New Arrivals
Strait Gait
The Southern Records Latitudes juggernaut thunders into town once more, this time driven by Kranky's very own Boduf Songs, aka Mat Sweet, who for the purposes of this release teams up with a couple of collaborators and strays slightly from his established sonic parameters, venturing into the realms of dark, cinematic drone for first piece ' Please Extract My Teeth With Your Rustiest Pliers (For Redemptive)', whose title is not only massively 'eww' inducing, but commits a grammatical felony at th…
New Egypt
"This latest in the ever-popular Latitudes series comes from Drag City avant-folkists White Magic, who have turned in a single ten-minute piece based on Eastern harmonies, delay loops and a tranced out approach to jamming that verges on Sunburned Hand Of The Man territory. For the vast majority of its duration 'New Egypt' relies upon a central three-note piano riff, which soon accumulates layer after layer of various other instrumental sources while seemingly improvised lyrics haunt the song thr…
Stone Circle
RESTOCKED! 10/10 on Foxy Digitalis, writing "best psych album of the year! Maybe even best psych album ever?! “Stone Circle” deserves much more than a measly ten stars!”. Wood-land have released a few bits and bobs on the Install label but i'm totally unfamiliar with their work. 'Stone circle' is the duo's first full length release, limited to a super small run of 100 copies. On first listen i reckon it's total winner. Twenty tracks of brooding lo-fi instrumentation that sounds like it was recor…
Cracked Refraction
Cracked Refraction ties its complex knots with infectious vigor and a predilection for playfulness. Wrack’s melodies are slithering and serpentine, and the music is built of smaller segments assembled in what can seem a slapdash manner, with all sorts of jutting ends and unexpected collisions. What Bruckmann’s done, though, is intentional, placing his players on different planes, with straight lines failing to meet, runs of notes ricocheting at impossible angles, and expected avenues folding in …
Somnambulance to Dream General
"Somnambulance" is a reworking of an album of odd and obscure tracks that was released in a microscopic edition on CD-R before. For this CD, Mr. Liles has provided his funniest and possibly most controversial artwork as of yet. You get an hour of music of many different styles: Andrew Liles' trademark of eerie and spooky sounds is there; also electronics and a whole range of instruments are placed in between sketches and longer tracks. And if all this weren't enough, you get three bonus tracks t…
Niederländische Sprichwörter
Luigi Archetti und Michael Heisch spent over two years experimenting in the studio. The result is the album the "Netherlandish Proverbs" – a musical approach to the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 – 1569). Conceived by a process of random selection, the album presents the listener with freshly perceptible, kaleidoscopic-like audio experiences."The Netherlandish Proverbs" is one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's best known paintings. It contains over 100 sayings and idioms illustrating hum…
You+Me+The Continuum
Primordial Undermind's second full-length blast of psychedelic freakout guitar bliss evolves the sonics found on their critically-acclaimed September Gurls debut into freer, more expansive territory, while retaining plenty of the finely-honed song craft familiar to those lucky enough to have grabbed any of their unfailingly excellent singles. Long modal excursions into the heart of free guitar darkness like "Device", "Turning of the Worm" and "Persistence of Trinity", are counterbalanced by defi…
Watershed
If the three compositions proposed by Denis Fournier have already been recorded, they merit to be here as resurgences, like scenarios encouraging the freedom of transformation without which free interpretation is nothing. “I often say that I don’t make improvised music, but that I improvise music. In other words, I put together there and then elements of my life, of my history, of my culture…” In other words, no structure commands the action. Every structure opens to the action (to sharing) whic…
Dispositions Furtives
Through the open sound portals created by his compatriot Castiglioni, the Italian pianist Alfonso Alberti first entered col legno's World of New Music; on his second album, he dedicates his sensitive and brilliant musicality to Gérard Pesson's fragile and puzzling fabrics of sound. A selection of piano pieces has been compiled in a joint effort by the pianist and the French composer; in his interpretations Alberti lets us catch glimpses of musical structures as though they were glittering just u…
Thousands Raised to the Sixth
2012 release ** The most recent solo incarnation of pioneer Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel, et al.), this is the definitive OLWDTW release spanning two discs. Crowning achievement in a prolific and highly collectable catalog. Solo project of Campbell Kneale, formerly Birchville Cat Motel, and one-half of Black Boned Angel. Packaged in an oversized 5.5" square folder with two art inserts and music spanning two discs, each in an envelope.
(1975-1991)
Just arrived! The research-performance group kiva was created in 1975 by the American trombonist John Silber and the French percussionist Jean-Charles François as part of a research project at the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California San Diego. During the period of its existence (1975-91) various members (often graduate students from UCSD) joined the two permanent musicians, John Silber and Jean-Charles François, to contribute to the groups artistic production. Two persona…
Psappha; Rebonds A & B; Okho pour trois djembés
This amazing CD contains some of the great works for solo percussion by the authorities in the field of contemporary music. The performances and recording quality are both superb! Clearly all care and effort went into the recording and text however, the dual layered dvd /cd is in PAL format, and will require said player or a media transfer to see the studio footage and interview with Xenikas. Considering we spend much time searching for the "right music" to add to our collection, this disc…
Otinku
The Modern Sound Quintet were formed in Stockholm by Trinidadian steel drum master Rudy Smith. On Otinku, Smith wails out on his set of 'pans' (as I believe the vernacular goes) in an improbably slick bebop mode, accompanied by a rhythm section capable of keeping it free and swinging one moment, and then within an instant locking down a groove. While pieces like the title track and 'Bye Bye Blackbird' flow effortlessly, 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' and 'Memphis Underground' lay down a solid bedrock of …
For Pau Torres
Catalan musician Ferran Fages, known for his guitar work as much as his work with turntables and electronics, delivers here a striking album of evocative, nocturnal electric guitar explorations. Bracketed by two intricate pieces of feedback, the centerpiece of this work maps out a carefully constructed arc of a story, bringing this album closer to that often misunderstood soundtrack-for-a-movie-yet-to-be-filmed genre. Ferran Fages: electric guitar and walkie-talkie. Composed, recorded and mixed …
Water days
The book and audio CD documents an exchange of pictures, texts, sounds and voices between multimedia artist Leah Singer and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. WATER DAYS began as two texts each inspired by the contrast between wanderlust and the desire for home and in this volume attempts to create a filmic sequence of photographs to augment and accompany the recording. The new sound piece WATER DAYS, a radio piece for Atelier de Création Radiophonique de France Culture (ACR) is a mix of sound recording…
Para Pacem Para Bellum
Para Pacem Para Bellum” is the first CD release with the great music of Svyatoslav Lunyov's. That serious, highly emotional and spiritual work is the result of two general methods of creating music: academic tradition (scores, acoustic instruments and playing of the real musicians) and the contemporary/experimental way (generating, synthesis, editing with computer tools). Needs to say that this electro-acoustic work combines the well-known traditional elements of the Requiem, Passions and the Ma…
Mining Our Bid'ness
A revelatory debut album by a 64 year old pianist/composer may beg the question: where has Carei Thomas been all this time? Born in a culturally diverse neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Thomas cut his musical teeth in Chicago during a particularly fertile period for that city: gigging with Sun Ra as an improvising vocalist in 1959-60, joining up with the AACM for one hot minute in 1966, co-founding a group called The L…
Snow Blind
RESTOCKED!! Limited to 300 copies only "We haven't heard from New Zealand dronescaper Peter Wright in about a year. Well, it's been at least that long since we've reviewed one of his discs. Somehow two other Wright discs slipped through the cracks in that time though, which is a shame, since pretty much everything we've heard from Wright is fantastic. This latest double disc is no different Nine looooooong tracks spread out over two discs, most in the 15-20 minute range, which is ideal for Wrigh…
Lacunae
Sound and video artist MPLD works in a world of sentiment and detachment, creating a Lost & Found aesthetic uniquely his own. Lost are the old Kodachrome slides which make up the foundation of his work. Found are the feelings of misplaced memories the slides conjure, as well as the sounds — processed and amplified — of the projectors that bring those images back to life. What’s seen on lacunae is a straight shot of the screen during a rehearsal for a concert, although that might not be clear to …
Palace of marvels (queered pitch)
Marcus Schmickler's new release following his acclaimed Altars Of Science (EMEGO 082CD) is a must-have for those interested in the rising field of contemporary computer music. It reconfirms Schmickler's interest in the liaison of sound, phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Schmickler, therefore, utilizes a new interpretation of 1960's discovery, the Shepardtone, discovered by Roger Shepard, which creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually rises or descends in pitch yet ultimately …