New Arrivals
Cherlokalate
Effervescent songbird JANE WEAVE unveils a canon of femme-folk, laden with finger picked meandering melodies, ethereal harmonies and wistful leanings. In the same vei as acid folk such as Linda Perhacs and Karen Dalton, this decade spanning collection traces a line between the acid-soaked protest rumblings of yesteryear and the forward/backward facing revivalists of today.
Kataract
This album is a single forty-minute track exclusively made up from recordings of waterfalls within America's Pacific Northwest. The source material was cultivated and mixed over a two-year period and takes the form of a monstrously powerful, ferociously noisy concrète piece. Menche has always situated his work towards the extremes of electroacoustic music and Kataract is no exception, but for all the turbulence and extreme frequency manipulation here there's a level of detail on show th…
Under Stellar Stream
For his latest album, UK avant-folk maverick Richard Youngs seems to be converging on some of the most assured and firm-footed vocal work of his career to date, fashioning rock-solid songs from typically leftfield instrumental tactics. On 'Broke Up By Night', Youngs sounds like a gnarled old folkie of almost Ewan MacColl proportions, albeit accompanied by organ drone and wispy electronics. It's a rather magical, mantra-like cadence he elicits, and the album springboards nicely from this point. S…
Treeg Salaam
Group Doueh's second Sublime Frequencies album 'Treeg Salaam' is finally available on CD. If you're not familiar with Group Doueh, this is as good a place as any to get your fix, featuring tracks compiled and edited from Salmou "Doueh" Baamar's personal cassette archives recorded between 1989-1996. Next to Omar Souleyman and Group Bombino, Group Doueh are one of the few acts to be fully signed and released through the label, offering full length albums of original material which have become cher…
Apokatastasis
Consisting of one side of solo lute material by Van Wissem and one side of new pieces by the duo. Film maker Jim Jarmusch plays electric and acoustic guitar and does tape on one piece. Van Wissem plays lute and 12 string electric guitar. CD edition.Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem met on the streets of New York in 2006. Finding that they shared many interests, both a friendship and a musical collaboration was soon born. The duo has released two albums of lute and guitar compositions: Conce…
Parallel World
Originally released in 1976 by Nippon Columbia, this is the final album by legendary Japanese space/psych-rockers Far East Family Band. Droney and far-out electronica influenced by German producer/electronic music composer Klaus Schulze is more pronounced, merging prog rock with electronic music to create something rather weird and wonderful. Although Schulze oversaw the production of the album rather than playing on it (which he definitely didn't!), the synth star here is Masanori Takahas…
Nowhere
1998 reissue, orginally released in 1984. A combination of spacey electro-pop, dub and dark avant-rock influences, Phantom Band is one of the most authentically weird, essential and yet surprisingly overlooked organisms orbiting the Can universe. This is the third and final album from the project, masterminded by Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, featuring Dominik von Senger (Dunkelziffer, Damo Suzuki Band/Network) on guitar, Helmut Zerlett (e.g. Dunkelziffer, Unknown Cases) on keyboards and Sheldon A…
13 13
'First reedition. Recorded in 1981. Originally released in 1982. Lydia Lunch: vocals, piano. Dix Denney: guitar. Greg Williams: bass. Cliff Martinez: drums, percussion. Digipack.'
One-Armed Fiddler
Mid-70’s album of instrumental Appalachian fiddling (with guitar and bass accompaniment) by a guy who, after a grisly gun-related injury, developed a between-the-legs bow technique. Mr. Smith was a repository of would-be lost traditional tunes, and his unique, microtonal playing only makes these gems all the more precious. For fans of the Anthology of American Folk Music and/or Jandek.
H\'Art Songs
Moondog's fanbase seems to be righteously on the up nowadays, with reissue after reissue re-illuminating his singularly out-there musical genius. This is a stranger album than most however: on this one Moondog sings. Yes, this is possibly the only entry into the blind Viking impersonator/singer/songwriter sub genre. Inevitably, it's really good. Even though this album (recorded in 1969, incidentally) reduces the composer's ordinarily expanded palette to little more than voice and piano, there's …
Window dressing
'Jean-Luc Guionnet and Seijiro Murayama have been playing and performing a lot over these last past years. Their unique approach is based on space exploration and intensive relationship to sounds and silence. The first piece - Procédé - was recorded live at Radio Slovenija (Ljubljana - Slovenia) on june 2010. The three other pieces - Processus, Procession, Procès - were recorded by Eric La Casa in Paris on december 2010. The main purpose was to work out a specifically designed process for…
Con 3
This album saw Conrad Schnitzler head further in the direction of pop music. Like Consequenz, Con 3 (1981) is a collaborative effort with Wolfgang Seidel, alias Sequenza. Con 3 is a really odd mixture of numerous ingredients which Schnitzler was capable of combining with dexterity and taste. His musical handwriting is immediately apparent in the foreground. Effervescent electronic sequences can be heard on all nine pieces, coming from somewhere and appearing to go wherever -- this is Schnit…
Alberto Boccardi
Soundscapes that alternate unstable vibrations of the earth’s surface to static animal references. Acoustic instruments, electronics, voice and field recordings, in the first work by Alberto Boccardi, tell emotional phases grown from the memories but living in the present. The use of sound is purely functional to instinct, and to the desire to define the boundaries of otherwise ephemeral images.Alberto Boccardi (1980) engineer and electronic musician he go…
Life Is People
Bill Fay is one of English music's best kept secrets. At the dawn of the 1970s, he was a one-man song factory, with a piano that spilled liquid gold and a voice every bit the equal of Ray Davies, John Lennon, early Bowie, or Procol Harum's Gary Brooker. He made two solo albums but his contract wasn't renewed, which left his LPs and his reputation to become cult items. But he never stopped writing, the music kept on coming. Now, in his late sixties, he has produced Life Is People, a brand …
Only
Pieces by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Hanns Eisler, Giacinto Scelsi, György Kurtag, Frederic Rzewski, Henri Pousseur, Théodore Botrel, Rudolf Siecynski, and Sephardic songs. Performed/interpreted by vocalist Marianne Pousseur. "I like to listen to music in places that haven't been designed for it. I like when music mixes in with noise. Only came from a very personal desire to open the doors of my musical world to the concreteness of daily life, to tear down the fictional barriers between places a…
Bloom
First in the 'Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent' series of three CD EPs by this new project founded by Irish singer Clodagh Simonds. Contributors incl. Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Laura Sheeran, Lydia Sasse, Cora Venus Lunny, Toby Arnott, Carter Burwell and Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio. The CD comes in a beautiful embossed cover in an edition of 2000 copies.
Capsizing moments
A veritable tour de force of 'inside' prepared piano playing - preppiano extensif. The whole of a solo set performed at Les Instants Chavirés near Paris. Sophie Agnel's preparations, neither static nor fixed, evolve during the course of her playing as she adds, moves or removes an object, or replaces one artefact with another. These preparations include disposable water cups, nylon fishing-line, bouncing balls, aluminium ashtrays, aluminium foil, industrial nylon, inner-tube rubber and polished …
In Winter
One more new Gianluca Becuzzi release on Silentes, this time in collaboration with Luigi Turra. Composer of musique concrete and graphic designer whose main interest is the musical balance between silence and the tactile perception of sound, Turra’s works were published by labels such as and/OAR, Unfathomless, Non Visual Objects, Smallvoices and many others. A lot has already been written about Becuzzi, here we would just like to remember his historic Darkwave / Industrial project…
Teeming
'Magda MAYAS and Christine ABDELNOUR SEHNAOUI both play acoustic music that is diametral, a space they conquered by changing the traditional ways of their instruments: modern alchemy. Together they express a strong physical experience. MAYAS is a master of sparse fragments of motion and SEHNAOUI works in a flux of changing sounds. The multiple layers of their performance create a shivering moment of existence, which reminds me of the words of the Danish artist Malene Bach: 'Art finds its own re…
Rebuses
Franz Hautzinger (quartertone trumpet), Masahiko Okura (reeds) and Tetuzi Akiyama (tape delayed electric guitar). Recorded in Tokyo, 2004.A rebus is "a representation of a word or phrase by pictures or symbols", as you probably all know. Just wondering what the words might be then, on listening to this remarkably active (in its discreet lowercase way) trio outing from trumpeter Hautzinger, saxophonist Okura and guitarist Akiyama. EAI is, after all, supposed to be slow and spacious (think Hautzin…