New Arrivals
Centralia
Mountains’ music is defined by slow builds, and subtle transformations, textures and melodic lines that evolve in a variety of ways to create grand soundscapes and acutely detailed compositions. For Centralia, the duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg wrote and recorded in a way that mirrors the pace of their music. While the current trend in experimental music is towards hyper-prolificity, Mountains have taken their time on Centralia, resulting in an album that is as precise as it is boundl…
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
Keeping a record of it
Keeping a record of It is the follow-up to Lonnie Holley's debut album, Just Before Music. It features recordings made in 2006, 2010 and 2011. Guest performers include Cole Alexander from the Black Lips, Bradford Cox from Deerhunter, and visual artist Lillian Blades.
'Last year, at 62, after decades of singing while he worked, Holley released his jarring debut album, Just Before Music, a marriage of improvised keys and the rambling, hollow bellow of his voice, as well as the first original rec…
On Onions
On Onions is a photographic study of onions by Israeli-born artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry’s selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry’s first artist’s book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fru…
Living Theory Without Anecdotes
The album Living Theory Without Anecdotes confates Nicolas Wiese's acousmatic compositions from the years 2009-2011. There is a common thread: all four compositions are constructed out of samples from acoustic instrument and object recordings, and mostly have rather foating structures with slow crescendos and little disruptions. A significant element in Wiese's soundworks is the spatial layering - there is an architecture of foregrounds, backgrounds and diferent midgrounds that integrate …
So sorry
A meeting between Japanese sound artist Takahiro Kawaguchi and two american improvisors, Nick Hoffman (head of the Pilgrim Talk label) and Aaron Zarzutzki. Recorded by Brian Sulpizio at The Chateau, Chicago, in September 2011 and then edited and mixed by Giuseppe Ielasi in Oreno.Numbered edition of 250 copies. Black vinyl (cut at SST), screenprinted cover on heavy grey stock.
The Magic Of Ju-Ju
Gatefold 180 gram reissue of tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp's 1967 "tour de force." "...combining free jazz tenor with steady frenetic African drumming. Shepp's emotional and fiery tenor takes off immediately, gradually morphing with the five percussionists -- Beaver Harris, Norman Connor, Ed Blackwell, Frank Charles, and Dennis Charles -- who perform on instruments including rhythm logs and talking drums. Shepp never loses the initial energy, moving forward like a man possessed as the dr…
Rubaiyat Of Dorothy Ashby
Incredible work from the amazing Dorothy Ashby – a brilliant set of funky and spiritual tunes, set to full backings from Chicago soul arranger Richard Evans! This album is easily one of Ashby's greatest, and it's dedicated to the writings of Omar Khayyam – one of the forces guiding Dorothy's more spiritual sound at the end of the 60s, clearly opened up in a way that's not unlike the direction of Alice Coltrane's work, but a lot more focused and a lot more funky! Ashby not only plays her…
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980
Blackest Ever Black presents the first vinyl edition of Dickon Hinchliffe's original score for 1980 -- the second part of Channel 4 and Revolution Films' Red Riding trilogy, adapted by Tony Grisoni from David Peace's quartet of novels and first screened in 2009. Each film in the Red Riding trilogy, a landmark achievement in British television history, was helmed by a different director and had its own distinctive look, sound and feel. While Julian Jarrold's 1974 and Anand Tucker's 1983 were bo…
Pansophical Cataract
John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and writer who is perhaps best known as the drummer for Oneida. Man Forever, his vehicle for exploring the outer limits of drum performance, was created to overwhelm, to investigate the nuances that bloom in the midst of repetitive music, and to act as a pure sound experience.
Originally based on the idea of creating a sort of punk-infused Metal Machine Music for drums, Man Forever has evolved from a f…
Black Tie
LP version. Includes mp3 download and full-color poster. After two bone-chilling full-lengths for the Type Recordings imprint, Erik K. Skodvin has embarked on his first journey for his own Miasmah label with Black Tie. While originally conceived as a soundtrack to an installation by Norwegian artist Marit Følstad, Skodvin uses this as a starting point to craft his most unnerving long-form pieces to date. Split into two distinct movements, "Black Tie" and "White Noise," we are exposed to the y…
Old News 9
Jim O'Rourke's Old News series continues with this, the ninth installment. This new release is unique in the series in that it is the first to feature an all-new composition. The work here showcases the kind of experimental concrete drift which O'Rourke has been exploring for a number of years, resulting in a magical blend of musical abstraction. With the measured hand and alchemical technique of a François Bayle classic, Jim has us spellbound with A-side, transmuting spectral whistles in…
L'Origine / TEMA
Drawing inspiration from the "Action Direct" expanded guitar performances of Masayuki Takayanagi, Fusinato places the guitar at the centre of his work. A few crudely played strings provide the impetus for a long chain of electronics which obliterate the original signal and leaves us with a hyper-kinetic wall of full frequency spectrum noise. Like the piano in David Tudor early 1960's performances of Cage's Variations II, in Fusinato's work, the guitar is the object of a dialectic of simultaneous…
Summer through my mind
Richard Youngs presents his debut recording for BaDaBing Records, and the label is looking forward to a long relationship. For Summer Through My Mind, Youngs pushes himself into a challenging new sphere yet again. A renowned musician with over 40 albums to his name, he goes somewhere he never has before - to the heart of American music. Summer Through My Mind is a country music album, warped through Youngs's ambidextral mind. A warning: it's not like any country album one has heard before. There…
Swisher
The Blondes duo refract their house abstractions through a smudged psychedelic prism on 2nd album 'Swisher' for RVNG Intl. Picking up where their eponymous debut left off, Sam Haar and Zach Steinman start with the kosmic organ swell and atom-split rhythms of 'Aeon' before locking down to a driving, technoid momentum with 'Bora Bora' which carries through the album in the glyding dub-house gait of 'Andrew' to the ornate, future-baroque arpeggios of 'Poland' to the laser-grabbing, Belgian-styled t…
Paranoid Cat
Paranoid Cat is Philadelphia guitarist Chris Forsyth's third solo album and first for Family Vineyard -- a sprawling, harmonically-charged side-long suite backed by a clutch of compositions merging raw and delicate American roots traditions. After more than a decade trotting the globe and recording with a mess of today's avant garde greats, plus co-leading the brazenly absurd Peeesseye, Forsyth has arranged a full-band to accompany his electric six-string vision of interlocking arpeggios and max…
Pictures of sound. One thousand years of educed audio : 980 - 19
Using modern technology, Patrick Feaster is on a mission to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds--many of which were never intended to be revived. Over the past thousand years, countless images have been created to depict sound in forms that theoretically could be "played" just as though they were modern sound recordings. Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic "pictures of sound" dating back as far as the Middle Ag…
Spit
Debut album from Ron Morelli, founder of the influential L.I.E.S. label featuring 8 electronic variants; from House and industrial tape experiments to saturated metallic beat tracks... There’s so much that could be said about Ron Morelli, his L.I.E.S. label, or the fact that his debut album comes to you via Hospital Productions, but instead, here are some words from the man himself. “I’m a regular guy, enjoy a good steak, drinking beer, and occasionally a game of pro basketball, Republican talk …
Fait a la machine
40+ min of heavy machinery pounding, hissing, and vibrating, plus a bonus 63 minute CDR of the dronier side of machines at work. If you enjoy artists like Vivenza, Matt Heckert, early Esplendor Geometrico, or Chop Shop, this might be right up your alley. "Unlike a lot of recordings of natural and dissonant phenomena, Fait a la Machine works just as well as a piece of music as it does an audio documentation of the world surrounding us. It makes that leap from interesting to enjoyable in a way…
The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World
Peter Jefferies's extraordinary debut solo album, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World, first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs -- for both the album and a striking 7-inch, 'The Fate of the Human Carbine,' released around the same time -- it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a couple of years it slipped…