New Arrivals
Arf Arf
The Australian sound poetry / film-maker / artist group ARF ARF consists of Marisa Stirpe, Frank Lovece, Michael Buckley and Marcus Bergner. Between 1985 and 2000 they produced and mounted hundreds of live performances in Australia and Europe. Their film 'Thread of Voice' (featuring Bob Cobbing / Konkrete Canticle) has been shown widely including at The Serpentine Gallery (London), The Pompidou Centre (Paris), Arsenal Kino (Berlin), Millennium (New York) and at the Museum of Modern Art in…
Piano solo
Recorded live at Cafe OTO in March 2009 during Otomo Yoshihide's first residency here. This was one of only a handful of solo piano performances Otomo has given where he uses the instrument as a control matrix for harmonically rich feedback tones and devastating clusters of complex noise. Beautifully rendered with maximum dynamic range by Lupo's 45rpm cut!
Pan Am Stories
Tape-warped phantom band Rangers finally unleash the lush, soaring, expansive prog-pop opus we always knew was floating inside the fretboard (and imagination) of multi-instrumentalist mystery maestro Joe Knight. The north Dallas-raised, San Fran-residing head Ranger grew up taking classical guitar lessons from a dude who claimed to have 'toured with the Dead,' and some of that brain-wonked jam agenda obviously seeped into the young Knight, who began recording his own loose, lo-fi jangle s…
Air Museum
Air Museum blurs the lines between acoustic and electronic music even more without sacrificing melody or the delicacy of their sound. It is an album of firsts. It was the first album that the acoustic instruments were not processed via a computer. Instead, the processing of the instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitar, cello, accordion, piano, bass etc.) was done using a variety of pedals, modular synths, and other analog techniques. While acoustic instruments were used extensively, …
Mono
Initially published on CD by Smalltown Superjazzz in 2011. Mats Gustafsson, tenor and baritone saxophones. Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, bass. Paal Nilssen-Love, drums. The Thing music + two Sonny Rollins tracks and one Norwegian trad. Recorded and mixed 2011 in mono in Melbourne, Australia. Limited release of 500. Heavyweigt double-vinyl, first time on vinyl. Manufactured by Trost Records." (label info)
Totaled And Stranded
Awesome release: recorded in a hotel room after we totaled out tour vehicle and became stranded in the worst snowstorm in Ohio history†Beatty, Connelly, Tremaine. Artwork: hand cutted black cardboard, Xeroxed recycled paper, raw paper inner sleeve. The B side is screenprinted by Serimal. Limited edition in 500 copies. A 1-sided album of piercing vocals, walls of guitars, precise heavy electronics and thundering drums. A fusion of metal, noise rock, free jazz, industrial, and harsh electron…
Body issues
Patricia's warm, fuzzy post-techno-house slots neatly with the Opal Tapes aesthetic on his debut album, 'Body Issues'. Six tracks come off like a boosted 1991 or Huerco S, pushing malleable bass hits below swirling streaks of melody bursting with ferric quality. There's firm parallels to be made here with Anthony Naples, albeit with a noisier bent in 'Hissy Fit', whilst on 'Melting' juicy acid forms over a brittle jack track and the sweet-but-slamming 'Jospehine' and 'Plural' appear like some GH…
Scarcity
During drummer Paal Nilssen-Love's July 2013 solo gig at Auido Rebel's Quintavant in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, he was joined on stage by Arto Lindsay performing on electric guitar and voice. The result is this 180 Gram LP, one side at 33 RPM and one at 45 RPM presenting two improvisations from these powerful improvisers. Of the performance Nilssen-Love writes: The gig was organised by the guys running Audio Rebel i Rio... fantastic guys who's also musicians. Gig was amazing and we we're both drench…
Corporate Laughter
Debut CD from one of Chicago's finest modular synth manipulators, Neil Jendon. One of the first things that struck me about Neil's work, when I saw him live, was his pacing. Neil would subtly build levels and layers of various oscillations, frequencies, and tones so deftly that by the time he was sending a hailstorm of electronic chaos out of the PA like buckshot, you almost had no recollection of how he got there without you being aware of it. 'Corporate laughter' reflects many of Jendon's fant…
Spectral life
Debut LP of one third of avant drone metal outfit Locrian. Contemporary artist / musician Terence Hannum is back on wax with two side of meditative and sonic cathartic noise torrents. Following on a dozen of highly regarded solo tapes and cdr, Spectral Life follows the artist through 2 tracks of electronic and acoustic drones blending in the most efficient way all the previous works of the artist. While the A side is made of short different synth-driven pieces blended together in an immense open…
(no thing-ness)
"(no thing-ness)" comes hot on the heels of Brian Pyle’s latest highly acclaimed Ensemble Economique album on the Not Not Fun label. While "The Fever Logic L.P." saw him head diving into a sort of ambient goth pop this brand new 12“ appears to be more influenced by industrial, almost EBM-ish textures. The atmosphere seems more aggressive with an almost militaristic touch, and titles like "New Banking System" hint at the source of this anger. Combined with Pyle’s cinematic tension this makes for …
EP1
Stefan Jaworzyn, the legendary underground figure with Whitehouse and Skullflower on his CV, revives his Shock label - home to stacks of releases by Coil, NWW, Ramleh in the '90s - with a discombobulated analog assault on the weirdest dancefloors. Two sides unfurl a barrage of modular bleeps and mescaline flash electronics equally inspired by the linear hypnotism of minimal techno and free jazz aesthetics. A-side 'The Fucker' is driven by a a rugged breakbeat through bracing, atonal maelstrom of…
Barca beach
Live recordings from Barcelona, summer 2009. Frankensteins Ballet features Mik Quantius (Embryo) speaking-in-tongues and Thomas Hopf on drums. Other members have played with Damo Suzuki, Michael Karoli, Michael Rother etc. Some serious damaged krautrock jams happening on this one, not to mention the weird dub space some of this is floating into. Edition of 70 copies.
All about Mimi
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Ricardo Guerreiro, computer. Christian Wolfarth, cymbals. Recorded 2012 in Lisbon.
Gongs of Cambodia and Laos
A compilation of gongs of ethnic minorities in Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri provinces of Cambodia and in Champasak and Attapeu provinces of Laos, recorded between 2003 and 2007, released for the first time on a double vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker at dubplates Berlin. Georges Condominas had released end of the 50s on the french label Ocora a vinyl containing recordings of gong ceremonies 'musiques Mnong gar du Vietnam', in between so much has happened and more than 50 years later it's tim…
Vilke
Julian Cope Review on Head Heritage Site: VILKÉ is the particularly fine and sprawling new 2LP by American composer, field recordist and hiker Daniel Menche. Inspired by the wolves of his travels in the N. West and named for the Lithuanian for ‘she-wolf’, VILKÉ presents us with four side-long pieces of haunted and eerie atmosphere music whose dilating post-industrial rhythms, and seemingly ever-decaying, ever-degrading, cicadas-driven post-industrial drone-o-drudge inhabits a parallel half-world…
Ep1
Ripatti is a new label from Sasu Ripatti, better known to the world as Vladislav Delay. Envisaged as a studio diary of sorts, the label will be cataloguing ongoing experiments made by Sasu in his studio on his own and alongside various collaborators. This first twelve features two extended productions from Sasu under his own name, feeding into the emergant Techno/Footwork nexus and delivering something far removed from the submerged dub variants he made his name with on his classic 12"s and albu…
Protoplasm
Hand-stamped edition of 500 copies** Blackest Ever Black present recordings of Black Rain's riveting performance at Corsica Studios in October 2012. It's the first release by Stuart Argabright (Ike Yard/Death Comet Crew) since BEB compiled and reissued their seminal cyberpunk missive 'Now I'm Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95' on LP, and offers a murky glimpse of what to expect from the Black Rain album due in early 2014. There are few others who do this sound with such authenticity and …
Real Sugar
"Ryan Garbes is the drummer of Iowa City bands such as Wet Hair, Dunebuggy, Trash Dog, and formerly Raccoo-oo-oon. His recordings under his own name represent a unique brand of solo multi-track recording with a seamless integrity; through a skillful use of instrumentation and recording technique, Garbes eschews notions of low fidelity for songs reminiscent of traditional American garage rock produced in the haze of an early '90s UK aesthetic. Genuine pop songs, cloaked in a comforting was…
Fume of sighs
The third CD by the trio of Rex Casswell (electric guitar), Phillip Marks (percussion) and Paul Obermayer (samples), creating beautiful jagged, sharp edged textures propelled by some of their tightest, strangest, most powerful rhythmic designs yet. The third CD by the trio of Rex Casswell (electric guitar), Phillip Marks (percussion) and Paul Obermayer (samples). Bark! again take their group virtuosity to new areas, creating beautiful jagged, sharp edged textures propelled by some of their …