New Arrivals
Leh Jani
First release on Sham Palace, a new label from key Sublime Frequencies conspirator Mark Gergis. "Leh Jani" -- the legendary Omar Souleyman track -- was originally released in Syria as a sprawling 30-minute epic groove, alongside two additional tracks. The entire 60-minute cassette album was recorded live to tape in 1998 at the home studio of producer Zuhir Maksi in the village of Ras Al Ain in northeastern Syria. Many of Omar's early tapes were recorded in this fashion to replicate the feeling o…
Virgins
Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance. The sound palette of this work is wider, almost 'percussive' and tighter sounding than previous works. While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digit…
Appalachian excitation
The meeting of composer Arnold Dreyblatt and psych-folk trio Megafaun shouldn’t be seen as unlikely just because it’s cross-generational, or even (arguably) cross-genre. Such categorizations have to be set aside before taking in their Appalachian Excitation. Born in New York in 1953, Dreyblatt came up under such lauded experimental groundbreakers as Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young, obtaining a Master’s degree in composition from Wesleyan University. Now based in Berlin, where h…
1933 Your house is mine
The cacophonic discord of Missing Foundation and the prophetic vision of Peter Missing culminated into a sophomore album following their legendary self-titled debut which was collected under the banner as 1933 Your House Is Mine. This tumultuous effort was brought about in 1988 as a means to educate the forgotten and venerate their followers using brash performance tactics and industrial rhythm to rally their cause. An industrial soundtrack of urban protest, Missing Foundation found their voice…
Alien, All Too Alien
Their cat may well be all too alien but there's quite an earthly feel to this epic voyage of a record from the brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio. It feels like you are slowly drifting through different continents perched on a floating glass-domed steel barge, observing the strangely contrasting cultures go about their business, seemingly unaware they are being watched. Though there are certain sounds contained herein that are quite familiar to many 21st century homosapie…
No Answer : Lower Floors
CD version. "No Answer : Lower Floors is the record of 2013 you need to be most worried about. No Answer : Lower Floors is further flesh to the shadowy silhouette cast by this Michigan art abstraction unit, perenially poised on the cusp of a precipice. Wolf Eyes will carry on forever but always remain mysteriously unfinished. The No Answer : Lower Floors material covers all bases: tough to toughest to tangled, all done in the Wolves' least convoluted smooth style. The vocals, delays, primit…
Nihtes niht
'The music supposed to be a soundtrack for lonely ice-soundscapes... when you stand there on lonely wide inhuman places and feel lost, but you still stand on ice...' - Baraka[H] The newest collaboration between masters of evocative noise/drone ambient is divided into four long tracks, four directions of nothing. The tracks are entitled in middle ageindo-german language, for north, east, south, west. And the album title means nothing from nothing - very weird notion, as it doesn't exist anymore i…
Music Of Changes
The title is a double pun. The score is the first that John Cage devised allowing the hexagrams of the I Ching to fully determin e how the music would procee d, event by event, gesture by gesture—the musical details (pitch, duration, dynamic s, density, tempi) being painstakingly, albeit fortuitously, derived through point-by-point con sultation from charts of possi bilities designed by the composer. (Christian Wolff, Cage’s young friend and musical associate, had presented Cage with a co…
Black Magic & Mustache
Seattle-based Simon Henneman's first solo vinyl release is here. Mr. Henneman has worn many hats in the musical vortex of the Seattle sub-underground, most "famously" as one of the Diminished Men, who released an LP on the Sun City Girls Abduction label in 2009. That LP gave the lucky few who procured a copy an idea of the talents of that great band. Here, Mr. Henneman strikes out on his own and creates a solo journey of a much more intimate palette. Playing every instrument on the reco…
Metz
Some will find it hard to believe that a glamrock band with a gritty urban veneer came from Texas and stuck together long enough to release this milestone record. Indeed, I was startled to learn that they're from Texas and not NYC or London. Clearly the underground music scene throughout Texas is fertile with talent and enough socio-cultural diversity to support any genre, including mid-70s glamrock. Metz take on glam includes some of the associated clichés like heavy chunks of chord strokes and…
Barca beach
Live recordings from Barcelona, summer 2009. Frankensteins Ballet features Mik Quantius (Embryo) speaking-in-tongues and Thomas Hopf on drums. Other members have played with Damo Suzuki, Michael Karoli, Michael Rother etc. Some serious damaged krautrock jams happening on this one, not to mention the weird dub space some of this is floating into. Edition of 70 copies.
Journey from Anywhere
Compound Eye is Drew McDowall (formerly of Coil) and Tres Warren (Psychic Ills and Messages). Journey from Anywhere is their second album release following Origin of Silence, an art edition LP on The Spring Press label. This double LP features four sides of improvised electronics that lead the listener into the dark recesses of the duo's subterranean explorations. Each of these works move at a slow and considered pace, gradually unfolding into a transportative blur of dark psychedelic minim…
Lemuria
The hidden meanings are those that are at the origin of things. In an interview to Blow Up magazine in 2010, Venetian sound artist Enrico Coniglio, commenting on his aesthetic approach to the soundscape (it is the result of the aggregation of clusters of elements that have reason for existence in relation to their own specific function), marked off the traces for a path that some time later would take him to collaborate with the photographer and field recordist Giovanni Lami, from Ravenna, in …
Six & Six
Originally released in 1981, JANDEK'S second album stands as an incredible document of the formative stages of his cracked genius. The musical elements are almost catatonic: 9 songs drift by as a series of slight variations on several desolate, untuned acoustic guitar phrases. First time on vinyl in over 25 years. Old-style tip on jacket. LIMITED!
13
The first full-color Yeti in the new larger format, with a gatefold sleeve featuring artwork by Geneviève Castrée. Heavily illustrated throughout. Did we say already that it's full-color?On the hard vinyl 7-inch EP: rare/unreleased tracks from The Great Unwashed, Moon Duo, the Trypes, and Karen Dalton.INSIDE THE BOOK: groovy posters from Christchurch, NZ in the 1980s; Oral History of the Rock Band Codeine; Gisele Prassinos; Ben Bush; Ilyas Ahmed; Sarah Meadows; David Moreno; Quentin Rowan; Josh …
The Soft Room Recordings 1980-84
Paul Nagle is an electronic artist and synthesist from UK who started to produce wonderful fascinating electronic sounds since the late 70's when his parents moved to a remote farmhouse, triggering creative outbursts in many fields - music, painting and writing to name but three. His music which combines elements of electronica, ambient, trance, minimalsynth and new age would have perfectly fit to a label like Martin Reed's Mirage who also released early works of Colin Potter, Ian Boddy, Mark S…
Mountains Of Tongues
Important collection of recordings documenting and preserving "fringe" or under-represented folk cultures and voices from a unique region at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. It spans a diverse cross-section of music by Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens and many other ethnicities which fall outside their country's definition of national folk music - Azeris from Georgia, Kurds from Tbilisi, Avars and Lezgis from Azerbaijan, or Molokans in the South Caucasus - giving room for al…
God Is Good
ground-breaking CD edition: God is Good is Om’s fourth studio album, and the first with new drummer Emil Amos (Amos made his first official recording with Om in the single “Gebel Barkal/Version” on Sub Pop last summer). It’s a big change, obviously, for a two-piece, and a fairly unqualified success. Amos, who also records with Grails, Holy Sons and Shrinebuilder, is far more flamboyant than Chris Hakius, less tethered to the steady chink of cymbals, more apt to range free-form over toms, rims an…
Bronze Age Subway
"Fruitful meeting of two very consistent mainstays in the southern drone hemispheres... The recordings took place in Buenos Aires when Antony recently was on a trip to South America.. Dark and broodling, yet also soothing and narcoleptic drone works from these two masters of their fields.. Guitars, violins and organs create buzzing forcefields and nocturnal sonic transfixions.... Top shelf trans-continental drone extravaganza from these highly prolific gentlemen. Don't miss out!"
Dance of the vampires
"Roman Polanski’s 1967 film ‘Dance Of The Vampires’ (as it was originally called, but more widely known by its re-named title ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’, or ‘Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck’) is a camp horror cult classic. At the time the film was marketed as a ‘farce’, which overlooked the fact that this film is fantastically eerie. The major part played by the soundtrack in giving the film this effect cannot be understated, and the cold-as-snow production did much to enhance the b…