New Arrivals
The Wyrd Meme
A quartet of new songs from the ever-wonderful Alasdair Roberts - a follow-up to his long-player Spoils, released earlier in the year. The tone is carefully poised between staunchly traditional folk values and more modern arrangement styles; though Roberts' fingerpicking and unaffected delivery are faithful to the genre's purist leanings, there's nothing conventional about the songs' segmented structures or the often very minimalist arrangements. It's quite strange to hear such a seemingly old-f…
At the cut
Spilling over with trembling strings and thunderous crescendos, "Coward" foreshadows the electric energy that is to be found throughout Vic Chesnutt's newest record. With members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion, and Fugazi once again contributing, At the Cut is populated by giant melodies, quiet meditations, and intense studies on mortality and memory. But, for all its bombast, At the Cut is probably most notable for Chesnutt's unwavering honesty and cathartic powe…
Mats G Plays Albert A
99 copies only one-sided LP black vinyl, with insert. Mats Gustafsson -- baritone sax, music box rec, mixed and mastered June 16, 2009 by Ola Glans, Svinaberga, Sweden. After his rendition of Duke Ellington pieces, the series continue with Mats unique versions/visions of classic Ayler's tunes like 'Our Prayer' and 'Angels/Spirits.' Here he plays music box and baritone sax; the sound is full and warm. Recorded in June 2009. 'These two albums on yr label are two of the ones I m most pleased with e…
This is no fun acid 02
'In the beginning there was Roland's founder Ikutaro Kakehashi and an arsenal of computer controlled analog jock boxes designed specifically to outmode the trad rock (read: human) rhythm section... the circuitry was so tightly wound however, so rooted in synthesis that it failed to meet its promise. It wasn't until the mid-80s that the TB-TR system took novel form as acid house; a simple but novel attitude shift that saw an embrace of extra-terrestrial machine funk aesthetics converging with the…
Up To Earth
Vinyl edition of this joyous improvised music drawing on South African roots and European free jazz from Chris McGregor and a group including Evan Parker, Louis Moholo, Barre Philllips, &c. This album only had a few test pressings at the time of recording and this is therefore the first vinyl release of this classic work. In 1969 the Chris McGregor Group were riding high on the London jazz scene, playing and hanging out with all the rising stars of British free jazz. Sessions for the pre…
You Are The One I Pick
"Nottingham duo Felix make their Kranky debut with this fine and idiosyncratic collection of songs. The main focus here is the vocal/piano/cello talents of Lucinda Chua, whose sparse yet quirk-loaded minimalism receives guitar and bass backing from Chris Summerlin, who's probably best known for his work in the rock band Lords. Chua's writing is quite unlike anything else currently out there; her lyrics convey strange or often very simple, domesticated ideas delivered in a pared-down, plaintive f…
A hidden place
Sohrab was born in Tehran in 1984. He was seven when the Iran-Iraq war ended. His name, from an old poem called “Shahname”, means “rouge water”, which can also mean 'blood'. He started a punk band with his brother and a friend, which lasted about two years before splitting. Sohrab is totally isolated in Iran, with little or no connection to what is happening there. Sohrab is, like so many, displaced within his own country and occupies a similar internal cultural isolation. This is suggeste…
Tenebroso
Last copies, 2009 release: Tenebroso is the result of a night of sounds played together by OmegaKaanan (The Intelligence), OmegaNene (Movie Star Junkies, Vermillion Sands), OmegaMatt (The Mojomatics), OmegaG8 (With Love), OmegaMac (Apoteosi del Mistero). This session has been recorded with an eight-track cassette recorder at Outside Inside Studio during a night in May 2008. Previously released as a free download by Clinical Archives netlabel.
Clear
Clear and Discovery were originally released as two companion CDRs by James Ferraro (of the whole Skaters / Lamborghini Crystal / 90120 / Splash / Nirvana axis) and comprise the August 1974 (Taj-Mahal Travellers) of his discography. Both albums contain absolutely beautiful whirling hall-of-knives-style synth drone that makes one want to reference Klaus Schulze or Bobby Beausoleil. Clear bursts with flam beats and a cluster of melodies muffled like a calliope wrapped in a soggy tarp, while Discov…
United World In Outer Space
Decades before his time, political and musical revolutionary, Sun Ra, developed a new plane of cultural existence where black people were all-powerful beings from outer space, sending their intergalactic message through jazz music. Recorded live in 1975 at Cleveland's legendary jazz club, the Smiling Dog Saloon, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra descended on the city for a week-long residency. You can imagine how the uninitiated's jaw must have dropped when Ra and his 15 musicians marched out onto th…
BloodLinks + SacredPlaces
Poet Laureate of East St. Louis+founder/editor of internationally acclaimed journal "Drum Voices Revue". Principal architect of black cultural arts movement of the 60s, teacher & acclaimed writer of countless volumes of poetry, Redmond has been called "the preacher of poetic rhythm" by Maya Angelou, "a carver of high song magic" by Quincy Troupe & "a worker & healer" by Ishmael Reed. On this spirited, funky, streetwise collection of 12 vintage cuts recorded live in the studio in Sacramento in 19…
Thing
For fifteen years, Trans Am has forged a musical legacy that has consistently confounded those who would confine them to generic indie-rock labels and rather spoken for itself. Trans Am a-la 2010 is a band of veterans unafraid to contradict themselves, one that has grown stronger in its music and more confident in its identity over the course of now nine full length albums.
Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy
This disc brings together the Sun Ra recordings "Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy" and "Art Forms Of Dimensions Tomorrow" (recorded in 1963 and '61-'62 respectively). Cosmic Tones functions as a kind of blueprint for the sort of large-scale jazz weirdness that would inform much of Sun-Ra's subsequent works, featuring the woozy reeds of 'And Otherness' and the afro-jazz experiments of 'Thither And Yon'. On 'Adventure Equation' a space echo treatment on the recording which is reprised for the sax f…
In Psychic Defense
“In psychic defense” is the last work of Clay Ruby as Burial Hex. With this record Burial Hex faces a new chapter in his music where noise, post-punk, a wise use of the rythm, experimental wave and dark melodies match together in a perfect balance. The record is elaborated as a protection spell in psychic self-defense, and the lyrics are from an old hymn to the Archangel Michael, always been seen as a leader and protector of the faithful. This one sided also confirms the collaboration betw…
Badlands
If you think something’s wrong with your speakers, you are mistaken. No, you can’t turn up the bass. You’re just listening to the raw, stripped down wail of Alex Zhang Hungtai, better known as Dirty Beaches. His MySpace describes the music as “minimalist rockabilly,” and those are probably the two best words I could think of to describe his newest LP, Badlands.At times, Hungtai’s vocals sound quite Elvis-esque; at other times, you can barely make out the mumbling echoes over the subdued drum bea…
MP3 Deviations #8
The MP3 Deviation album contains pieces that are results of the collaborative research by a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) and myself, led by Tony Myatt at Music Research Center at the University of York in UK in 2009. My idea was to develop new software based on the disruption of the MP3. Primarily I thought the MP3 as reproducing device could have created very new sound by intervention between its main elements, the compression encoder and decoder. It turned out th…
Friday Group
From out of the Great Republic of Texas, and a new side project from Tom Carter (Charalambides) and Brian Smith (Iron Kite) rises a lone star called Friday Group. In a seemingly appropriate gesture, the opening scherzo of droney solo guitar twang blows dusty debris across the speakers, as if a small sand storm in a remote part of Amarillo. With wind wrestling loose gutters and flat chimes, the first movement is almost a weird paean to Ry Cooder's desolate Paris Texas score. Axe attacks ho…
Kablys. Live at 11:20
This is a great live performance of the best Lithuanian contemporary jazz musicians played live at the small punk club in Vilnius. That was a hot night. Liudas Mockunas - tenor, baritone and soprano saxophonesEugenijus Kanevicius - bass and electronicsDalius Naujokaitis – drums
Insect
'insect is a work by Dave Phillips that consists of untreated field recordings made in Thailand in 2001. It was first presented live on the 6th of December 2002 at Egocity in Zürich. the accompanying text evokes questions of what might happen to humanity if insects were to perish. Insect was originally issued as a cdr in an edition of 50 copies in 2003, and later rereleased by dp on demand. By the time i heard this work, almost 3 years after its release, i was astounded by its sound. A wo…