New Arrivals
The Revenant Diary
"Don't look back," repeats one of several voices within Mark Van Hoen's The Revenant Diary, his fifth solo album and first release on Editions Mego. Surrounded by weighted beats, analog synthesizer drones and granular dirt, the unidentified, siren-like female voice's advice is as much seduction as warning. Tellingly so, for as well as being both Van Hoen's most ambitious and his most accessible work, The Revenant Diary is an eloquent meditation on the allures and dangers of memory, regret …
Vacation Music
For a couple of years Ryoji Hojito, together with his wife Yoshiko, were coming to Lithuania for a one week autumn vacation. We've met in the course of their explorative journeys around the country and without thinking too much went to a studio for a spontaneous session and a year later played a concert at St. Catherin's Church in Vilnius. Both of us were happy about the music we've got on tape and today we want to share with you seven impro peaces!
Kontinent Varèse
On"Kontinent Varèse" col legno has assembled seven major works of a pioneer of electronic music, performed e.g. by the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, the RSO Vienna and Martin Grubinger!Edgar Varèse is regarded as one of the pioneers of New Music, and with good reason. His piece “Ionisation” was the first-ever composition written exclusively for percussion ensemble to be performed in a traditional concert hall setting; and he explored and searched intensely for sonic experiences. Varèse integra…
Durée
Back in 1999, on the forefront of the Japanese electronic/acoustic microsound scene, was the then two-piece live improvisation band Minamo (two more members were added in 2001 to make the current four-piece lineup). Their live concerts helped pioneer this hybrid of delicate and natural instrumentation with microscopic electronics and subtle digital processing bringing an organic richness to a genre that threatened to remain coldly digital. Fans of Minamo not lucky enough to see them create their…
The Invisible Hands
The Invisible Hands is the English translation of the band's original Egyptian Arabic name: El Ayadi El Khafeyya. Taking almost two years to create amidst an unusual and challenging backdrop, this is the brand new project of Alvarius B. (Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls). Eleven highly-crafted new songs projected through his typically dark lens of songwriting and a band of brilliant musicians from Cairo, the premier, self-titled CD version of this album is the English language vocals edition (s…
Drum Dance to the Motherland
Deluxe reissue of this outsider holy grail, cosmic free jazz at the top!!There's not another record on the planet that sounds even remotely like vibraphonist khan jamal's eccentric, one-of-a-kind masterpiece, drumdance to the motherland. in its improbable fusion of free jazz expressionism, black psychedelia, & full-on dub-like production techniques, drumdance remains a bracingly powerful outsider statement thirty-four years after it was recorded live at the catacombs club in philadelphia…
47°13' N 7°E
Another uncommon sonic wringer from Portuguese label Creative Sources has been signed by a couple of Switzerland-based (as you could easily surmise from the geographical coordinate, which point to a place the district of Franches-Montagnes in the canton of Jura in Switzerland, they used to name this release) musicians, Lea Danzeisen and Christoph Schiller, who decided to squeeze the spinet, the little brother of harpsichord and piano, whose sound got totally transfigured by meticulous mod…
Ablation
Welcome return for Robert Hampson with the first Main album in seven years, new on eMego. Hampson founded Main with Scott Dawson upon disbanding Loop in '94, and while their initial releases still bore traces of their space-rock origins, the goal was always total ecstatic abstraction, and by the time of the Hz series, completed in '96, they'd pretty much achieved it. Main's music has been called many things: industrial, noise, isolationist electronica, dub, drone; the truth it, it's all a…
Jazz Raga
Awesome reissue! The world famous Impulse jazz catalogue is so cavernous you truly need a music-minded flashlight to uncover its deepest and darkest secrets. Thankfully Light In The Attic has recently acquired such luminescent technology and the first discovery is Hungarian guitarist GABOR SZABO’s 1967 Indo-fusion landmark, Jazz Raga. combines Szabo's distinctive 6-string touch & open-minded ideas. It brings together jazz, pop-rock & his native European influence, along with hypnotic sitar, st…
The state we are in
The first thing this CD reminded me of was Tape...then I checked out the press release and it turns out that Tape's Johan Berthling (also very recently sighted on that Fire! with Jim O'Rourke record) is in fact one-third of this band, the other two being Andreas Soderstrom (Ass) and Per Eklund on drums. It is, as you would expect, gently paced instrumental stuff, slightly pastoral-sounding, with intertwining guitars and a some subtle Hammond organ and trumpet bits. This is a mightily rel…
Hum Crackle & Pop
"The 2nd Digital Primitives release (Cooper-Moore, Assif Tsahar, Chad Taylor) digs in deep to fuse a new sound from blues, folk, jazz & funk, with accents from the music's African antecedents."
Drones
In the beginning there was the piano. As soon as he had mastered the basics, Jean-Philippe Goude discovered the spell of melancholy while working on a little musical piece: an etude ringing out in the style of a somber hymn. Not the dead meat smells of somberness that, according to Picabia, serious people emit, but the earthen gravity of an abyss dug by life itself. Everything is the result of this bedazzlement. At 11 years old, Jean-Philippe Goude closed his eyes. When his eyelids finall…
Simple Psychedelic Pleasures
I love the Tadpoles, a quintessential American psych band, so chances are I was going to be all over David Max’s solo platter when I heard about it. And I am. I don’t want to go on and on with endless comparisons with his work with the Tadpoles because much of that is obvious. Let me just say that maybe its sort of another tentacle from the body of the Tadpoles; sprung from it, indebted to it, but operating with a mind of its own. And name-checking all of David’s influences, though tempting and …
Eye Mohini: Sun City Girls Singles Vol. 3
Volume 3 in the series of Sun City Girls singles, compilations, and rare tracks, consists of material recorded between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Much of this collection reflects the Arabic guitar instrumental and acoustic pseudo-Asian vocal folk styles of the band from the period when they recorded relentlessly. The 14 cuts vary wildly in scope yet maintain a consistent listening experience throughout, bridging a wide gap between the band's second full-length LP Grotto of Miracles (T…
Plekzationz
CD version. This recording contains seven remixes by UK-based artist and electronic musician Mark Fell of the first three 12" singles released on the record label Sensate Focus in 2012. These were called 10, 5 and 3.3.... The first of these, 10, was itself a reworking of materials from an earlier project by Fell and Terre Thaemlitz, released on Comatonse Recordings in 2012. The seven remixes were written and recorded in June 2012 at the Upper Lounge, Chatham Street (UK) using a MacBook Pro ru…
Manic Depression
Experimental tape recordings by Rodger Stella from the early to mid nineties. Psychedelic analog noise and drone consisting of tape manipulation, obscure electronics, shortwave, field recordings and acoustic delay. Edited by Dan Johansson.
The Tale Of The Heike
An epic concept album narrated and performed by Akira Sakata, Heike Monogatari ("Tale of the Heike") is the most disturbing entry so far in the DoubtMusic catalogue. This work is an expression of the philosophy of impermanence. It's also a vision of Hell. Woodwinds signify madness. Bells accentuate silence. And Sakata's voice unleashes a phantasmagoric torrent of shomyo (Japanese Tantric Buddhist chanting), death metal growls, and pure pandemonium. Is he serious? Or not? One thing is cert…
Spiritual Jazz
Now-Again Records, in conjunction with Jazzman Records, presents an expanded version of the compilation that introduced many listeners to the sound of the unsung musicians who - in the midst of the Vietnam War and the fallout of the Civil Rights struggle - created some of the most beautiful spiritual and meditative music of the 60s and 70s. The music was at times funky, at times contemplative, but it always strived to say something about the world in which the musicians lived.
Free Action
2008 release. "A deep excursion into the laboratory of Germany's most important avant-garde jazz musician. A milestone of breaking down barriers between genres. Feat. Jean-Luc Ponty (Zappa, Mahavishnu). Originally released on MPS in 1967. Unique gatefold cardboard packaging."
The Last Recording
Final solo alto sax blasting from the late legendary Japanese underground hero Kaoru Abe. Abe was an inspiration to free/jazz and Japanese noise lovers world-wide, lived a fast and hard life and ripped his guts inside out on each and every of his many releases. Extreme music for those who need it.