New Arrivals
erosion and growth
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in Cardboard String Sleeve with Liner Notes and album art.*
"In loving memory of Kathryn Eagle.
This piece uses a record (a data structure) resulting from a field recording. It began with a waterfall in Washington (Little Mashel Falls) near my parents’ home, which I recorded in my mother’s final months of life. A brain cancer slowly took away her abilities, beginning with her speech. A loquacious person her entire life before this, I had to learn to hear and underst…
déluge
Tip! "Trombe’s 2019 self-titled debut LP kicked off the Nantes unit’s ongoing two-piece experiment with a short and sweet exercise in minimal brut-jazz, with percussionist Erwan Cornic rattling chains and trinkets just as often as he plays full drum set and Thomas Beaudelin yanking the sax valves like root vegetables. But even though the duo has garnered praise from devout skronk stalwarts like Mats Gustafsson, their particular style has always had a distinct, almost delicate melodicism at its h…
Nothing left but silence
**300 copies in handmade textiled artwork w/ printed inner** 'Nothing left but silence' is Erik K Skodvin’s third solo album for Sonic Pieces and his most quiet to date. Subtitled as "Musical improvisations and quiet collages from the subconscious”, Skodvin reduces his instruments to guitar, reverb and amp - and creates a skeleton of eight hypnotic ragas that meanders in an eternal loop between ephemeral and singular.
Only on the horizon it’s possible to sense that Skodvin has also touched the …
Al Hadaoui
Habibi Funk is back with another album from Casablanca. Completely unreleased album which was recorded in Morocco in 1973 by three generation family band. A unique blend of Gnawa, Funk and Rock. Traditional Moroccan music meets electronic guitars and dense layers of percussion by a band that used to run in the same circles as Fadoul (And actually wrote one of his songs).
Ancestral Ground
*100 copies limited edition* An interrogation of identity pervades every corner of Zeynep Ağcabay’s ‘Ancestral Ground’, the debut body of work under her birth name. As someone who has formed their practice creating soundscapes for high fashion labels and runway shows, this is an artist finally being given full carte blanche in creativity. Zeynep’s Turkish ancestry is present through all seven tracks. However, it is not simply a borrowing or a homage. Very much still connected both geographically…
Black Sun Ensemble Vol. 2
"Lion's second volume of the Black Sun Ensemble's recordings for their classic first album contains an alternate version of that album, including the tracks from the Camera Obscura label CD (2000) version of that album -- well, sort of. When sifting through the masters while preparing the Lion reissue of the real, actual first Black Sun Ensemble album -- as issued in 1985 on Pyknotic -- it became clear that many of the original LP tracks were also on the Camera Obscura CD release, but under the …
Tightrope Walker
Tip! *315 copies limited edition* Barstool Mountain returns to Absurd Exposition after the well-regarded "III" CD from 2022. On "Tightrope Walker", the project's debut LP, Mattias Gustafsson continues his "harried, frazzled, grizzled" experiments in tape mangling with his Altar of Flies alter-ego. The album furthers the buildings-crumbling barrage of "III", leaving just enough room to realize that the walls are coming down hard.
Leadlined
*2023 stock* Leadlined is a 35-minute lamentation of the perverse ideology of the English, shaped by sound collage and heavy electronics. Heaving drones of memory churn the decayed hum of modernism and the spiritual bus routes of the past. £40 million of military hardware flying low over the colonial jugular; the knifing wind off the Kentish coast, shearing through the tendons of Roman roads and Saxon shores. Through the record’s mediation of these imagined pasts and displaced futures — the sine…
Unlimited Dream Company
Unlimited Dream Company is the latest barrage of rhythmic industrial noise from Iker Ormazabal Martinez. The release is 40 minutes of tense sleep paralysis in which piledriver basses, blown out kicks, slicing synths and growls of feedback straddle sub pressure drones. IOM’s voice is minced by this machine churn: the infernal drill master swallowed up and regurgitated by his nightmares in a fugue of recoiling anguish. Bringing to mind the great Esplendor Gemoterico, IOM channels a torrent of frus…
Hand / Fist
Noise Against Fascism flexes their tendons, clenches their fist and pulls back from the brink to deliver a blistering cacophony of harsh electronics for a new release on Brachliegen. Hand/Fist is aural struggle against a feeling of contemporary socio-political melancholia, manifest in two differing approaches to confrontational noise and bludgeoning tone. In the wake of a relentless decimation of social communality, Mathias Kristersson cites the importance of art and utopian ideals for both the …
pearly
Pearly is a fizzing, hallucinatory noise release from Tom Betteridge, consisting of two oleaginous sound poems, entirely improvised with minimal stitching and post-processing. Phantasmatic vocal improvisations are mulched into something oblique to speech, becoming sharded utterances part-lost in swathes of noise. Working with cassette tape recorders & close miking techniques, Betteridge upends the standard listening hierarchy of aural objects; tipping the scales, the human voice brushes against …
Soma
*2023 stock* The duο’s work focuses on the creative fusion of composition and improvisation, where links between experienced and ideal sound are constantly being formed and deformed. This double CD reflects the two dimensions of Soma. The first CD presents the close musical liaison between Anisengos and Atzakas, along with three additional trios with Michalis Siganidis. The second CD features guest musicians, Savvina Yannatou, Maria Thoidou and Michalis Siganidis, who form trios, quartets and qu…
Locum Windsock
The Darkening Scale is the solo project of David Janssen aka Ted The Loaf of Renaldo & The Loaf. A purely digital affair, DS started in 2006 when RATL was on hold. The Entomology of Sound was the first album and came out as digital file and a very limited CDr. David says about it: "Back in 2006, much to my surprise, I found myself making music again after a long gap. Starting at the bottom of a steep learning curve, The Entomology of Sound was the first result". Several albums followed, one of t…
Visceral Underskinnings
Hastings of Malawi are Heman Pathak, David Hodes and John Grieve. They recorded the album in one night in 1981 with no plan and no idea of what they were doing. They played drums, clarinet, synthesiser and piano but also made use of things that they found lying around the studio – old records, cookery books, telephone directories and a telephone. The recordings were played down the phone to randomly dialled numbers and the reactions added to the recording. All three had been involved in the reco…
Fulufulu Paupepa Paupapa
GBK are an Austrian free jazz trio that isn't afraid of being groovy. The band was founded in 2007 after a first meeting the year before, being thrown together in an improvised music session. They performed many years under the name of KGB before changing their name recently due to Russian war against Ukraine. All three musicians are happy to swap roles in their trio, therefore abstract experimental sounds have the same place in their repertoire as groove and melody. Drummer Didi Kern works both…
Continuing A Worn Out Tradition III
*300 copies limited edition* Archaic Vaults – a label operating between London and Berlin, run by Severin Black – present its first vinyl release: a compilation of ›durational ambience, field recordings, oversaturated improvisations and spatialised synthetic loops‹, featuring Suburban Crooked Collective, Burning Pyre, Ciaran Jacob & Flora Yin-Wong, Chantal Michelle, YL Hooi and more: A diverse cohort of familiar and new collaborators alike.
Seismograf
*150 copies limited edition* In line with his recent body of work, Uwe Zahn bundled minimal compositions telling narratives situating in the melodic realm of ambient music. On first sight, it seems common that one can enter or construct such stories through the melodies these compositions offer. However, melodies never stand on their own – maybe only theoretically – but in fact truly reveal their magic through the sonical context they’re embedded in. To Zahn, a crucial part of his practice is al…
Weltschmerz
*2023 stock* Siddhartha, named after a novel by Hermann Hesse, were formed in 1973 in Korntal near Stuttgart. They performed an intelligent mix-ture of progressive and art rock influenced by psychedelia and folk. Although their 1975 album is called "Weltschmerz" all songs contain English lyrics except for "Weit weg". It was released in a limited edition of 400 copies and is now one of the most sought-after collectors’ items. A thirty minute demo tape by Siddhartha which was recorded after the re…
Vessels
"I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tide-flats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off." - William Faulkner.
This is the third and final instalment of Jeremiah M. Carter’s album triptych, »Vessels«. Following »Rejoice« and »Speak You Also«, all three album’s where conceived within a 6 month period during ferociously exalting …
All Along The Way
Tip! 370-page book + CD chronicling of a solo tour through North America from May 5 to June 30, 2022.In addition to the book, there are two concert recordings on a factory-pressed CD:Portland: recorded June 1 at the Discordance Concert Series.Chicago: recorded June 15 at Elastic Arts.Jason Kahn // modular synthesizer, mixing board, tubeamplifier, electromagnetic transducers, contactmicrophones, radio, field recordingsAll recordings by Jason Kahn.