New Arrivals
Too Down To Die
Not Not Fun's most form-destroying release from Robedoor. Seismic future-primitive energies on side-long track "Parallel Wanderer." Continues the incarnation of Robedoor featuring MG Gengras (Personable, Pocahaunted) on drums, moog, bass and piano. "Britt Brown, and Alex Brown unleash their latest Robedoor communications. 'Parallel Wanderer' is an epic drifter serving up ten minutes of raga-like drones before blowing the roof off it with crashing drums and upwards spirals of guitar. '(In The) Cy…
Brooding Forest
Hunting Rituals is the moniker of Scott Johnson (also Scott Cloud, Thoughts On Air) which was inspired from many impromptu collaborations with other weirdo musicians within the city limits of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Brooding Forest was the first recording to feature a second member, a fellow collaborator Jeremiah Buchan from Bottom Feeder who was also a main influence on the overall ritual sound process. This recording fuses Scott's focus of feral improv with Jeremy's premeditated lands…
A Fire
23 minute piece of solo guitar wrangling by the avant blues elder statesman. Limited, hand-numbered edition of 350 housed in screen-printed wrap-around with insert in poly jacket** "Connors is an avant-garde legend, with more than 100 releases of his singular alien take on the blues. RIYL: Jack Rose, Michael Chapman, Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey. A Fire is a single-sided LP by master guitarist Loren Connors. Recorded live in Philadelphia in 2010, this 23 minute piece follows in the style and visual …
It is all about
Mats Gustafsson : Saxophone [BarItone, Slide], Flute [Fluteophone]. Recorded live January 22, 2006, at Potlatch Festival, Oranssi, Helsinki Finland. Format : Vinyl, LP, LimIted EdItion. Released date :15 Nov 2007. Genre : Jazz. Style : Free Improvisation. CredIts : Artwork by Matias Pöschl. Mastered by Teemu Korpip. Producer : Olof Madsen. Recorded by Jari Suominen.
Walking The Monkey
Billy Roisz is one of the best-known figures on the Austrian experimental scene. Active for over a decade as a video- and sound artist, she has collaborated with dieb13, Angélica Castelló, Burkhard Stangl, Silvia Fässler, Martin Brandlmayr, Toshimaru Nakamura, Mario de Vega, eRikm and Ilpo Väisänen. Her ability to translate experimental music into visual imagery is particularly noteworthy, revealing tactics borrowed from minimal and conceptual art. Walking the Monkey is her solo debut album…
Hallway Of Mirrors
VHF is releasing a bunch of solo guitar dudes over the next few weeks. Here's one of 'em! It's an album from New York's Alexander Turnquist called Hallway of Mirrors. It says that above so it's kinda pointless me saying that. Having said that the New York thing was a new bit of info so it's not all filler! I've not heard this chap before but I was rather taken with him on first listen. It's not a million miles away from the likes of James Blackshaw.... ie extreme 12 string fingerpluckery which i…
Eskra
Temperatures are a London-based duo formed by Peter Blundell (bass, voice) and James Dunn (drums, synth). Blundell's rumbling delayed bass runs against Dunn's bursting drums that simultaneously trigger an unruly ARP 2600. Vocals are both muffled and shouting at times and eventually end up getting buried under a (controlled) landslide of sounds. Thanks to their instinctive but thoughtful approach to noise, Temperatures can express a suffocating sense of alienation and mal de vivre, as well as tod…
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…
Joka Baya
First in a trio of limited edition new LP’s from the ever mysterious Vibracathedral crew, returning from another relatively quiet period with an uncompromising set of outre’ jams. Slightly reorganized around a lineup of stalwarts Mick Flower and Adam Davenport with frequent collaborators John Godbert (Total) and John Moloney (Sunburned Hand of the Man), the band here stretches way, way out over these six sides, taking in several different styles while maintaining “that” sound all the way through…
Body EP
You either loved or hated Autre Ne Veut's electrifying 2010 album for Olde English Spelling Bee, and we loved it - as we made abundantly clear at the time. Since its release, ANV has been reasonably quiet, most recently seen turning up on Mordant Music's Variables II 12"; but he's been putting his time to good use it seems, crafting this killer four-track EP for Hippos In Tanks. 'Sweetheart' finds our man warbling and whining in that unmistakable multi-tracked falsetto of his, against a r…
Time Building
I started making music in earnest in 1994 with a Casio keyboard and a four-track cassette recorder. Since 1996 I have been using a Korg MS10 analogue synthesiser and some effects pedals which I have added over time Ñ delays, phasers, a ring modulator and a pattern generator. Occasionally I use acoustic sounds as well. On this LP, I made extensive use of a pattern generator (a Moog Murf) in combination with other effects. Before recording anything, I spend time designing and shaping the sounds I'…
Of Mythic Worlds
Exact repro of this 1980 album, the second Sun Ra album to be released on Philly Jazz following Lanquidity. Undated live recording, not previously reissued on either LP or CD! "Sun Ra's music is equational. It is based on a system and philosophy as old as the most ancient of civilizations, and it points the way of the future as well. Music is not seen as merely entertainment. Ra has oftentimes mentioned the potentials of music to change the social order. In fact, the highlight of many of his per…
s/n
A split LP with Harappian Night Recordings 6 reviews in psychopathic alchemy and Kommissar Hjuler Karawane from Hugo Ball. Limited to 300 copies. Yellow vinyl. "Der krazy Kommissar recites a Hugo Ball nonsense poem from 1916, written the same year Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto & founded the Cabaret Voltaire. Harappian is a one man UK bedroom string plucker & droner who cuts together, mimics, & plays along to his international records. He pulls off some pretty flamin' rock tunes here, full of t…
Throat
In view of the band's assertion that this is a program designed to be listened to in one sitting, it seems a little impertinent to discuss highlights. The seven tracks that make up "Throat" seem a little arbitrary in view of the overall discontinuity of the release, but in as much as this is music which has no time for a lot of preconceptions, that might be an inherent part of the band's intentions. The opening is where the Brotzmann reference comes into its own, but before the piece is o…
God Is Saying This To You...
More than a mere odds-n-ends collection, Kurt Vile’s latest LP is a compilation of tracks from Overnite KV, a tour-only CDR, along with a handful of extra tracks recorded specifically for this release. Here we find Kurt solo, four-trackin’ as usual, and blowing minds with his mix of bluegrass guitar, blazed singer-songwriterisms, and the knowledge of how to balance these contexts out with laidback precision. Psychedelic to its core, these twelve tracks speak to the will of the casual perf…
Go Grey
The second full-length release by U.S. Girls is an even more fully realized excursion into a hazy alternate universe where pop vocals and muzzy scree fuse in harmony. Go Grey conjures up ambient aerosols while luminous kaleidoscopes of sound sizzle, peak, and explode. Megan Remy is a chanteuse from (perhaps) the future, guiding all who choose to sail an evocative trip through her unique aural hallucinogenic landscapes. It's a journey of lush vistas, warm currents, and complex beauties. 23nd-Cent…
Counterfeit Memories
Garbage freedom noise & riffage from Rochester gents John Schoen, R. Nuuja and Jason Finkbeiner. Liner notes are some sort of prose poetry (translated into arabic; including a reference to Armand Schaubroeck, no less) from everybody's batthroated hero Dylan Nyoukis
Inventions
Sandy Bull's 1965 LP Inventions remains one of those legendary albums that almost no one has heard. Its impact, however, can be scene in the title of this new compilation spotlighting a great unsung hero of "psychedelic folk." "Blend," the 22-minute opus from 1963 that opens this disc, surely fits that designation, perfectly blending folk, jazz, and Indian influences into what Bull called "new guitar raga." An eclectic virtuoso who switched from acoustic guitar to banjo to Stratocaster to oud (m…
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…
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…