New Arrivals
No Visible Means
Originally self-released in 1984 on Pterodactyl Records, No Visible Means is the work of Canada's own Lou Champagne. Lou Champagne was active the Ontario music scene and also performed with other local musicians from that region as well. The Lou Champagne System was the real-time guitar synth solo act of Lou Champagne. Due to his knowledge of electronics, he was able to link his guitar, synth, and synthetic drums into a working one-man solo act that was playable with floor switches and …
Ensemble Pearl
Double LP edition. Cosmic, heavy amplified rock drops and ripples, auras radiate and expand into cloud forms, through which lightning bolts. Tides rise, the moons wax upon a place somewhere between Link Wray, Hex-era Earth and early Tangerine Dream. The echoes return, leaving a trail that blows and drifts, creating a separate piece. Ensemble Pearl are Atsuo, William Herzog, Michio Kurihara and Stephen O'Malley. Their debut album also features the elemental forces of Eyvind Kang and Timba H…
Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism In Vintage Music...
..And Photography 1890-1950 The latest release from Grammy Award-winning reissue label Dust-to-Digital gives music fans another reason to rejoice. A stunning 96-page hardcover book of historic baptism photographs, taken between 1890 and 1950 and compiled from the collection of noted folk art collector Jim Linderman, is accompanied by a CD of rare gospel and folk recordings from original 78 RPM records (1924-1940), featuring artists Washington Phillips, Carter Family, Tennessee Mountaineers, …
Interval Signals
Brian Pyle is becoming a big name in disquieting ambient and haunted audio, and two new releases (this and Light that Comes, Light that Goes) from him this week aptly explain why. Interval Signals is an enticingly evocative story, a single-take journey through a series of interiors and exteriors spaces layered with memories and geographies. Melancholy like an old crime scene, its mixture of ancient broadcasts, echoes trapped in the dusty twentieth-century telephone network, spiritualistic tuned …
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…
Afro Noise I (Volume 4)
Dirter Promotions presents another volume of Cut Hands material, containing reworked and remastered versions of some tracks from his Afro-noise project. Comes in a beautiful special edition on 180 gram vinyl mastered by Noel Summerville and featuring the magical vévé artwork of Mimsy DeBlois, in a one-off pressing of 750 copies. The entire 750-limited pressings of Volume 1 and Volume 2 sold out on release day, so don't miss these! A reclamation of the conscious through 16 pieces (split betwe…
Here Come The Cars
A year after the Clean's reunion LP Vehicle (also their first proper album ever) put them back on the international-pop radar in 1990, guitarist David Kilgour retreated with his new Revox tape machine (which he'd been singing about rapturously in his side-project Stephen and elsewhere: "Have you seen my new tape machine?!") and cut his first solo album, Here Come the Cars, issued by Flying Nun in 1991. From the jarring cover image of David through to the last note, Here Come the Cars is a specia…
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released…
Osaka Fortune
Osaka Fortune is the meeting of two Norwegians and to Japanese artists Ð two drummers and two noise musicians. The album was recorded in Osaka, Japan February 2011. The quartet had previously performed live together, but this time they set up a studio recording on their tour of Japan. Jojo Hiroshige is the guitarist and leader of infamous Japanese noise band Hijokaidan, which has been going since 1979, known for their violent and energetic performances. Hiroshige has also run Alchemy Records sin…
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…
Stranded
Since 2002, Idea Fire Company has performed and recorded as a quartet with core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust (me!), joined by Meara O'Reilly and Jessi Swenson. (Meara and Jessi, along with Matt Krefting, start in my finally completed feature-length film Here's To Love!). I feel this LP is as strong as any I've been involved in, and I feel pretty strongly about my body of work. Stranded is the perfect companion to Anti-Natural. Excellent Karla Borecky cover. 180 gram luxury object.
The watchers
The Watchers is a historic collaboration between Lubomyr Melnyk and James Blackshaw. These new pieces are being released as a CD/LP with material exclusive to each format. LP is pressed in an edition of 500. I first met Lubomyr Melnyk at a festival called Hea Uus Heli in October 2008. We were both scheduled to play that day and I was very excited to see him perform. Before the show I bought several LPs from him and mentioned as much. Lubomyr (more than modest and courteous, as he always i…
Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco
Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco is a full-length LP that features six extended tracks from the golden age of the Moroccan record industry. After Morocco gained its independence in 1956, Moroccan-owned record labels sprouted and flourished in Casablanca. The inexpensive 45 rpm format allowed the record companies to release thousands of songs during the 1960s, creating a snapshot of the raw and hypnotic Berber music that thrived throughout Morocco. Powerful traditional styles were still aliv…
Yesterday & Today
Double vinyl LP pressing includes bonus CD pressing of this 2009 release. The Field is Axel Willner, and 2007's Here We Go Sublime was one of the year's most acclaimed releases, receiving a 9.0 from Pitchfork as well as universal praise. It was a soundtrack to the spit-shined airport of your dreams - faceless, futuristic, and fuzzy. Now, Willner expands his palette, continuing the oblique sampling strategy while building up the rhythmic architecture.
Concredrones
M.B., also known as Maurizio Bianchi doesn’t need much introduction. In the early 80s he was responsible for a string of compelling electronic music albums in the first wave of ‘industrial music’. After a hiatus of many years he returned in the late 90s and since then has been very active with many new solo releases, but also on the side with collaborations. Here he works with Mario Costa, also known as Sostrah Tinnitus, from Italy, who has had a number of releases on labels as Umbra, Beyond, My…
The End Of An Ear
New remastered edition of the classic debut solo album by Robert Wyatt, released in 1970. Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce a newly remastered edition of the legendary debut solo album by Robert Wyatt. Recorded in August 1970 whilst Wyatt was still a member of SOFT MACHINE, his first solo outing was a blend of Jazz and Experimental music that he had pioneered on his composition ‘Moon in June’ on Soft Machine’s "Third” album. The sessions for "The end of an ear” saw Robert Wyatt joined …
Live! At The Butchery
Three guys in South Africa obsessed with Can, Red Crayola, Pere Ubu & like sounds, a disdain toward apartheid, & the means to record themselves make one fantastic 200+ press LP in 1981 which disappears in obscurity. S.S. Records gives it a second life. Underground DIY classic which belongs on the NWW list (if they only knew about its existence!). 330 pressed.
Berlin
Rhodri Davies: harp. Mark Wastell: violoncello. Simon H. Fell: double bass. 'One day, I hope, the story will be written. The story of the group IST and its relationship to the birth of the music that subsequently became variously known as New London Silence or Lower Case Improv (and yes, I use those upper case letters intentionally). Perhaps the learned critics (who seem very rarely to actually ask the musicians) will tell us just what our place is in this history. Certainly we were not the firs…
Return of the Repressed; Tape Recordings 1984-90
Emily Faryna is a Canadian artist and singer known so far only by real fans of Minimal/Synth-related Wave-music and cassette-culture collectors. Like most singers, she started doing small gigs, slowly making a name for herself. By 1984, she was working under the MoDaMu Records label out of British Columbia in Canada. Her debut album, I’ve Got a Steel Bar in My Head, was released that year (MoDaMu10). The Track Doomed to Fail was released on the Underground Vancouver 1984 Compilation the same yea…
Cry
Cry was recorded in a shed at Taieri Mouth between 1998 and 2000 and then released by Emperor Jones on CD in 2000. Alastair has always been one of the most admired yet paradoxically ignored musicians from the New Zealand underground since he first started out in The Rip on Flying Nun Records in the early 1980s. Having already worked with the incredibly talented New Zealander otherwise known as Michael Morley, it seemed natural for MIE’s next step to go on to work with Alastair on getting …