New Arrivals
Smalltown Supersound On Fire
Limited edition vinyl! All new stuff taken from the forthcoming STS releases. As well as some exclusive goodies such as Bjorn Torske's great Sunburned Hand Of The Man remix (a Moondog meets Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari style remix) as well as Prins Thomas' remix of Tussle. The album also introduces the new sinings; K-X-P from Helsinki, Finland, Mungolian Jet Set from Oslo, Norway, Meanderthals from London/Oslo, and, Drivan, which is Kim Hiorthøy with 3 Swedish girls on vocals…
Prince Of Truth
Beginning with her first Constellation release in 2006, Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista project has steadily been gaining recognition for its complex beauty and fierce, raging appeals. Bozulich has been knocking these and many other ideas into form for two decades (Neon Veins, Ethyl Meatplow, The Geraldine Fibbers, Scarnella). Evangelista is the best and the brightest, filled with adventurous risk taking that sometimes whispers and licks, sometimes pulls the listener so close that it is hard to bre…
Coin coin chapter one: Gens de couleur libres
At first look this might seem like a weird move for the Constellation label as Matana Roberts’ debut for the imprint is pretty much straight-up free jazz. But she’s got some serious history with the Montreal collective, even throwing down horns with Godspeed Thinking about it too, there’s always been a nod towards the free jazz scene (not least on Colin Stetson's recent genre-bending LP) but where others were a nod, ˜COIN COIN Chapter One : Gens de Couleur Libre…
Broken Hearted Dragonflies
There is a legend in Burma stating that swarms of male dragonflies gather to join in choruses of high-pitched tones to court their mates. The ones that don't succeed in mating eventually scream so loud that their chests explode and they drop dead to the ground. These recordings are a tribute to this legend. Droning cicadas, dragonflies, and other insects display their charm as masters of the high frequency airwaves, recorded live and unprocessed by Tucker Martine in the lush settings of L…
GAU
In March of 2012, nearing the end of a tour together through the Netherlands and Belgium, Celer, Machinefabriek, and Jan and Romke Kleefstra gathered in a country studio, spending an afternoon improvising to record Gau. Recorded by the old hardcorerocker Jan Switters at the Landscape studios in Gauw, situated in the countryside in the midst of Friesland, the place was surrounded by green fields with idle tractors, few trees, buzzards and only massive farmhouses dotting the horizon. From the almo…
Yird Muin Starn
A sonic map of the artwork and cosmos, Yird Muin Starn is at once funny, moving and informative, surging from singing to hymnal pockets of throbbing space where scale is both tiny and boundless'. The third element in their new public artwork 'Yird Muin Starn' (old Scots for Earth Moon Star) this album of cosmological songs and sonified constellations is Matthews McIntosh second space related release. Composed and engineered by Matthews from field recordings gathered all over the Galloway f…
Animalia Corolla
Most of us are living in an urban world, dominated by constant noise and contagious stress. Our ears are conditioned by this aggressive environment and have often lost the ability to perceive another discreet world surrounding us. It might be hidden but also swarming, vivid and incredibly musical. We are all able to prick up our ears to some birds chattering together, the wind shaking leaves, toads singing serenades or old spirits telling us their immemorial adventures…Since its creation in 2006…
Chance of rain
A cerebral exploration of the intersection between rhythmic and ambient music, drawing together ideas of movement and stillness, psychedelia and presence of mind. On Chance Of Rain dance tracks are imbued with unpredictable structures, ambient drift and deep harmonic passages, while keyboard-based interludes reinforce both the far-out and contemplative aspects of the record as a whole.” The tracks on the album are apparently fleshed out versions of live hardware improvisations, a move not unknow…
Curse of the Bodysnatchers - Tape-Recordings 1980-86
Gerald O'Connell and Mark Harvey began recording as Mystery Plane in 1980, although they had worked together since 1978 in two other more conventional five-piece bands ( The End and 3D5). The very early stuff ( for instance Death Sentence contained on the bonus 7" for members) was recorded in Gerald's living room on a two-track Akai reel-to-reel with a primitive internal overdub facility. For the most part Mark wrote and sang the songs, while Gerald created the backing tracks. In 1981 they were …
Lines Describing Circles
Over the past year as Peder Mannerfelt has shed the skin of The Subliminal Kid, we've only had small samples to taste of his new brand of musical sorcery. Lines Describing Circles changes all of that. Ten tracks deep, this is not so much an album as it is a declaration. From the opening, harrowing crackle of "Collapsion," Mannerfelt's intent is to crush the listener into a perfect metal cube. Lines Describing Circles displays the sound of a man fully in control of his machines. Throughout th…
Mimikry
2010 edition, long out of print, few copies resurfaced. Box Set, Limited Edition, Special Limited Box Edition - Album comes in a cardboard sleeve with tracks 11 and 12 as bonus tracks and as part of a box set including inserts. Having nicely set up the release of this album with their Ret Marut Handshake EP a few months back, Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld (of Einsturzende Neubauten fame) deliver a set that exceeds all expectations. One of the most strikingly obvious comparisons to arise from …
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…
Dropped Pianos
This Tim Hecker release is composed of sketch pieces recorded in 2010 in preparation for what would become the Ravedeath, 1972 album. All of the compositions are piano driven and minimal in nature. This is not a new Tim Hecker album, but rather a peek behind the curtains into the working process. That these pieces stand on their own as compelling soundworks is a testament to the fact that Tim Hecker is at the absolute top of his game at the moment, and has been for years.
The Godward Way
Daniel Higgs has always been held in the highest esteem by us here at Southern, becoming an almost totemic figure in the process. Certainly an appreciation for his work, and the canon of the band Lungfish, has been a job requirement for all the staff who've worked with us over the years. He has graced us with visits from time to time, and his London shows have always been must attend events for Southern alumni. Naturally, a Latitudes recording would be the jewel in the crown for our catal…
Berlin
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Chris Heenan, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet. Alexander Frangenheim, double bass. Ofer Bymel, percussion. Recorded 2010 in Berlin.
Pansophical Cataract
John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and writer who is perhaps best known as the drummer for Oneida. Man Forever, his vehicle for exploring the outer limits of drum performance, was created to overwhelm, to investigate the nuances that bloom in the midst of repetitive music, and to act as a pure sound experience.
Originally based on the idea of creating a sort of punk-infused Metal Machine Music for drums, Man Forever has evolved from a f…
Occlusions
… Occlusion is a loose framework for a multi-channel, freely improvised piece of LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC, performed without the aid or consent of pre-recorded or even pre-arranged materials of any kind. A given realization will last between 10 and 30 minutes ; time is elastic. Every effort has been made to avoid divisible rhythms (although mistakes are occasionally made) ... Still, I consider it a "kind" of Dance Music. These two realizations, recorded a week apart at festivals in France and…
Preplexure
John Oswald (Plunderphonics) returns with two fourteen-minute-plus tracks of sliced and diced audio assemblage. Pre and post versions of Plexure out in 1993 on Avant, 'PrePlex' (1982 - 1992) and 'Plexure concentrate' (1992 - 2009). Here some feedbacks: 'Highly recommended. Imagine playing Ôname that tune' at 5 times the speed of your ears' ability to recognize familiar sounds. This composition, made up entirely of pop music samples, deserves five stars because of its meticulous organizatio…
This is folk music
Raphael Lyon is the enigma known as Mudboy. From the incredibly detailed art/packaging to bizarre mp3 releases attached to scrap metal or plant matter to Freddy Krueger-inspired art installations, Lyon has always been one of the strangest cats on the scene.This unique perspective also infects his music. Whereas many of today's kosmiche-influenced artists bubble up from the noise scene (with knob-twiddling pedal pusher seemingly a prequisite to sequencing synth jammer these days), Mudboy's work h…
Scott 3
2013 repress. "Scott 3, originally released in 1969, marked a big change in Walker's approach to albums as, for the first time, the record is dominated by his original compositions. In fact, the only other songwriter that makes it onto the album is Walker's idol, Belgium's legendary singer/songwriter Jacques Brel. Scott 3 again features string heavy production courtesy of Wally Scott, though it occasionally moves out of pop ballad territory into a more cinematic feel influenced by Ennio M…