New Arrivals
Twenty Systems
Twenty tracks made on 20 synthesizers spanning 20 years, accompanied by a 60-page color book with a foreword by Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud, Twenty Systems is Benge's acclaimed concept album, first released in 2008. His 10th solo album, this ambitious project combines an audio CD of new music with a hardbound full-color book containing photos and diagrams of the electronic instruments used, along with a detailed history documenting the development of synthesizers between 1968 and 1988. The purpo…
Red Sugar
Restocked, reduced price 'winter family are the brooklyn based duo of ruth rosenthal and xavier klaine. alt.vinyl is proud to release this double vinyl ltd edition edition (300 copies only) of their latest intensely atmospheric work. artwork by franz vesolt, layout by fabien lehalle. audio mastering by patrick klem. review: a rare and unique audio worldview expressed by the singular approach of brooklyn based duo ruth rosenthal (spoken words) and xavier klaine (harmonium, organ etc..). fro…
V/A
Compilation of early gospel recordings spanning from 1927-1955. Sanctifies blues by the Two Gospel Keys, Mother McCollum, Blind Rosevelt Graves, Lottie Bracey, & Sister O.M. Terrell. Beautiful slow country gospel by the Anglin Brothers & Delmore Brothers. Intense vocal performances by the New Gospel Keys, Elder Richard Briant & the Silent Grove Baptist Church Congregation, & much more! All killer no filler comp that rocks hard & get deep & sad too. Ltd one-time pressing
Oiseaux-Tempete
Oiseaux-Tempête debut album retraces, in a sonic odyssey, the qualms and queries of a sickly and dysfunctional Western society. Experimental, Stoner, Post-Rock, Ambient, Free Music. The trio was created in Paris in 2012 by the musically versatile pair Frédéric D. Oberland (guitar) and Stéphane Pigneul (bass) (members of FareWell Poetry and Le Réveil des Tropiques) and percussionist Ben Mc Connell (drummer for bands such as Beach House, Rain Machine, Au Revoir Simone, Marissa Nadler and Winter Fa…
Apophenia
Belgian/Italian duo Andrea Taeggi and Koenraad Ecker isolate a diffuse mixture of techno and concrète noise with 'Apophenia' for Opal Tapes. Building on the decayed structures of last year's 'Contrapasso' album, their latest blends the chaotic virtues of their improvisational approach with a more premeditated logic, manifesting five arcane constructions balancing abstract expression and rugged, grooving purpose. In that sense it works well alongside Opal Tapes' boss Basic House, but Lumisokea's …
Live at Caffe Lena: Music from America's Legendary Coffeehouse
"Unreleased performances by Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Kate McGarrigle, Rick Danko, Anais Mitchell, Sleepy John Estes, Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie, and more. Caffè Lena, the oldest continuously operating folk music coffeehouse in the US. Opened by Lena Spencer in 1960, this tiny room has played host to influential artists across diverse genres of music; traditional folk, blues, singer-songwriters, jazz, and bluegrass. Luckily, many performances were caught on tape through …
Chimerizations
Chimerizations feature a radically new form of documentation of Florian Hecker’s sound works that dramatize the phenomenon of Auditory Chimaeras.
“Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other.” (Robin Mackay)
The publication presents the documentation of Hecker’s recent sound pieces (“Magnitude Estimation,” 2010; “Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera,” 20…
A Life Is Everywhere
'A Life Is Everywhere' is an ecstatic mix of rhythm, noise, drone, texture and melody. Simultaneously heartfelt and not for the faint hearted. Within their self contained world Cindytalk continue the unique trajectory that has purveyed their career starting in 1982. This instalment further explores the fearsome terrain that was initiated with previous Editions Mego releases such as 'The Crackle of my Soul' and 'Hold Everything Dear'. Throughout the 6 tracks on offer the standard fair of m…
Pyrolator's Wunderland
LP version, on 180 gram vinyl. Bureau B reissues Pyrolator's Wunderland, originally released on Ata Tak in 1984. Quote 1: "I have always strived for the opposite of whatever is hip at the time." (Pyrolator in June 2013) Quote 2: "Wunderland is so beautiful -- the first time I heard this record, I cried." (Andreas Dorau). New York City, 1983. Andreas Dorau has a gig at Danceteria and Pyrolator accompanies him as sound engineer. Back then, it really looked as if Ata Tak could make a go of it in th…
Prediction and Warning
“Steve Noble [‘s] armoury of textures and tones is an acoustic mirror of [Ikue] Mori’s electronica, and just as spellbinding. He attacks his orthodox, loose-skinned drum kit from all angles, lays upturned gongs on the drumheads and is a master of orthodoxy as well as the avant-garde. His duet with Mori was the evening’s highlight, a pulsating welter of scrapes, thumps and press rolls interrupted by silences made sinister by the tick of an off-kilter metronome.” – Mike Hobart, Financial TimesIkue…
Black Tie
LP version. Includes mp3 download and full-color poster. After two bone-chilling full-lengths for the Type Recordings imprint, Erik K. Skodvin has embarked on his first journey for his own Miasmah label with Black Tie. While originally conceived as a soundtrack to an installation by Norwegian artist Marit Følstad, Skodvin uses this as a starting point to craft his most unnerving long-form pieces to date. Split into two distinct movements, "Black Tie" and "White Noise," we are exposed to the y…
Sane Men Surround
Following up their warmly-received 2011 Alter debut, The Letter (ALT 005LP), Sane Men Surround is the second album to emerge from Southend-on-Sea's Liberez. Like their debut, the nine tracks here continue to savagely EQ percussion, guitar, violin and electronics into abstraction with tracks like "A Warning and My Madness Offends," bearing the industrial and almost ritualistic atmospherics of its predecessor, while "Nema Te" and "What's Mine Is Mine" introduce a new style of composition and songw…
Do You Love Me?
Do You Love Me? is an extension of Lutz Bacher's videos of the same name, in which Bacher interviews curators, artists, friends, and family about Bacher the person and Bacher the artist. Though Lutz Bacher is the starting point, the interviews often reveal more about the people being interviewed than Bacher herself. The publication takes the form of transcripts interwoven with images of Bacher's artwork from the 70s to the present as well as photos, letters, and ephemera.
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
Jigokuhen
Jigokuhen is the final instalment in Masami Akita's 15 part Bird Series for Important Records. Inspired by Olivier Messaien's Catalogue D'Oiseaux, the Bird Series saw the release of one CD per month for 13 months while a 14th disc was released free via download to series subscribers and on CDr with the purchase of Merzbow's EcoBag. This 14th Bird Series release is being issued on the 2 year anniversary of the start of the Bird Series and in conjuntion with Vampilla's new album on Important …
Boring Embroidery
Boring embroidery features five beautiful, fragile yet raw improvisations for pianos and electronics performed by two of the UK's brightest talents. Picking up from where 2010's Turned moment, weighting release on Another Timbre left off, Boring Embroidery inhabits a slow, precise musical world that references Feldman and Tudor, yet remains resolutely improvised. Recorded in 2010 and 2011, this album possibly marks the end of the duo's piano collaborations but if so, it provides a perfectly matu…
Superdisque
Superdisque is the first album from the French trio formed by David Fenech (electric guitar) with Jac Berrocal (trumpet) and Ghédalia Tazartès (vocals). Somewhere beyond the borders of rock, jazz, punk and sound poetry -- the vocals seem to come from another planet, with lyrics in an improvised language. The winds are blown from Tibetan human bones and conch seashells. Guitars sound like rubber and steel. Expect the unexpected. Special guest Zap Pascal (accordion) appears on one track. Dav…
Pangaea Ultima
Double LP version. Pangaea Ultima, Steve Moore's debut record on Spectrum Spools, is an epic musical achievement, not simply for its sonic sophistication and compositional mastery, but also because Moore has crafted here an album that has come as close to any in transcending the boxed human logic of time and place. The album title refers to the name which geologists have given to the future super-continent that is suggested may form on earth in the next quarter-of-a-billion years. Over th…
Souvenir Of Italy
A lost gem from the mid 80s in the best italian tradition, BlowUp reissue of the month: to describe GustoForte’s Picture disc “Souvenir of Italy - La merda che fuma”, to give some dialect shape to the electro-magnetic throbbings that come out from the record , to try drawing, with grammatic help also that more basic, a logic or a descriptive way, it’s complex.And not because exists a multi-shape objective difficulty but rather the concreteness it’s impossible to approach to GustoForte: sandpaper…
Krionika Soshiki
In the early 80s Paolo Bandera was a founder (along with Eraldo Bernocchi) of the monumental collective post-industrial Sigillum S. In 1993 he created his solo project SSHE Retina Stimulants ("Super Sound High Energy" Retina Stimulants), devoting himself to sharpen the edges of concepts and noise extremes. Krionika Soshiki is one of his most representative works of the first period of solo activities. The six tracks run through subliminal arenas, with flows and ideas collapsed to state of …