New Arrivals
Noise Art
An album of unreleased music made by Jeff Keen, one of the UK's great avant garde artists. This is music found on cassettes in his studio after his death. It was made by Jeff (throughout the 1980s) using field recordings from his local amusement arcade: radio, TV, films, an Atari, a ZX Spectrum, a delay unit and a WASP synth. This is the first Jeff Keen album ever issued. Jeff Keen is one of the great undiscovered artists of our times. A missing link between the Dadaists, Cocteau, Warhol, …
Ceremony
Phoenix Records reissues a digitally remastered edition of People's sole album, the legendary Ceremony -- Buddha Meet Rock, originally released in 1971 in Japan. Nobody's sure if the musicians on this recording ever performed as a group or whether Ceremony was simply a studio super-project. Certainly, guitarist Kimio Mizutani had already enjoyed a certain amount of critical exposure following stints with Love Live Life + One and Masahiko Satoh's Sound Brakers, and it is Satoh's jazzy fuzz guita…
In Celebration Of Knowing All The Blues Of The Evening
Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia is the project of Jaime Fennelly (of Peeesseye, Evolving Ear Records) and Shawn Hansen (who also has releases on Evolving Ear). The two join their forces here for an epic ride through the volatile moments of twilight. A synaesthetic kind of excursion, inspired by the deepening shades of light and dramatically rendered through the warm, swelling tones of Farfisa organ and analog synthesizer. In Celebration... in all its moody and cinematic drive could be the quin…
Marvellous Boy: Calypso From West Africa
endlessly satisfying' (Boston Phoenix); 'Blending cheeky calypso with rocking highlife — and by turns breezy, wistful and downright uproarious' (Daily Telegraph); 'gems at every turn... weaving highlife, swing, military brass bands, Afro-Cuban jazz, into a hell of a compilation... Honest Jon's have added to the highest order of this simple music of heartbreaking celebration' (Brainwashed). The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orche…
Black Box: Torture Garden/Leng Tch\'e
"The controversial and influential Naked City Black Box couples two of Zorn's most extreme and violent creations. Torture Garden (1991) presents Naked City's intense and groundbreaking music combining free jazz, bebop, r&b, country, funk, rockabilly, surf, metal and grindcore—usually in the same song! The rare, seldom heard Leng Tch'e (1992), released only in Japan and long out-of-print features Naked City in an agonizingly slow, brutal 32-minute assault. This special 20th anniversary ed…
Anro
A narrow path of safety extending through the gloom, its edges bleeding into the fearful zones of disorder and formlessness that enclose it. Paths create borders, they limn the known from the unknown, the clean from the unclean, the citizen from the exile, the present from the past. But while paths create boundaries, they themselves are ambivalent, neither here nor there, neither now nor then. The act of making a path where none existed always involves the subjugation of the unknown and f…
The invisible city
Recorded and mixed during 2008-2009 in Berlin. All tracks composed by BJNilsen using tape recorders, computer, organ, acoustic guitar, electronics, viola, subharchord. Field recordings from Sweden, Iceland, Norway, UK, Japan, Portugal and Germany. The subharchord was recorded in the EAM Studio @ Adk, Berlin. Viola played by Hildur Gudnadottir. Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye.
Under Milk Wood
The new LSD March album Under Milk Wood is their first full length since 2007's Constellation Of Tragedy for Important Records. With grace (in the rock sense), style, humor & the perfect touch of heavy riffage this tremendously unique and original recording is a classic of the new Japanese underground. Recorded at Black Snowflake Studios in Japan, Under Milk Wood is a fascinating ghostly rock album full of clean untreated restraint and a grounded calm compliments of Takahashi Ikuro's drumming. I…
Dark Places
Certain places are more horrifying than others, closer to the source of primordial terror, be it the netherworld, the glacial outerspace of Lovecraftian ancient evil or simply the subconscious. Such places are sources of myth and awe. For their second album, Owwl tapped into these sources. Dark Places channels the world's sinister sites. The results are minimally shifting walls of drone, oppressive and entrancing like stars in a forlorn place or the historic pitfall of ground drenched with…
Thing
This powerful 1972 performance by Arni Cheatham's group provides a unique glimpse of the jazz scene in Boston. The group borrowed the most innovative characteristics of jazz and rock, but never sounded derivative. This is early seventies "jazz fusion" of the highest order, before the term evolved to mean a light, commercially acceptable genre. As with many innovative jazz forms, the recording was made at one of the many local universities, Harvard. The resulting album was pressed in scant…
Recyclopaedia Britannica (Selected Works 1992-2002)
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly "topical" audio-jokes at the expense of one's raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being "groovy", the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw m…
92982
Once again unveiling hidden treasures from his archive of tape loops, William Basinski releases three pieces made at his Brooklyn apartment during one night in 1982, adding a fourth composition (based on the same source material) made earlier this year. You can't help but wonder why this music, recorded so long ago, is only just surfacing. Was the world not ready for WIlliam Basinski in 1982, or was WIlliam Basinski simply not ready to hand himself over to an audience at that point? Whatever the…
Prisoner
Hailed as a hero of underground film in the 1960's, director Masao Adachi presents the shocking new film 'Yuheisha (Terrorist)' after a hiatus of 35 years. The soundtrack was composed by Yoshihide otomo, who is known worldwide for transcending the boundaries of jazz, improv, and noise. As a producer and film composer, he has gained critical acclaim for the soundtracks of 'Heart, beating in the dark', 'Canaria', and 'Boku Wa Imoto Ni Koi Wo Suru'. Also appearing in the film and playing acoustic g…
Puzzle
"Produced by Centre international de recherche musicale, Nice, France. Project involving 22 instrumentists featuring Pierre-Yves Artaud (flutes), Alexandre Ouzounoff (bassoon), Daniel Kientzy (saxophone), Vinko Globokar (trombone), Elisabeth Chojnacka (harpsichord). Puzzle 1999 (14-17) commissioned by INA-GRM." (Discogs)"An extension of the 'virtual orchestra' in which composer Pascal composes music out of gathered individual instrumental tones and lines (with the musicians never having met …
Orchestral works and chamber music
ESSENTIAL RELEASE: The impulsive and electrifying Ata (1987) was referred to as "a kind of shifting of the senses" by the composer. The task of sketching N’Shima (1975) was actually assigned to a computer, whereas Metastaseis (1953-54) is devoted to architecture; the composition was derived from the bases of calculation used for the pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair of 1958 and is famous in particular for its glissandos and thickening clusters. Ioolkos, written for Donaueschingen in 1996, a…
Becalmed
Becalmed is the debut album from Sydney pianist Sophie Hutchings, recorded between two different settings: one with engineer Tim Whitten, best known for his work with The Necks, and one with Tony Dupe, who records on the preservation label as Saddleback. Becalmed isn't an entirely solo affair, and you'll hear Hutchings' family and friends helping her out with violin, cello and percussion - all elements that greatly help bring these recordings to life. Beautifully recorded, elegiac and romantic c…
Prayer Wheel
The Prayer Wheel, like this CDR, spins prayers into the ether. Book of Shadows combines psychedelia, experimental music, and the pursuit of spiritual understanding, all performed together in the eternal present. For the Prayer Wheel release Sharon and Carlton Crutcher are joined by longtime guitarists Aaron Bennack, Jonathan Horne (Plutonium Farmers), and Douglas Ferguson. Also appearing on this release are percussionist Johnny McCollom of the Primordial Undermind, theremin player and fil…
Open Percussion
this CD is an amazing achievement. Kjos Sørensen is a brilliantly gifted performer, but clearly an imaginative and creative one too. A very special issue, continuing BIS’s tradition of opening our minds and our ears.
Prince Of Truth
Beginning with her first Constellation release in 2006, Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista project has steadily been gaining recognition for its complex beauty and fierce, raging appeals. Bozulich has been knocking these and many other ideas into form for two decades (Neon Veins, Ethyl Meatplow, The Geraldine Fibbers, Scarnella). Evangelista is the best and the brightest, filled with adventurous risk taking that sometimes whispers and licks, sometimes pulls the listener so close that it is hard to bre…
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…