New Arrivals
Beija Flors Velho E Sujo
São Paulo Underground is an electronica-laced tropicalia funhouse, a secret passage between Chicago’s volatile avant garde jazz scene and Brazil’s teeming creative capital. Featuring Chicago maestro Rob Mazurek on cornet, harmonium and various effects, and São Paulo’s Guilherme Granado on keyboards, synths, sampler and vocals, and Mauricio Takara on percussion, cavaquinho and electronics, SPU delivers its fourth revelatory album Beija Flors Velho E Sujo.In its latest incarnation, SPU is a power …
Ensemble Pearl
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 Harris. These playe…
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Cute doesn’t cut it, at least not all the time. But take cute, add drum machines, and put him (yes, for our purposes, “cute” is a dude) in short-shorts, smear him with trashy makeup, wrap him in cellophane and bind him in handcuffs—as Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes has been doing onstage lately—and suddenly this thing called “cute” undergoes a transfiguration. It’s a whole new beast.Once the most overtly precious of the Elephant 6 menagerie, Barnes has since jettisoned the everybody-and-his-roommate…
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…
Music For Fireworks
In 1978, Philippe Genion bought a guitar for 1000 belgian francs (25€). He connected it to his hifi amp, quickly learned how to play "smoke on the water" and a few punk songs with two fingers and within two weeks, pushing the amp more and more to the limit, blew his 200W speakers out. Later, around 1980, he bought an old ARP synthesizer from walloon band "Jo Lemaire plus Flouze" and started playing with these instruments and a few old flanger and distorsion pedals, and started recording so…
Mellow Out
Mainliner, were a Japanese trio consisting of Asahito Nanjo (High Rise), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple) and Hajime Koizumi and their debut album 'Mellow Out' is considered by many to be thee CLASSIC Japanese underground album. Since it was first released in 1996 it's legend has grown and grown, and it's still talked about by lovers of all things loud, noisy and Japanese as THEE definitive Japanese noise rock statement. Upon release it was instantly dubbed 'the pinnacle of achieveme…
Dutch Tvashar Plumes
'Dutch Tvashar Plumes' seems to map the changes in Lee's approach to music making over the last 4/5 years. From his initial exposure and subsequent immersion into Jungle as a teenager, he soon began experimenting with structure and sound design which led him to a more 'academic' approach with 'Computer Music'. There were many self-imposed rules he adhered to during this time. These last few years he decided to break with that and make an intuitive venture forward. This record is the first real d…
The Spanish Suite
2012 Re-release "The Spanish Suite was written to magnify the contribution that Moorish Spain made on the European Renaissance. The relationship of music to cosmic rhythms and harmony was altered from the original state of Spanish music and eventually distorted down to the 12 tone equi-temperment system of tuning. The Artistic Heritage Ensemble was taught to play outside of the 12-tone system and to recognize natural tone relationships. The musicians had to be dedicated to music for life …
Criminale - Vol.2 Ossessione
A record as weird and wild as the cover – filled with really tripped-out sounds from the obscure Flipper sound library in Italy! The music follows strongly in the best style of the rock-driven sounds from Italian horror films – but there's also a more compact approach too, with some funky elements that really make the whole thing sparkle – and a restrained approach that's far less indulgent than the prog styles that Italy was famous for at the time. The whole thing's great – a wicked mi…
Infinitesimal
Berangere Maximin was born in December 1976 on the remote French colonial Island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean where she resided until the age of fifteen. Performing first as a singer, she later studied electroacoustic music with the composer Denis Dufour (a member of the Ina-GRM from 1976 to 2000) at the Perpignan Conservatoire. Her first professional experiences occurred in Paris, and in 2002, she moved there permanently. From 2002 to 2007, whilst running the organisations Motus (concerts pro…
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…
Mitosis
"12k kicks off its 11th year with a new release that takes the label down new sonic pathways. Caught between the organic and electronic minimalism that 12k is known for and the unconventional Japanese pop musings and songwriting style of Happy, Moskitoo's Drape is an infectiously strange, bleepy, and dreamy debut release. Sanae Yamasaki (Moskitoo) hails from Sapporo, Japan in Hokkaido, the country's northern-most prefecture. Perhaps a reaction to the cool climate of her home, her multi-instrumen…
Graft
Graft is an album by Japanese noise master Masami Akita aka Merzbow. This LP album is pressed on lime-green vinyl in a "bootleg"-style sleeve and sealed with a sticker. Limited to 300 regular copies. According to the Merzbow blog, the design was inspired by a '70s Jethro Tull bootleg called My God, and the recording was inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. Recorded in November 2009 at Munemi House, Tokyo.
Berlin
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Chris Heenan, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet. Alexander Frangenheim, double bass. Ofer Bymel, percussion. Recorded 2010 in Berlin.
Remember your black day
“Remember Your Black Day” features the first material conceived and produced as a full length by Dominick Fernow for the Vatican Shadow project following almost a dozen tapes (mostly released on Hospital Productions) and vinyl editions (released by the likes of Blackest Ever Black, Modern Love and Type) over the last three years. None of the 8 tracks included have been released before on any other format. At a time when the scene is saturated with “Noise Techno” the album is almost celebratory b…
Abisso
Close your eyes. You may think Satan is singing. Open them: you’ll see a small masked woman, with dreadlocks down the her ankles, and without vocal effects. Close your eyes again: you’ll think of a heavy metal double kick drum set. Open them again: a gigantic, wrestling masked man is torturino a floor tom, a snare and a cymbal, standing up, no kick. Two people, half gear, enough to bring Hell.This is OvO. What they do is not easy to file. Not noise, not metal, not doom, not punk, not rock and ro…
Living Theory Without Anecdotes
The album Living Theory Without Anecdotes confates Nicolas Wiese's acousmatic compositions from the years 2009-2011. There is a common thread: all four compositions are constructed out of samples from acoustic instrument and object recordings, and mostly have rather foating structures with slow crescendos and little disruptions. A significant element in Wiese's soundworks is the spatial layering - there is an architecture of foregrounds, backgrounds and diferent midgrounds that integrate …
Old Punch Card
Taking inspiration from early music concrete and electronic music, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Nuno Canavarro, Raymond Scott, David Behrman, and free improvisation, Old Punch Card is a beautifully noisy, jagged, yet stately album of synthesizer music. The ideas and implementation of Old Punch Card (the album title alluding to the electronic, faintly mechanic origins of the music) were the result of an entirely new challenge: to do something completely different from anything else he's…
Lipstick
This valley-chameleon changed colours more than David Bowie dyed his hair, which takes a lot of skin, brains and guts in an area that should have been called Noisehampton, a hay fevered pit surrounded by mountains that stare at champions such as Body/Head, Fat Worm Of Error, Thurston Moore, Breaking World, Joshua Burkett and so on, all playing in premier leak! Krefting was a member of the glammed Velvet rock band The Believers, of the much loved drone band Son Of Earth with Aaron Rosenblum…
Retro-2038
COH is the moniker used by Ivan Pavlov from Russia for more than a decade. COH is also the Russian word for \'sleep\'. Yet, do not be deceived - RETRO-2038 is much more of a deep space than a deep sleep. The second COH release on Editions Mego is a true delight to behold, inviting as it does its exploration of electronic sound in minimalism, futuristic pop and the uncharted territories inbetween. Ranging from digital updates of Giorgio Moroder\'s pulse experiments to menacing lingering LF…