New Arrivals
Copenhagen Dreams
Copenhagen Dreams is director Max Kestner’s documentary film portrait of Denmark’s capital. It’s a film about the physical surroundings that are part of shaping our lives. About the buildings we wake up in, the front doors we walk out of, the streets we traverse. It is also a film about how the way we live our lives affects our physical surroundings. About the places we dream of and the walls onto which we scratch the names of our loved ones, before it’s too late.It focuses on the city as a phys…
Harmonia & Eno \'76
AWESOME!! Fans of ambient music and Brian Eno will want to watch for a new album on the new Amazing Sounds label, Harmonia & Eno ‘76 Remixes. The album features remixes of tracks from the classic album Tracks & Traces by Shackleton, Appleblim & Komonazmuk. 2 tracks 12"
Always Wrong
f you're wondering whether record labels still matter, consider the case of Wolf Eyes. Their last two widely distributed albums, 2004's Burned Mind and 2006's Human Animal, came out on Sub Pop and got lots of media attention, even landing the band on the cover of The Wire. Three years later, Wolf Eyes return with Always Wrong, a follow-up of sorts after reams of smaller-run releases. It came out on Hospital in May, and I can't find a single review beyond a few blog entries and tweets. Even The W…
Things That Happened
Joke Lanz aka Sudden Infant creates an unique blend of physical sound-poetry and dadaistic vocals, using contact microphones, prerecorded soundloops and noises. The result is abrupt Musique Concrète juxtapositions of spasmodic gibbering and a battery of disorienting electronics. It's a fragmented field of sound that comes to its own autonomy!' Two great live recordings which shows more the competence of Joke Lanz then the most studio recordings ! Termite Club, Leeds, England (Live 2004-08-21). R…
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…
Flammende Herzen
Michael Rother (half of the influential Krautrock group Neu! and a founding member of Kraftwerk and Harmonia) recorded this first solo album with producer Conny Plank in 1976. Rother's signature guitar sound, the mechanical percussion (Jaki Liebezeit of Can) and the simple yet outerworldly anthemic melodies make Flammende Herzen an outstanding and visionary record."Finally reissued on vinyl, this is the 1976 solo debut from from Neu!/Harmonia guitarist Michael Rother. This would be the fir…
Shining Skull Breath
This ultra limited, and long out of print cd-r from 2007, finally available again, now as a super swank (and still quite limited) lp...Another gorgeous sonic transmission from right here in the Bay Area, from AQ fave Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, the man behind Tarentel, and the Root Strata label. Those familiar with Cantu-Ledesma's music know that he usually speakers in hushed whispers, breathy and breathless, soft sonic shimmers allowed to drift like billowy clouds into your ears. But here, C-L …
Debris
Field recordists Douglas Quin and Cheryl Leonard have gone to great lengths to capture their Arctic and Antarctic field recordings, spending countless frigid days with frozen fingers trying to hold tightly to hydrophones dangling amidst the ice floes and slushy waters. It's no wonder those two present their work in such an unadulterated fashion when the work came at such cost and at such peril. But Jana Winderen is far more creative in her approach to field recordings, only too happy to …
\'Live @ Sensational Fix
On June 17, 2008, the exhibition Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix openedat LiFE in Saint-Nazaire, France, with a focus on their multi-disciplinary activitiessince 1981 collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers, designers,and musicians, as well as other works selected by the band.As part of the exhibition project, My Cat Is An Alien performed on stagewith their long-time collaborator Ramona Ponzini (Painting Petals OnPlanet Ghost, Black Magic Disco, Z ev) singing Japanese, Michael Mo…
Live in Vilnius at Piano. lt
Recorded live in June of this year at PIANO.LT in Vilnius, Lithuania, this new limited edition LP on the NoBusiness label will surely please the fans of Charles Gayle, who has now completely switched to alto. Dominic Duval plays bass and Arkadijus Gotesmanas drums, the latter one having taken the initiative for this session that is dedicated to the late Rashied Ali with whom Gayle performed a lot."Hearts Cry", the long first piece has Gayle on alto, playing quite intensely around a limited tonal…
Medusa’s Lair
Filleted over two sides of wax, here we have a rare meet up of three of the brightest lights in the Twin Cities’ musical orbit. On March 21, 2009, PAUL METZGER—best known for his transcendental gypsy raga guitar and banjo meditations—jumped in the ring with percussionist DAVU SERU and veteran multi-instrumentalist MILO FINE for an evening of uncompromising spontaneous composition. Medusa’s Lair is stunning, inscrutably wily, living music. One-time edition of 300 LPs pressed on 180-gram virgin vi…
Luck In The Valley
LP version, presented in an old-style tip-on jacket with a hand-pasted letterpressed cover, limited edition...Like all pre-war recordings and all of Rose's releases, this album was recorded live. It was not created using overdubs but rather by recording a few 'takes' and selecting the best performance out of those. Rose stated, 'I wanted the songs to have an immediacy and spontaneity as they were being recorded. All the musicians chosen for the record know how to play the songs withou…
Bermuda Telepaths
RESTOCKED, very last copies... Brand new LP by the So-Cal recluse responsible for the recent "Matrix Metals" cassette on NNF. This one is deeper into the Vodka Soap-style ritual electronics zone.
Ufo
The first 2 Guru Guru releases, both from 1971. Musically, these 2 represent (along with their 3rd, Kanguru) the reigning moments of this acid-destroyed-jamming Krautrock outfit, and are essential artifacts of pure thunder.
Weighted Ghost
It's no secret that Aaron Dilloway is one of the best around. Opening with some seriously demented synth growl, Weighted Ghost gets down to business in no time at all. Stoically repetitive sequences build and build until the pressure in your skull reaches the breaking point. Dilloway pushes past the point of no return, scowling all the way until each layer is sufficiently soaked in dirt and brine. This isn't pretty and it isn't meant to be. The flipside fakes you out in the beginning,…
Dispossession
Dispossession is the second full length from Brooklyn’s Mike Wexler, and his debut for Mexican Summer. An artist who defies easy categorization—a songwriter/guitarist without a traditionalist bone in his body, with an ear for far flung sound-worlds and sonic atmospheres both high & low, Wexler brings all of his manifold interests to bear in carving out a space for a singular vision uniquely attuned to the present moment. Dispossession is the product of over two years of intermittent recor…
Lonely microphone
RESTOCKED!! An unreleased 30-minute piece by composer and sound artist Joe Colley. Composed from concrete materials and premiered at Field Effects, San Francisco, in 2002. Rehersal version discovered and slightly re-edited in late 2011. Joe Colley (b.1972 Ft. Lauderdale) is a self taught artist concerned primarily with the phenomena of sound and it’s unique ability to activate a consciousness set apart from rational understanding in a way very different from visual or verbal means. This co…
What I Became
"If string theory is correct, this is approximately the thirteenth album Matt Valentine has released that definitely shouldnt be filed under a group name (Tower Recordings, Bummer Road, Golden Road, etc.). On the other hand, if string theory is correct, this might also be his 11,000th album. The truth, one suspects, is somewhere in between. Since bedding down in southern Vermont at the dawn of the century, MV has been as cussedly prolific as anyone. The gout of LPs, cassettes, CDRs, singles and …
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
Only Stories
Latest from the uber prolific Aidan Baker, of mighty doomdronedirge duo Nadja, and as we've discovered in the past, Nadja is Baker's outlet for the heavier stuff, while working under his own name he tends to veer toward the minimal, ambient and drone side of the spectrum. So that's what we were sort of expecting from this, and while it definitely does lean more toward those sounds that the crush of Nadja, it's actually something else entirely, a solo acoustic record. That's right, just ac…