New Arrivals
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…
The jungle he told me
Joachim Badenhorst (1981) is a Belgian reed player who divides his time between NYC and Belgium. Over the last 5 years Joachim has released a number of albums with different projects, such as Baloni, Han Bennink Trio, Rawfishboys, Taro, Tony Malaby’s Novela, Thomas Heberer’s Clarino, Mogil, Polylemma, Os Meus Shorts, International Trio, Red Rocket and Equillibrium.The Jungle He Told Me is Joachim's first solo album. It consists out of nine pieces on clarinet, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone. B…
Scott (The Collection 1967-1970)
This box set collects remastered versions of Scott Walker's first five solo albums. The Scott albums are the fulcrum of Walker's career: You can hear where he'd been, and in retrospect, where he was going. His third act was emerging after 20 years of almost total silence with Tilt, The Drift, and Bish Bosch, released between 1997 and 2012. Walker's latter-day albums are fearless and violent, featuring wailing donkeys, moans, scrapes, and famously, the sound of someone punching meat. They seem to…
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…
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.
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 …
Alice
Limited, hand-numbered edition of 500 green vinyls housed in lavish die-cut and foil-block embossed jacket** Alexander Tucker (Imbogodom/Guapo) and Daniel O'Sullivan (Æthenor/Ulver/Guapo) reprise their Grumbling Fur alias for the Latitudes series following that excellent album for Aurora Borealis in 2011. Both artists have previously graced the series already - Tucker solo and with Ginnugagap, and O'Sullivan with Miasma And The Carousel Of Headless Horses - and don't disappoint with their…
Almanac
Dragon Turtle Almanac is a heavy trip; a document of transformation, entropy, and causality. Dragon Turtle evokes Morricone landscapes as if painted by Glenn Branca, where dream atmospheres meet brutal realities of nature and relationships. These forces are both beautiful ("Causality", "Belt of Venus") and destructive ("Moon Fallout", "Burn the Leaves"). The textures and layers move with a sense of urgency and purpose ("Hometime", "Hourglass"). The duality of Tom Asselin and Brian Lightbody's mu…
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…
Gamma
""Vinyl of the Month must surely go to the epic "Gamma" by Italian quartet VipCancro, whose startlingly out there performance pitches the ensemble against such Krautrock epics as German Oak, Yatha Sidra and early Guru Guru. Indeed, for anyone requiring brain tissue abandonment Gamma will entirely do you justice. Their peculiar line-up of two synthesists, bass player and samples places VipCancro into a pure avant-garde territory, allowing splendid outbursts of canon-like percussion, and cin…
Novaya Zemlya
Novaya Zemlya (lit. "New Land"), also known in Dutch as "Nova Zembla" and in Norwegian as "Gåselandet" (lit. the "Goose Land"), is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe, the easternmost point of Europe, lying at Cape Flissingsky on the northern island. The artwork, by Jon Wozencroft, includes an essay by Thierry Charollais, "Thomas Köner's Novaya Zemlya: towards a metaphysical geography"... Of course we find the unique Köneresque glow…
Regions of the old school
After the mind-erasing and shamanic Amaranthine released in January 2012, MIE is ecstatic to be working with Richard again on a true magnum opus of the Youngsian experimental catalogue. Regions of the Old School is an epic and proudly sprawling collection of instrumentals and songs. In a conceptual nod to the long out of print Festival, released in 1994 by Table of the Elements, it features five extended tracks scored for a diverse array of instruments with guest vocals by Madeleine Hynes and ad…
Spielt Noise Boys
This is Electro 80's minimal punk at its very best - think Grauzone meet D.A.F. meet Suicide!Stephan Eicher recorded the totally 7 songs (only 5 were later released on the debut 7") on a simple dictaphone recorder with no overdubs or mixing and purely with 'stolen' equipment (after the Police stormed the Spex club where Stephan worked, and where the band that was supposed to play had to leave behind their equipment.).With almost no equipment he tried to reproduce tracks by his short living first…
Rave Slime
Limited edition 12" vinyl. Comes in a 140 micron polished finish PVC sleeve. Contains 2 locked grooves and a palindrome. 45 RPM. A double blow of brutalist composition and raw electronic music. Key words: extreme rave, radical synthesis, computer music for hooligans.
Blue Clouds
Some cream for your acid-folk tea - hitherto unreleased sides from the two and a half bards (well, two bards and a maiden - forsooth!) who self-released All On the First Day back in '72. These include studio recordings from later in the 70s, a couple live songs and an outtake from the legendary album itself! Well, the first legendary album anyway - for Blue Clouds is clearly another.
The Nethack Dictionary
In March 2005, drummer Teun Vergruggen (Jef Neve Trio, Flat Earth Society) invited the eccentric guitar player Mauro Pawlowski (dEUS, Somnambula) and Rhodes/piano wizard Jozef Dumoulin (Määk Spirit, Magic Malik, Octurn) to play a single session based on pure improvisation. The result left most people wondering how to categorize this music, and brought Othin Spake on the stage for many concerts. Six years later, the band has played in many jazz and alternative venues in Europe, released three …
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…
The Somnambulist's Tale
An early and one of the most special Gnod recordings is out now on Aguirre. The Somnambulist's Tale consists of two sidelong adventurous pieces which are carried by an incredible loop. The haunting ambience in combination with electronics, distant guitar layers, conversations between the band members, a typewriter, and other sounds from found objects makes this quite an atypical Gnod release, but definitely a great one. Influenced by early Krautrock bands like Can, Hawkwind and Ash Ra Temple, G…
Frog 2
The music developped by Frog is a work on percussions of all sorts : electronic, metallic, or else.. bathing in atmospheres made of « humid » tessituras. The music is simple, and unlike Brume, accessible ! Except for the arrangement of rhythms, 75% of work is concentrated on textures, mainly electronic : analog and digital.Electroacoustic is rarer here, most of the sounds being filtered by « vintage » analog synths using the whole usual range : VCO, VCF, VCA, envelope modulators etc.…
The Dew Line
Deluxe gatefold sleeve reissue of this all-time classic of deformed rock song and avant guitar downs from Michael Morley of The Dead C: originally issued in 1994 by Table Of The Elements/Precious Metal, this new edition re-masters the original while adding five bonus tracks from the same time period and re-jigging the running order for maximal wipe-out.. Michael Morley has trawled through his extensive collection of unreleased tracks from the original recording period to integrate a furth…