New Arrivals
NYC, Hell 3:00 AM
James Ferraro takes inspiration from "the things I see" in his 'NYC, Hell 3:AM' dystopia. The follow-up to 'Sushi' is a wry reflection of his locale, "a surreal psychological sculpture of American decay and confusion" evoking imagery of "rats, metal landscape, toxic water, junkie friends, HIV billboards, evil news, luxury and unbound wealth, exclusivity, facelifts, romance, insane police presence and lonely people... all against the sinister vastness of Manhattan's alienating skyline." Of course…
ACE 26,250'/11 DEGREES 22.4'N 142 DEGREES 35.5'E
The audio on this LP was inspired by early efforts to explore extreme locations on earth, and the clash between the will of humans, the limits of their bodies, and the immutable laws of the natural world - the latter which can easily destroy both of the first two. The 11° 22.4'N 142° 35.5'E side is based on the 1960 dive by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in the bathyscaphe Trieste to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on earth. This side aims to mirror the …
Japlan
Der Plan were invited to Tokyo in 1984 to play six concerts for Seibu, a Japanese department store chain. Seibu were staging a “German Week”. But how did they come to choose Der Plan, of all bands? Why not an Oktoberfest combo or the Scorpions? Moritz Reichelt explains: “German New Wave was really popular in Japan. They knew more about it than people here at home. Catalogues and magazines detailed every obscure record and depicted the covers. This particular department store chain was linked …
@
Screeches, Scratches, Knocks, Bangs, Explosions and Howls in the Night! “@” is a fabulous studio recording of two Downtown masters. Both long-time supporters of extreme music and proponents of free improvisation, John and Thurston share a deep musical connection and come together here to create their first work together. A varied and powerful program of duo improvisations, “@” presents the community of NY’s Downtown scene at its collaborative best.
Proceed with Caution!
Whereas the earlier black jazz album Shawn-Neeq had its share of riff-based funk, Calvin Keys' second outing Proceed with Caution! (1974) sticks close to straight-ahead jazz verities with the 30-something guitarist in the studio with seven similarly young, on-the-rise musicians including Charles Owens (saxophones, flute), Oscar Brashear (trumpet), Al Hall Jr. (trombone), Kirk Lightsey (electric piano), Henry Franklin (bass), and Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums). Keys can really play the guitar, e…
Living on the Invisible Line
Since 1997 Italian brother duo My Cat Is An Alien has been documenting an ever deepening musical dreamscape, their massive body of work representing some of the most emotive and soulful improvised experimentalism in underground music. Recorded in a remote region of the Western Alps, this latest LP navigates especially tranquil territory as it builds blissed-out pastoral mirages, dappled just slightly with glimmers of an outer darkness. Like much of the duo's best work, Living On the Invis…
Lieu
FaravelliRatti is a duo comprised of Nicola Ratti (guitar) and Attila Faravelli (computer) who play with a tower of different prepared speakers and a taper recorder in between them. The idea is to fed speakers with different languages in the same space and have them resonate with the phisical space. Every speaker is prepared and positioned so the resonance can be controlled by the players, moving their bodies around the sound totem in between them. Their live set represent this idea, of building…
Keep An Eye Out
Table of the Elements continues to celebrate its 15th anniversary with the tenth installment in its Guitar Series Vols. 3 & 4. It’s a 12xLP romp of deviant fretnoise by some of experimental music’s most prominent players, including Christian Fennesz, Thurston Moore, and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley. Sunn O))) founder Stephen O’Malley summons a mesmerizing drone, absorbing the listener into an aural tar pit of deep, inexorable oblivion. He wears a cloak of post-metal allegiances with behemoths li…
Elogia De La Sombra
Two tracks, 31 minutes. Southern are very excited to present the latest release in our Latitudes series from Master Musicians of Bukkake. Recorded at Southern Studios by Harvey Birrell on 17 April 2010. Additional tracking and mixing at Aleph Studios in Seattle. Produced by Randall Dunn. Mastered by Mell Dettmer. Artwork by Randall Dunn and A.Turner. Elogia de la sombra is the 24th recording in the Latitudes series.Master Musicians Of Bukkake are an enchanting collective, comprising a fine pedig…
Greek Rhapsody - Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956
Greek Rhapsody -- Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956 is a 2CD collection featuring 42 tracks meticulously remastered from 78rpm recordings of Greek instrumentals (1905 to 1956). Many tracks are rare and never previously reissued on CD or vinyl; some are taken from the only known copies, while previously reissued tracks are here offered in far superior sound quality. This compilation offers, for the first time, a unique panorama of the instruments and styles of the Greek music of the…
Apophenia
Belgian/Italian duo Andrea Taeggi and Koenraad Ecker isolate a diffuse mixture of techno and concrète noise with 'Apophenia' for Opal Tapes. Building on the decayed structures of last year's 'Contrapasso' album, their latest blends the chaotic virtues of their improvisational approach with a more premeditated logic, manifesting five arcane constructions balancing abstract expression and rugged, grooving purpose. In that sense it works well alongside Opal Tapes' boss Basic House, but Lumisokea's …
Imaginary Softwoods
Three years ago, a triple cassette oddity appeared out of nowhere adorned in washed-out nature collages and zero information. Turns out that John Elliot of Emeralds was behind the madness, and after further dissection of the sounds enclosed and it all began to make sense.Those three tapes (one yellow, one blue, one red) were the first taste of something that felt like a lost private-press object from the early European electronic experimentations of the '60s & '70s. Each vignette is its own stor…
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…
Character
Opportunities for introspection have come few and far between for Canadian-born, New York City-based cellist Julia Kent. After coming to prominence as a member of the cello-driven group Rasputina in the ‘90s, she went on to arrange and play on numerous recordings and tour extensively as a member of Antony and the Johnsons, among other projects.The opportunity to explore her own emotional and creative world came with her solo LPs, Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011), and it is something she ap…
Surveillance
Painted Caves is Evan Caminiti. Surveillance is his debut LP under this alias. Primarily sourced from modular synthesizer, Surveillance compiles 7 tracks recorded over the last year, warped with cassette tapes and other digital tools. Beamed in like a scene from Videodrome, this sensual brand of dystopian psychedelia creates a grainy and tension filled narrative to get lost in. Much of Caminiti’s past work has inhabited a world of it’s own, but Surveillance is a direct response to life in an …
Recur
After successful EP Collapsed, the Bristol-based project Emptyset strikes back with a full-length album on Raster-Noton. Once more James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas challenge the perceptual boundaries between noise and music and the potential for both technology and architecture to embed and codify themselves within sound. Recur is presented as Emptyset's third studio album -- continuing on from their work with Demiurge, the material examines the central themes of time, structure and recursion, thr…
Frog 2
The music developped by Frog is a work on percussions of all sorts : electronic, metallic, or else.. bathing in atmospheres made of « humid » tessituras. The music is simple, and unlike Brume, accessible ! Except for the arrangement of rhythms, 75% of work is concentrated on textures, mainly electronic : analog and digital.Electroacoustic is rarer here, most of the sounds being filtered by « vintage » analog synths using the whole usual range : VCO, VCF, VCA, envelope modulators etc.…
New Egypt
One track, Ten minutes. Latest Latitudes session from Mira Billotte and Doug Shaw’s Psychedelic folk combo.- New Egypt follows White Magic's hugely successful Dark Stars EP (Drag City, 2007).- This track was created specially for the Latitudes series and recorded during White Magic's 2007 European tour.- As usual this Latitudes release is in super fancy art cardstock packaging with gold foil blocking, limited to 1000 only!When i saw White Magic play for the first time I walked away charmed and e…
The watchers
The Watchers is a historic collaboration between Lubomyr Melnyk and James Blackshaw. These new pieces are being released as a CD/LP with material exclusive to each format. LP is pressed in an edition of 500. I first met Lubomyr Melnyk at a festival called Hea Uus Heli in October 2008. We were both scheduled to play that day and I was very excited to see him perform. Before the show I bought several LPs from him and mentioned as much. Lubomyr (more than modest and courteous, as he always i…
Song Islands Vol. 2
Song Islands Vol. 2, released under the Mount Eerie moniker as opposed to Microphones like the original Song Islands compilation, is a sizable compendium of songs covering from the 2002 release of Song Islands to the present day. Coming in at a total of 31 tracks, Song Islands Vol. 2 continues Phil Elverum’s powerful and decidedly exploratory musical style. The compilation maintains an incredible sense of intimacy, even when the vocals get choral, which is on the precipice of being the rule as o…