New Arrivals
Urban Gothic
Not Not Fun label-mate Xander Harris has released “Urban Gothic,” the most overtly Carpenter-influenced modern electronic album to date. While Harris cites a laundry list of influences, new and old, it is Carpenter’s distinctly chilly synth-based sound that is most evident here. Although just as Umberto and Ensemble Economique mixed an array of genres ranging from African tribal music to disco into their reimagining of the horror soundtrack, Harris also draws inspiration from 80s synth pop and d…
Air Museum
Air Museum blurs the lines between acoustic and electronic music even more without sacrificing melody or the delicacy of their sound. It is an album of firsts. It was the first album that the acoustic instruments were not processed via a computer. Instead, the processing of the instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitar, cello, accordion, piano, bass etc.) was done using a variety of pedals, modular synths, and other analog techniques. While acoustic instruments were used extensively, …
French Antarctica
probably the most anticipated record of the year for this household. the clip below has been on repeat for a couple months. Kye is proud to present 'French Antarctica', the debut LP by Good Area. Drawing from a palette of guitar, rhythm box, cornet, shortwave radio and room activity Good Area have crafted the ultimate stand-alone testament to instantaneous expression. Bypassing such obsolete concepts as dexterity and restraint 'French Antarctica' cuts loose with a raw unbridled rush of creative …
7.10.12
a minimalist repress of this classic release from 2012 which sold out globally in ONE day! Review: Six months after the release of the limited edition '7.10.12' vinyl boxed set, alt.vinyl and :zoviet*france: are making the music from the album more widely available in a more conventional form. Retaining the original 7-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch vinyl formats, the three discs are pressed in standard black vinyl and packaged together in plain black sleeves.
Don't tell the driver
Finally, after 15 years, Big Mick Turner has turned in the big rock record we always knew he had in him. Yeah, Don't Tell the Driver is a different kind of record from all the Mick Turner records -- not just his own, but the ones he's done with Dirty Three, Bonny Billy, Cat Power, Fungus Brains, and Venom P. Stinger put together. So, what's so different about Don't Tell the Driver anyway? Well, Mick grew a mustache for this one. That must mean it's his Sgt. Pepper; a consolidation and developmen…
94diskont
The extremely influential 1995 classic album from Oval is finally re-issued on vinyl. Freshly cut to vinyl by Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering the two LPs are pressed on orange vinyl and packaged in a jacket replicating the original. LP1 is the album, LP2 is a 12" featuring remixes from Jim O'Rourke, Scanner, Mouse on Mars, and Christian Vogel. Included for the first time is a free download coupon. Limited to 1,500 units worldwide."
Brombron 26: Two lost souls
Korm Plastics is proud to present the twenty-sixth release in the Brombron series (missing numbers will follow later this year). Originally a co-production between Staalplaat and Extrapool, it is now hosted by co-curator Frans de Waard. In the year 2000 Frans de Waard and Extrapool started the Brombron project. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in a …
Hemp Is Here
Leven Signs' Hemp Is Here came and went in 1985, as both a cassette release (Unlikely Records) and vinyl release (Cordelia) in the blink of an eye. The duo of Peter Karkut and Maggie Turner managed to craft one of the strangest, most affecting albums of new wave experimentalism of the era, but due to the album's impossible-to-find status, it's been largely forgotten and continuously overlooked ever since. A chance encounter with the cassette version of Hemp Is Here led Brad Rose of Digitali…
Nine Months To The Disco
The most impressive, but also the most overlooked of all the bands that lurched around the mutant extremes that trail through Gang of Four, the Mekons, and, ultimately, the Pop Group, the Glaxo Babies' debut album was actually cut following the collapse of the original band -- both vocalist/songwriter Rob Chapman and drummer Geoff Alsopp had departed, with saxophonist Tony Wrafter explaining the reason for the rift. "Rob was into songs and we weren't." Too true! Under Chapman's aegis, Glaxo Babi…
Balf Quarry
LP version; printed innersleeve with lyrics. Before Balf Quarry landed on my desk, I figured the dirtiest thing in Connecticut was Chris Dodd's browser history. Not so. Among other things — like guitar tones that buzz around like contact-high June bugs, Elisa Ambrogio's slack vocals wavering between coy calls and willfully distant snarls, and a production value so low and dense you feel you're listening to them from the dining room above their rehearsal space — Hartford natives the Magik Markers…
Kogetsudai
Kogetsudai is Sylvain Chauveau's 10th album, the second in a trilogy initiated by Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) (2010), where the song structure is dismantled and reconstructed on the fringe of silence. Whereas Singular Forms found inspiration from Abstract Painting, Kogetsudai is influenced by Zen rock gardens found in Japan Ñ also the location where the album was conceived (for the most part) Ñ and from which the album borrows its title. Layers of minimal electronic sounds and filtered f…
Pangaea Ultima
Double LP version. Pangaea Ultima, Steve Moore's debut record on Spectrum Spools, is an epic musical achievement, not simply for its sonic sophistication and compositional mastery, but also because Moore has crafted here an album that has come as close to any in transcending the boxed human logic of time and place. The album title refers to the name which geologists have given to the future super-continent that is suggested may form on earth in the next quarter-of-a-billion years. Over th…
Jessica In The Room Of Lights
Reissue of this largely unknown yet spellbinding touchstone in the canon of Sheffield's industrial music heritage, the album was recorded in 1986 as a soundtrack to a theatre performance recorded by John Avery, a contemporary of Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. Forced Nostalgia's sixth release imposes the uncannily affective melancholia of John Avery's 1986 soundtrack to a theater performance Jessica in the Room of Lights by the coincidentally-named Forced Entertainment company. Avery employs pi…
Guff Vout Mulch
The Smegma & Blood Stereo collab LP "Guff Vout Mulch" on Nashazphonehas finally landed. Old fashioned postal collab finished up in 2009, sweet printed colour sleeves and bonkers liner notes by the noise soulman John Olson.Good old fashioned Trans-Atlantic postal collaboration LP between Smegma and Blood Stereo, recorded in Brighton, Pasadena and Portland. The whole shebang was finished in 2009, but Cairo's Nashazphone label didn't think you dinks were ready for it then, now they reckon yo…
Fa 2012
Fa 2012 + Fa (Mark Fell Remix). Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering, Berlin, July 2012. Layout by Tina Frank. Special 12' featuring new versions of the track Fa, taken from the debut Fennesz solo album ÔHotel Paral.lel' (1997). 15 years after its initial release, Christian Fennesz gives this throbbing monster of a track a new seeing to, extending it and adding more of that magic he is so well known for. The album was always an exercise in exploring alternate means o…
Surfaces
Gianluca Favaron returns on Silentes with the second release in the prestigious “Private Sounds” series. Besides having published some solo works, Favaron is part of Under The Snow along with Stefano Gentile and collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen project. In the past he has released music as Ab'she and was part of Lasik Surgery along with Pierpaolo Zoppo. Among his most recent releases we remember his collaboration with Corrado Altieri entitled "The System of Objects". "Surfaces" is a m…
The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group
The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group is a spice-hunting collective formed in Rotterdam in the summer of 2012, when multi-media cultural center The Worm graciously opened their world-class synthesizer studio to the current incarnation of Sun Araw Band. Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw, Magic Lantern), M. Geddes Gengras , Tony Lowe (CEO Raw Tings), and Butchy Fuego (San Gabriel, Boredoms) spent a week amidst Syrinx, Serge, and Surinamese victuals, tracking the self-titled double album live to two-trac…
Glass Canyon
It's been a little while since we've last heard from Oakland-based sound artist Marielle Jakobsons in a solo capacity, but that's certainly not to say she hasn't been busy. Last year saw full-length outings by her two duo projects, Date Palms and Myrmyr, and already in 2012 works with Bay Area drone ensemble Portraits and trio recordings with Helena Espvall and Agnes Szelag have been released. Her last major solo outing (under the nom-de-plume Darwinsbitch) came in form of the dark, comple…
Isometrie sonore
Postface by M.B. - An isometric sound ineluctably holds a thematic notion which generalizes that of the rigid motion of noise, combining with a psychometric and cacophonous object. Formally, it is a modulatory function between two metric spaces preserving their silent distances. In the example shown here, isometry moves along electronic pathways and captivates the listener's mind through rotations and reflections in plane or in spatial sound, maintaining the geometric concepts of experimental su…
Jazz Sahara
Decades before the advent of 'world music', bassist-composer Ahmed Abdul-Malik introduced Arabic music into jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. Best known in jazz circles for his solid work with Randy Weston and Thelonious Monk, Abdul-Malik, who is of Sudanese descent, was also the first to use the oud, a pear-shaped, traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument similar to a lute, as a jazz instrument. Recorded in 1958, with tenor saxophonist Johnny Gri…