New Arrivals
One Verse Sharpens Another (EP 2)
Ricardo Donoso completes his latest trance mission for Digitalis with 'One Verse Sharpens Another'. Four tracks of serpentine arpeggios, rolling bass pulses and stealthy, soaring synth chords simulate cybersex in anti-G, from the X-Files atmospheres and alien seduction of 'The Redeemer', to the piloerect triggers and tense pizzicato strings of 'Open Drawer, Full Of Masks' on the A-side and over to the sublime, supple bass roll and gentle ambient caress of 'Child Primitive' or the mind-wea…
7.10.12
a minimalist repress of this classic release from 2012 which sold out globally in ONE day! Review: Six months after the release of the limited edition '7.10.12' vinyl boxed set, alt.vinyl and :zoviet*france: are making the music from the album more widely available in a more conventional form. Retaining the original 7-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch vinyl formats, the three discs are pressed in standard black vinyl and packaged together in plain black sleeves.
Sequitur
Emeralds co-pilot Steve Hauschildt follows up his 'Tragedy & Geometry' album for Kranky with the plush new age disco dreamscapes of 'Sequitur'. Arguably, Steve is the lazy one in Emeralds, conjuring only three solo album to date compared with the gazillion respective works from bandmates John Elliot and Mark McGuire. But, as evidenced here and previously, he's also the canniest and most pop-wise, honing a more concise, richly rhythmic and melodic style of composition still rooted in cereb…
A Crack-Up at the Race Riots
"'It's about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice. I wanted to write the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel.' -- Harmony Korine, addressing a national television audience, 10/17/97. Back in print from Harmony Korine, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots was originally published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998. Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in …
Red Sun
What makes the music of Kasia Głowicka special? First of all space. Deep and extensive. As in ambient music. Built by reverbs, echoes and electronics. Against this background - a piano. Flickering , rippling . Cascades of repeating notes and rhythms. As in minimal music . Tonal associations, but with different development. Clear sounds, distorted, appear then re-appear hear and there as whispers and crackles. As in glitch music. But clearly you hear the skills of a seasoned composer –…
Brokeback And The Black Rock
In the fall of 2010, when Douglas McCombs convened a new version of the band, Brokeback hadn't played a live show for more than two years and had not recorded any new music for eight. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. McCombs's idea was not to start over, exactly, but to start fresh, approaching similar harmonic content from a different directio…
Amulet
Oren Ambarchi live recordings assembled on Cheryl Cole's iPhone at her house in Winnipeg. Not really, but it's that's how I first misread the description. Amulet actually presents two iPhone recordings assembled at Chez Cole, Winnipeg, July 2013 by the inestimable Oren Ambarchi. We've no further info but from what we can hear these are rudimentary iPhone recordings excerpted and crudely edited from a live performance (a shard of applause possibly gives the game away) between rippling, dynamicall…
Apophenia
Belgian/Italian duo Andrea Taeggi and Koenraad Ecker isolate a diffuse mixture of techno and concrète noise with 'Apophenia' for Opal Tapes. Building on the decayed structures of last year's 'Contrapasso' album, their latest blends the chaotic virtues of their improvisational approach with a more premeditated logic, manifesting five arcane constructions balancing abstract expression and rugged, grooving purpose. In that sense it works well alongside Opal Tapes' boss Basic House, but Lumisokea's …
Re-Engineering
Steven Warwick aka Heatsick cocks a unique and compelling perspective on contemporary dance music with his bold follow-up to 'Intersex', a gorgeous, layered work that those of you into DJ Sprinkles should check out without delay. Now woven with leaner dancefloor muscle, the deeply funked views of 'Re-Engineering' are characterised by the artist as a "cybernetic poem". We can take this quite literally in his use of spoken word in pieces such as 'Re-Engineering' with its Chris Morris-esque wordpla…
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released…
Exile in Paradise
Established in 1978 by Truus de Groot in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, she tinkered with toy and electronic instruments in her flat - amidst the explosion of Punk Rock. Even though Truus was very active in that genre and “New Wave” as well, the more experimental side gradually took over and the concept of Plus Instruments was born. Plus Instruments released their first e.p. single in 1979 on Dutch label Plurex:
Playing odd electronic instruments, Bass and vocals, most of their performances were im…
Lalibela
Founded 40 years ago in 1972 The Pyramids released three albums before splitting up in 1977: Lalibela (1973), King Of Kings (1974) followed by the seminal Birth/Speed/Merging LP (1976). Three albums that made them one of the most mysterious and legendary of all the spiritual cosmic jazz collectives of the early 70s, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra. Lalibela (1973) was the first album recorded by The Pyramids following their landmark journey throughout Africa as students from Antioch …
Time of the Last Persecution
Time of the Last Persecution is Bill Fay's second and final album for the Deram label, originally released in 1971. An absolute classic of melancholy (borderline morbid) folk-rock that falls somewhere between Pearls Before Swine, Leonard Cohen, and a suicide prevention hotline. Time of the Last Persecution is almost single-mindedly obsessed with end times so it's fitting that this brilliant album would be his last release for over 30 years. Now that Fay is back with a new and highly laude…
How To Get Out Of The Cage
From 1982 to 1992 Frank Scheffer worked with John Cage on many different occasions, which resulted in a unique archive of historical audio-visual material. Based on this unique archive, including interviews, musical performances and images of different locations related to his life and work—filmed on 16mm—the filmmaker Scheffer created How to Get Out of the Cage—A Year with John Cage. Frank Scheffer wrote: "The famous artist Marina Abramovic introduced me to John Cage. She thought it woul…
Sketches From New Brighton
*Deluxe 2LP Edition Now In Stock* Scott Morgan makes a welcome return with his seventh album of amorphous ambient drift as Loscil. Since 2001 the Vancouver resident has eked out a special niche with his much-loved Kranky releases, a sound that's equal parts dub techno momentum and tenderly organic sound design, one which consistently and carefully treads a fine line between crepuscular, chamber-like melancholy and widescreen optimism. 'Sketches From New Brighton' is an impressionistic col…
United States of America Triptych (I)
Voice by Pete Simonelli, guitar by Miron Grzegorkiewicz, bass Guitar by Michael‚ Biela, turntable by DJ Lenar. Text excerpted from 1939 Southern Recording Trip Fieldnotes by John Lomax and Ruby LomaxAudio quotes excerpted from their recordings.
A big circle drawn with little hands
A big circle drawn with little hands was created from a box of things sent to Steve Roden by label owner Sylvian, who runs the ini itu label. the box contained everything from newspapers, coins, wooden toys, pamphlets, plastic objects, plastic bags, broken airline headphones, notes, a bottle opener, a noise maker of wood, a small electronic toy shaped like a butterfly that offered tones and animal noises, cardboard, a fan, and other things. i also used a banjo in the first track, and my voice in…
Arf Arf
The Australian sound poetry / film-maker / artist group ARF ARF consists of Marisa Stirpe, Frank Lovece, Michael Buckley and Marcus Bergner. Between 1985 and 2000 they produced and mounted hundreds of live performances in Australia and Europe. Their film 'Thread of Voice' (featuring Bob Cobbing / Konkrete Canticle) has been shown widely including at The Serpentine Gallery (London), The Pompidou Centre (Paris), Arsenal Kino (Berlin), Millennium (New York) and at the Museum of Modern Art in…
Remains unchanged
The Shadow Ring was founded by guitar player Graham Lambkin and percussionist Darren Harris in Cheriton, Kent, England in 1993. Tim Goss joined the Shadow Ring in 1996 performing on a variety of electronics. The group disbanded in 2003. 'Remains unchanged' is the long-time-coming archival overview of the shadow ring. Spanning the full decade of their existence, 'Remains unchanged' offers an alternate account of the group's labor, told through 20 never-before-heard tracks. From the lumbering mono…
An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music Vol 6
The sixth and penultimate edition in Sub Rosa's ongoing assembly of crucial noise and electronic music looks at the period 1957-2010. So far the series has been duly noted for its excavation and reappraisal of lesser known works by important artists and vol. 6 is no different, presenting 26 exclusive and original compositions including the work of Tzvi Avni, Joseph Nechvatal, and Kohei Gomi/Pain Jerk among better known titans of the avant garde such as Stephen O'Malley, Dick Raaymakers, J…