New Arrivals
Winds & Skins
Winds & Skins transpired to be the very last set of recordings made by Afro-Cuban percussionist Sabu Martinez, who sadly passed away precisely one month after this December 1978 session was committed to tape. The album draws a line under a career that saw the illustrious musician performing alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey as well as releasing a string of out-and-out classic Latin jazz records. Here the noted conguero teams up with the lauded saxophonist/flautist Sahib Shihab, who himsel…
Instrumental Tourist
Instrumental Tourist' is one of the year's most anticipated electronic music albums. The meeting of established artist Tim Hecker and studio magician Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never at his Software Studio yields an otherworldly and near symphonic suite apparently conducted "...to mimic the tropes and techniques of jazz-based improvisation, with little preparation prior", effecting a wide-eyed and fascinating sound as dramatic and enchanting as any we've heard this year. As you'd expect …
Interface
Awesome, monolithic slab of metal machine music from 1977, France, Paris...Heldon! A prog/early electronic holy grail replete with breathtaking and far-out Heldon's most crystalline work, building to the epic crescendo of the title track. Many fans consider this to be their masterpiece, but more importantly, Interface is a record that will continue to unfold for centuries to come. Richard Pinhas is an artistic iconoclast. A French intellectual as likely to collaborate with MAGMA as the radica…
Sub Contra
People of the North is Kid Millions (drums) and Bobby Matador (keyboard, synth, vocals) of Oneida, and Sub Contra is their Thrill Jockey debut. While their sound, like Oneida's, is constantly shifting and absorbing new concepts and ideas, Sub Contra is a work that fully embraces tumult and darkness in startling and dramatic ways. People of the North have been an active entity since 2003, but it wasn't until 2010 with the release of Deep Tissue on their own Brah imprint and Steep Formations, whic…
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…
Kenzo Deluxe
Guitarist Chris Forsyth is a unique voice in the realm of American music, having emerged from the challenging free form expressionism of his old group Peeesseye with a lyrical command rare in any genre. His newest work brings his trademark lyricism to new heights in his most straightforward setting yet. Gone are the fleshed out rock band arrangements of last year’s Paranoid Cat LP, replaced on Kenzo Deluxe, by Forsyth shunning overdubs and playing his transcendent songs alone in a room on his el…
Live at the Cairo High Cinema Institute
I saw him at a street party in Giza where a few hundred people had amassed to dance and scream into the night. Flanked by Khaled Mando and Islam Tata, his two drummers pounding furiously asthe signature tone of his synth intensified for almost two hours, Islam Chipsy demonstrated his completely revolutionary take on modern Egyptian Shaabi. The sound was raw and distorted, thevolume was deafening, and the energy was high. Thirty minutes into the set, the trio pulled out blindfolds and put them on…
Black wooden
6 songs, 21 minutes. In high summer of 2007, Phil Elverum, in the guise of Mount Eerie, found his way to Southern Studios. Armed with a borrowed guitar and some notebook paper, and with little time before an evening gig, Mount Eerie and Southern's engineer Harvey Birrell recorded the six songs of Black Wooden.Black Wooden is the coming together of ideas that had travelled with Mount Eerie for months and had solidified into compositions in the days and hours before the studio session. The title i…
Excerpts (& Half-Speeds)
Dan Melchior is known by many as a long-standing footsoldier of garage rock. Throughout his 15 years of service Dan has gained a reputation as being one of the few in his field willing to test the flexibility of an otherwise stagnant genre. Last year's brilliant Assemblage Blues LP (Siltbreeze) showed Dan scratching at the bars of his cage, restricted by the very domain he dominates. Excerpts (& Half-Speeds) is Dan Melchior's hammer in the mirror. A courageous act of self-vandalism, reduc…
Alcor
restocked!! Alcor is the debut LP by a new voice from the Australian wilderness. Hailing from Ferntree Gully, Victoria, the music of Astor has thus far been appreciated only via a string of barely-distributed CDRs. Alcor gathers together the prime of these micro-editions and presents the material as a seductive and puzzling new whole. Field recordings of humble organic activity bend against a foundation of discreetly processed electronics/piano, creating sonorities that are as undefinable a…
Mask of the Maker
Fuses deep kosmische moods w/ jet-propulsion lab experiments, classic galactic Italo, soaring starblood synth workouts, funky astral ragas, psychedelic dust coulds & rare mantric guest vocals
White Metal
“White Metal” is a new piece by Michael Pisaro, realised by the composer and Miguel Prado. “When I first heard that Michael was thinking of working on a project with the name “White Metal”, I contacted him, excited to know more about it. At first we talked about general aspects of the piece, without knowing the route it would take, beyond a couple of conceptual premises. At some point, Michael suggested that this project be included in his “Grey Series” a series of noise-oriented scores he was …
Outside/Inside
Charlie Nothing was the fractured-psyche pseudonym of author, father, horsekeeper, organic farmer, beekeeper, philosopher and clown Charles Martin Simon, inventor of the dingulator (guitar sculptures made out of the metal from American cars). Charlie's only visible offering to the record buying public was really anything but. Due to its rarity, The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, issued by Takoma Records in 1967, has been a source of consternation for in-the-know types for years. …
Orchestre Sidi Yassa De Kayes
After the 1960 independence, the Orchestre Regional de Kayes was founded in order to reinvigorate the local cultures from the Mand and the Kasso regions and turn some traditional themes into modern songs. Under the guidance of bandleader Harouna Barry, they evolve as one of Mali's finest orchestras. In the early 1970s, like most modern bands of Mali, the orchestra evolved into the Sidi Yassa de Kayes, named after Sidi Yassa, a late great singer. In 1977, they release one eponymous LP in 1977 on …
The Letter
This is the first album by Liberez, a group formed by recording engineer John Hannon and Pete Wilkins in Southend. The project began life exploring a deconstruction of the traditional "band" form before expanding to a quartet with the addition of vocalist Nina Bosnic, and multi-instrumentalist Tom James Scott. Musically rooted in improvisation, the band sought a progression from the loosely described "noise rock" sound at their inception into more abstract territories. The tracks were recorded a…
Black Mill Tapes Volumes 3 & 4
Our Head Technician returns with the keenly awaited follow-up to his amazing 'Black Mill Tapes Volumes 1 & 2' as Pye Corner Audio, including the previously digital-only Volume 3 and the as-yet-unheard Volume 4. Lurking in the shadows between deep house, slow techno, Carpenter soundtracks and classic electronica, these sibling LPs transcend genres with hallucinatory, shape-shifting effect, trudging forth from the pastoral whimsy of the first volumes to a darker, less certain point on the horizon.…
The Men Parted The Sea To Devour The Water
Numbered edition of 700 housed in die-cut, origami fold and foil-blocked jacket** 'The Men Parted The Sea To Devour The Water' is The Haxan Cloak's long awaited Latitudes edition. It's his first release since that jaw-dropping eponymous album (an end of year favourite across the board) and means that we're possibly one step closer to two things: a vinyl edition of said LP, and his hugely anticipated album debut for Tri Angle. But let's not get ahead of ourselves....here we find Bobby Kr…
Das Testament
Backwards proudly presents the reissue of a private Maurizio Bianchi vinyl LP, issued in a small edition of 300 copies in 1983 and titled "Das Testament". M.B. is an Italian pioneer of noise music, born near Milan. Bianchi began to produce music in 1979, and since 1980 has used electronic equipment with the avowed goal "to produce technological sounds and in such a way to work on complete realising of the modern decadence". Now remastered, for this release MB plays electronics, rhythms, neutroni…
Homage To The Sine Wave
Already out of print, Eleh resurfaces from the depths with a new full-length release on TAIGA records. Homage to the Sine Wave is the second release in the sound wave series following 2008's sold-out LP, Homage to the Square Wave. In a fashion similar to Square Wave, the elemental approach to construction of the pieces on Sine Wave is influenced by Josef Albers, the visual artist best known for his color studies embodied in paintings of geometric abstraction. Both faces feature sidelong composi…
Music for air raids V2.0
LP album, numbered and stamped vinyl edition limited to 250 copies. A different version from ' Music for Air Raids ', recomposed for the vynil format and entirely remastered. Comes above our heads the distant roar of ' Music for air raids v2.0 ' as a prelude to the waves of polyrhythmic drums and unremitting guitars, of powerful and constructive poundings that will penetrate us to the core throughout the album. As this album is a tour de force end-to-end, with raids of drums, persussions and gui…