an ambiguous malignance lurking in the deep fog. Bleak atmospheres and an abyss of s…
Less Is More
The piano trio is probably one of the most common ensembles to be heard in jazz, and truth be told, I am a little weary of them, preferring the expressiveness of a horn section. Yet once in a while, a piano trio comes forward that has something new to tell. When I listened to WHO Trio's "The Current Underneath" (Leo Records) a couple of years ago, I was immediately enchanted by the sheer musicality of the project. This one, "Less Is More", is even better. The trio consists of Michel Wintsch on p…
Kippschwingungen
In 2007, Frank Bretschneider was invited to compose music for the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument developed during the 1960’s at the RFZ, the technical center for radio and television of the East German postal service. Built in a limited edition of eight machines total, only three Subharcords (in Vienna, Trondheim and Berlin) are believed to survive to this day. The Subharchord is, broadly defined, a subharmonic sound generator, comparable soundwise to the Mixturtrautonium. It’s sugg…
Watershed
If the three compositions proposed by Denis Fournier have already been recorded, they merit to be here as resurgences, like scenarios encouraging the freedom of transformation without which free interpretation is nothing. “I often say that I don’t make improvised music, but that I improvise music. In other words, I put together there and then elements of my life, of my history, of my culture…” In other words, no structure commands the action. Every structure opens to the action (to sharing) whic…
Mort aux vaches
Packaged in a three-panel lenticular sleeve. Artwork & concept by Staalplaat. Limited edition of 500 copies.
Lo-lee-ta
Vladimir Nabokov: the master of "chamber music in prose" (literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki) and composer of crackling word sonatas. Franz Koglmann: a commuter between jazz/avant-garde and literature, and writer of intimate sound novellas. It was only a matter of time before Koglmann would create "Music on Nabokov," and transform literary motifs and characters into music. Together with his Monoblue Quartet (Tony Coe, clarinet/saxophone, Ed Renshaw, guitar, Peter Herbert, bass) the trumpeter K…
In Celebration Of Knowing All The Blues Of The Evening
Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia is the project of Jaime Fennelly (of Peeesseye, Evolving Ear Records) and Shawn Hansen (who also has releases on Evolving Ear). The two join their forces here for an epic ride through the volatile moments of twilight. A synaesthetic kind of excursion, inspired by the deepening shades of light and dramatically rendered through the warm, swelling tones of Farfisa organ and analog synthesizer. In Celebration... in all its moody and cinematic drive could be the quin…
Live In Leugen
In December 2009 Zebra (Roel Meelkop & Frans de Waard) were invited to play a hommage to Martin Hannett, the legendary producer of Joy Division, A Certain Ratio and Section 25 (to mention Zebra's favorites). This was the start of a long Factory Records weekend in Brussels. Zebra picked their favorite Martin Hannett productions and sprinkled them some further with their extraordinary electronic means to create a groovy, dense slab of music. This album is called 'Live In Leugen'. Leugen is the dut…
Belle De Jour
Klanggalerie are very proud to present you the first full re-issue of this second album on CD by Diana Rogerson with Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound. The CD has the original cover artwork as well as previously unpublished images. Full album, includes bonus tracks not on the Beastings CD re-issue. Remastered by Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter. "'Riding the Red Rag' closes the …
Gilberto Gil
2009 repress. First ever U.S. reissue of this album, with new liner notes by Peter Margasak. Released in 1971 while Gil was living in London, this is the third self-titled release from the bossa nova and tropicalia legend. Gil recorded this album while in political exile from his native Brazil and its somber, straightforward tone is a welcome change from the experimental, psychedelic assault of his 1969 long player. Featuring 8 originals and a brilliant cover Steve Winwood's 'Can't Find My Way H…
Bruder Luzifer
23 Track CD Anthology. For three decades Hamburg's Felix Kubin operated as an undercover Sci-Fi pop visionary. Lurching from seasick electronics to dramatic outsider songcraft, the highlights of Kubin's engaging teenage experiments (Krematorien) and later pop masterworks (Lightning Strikes) mingle here with electrified spaghetti-western romps (Sabàta) and terminal noise-spasms (Dead End Brain). Lovingly curated, this deluxe collector's edition features exclusive liner notes, unpublished p…
The End Of The Empire
Second album for the Brooklyn trio led by guitarist Ninni Morgia (ex White Tornado, ex La Otracina), in this recording with Stuart Popejoy (Bassoon) on bass and Kevin Shea (ex Storm and Stress, Talibam!) on drums. Compared to their first album, that featured Peter Evans on trumpet, “The End of the Empire” is more various and eclectic. The eight tracks open up to psychedelic and ambient music besides free jazz, marked by Ninni Morgia’s visionary guitar, Stuart Popejoy’s pulsating industrial bass …