New Arrivals
ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
Starring’s ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ combines minimalist musical patterns with dreamy poetry to create a new style front-woman Clara Hunter likes to call “sparkle prog.” It captures the frenetic energy of the band’s live show, but here it is overlain with a new palate of synthesizers, delay effects, drum processing, aux percussion, and vocals that create delicate, but sometimes radical juxtapositions between the lyrical and the experimental. Though songs like “the best” and “aphonia” …
6pezzi2009+lagodelnulla
Aggressive loop music based on sounds from photographic equipment and african field recordings. Besides being an early-Reich cheap imitation, ‘lagodelnulla’ is an italian expression (roughly translated as ‘lakeofnothingness’) found in an old Banda-Ngao lullaby (Central Africa, early ’60s). An ‘objet trouvé’ elevated as social commentary by the author. Volume encouraged. 35 minutes, transparent vinyl. Edition of 100 copies in recycled chipboard sleeve with silkscreened sheet (printed by Ped…
Ever And Anon
The mythical LAFMS collective Smegma really needs no introduction, where would we all be without them? How many bands were so ahead of their time (1973!), and have been for so long, like Smegma have? Well, here they are with a brand new LP of their famous mix of free jazz, industrial noise, improvisation, straight-up weird music so typical of these masters / US freaks. On the opening track, they are riding on the amazing drums of historical member Dennis Duck (of Dream Syndicate) to pay h…
July 19, 2006
may 2009 release: label-less lp release (“private,” if you will) covering the first ever duo set between myself & geoff mullen, recorded in concert at the brendan murray-curated “uppercase sound #2” event @ pa’s lounge, somerville, ma, 02143, usa, on july 19th, 2006 ...the music is entirely improvised, with geoff sticking largely to a suitcase-electronics-based setup (although he does provide some fine guitar & pedal alterations throughout) & myself to the doepfer (ditto guitar & korg guitar-syn…
The Burden of Hope
"I don't know about you lot but we're absolutely crazy about Grails here at Boomkat HQ, last year's incredible 'Black Tar Prophecies' album on Important blew us away so it's great to see 'The Burden of Hope', the band's 2003 debut, back in press on vinyl finally. At this time the band were working under the messy banner of 'post-rock' and lumped in with the whole Godspeed You! Black Emperor/Constellation scene; they were using violins, letting themselves succumb to the influence of dusty America…
Fugue
I began writing about this Tape & Bill Wells 'Fugue' record yesterday but I gave up as the words just were not coming to me. I guess that's probably a good sign though as I was just kind of getting into the melancholy zone of the record, which certainly is a thing of beauty. Wells' guitar playing is delicate and magical. The Tape guys really give him space to do his thing adding wonderful little details and twinkles into the mix. This quite simply is the prettiest, most charming record I …
Daydreaming
When you think of Seattle, what do you see? No doubt it revolves around Grunge, rain or Frasier... Well prepare to have your cultural preconceptions realigned by the stunning new album 'Daydreaming' from Seattle's Rafael Anton Irisarri, an artist better known under his 'The Sight Below' moniker. Whilst the notion of another record combining modern production with a set of ivories may seem something of a cliché, Rafael Anton Irisarri ensures any such misgivings are dispensed with soon afte…
Channel Pressure
The production duo's debut full-length album is a highly focused study in the effects of consumer electronics that touches on sensual bangers and hyper-spherical anthems prime for the dance floor. The record was engineered by another childhood pal, Al Carlson, and mixed by Prefuse 73 who states: 'Mixing these ideas that span from high school notebooks into a present sonic territory is F+L's right on conceptual evolution.' There's a fantastical, futuristic narrative arc running hard throug…
Ja / Nein - Sonate
LP in white vinyl, comes in aluminium-cork coversleeve, designed from children with mental handicaps with 4 inserts. It's limited to 150 copies.
Shot
ultralimited lavishly packaged LP (100 handnumbered copies only!), this ground-breaking electro-acoustic trio made my day. The album is largely improvised, with extracts of Charles Bukowski’s poetic works overlapping on the interweavings and multiple stratiï¬Âed references in the trio’s music. It features a faceted palette of acoustic, analogue and digital colours: drums, metallic objects, ethnical instruments, samples, sequences, filtered voice, pedal effects, vinyls, digital electronic…
Kiri No Oto
Lawrence English's epic masterpiece - finally available on vinyl for the first time. Strictly limited edition - Initial copies come on white vinyl* One of the most memorable and absorbing albums released by the wonderful Touch label in recent years, "Kiri No Oto" was first released by them on CD in 2008 and has spent much of the intervening time lodged in our minds as one of the finer drone/field recording albums to have been made this century. Kiri No Oto (a Japanese phrase meaning 'sound…
United World In Outer Space
Decades before his time, political and musical revolutionary, Sun Ra, developed a new plane of cultural existence where black people were all-powerful beings from outer space, sending their intergalactic message through jazz music. Recorded live in 1975 at Cleveland's legendary jazz club, the Smiling Dog Saloon, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra descended on the city for a week-long residency. You can imagine how the uninitiated's jaw must have dropped when Ra and his 15 musicians marched out onto th…
Apocatastisis
released 10 march, 2007. performed and recorded by michael gibbons (bardo pond) over the course of 2006 in the lemur house, apocatastisis is a meditation on restoration and awakening. an inner voyage in seven parts consisting of guitars, effects, sitar, tabla and violin. a truly special record. from a one-time pressing of 677 hand-numbered copies. housed within sleeves that were individually silk-screened by alan sherry (SIWA). all pre-orders of this release also received copies of this 500mg bo…
Summer Wanderer
“Summer Wanderer” is a sideslip in the discography of the Scottish avant folk musician Richard Youngs because it’s the only acappella release in his eminent and extensive list of recordings.“Summer Wanderer” was released for the first time in 2004 in an edition of twenty copies. For close friends only. A year later, Youngs re-released these recordings on his own No Fans imprint. So this vinyl release on the Ghent based Gipsy Sphinx label can actually be called a re-re-release. But that doesn’t m…
Primitive North
A mighty split release from two of today's most progressive underground metal bands, bringing together the formidable post-doom of Brooklyn's A Storm Of Light and the luminous sludge of Canadian duo Nadja. The real question here is whether or not the music can come anywhere close to the awesome sleeve art, and while that may not even be possible, the twenty-two minute epic from Nadja has a decent go at it. While A Storm Of Light throw everything at their plodding, Wagnerian outings 'Bro…
Weighted Ghost
It's no secret that Aaron Dilloway is one of the best around. Opening with some seriously demented synth growl, Weighted Ghost gets down to business in no time at all. Stoically repetitive sequences build and build until the pressure in your skull reaches the breaking point. Dilloway pushes past the point of no return, scowling all the way until each layer is sufficiently soaked in dirt and brine. This isn't pretty and it isn't meant to be. The flipside fakes you out in the beginning,…
Sun Circle
The most recent release on the lichen label; all releases are hand-assembled by zach wallace in his native ann arbor environs and offer of a lovely wave of art-sound, field recordings, improvisation with natural non-instruments, and, in the case of this particular title, a pair of pieces by greg davis and zach himself on farfisa, distorted vocals, and bells. the first appears to be a zonked “cover” of lamonte young’s “31 vii 69 10:26 - 10:49 pm munich from map of 49's dream the two systems of el…
Blue eyes are my reward
Jawdropping new collection of crop circles etched in sonic candy-floss by New Zealand’s beardsmith / noise-farmer Campbell Kneale. Rated by the horses mouth as the best thing he ever made, EVER, ‘Blue Eyes Are My Reward’ shimmers like an icicle-clad forest resplendent in its own crystalline magnificence. Snakecharming groove, dublike boomph, and bleary eyed strum blast the path out of a decidedly greying world of so-so metalized myspace drone, into a miniaturized drone-prairie of superpow…
Black Love
Saxophonist Carlos Garnett recorded with Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. His 1974 spiritual jazz album features an amazing line-up of Reggie Lucas (Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins), Buster Williams, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Alex Blake (Sun Ra), Charles Sullivan, Mauricio Smith (Tito Puente), Norman Connors, and Billy Hart. Exact repro reissue.
Frequency Conquistadors
Words are more often then not the point of departure for many works of Das Synthetische Mischegewebe. The track - titles here stem from ‘El Mundo Alucinante’ de Reinaldo Arenas, which itself is inspired by François-René de Chateaubriand’s ‘Mémoires d'outre-tombe’. It is about time rather than history and about being in history. Having lost the war of time, the only thing that remains to do is being, and here we go, ‘being infiniment exigent’ in it’s means of expression. DSM began in Berlin arm…