New Arrivals
We Will Always Be
There's a disarming honesty to the way Michigan-based husband and wife duo Windy & Carl communicate with one another. A blog post from Windy, published in late 2011, describes the making of We Will Always Be, framing it in the context of their relationship. "Yeah, we have had bumps in the road, and on occasion it seems as if we may never recover from these bumps, but we do," she wrote. That type of candor doesn't stop at the written word; it also bleeds through into the duo's music. Often their …
Matter
Ingar Zach, percussion. Martin Küchen, saxophone & pocket radio. Nikos Veliotis, cello & video. Looper's unique combination of floating sounds provides the spectator with a suspended environment to sink in, dislocating him from the casual perception of time and space.
The Rocker
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010!
Jailbreak s the duo of pedal steel-vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock-roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the 'New Weird America', where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina C…
L'Origine / TEMA
Drawing inspiration from the "Action Direct" expanded guitar performances of Masayuki Takayanagi, Fusinato places the guitar at the centre of his work. A few crudely played strings provide the impetus for a long chain of electronics which obliterate the original signal and leaves us with a hyper-kinetic wall of full frequency spectrum noise. Like the piano in David Tudor early 1960's performances of Cage's Variations II, in Fusinato's work, the guitar is the object of a dialectic of simultaneous…
The Background Noise
Under The Snow is a project by Stefano Gentile (guitar, objects, field-recordings) and Gianluca Favaron (microphones, field-recordings, processing). Stefano Gentile is well known for his work as owner of the Silentes and Amplexus labels; he is part of Maribor (along with Maurizio Bianchi, Nimh, Andrea Marutti and Gianluca Favaron) and in the past he has collaborated with Aube and Amir Baghiri. Beyond releasing under his own name, Gianluca Favaron collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen proje…
Penpals Forever And Ever
Expanding Erik Skodvin's extremely limited 2008 cassette edition Penpals Forever, this vinyl release remasters the original content and adds a whole extra side's worth of new material, all of which is exclusive to the LP. You wouldn't necessarily discern this straight away from the Deaf Center member's elusive and teasingly enigmatic music, but apparently 'Penpals Forever And Ever' is an "imaginary tale of a long dead baroque painter and his telekinetic correspondence with a flightless b…
Rufen
Rufen is the second installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) studio album. In four impressive live recordings, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Onnen Bock unfold aural panoramas which can only be described, in the truest sense of the word, as fantastic. Had Claude Debussy not already composed 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun,' then Qluster would have been ideally placed to do so, their transparency and polymorphism so reminiscent of his high Impression…
Unfinished. For William Turner, painter
"Which side of the picture should be hung uppermost? 2003, London: the first time I visited Tate Britain, Tate Gallery, and the first time I saw and really experienced the paintings of JMW Turner (1775-1851). Overwhelmed, especially by his late and unfinished works I was stunned by the power of the stillness of his work. 25 years before that something similar; me, as a young man in Madrid; Prado, Goya paintings and etchings - for me an initiation which opened up the door to earlier art an…
Late
New York's "...premiere improvisatory, vocal-and-electronics cosmic beat-box band..." return to Woodsist with a brilliant side of loopy hypnotics, including an insert code for free digital download of the 2007 cassette-only release for Tank Tapes redeemable directly from the label. All four tracks are previously unreleased, arms-out eyes-shut wanders through darkly tinted terrain. 'Oboh' opens up with what sounds like reversed field recordings made inside a washing machine at a Native Am…
Peepers
Elsewhere, ‘The Love Didn't Go Anywhere’ sees Leafcutter John play guitar on a beautifully loping piece that has the subtle afterglow of classic Roxy Music, with Bryan Ferry’s vocal replaced by the rapier glide of the two reeds, while Tom Herbert’s hefty double bass pounds out concise but penetrating lines. Interestingly, prior to the sessions, Rochford listened to a lot of ‘60s soul (“Aretha and Marvin Gaye”), an influence that he has channelled with more guile than is immediately discernible. …
70 Years of Sunshine
In 1943 a Swiss chemist accidentally absorbed through his finger-tips a tiny amount of a compound he was researching. Later, he recorded the effects in a journal - a document of the world's very first LSD trip: 'Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condi…
Music Of Changes
The title is a double pun. The score is the first that John Cage devised allowing the hexagrams of the I Ching to fully determin e how the music would procee d, event by event, gesture by gesture—the musical details (pitch, duration, dynamic s, density, tempi) being painstakingly, albeit fortuitously, derived through point-by-point con sultation from charts of possi bilities designed by the composer. (Christian Wolff, Cage’s young friend and musical associate, had presented Cage with a co…
Trees Have Cancer Too
Duo of Pedro Sousa and Pedro Lopes, two portuguese young musicians, and some of the most exciting in the plastic, tonal and energic exploration of sound in a long time. Using sax (Sousa), turntables (Lopes) and a communal use of electronics, their music is admittedly nervous, obsessively bent over the following moment. Unlike other past forms of improvisation more concerned with listening and a certain purity of sound, this search is as focused as much as frantic in the pursuit of a new d…
Jedwabnik
More music involving the seemingly always-at-work Wojciech Kucharczyk (does the man ever sleep?), this time in a quartet alongside B a ej Król, Jerzy Mazzoll and Radek Dziubek. The project's title Dwutysi czny translates as 'two thousand' - referring, according to a brief recent interview with Easterndaze, to the year when Król first came across the music of the other three players, a discovery that eventually led him to write to them to ask if they'd donate him some of their recorded sounds to …
Summer through my mind
Richard Youngs presents his debut recording for BaDaBing Records, and the label is looking forward to a long relationship. For Summer Through My Mind, Youngs pushes himself into a challenging new sphere yet again. A renowned musician with over 40 albums to his name, he goes somewhere he never has before - to the heart of American music. Summer Through My Mind is a country music album, warped through Youngs's ambidextral mind. A warning: it's not like any country album one has heard before. There…
Molam: Thai Country Groove from Isan Vol. 2
Molam is a multi-faceted folk country music native to Laos and the collection of rural Northeastern Thai provinces called Isan. Molam is an umbrella term used for numerous Lam styles. It literally translates into "expert singer" or "expert song." Featured here on volume two of this series are Lam Phun, Lam Thuy, Lam Plern, Lam Dern, and Lam Sing styles of Molam recordings from the 1970s and 1980s. All of these forms are built from a tradition that is centuries-old. A few examples of Molam…
Footnote(s)
Originally published as a cdr in 2005, limited to hardly any copies on Feater one's Nest, in the period Joshua Burkett visited Europe for the first time, it was about time these beautiful recordings saw some day light again on wax! I've met various people on other planets that i could compare to friends closer to home, Bill Nace calls himself a "fat Vaast Colson", Vladimier looks like Phillip Quehenberger, Tarp's Conrad Capistran's laughter sounds simular to W Ravenveers grinning and so on…
Spider John
This vinyl-only album fills a crucial gap in the evolution of legendary folk artist Spider John Koerner. Recorded in between 1965's Spider Blues and 1969's Running, Jumping, Standing Still (with Willie Murphy, both released on Elektra), Koerner is captured here live and unaccompanied at The Ash Grove in Los Angeles, bringing to light an exciting and previously-undocumented period in the career of Spider John. The excellent recording captures Koerner at the absolute peak of his guitar-playin…
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…
Marvellous Boy: Calypso From West Africa
Marvellous Boy Calypso From West Africa HONEST JON'S RECORDS **** endlessly satisfying' (Boston Phoenix); 'Blending cheeky calypso with rocking highlife — and by turns breezy, wistful and downright uproarious' (Daily Telegraph); 'gems at every turn... weaving highlife, swing, military brass bands, Afro-Cuban jazz, into a hell of a compilation... Honest Jon's have added to the highest order of this simple music of heartbreaking celebration' (Brainwashed). The inter-war dance bands of British West…