New Arrivals
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
Death Set
"JAMES JACKSON TOTH, aka WOODEN WAND, is your fearless friend, the stumbling guy who gets himself into incredibly fucked up situations but comes out shining and lives to tell about it, entertaining you safely and immensely. You should be grateful. In my view, he's a great American songwriter in full bloom. Most likely you'll think that's a preposterous claim, and I won't blame you, but you'll be totally, completely, and unforgivably wrong not to agree. To me, it's obvious Toth is animated with t…
A Romance Of 2 Planets
2010 release. Beautifully presented three-track 12" from Jamal Moss in his enigmatic Hieroglyphic Being guise, presented in a run of 500 copies on London's excellent Alter label - who're responsible for that OPN/Tomuttontu split 7" some months back. Jamal's unique and impregnable style is in full flow on the 12-minute A-side 'Sphere Of Madness', divining wandering, astral synthlines and frothing machine rhythms, all equally informed by vintage Chi-House, Industrial and New Age memes but entirely…
Mad Dog\'s Hustle
A too long unheard blacksploitation soundtrack from the Fantasy Productions house -- grooves from the pool of players who laid down the sounds on Secret Stash's fantastic Porno Groove compilation -- the score for the very little seen and long lost Mad Dog's Hustle from 1974! The music is credited to The Upstroke -- the same unidentified musicians from Fantasy's adult film scores -- and in a similar fashion to the porno soundtrack material, they're working very much in the appropriate idiom, but …
Self Title
There are no words to say how amazing the Heinz Hopf's debut album is. They are a harsh noise duo consisting of Matthias Andersson and Dan Johansson. The first is the mind behind the label Release the bats, and the second is the man behind the moniker Sewer Election. The result is 32 minutes of pure, brutal and uncompromising harsh noise. Comparisons with Incapacitants is too easy, their love of the Japanese noise is too evident. Comparisons that do not lead to the cloning of a sound. Thei…
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…
Hostile Environment
Bolder is Martin Maischein, who used to record as Heinrich At Hart on Position Chrome, and Peter Votava, also known as Pure, who has recorded previously for Mego and was half of Ilsa Gold. With their combined background in electronic music of all kinds, Bolder introduces a significant proposition to the current experimental electronic boom. Blurring the lines between industrial, techno, dub, ambient, and narrative forms, the work on Bolder's debut presents a dance amongst the abyss, a world wher…
Gongs of Cambodia and Laos
A compilation of gongs of ethnic minorities in Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri provinces of Cambodia and in Champasak and Attapeu provinces of Laos, recorded between 2003 and 2007, released for the first time on a double vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker at dubplates Berlin. Georges Condominas had released end of the 50s on the french label Ocora a vinyl containing recordings of gong ceremonies 'musiques Mnong gar du Vietnam', in between so much has happened and more than 50 years later it's tim…
Music for Sick Queers
The German Shepherds, formed by Sandy Stark and Stephen Scheatzle in Nov. 1981, released a three song ep in early "82 with "Booty Jones" -- to child molester and kidnapper Kenneth Parnell; "I Adore You" -- an offering of prayer and submission and "Message from JJ" -- a rousing sermon by Peoples Temple chief Rev. Jim Jones. Later that year a dub version of "I Adore You" and "The Earthquake Has Come" appeared on the "You'll Hate This Record, Record" compilation lp. In 1983 the Shepherds began work…
Strings
“Strings” documents the long awaited first encounter of David Maranha and Stephan Mathieu, taking place in the Tennis Court of the Parque de Serralves, in Porto, on a sun-drenched yet gusty late-afternoon in July 2011. Having discussed in advance which instruments, tuning and notes to use, the piece was accomplished as an improvisation on the violin, shruti-box and virginals, reflecting both players love for classic minimalism, but also their ability to transform this language and make it their …
A Strange Functional System
More than 30 years ago ‘Bizarre Unit’ released their timeless and highly collected classic single ‘Dancing/Away from the Screaming Car’. Now for the first time ever, Bizarre Unit and VOD-Records have uncovered the lost treasure trove of their surviving recordings. These unique recordings have been digitally transferred, edited and carefully restored from the ¼-Reel-Recordings and Cassettes. Embedded crackling and background noise from the original surviving Acetates have been careful…
Interval Signals
Brian Pyle is becoming a big name in disquieting ambient and haunted audio, and two new releases (this and Light that Comes, Light that Goes) from him this week aptly explain why. Interval Signals is an enticingly evocative story, a single-take journey through a series of interiors and exteriors spaces layered with memories and geographies. Melancholy like an old crime scene, its mixture of ancient broadcasts, echoes trapped in the dusty twentieth-century telephone network, spiritualistic tuned …
Awakening Messiah
Dominick "Vatican Shadow" Fernow presents veiled techno producer Violet Poison on his Bed Of Nails imprint with the spectral industrial gloom of 'Awakening Messiah'. To date Violet Poison is best known as the mysterious accomplice of Shaped Noise in their Violetshaped alias - but here he strikes solo, transmitting four cuts of steely, night-stalking cyberpunk driven by sputtering techno engines through intensely bleak synth interzones. Like Black Rain or Vatican Shadow, it's a chilling exercise …
Body issues
Patricia's warm, fuzzy post-techno-house slots neatly with the Opal Tapes aesthetic on his debut album, 'Body Issues'. Six tracks come off like a boosted 1991 or Huerco S, pushing malleable bass hits below swirling streaks of melody bursting with ferric quality. There's firm parallels to be made here with Anthony Naples, albeit with a noisier bent in 'Hissy Fit', whilst on 'Melting' juicy acid forms over a brittle jack track and the sweet-but-slamming 'Jospehine' and 'Plural' appear like some GH…
More Alien than Aliens
While the band is preparing for the recordings of the fourth album, Mamuthones goes back to the solo output of Alessio Gastaldello for a new EP of meditative and trascendental music. Once again deeply involved in tradition and ancestral memories, More Alien Than Aliens is mostly based on acoustic instruments with the aid of few analogue synthetizers. You can hear antique rites being consumed around fires at night, cavemen’s invocations and signs of extraterrestrial life as seen by the anc…
Dance Classics Vol. I
2013 repress. Born in Osaka, Kouhei Matsunaga is a musician and an illustrator. He started drawing during childhood under the influence of his grandfather. He grew up listening to hardcore techno and hip-hop, studied architecture and has been mainly making music since 1992. Under many different aliases (NHK, NHKyx, Internet Magic, Koyxen) he has released numerous albums on labels such as Skam Records, Wordsound, Raster-Noton and his first-ever album Upside Down on Mille Plateaux in 1998. He …
Doomsdayer Holiday
Following up last year's Burning Off Impurities and their recent Take Refuge In Clean Living EP, Grails return with their darkest, heaviest record yet. Written and recorded over the last 18 months,Doomsdayer's Holiday delivers on the promises made by their previous albums, taking equal pride in smoky psychedelics and mountain-ascending riffs. With Faust, Earth and Sunn O))) collaborators acting as engineers - not to mention drummer Emil Amos having recently become the new other half of Om - Grai…
Mountains Of Tongues
Important collection of recordings documenting and preserving "fringe" or under-represented folk cultures and voices from a unique region at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. It spans a diverse cross-section of music by Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens and many other ethnicities which fall outside their country's definition of national folk music - Azeris from Georgia, Kurds from Tbilisi, Avars and Lezgis from Azerbaijan, or Molokans in the South Caucasus - giving room for al…
Glass Canyon
It's been a little while since we've last heard from Oakland-based sound artist Marielle Jakobsons in a solo capacity, but that's certainly not to say she hasn't been busy. Last year saw full-length outings by her two duo projects, Date Palms and Myrmyr, and already in 2012 works with Bay Area drone ensemble Portraits and trio recordings with Helena Espvall and Agnes Szelag have been released. Her last major solo outing (under the nom-de-plume Darwinsbitch) came in form of the dark, comple…
the flowmotion years 1980-1982
PREORDER: Dark-Ambient / Ritual-Project Konstruktivists was formed by mastermind Glenn Michael Wallis in 1981/82 out of the ashes of Heute. Around this time - in the late 70's/early 80's Glenn Michael Wallis was heavily involved with Throbbing Gristle, the U.K. pioneers of "Industrial". Between 1980 and 1982 Glenn/Konstruktivists has recorded several tracks of which one solo-tape and several Konstruktivists-Tapes found release in extremely rare and limited edition on the legendary Tape-Label Flo…