New Arrivals
Probability A: three studies for compositions of infinite lenght
Probability A collects three pieces composed by William Hutson between 2009 and 2012. Over the past seven years Hutson’s project Rale has evolved to incorporate more negative space into the music. The three pieces herein contained were recorded as proofs-of-concept; they are tracks that Hutson made to loop indefinitely in his house as he built up the courage to use long silences in what is supposed to be a noise/drone act.
William Hutson began recording and performing as Rale in 2006. He …
GAU
In March of 2012, nearing the end of a tour together through the Netherlands and Belgium, Celer, Machinefabriek, and Jan and Romke Kleefstra gathered in a country studio, spending an afternoon improvising to record Gau. Recorded by the old hardcorerocker Jan Switters at the Landscape studios in Gauw, situated in the countryside in the midst of Friesland, the place was surrounded by green fields with idle tractors, few trees, buzzards and only massive farmhouses dotting the horizon. From the almo…
Christmas Soli
Remastered edition: John Fahey has made a habit of recording a new album of Christmas music every five or six years, but The New Possibility, which was originally released in 1968, is still his best. One of the best and most influential acoustic guitarists of his generation, John Fahey's music fused past and present, borrowing from the traditions of blues and folk music and filtering them through a modern musical viewpoint. Some of Fahey's most striking (and most popular) work appeared on a seri…
Comme A La Radio
Sensational reissue!!! In 1969, a French chanteuse, an Algerian multi-instrumentalist, and a Chicago jazz quartet undertook an experimental, exploratory, revolutionary musical voyage; a redrawing of musical parameters that, to this day, stands as a glittering beacon, glowing in the dark abyss of 'out' music. Featuring Areski Belkacem and Aart Ensemble of Chicago, Comme a la Radio is the sophomore album in Brigitte Fontaine's prolific career. Four decades on, and Comme à la Radio still sounds…
An Ambassador for Laing
LP version. Debut album from the Edinburgh-based duo of Marc Dall and Alex Ander, who work with intricately-stacked percussion, dub-wise bass and a rich harmonic tapestry of processed voices, keys, harp, vibraphone, guitar, woodwind, strings and synthesizer -- every sound re-sampled to the nth degree then subjected to subtle automation and rigorously fine-tuned over a period of many months. From the mesmerizing, pastoral drift of "Anger Sees Red" and "Dwelling by the Meadow" to agitated arabesqu…
Interface
Awesome, monolithic slab of metal machine music from 1977, France, Paris...Heldon! A prog/early electronic holy grail replete with breathtaking and far-out Heldon's most crystalline work, building to the epic crescendo of the title track. Many fans consider this to be their masterpiece, but more importantly, Interface is a record that will continue to unfold for centuries to come. Richard Pinhas is an artistic iconoclast. A French intellectual as likely to collaborate with MAGMA as the radica…
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…
Trente belles annes
Triumphal new CD, the first new recordings in an age, from one of the greatest bands on the goddamn planet, the trio of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller aka Borbetomagus: this is a roof-raising performance, recorded live at Instants Chavires, France, 19th December 2009. Borbetomagus combine the elevated amplifier violence of Jimi Hendrix at his most combustible with the spontaneous free music polyphony of Ascension-era Coltrane and the ‘guitar smashing’ h…
We Will Always Be
There's a disarming honesty to the way Michigan-based husband and wife duo Windy & Carl communicate with one another. A blog post from Windy, published in late 2011, describes the making of We Will Always Be, framing it in the context of their relationship. "Yeah, we have had bumps in the road, and on occasion it seems as if we may never recover from these bumps, but we do," she wrote. That type of candor doesn't stop at the written word; it also bleeds through into the duo's music. Often their …
Along the way
Former Emeralds member Mark McGuire has planned a new album following his 2011 albumGet Lost. Along the Waythrough Dead Oceans. On Along The Way, McGuire writes in the liner notes: "€œThis story is an odyssey through the vast, unknown regions of the mind€¦the endless unfolding of psychological landscapes, leading to perpetual discoveries and expansions, in a genuinely emergent and infinite world of worlds. Further he writes “[the new album] is not a critique, it is not inst…
Matter
Ingar Zach, percussion. Martin Küchen, saxophone & pocket radio. Nikos Veliotis, cello & video. Looper's unique combination of floating sounds provides the spectator with a suspended environment to sink in, dislocating him from the casual perception of time and space.
Blue Clouds
Some cream for your acid-folk tea - hitherto unreleased sides from the two and a half bards (well, two bards and a maiden - forsooth!) who self-released All On the First Day back in '72. These include studio recordings from later in the 70s, a couple live songs and an outtake from the legendary album itself! Well, the first legendary album anyway - for Blue Clouds is clearly another.
The Rocker
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010!
Jailbreak s the duo of pedal steel-vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock-roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the 'New Weird America', where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina C…
Sieve
As a duo Tim Catlin and David Brown aka Candlesnuffer come together as 'Helium Clench' and boast long histories in the Melbourne and international avant-garde music world. Both have independently developed a fascination with microtonal sound, in particular through Catlin's construction of harmonic overtone guitars and metal rod instruments tuned in just intonation, and in Brown's case through his explorations using the quartertone bass guitar. 'Sieve', their first duo recording is a stud…
Films super-8, la nature comme atelier
A book all in French about the Swiss artist Roman Signer and his work. Texts from François Bovier and Hamid Taieb, Geneviève Loup, Rachel Withers, + an interview with Roman Signer.
The Background Noise
Under The Snow is a project by Stefano Gentile (guitar, objects, field-recordings) and Gianluca Favaron (microphones, field-recordings, processing). Stefano Gentile is well known for his work as owner of the Silentes and Amplexus labels; he is part of Maribor (along with Maurizio Bianchi, Nimh, Andrea Marutti and Gianluca Favaron) and in the past he has collaborated with Aube and Amir Baghiri. Beyond releasing under his own name, Gianluca Favaron collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen proje…
Penpals Forever And Ever
Expanding Erik Skodvin's extremely limited 2008 cassette edition Penpals Forever, this vinyl release remasters the original content and adds a whole extra side's worth of new material, all of which is exclusive to the LP. You wouldn't necessarily discern this straight away from the Deaf Center member's elusive and teasingly enigmatic music, but apparently 'Penpals Forever And Ever' is an "imaginary tale of a long dead baroque painter and his telekinetic correspondence with a flightless b…
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
Rufen
Rufen is the second installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) studio album. In four impressive live recordings, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Onnen Bock unfold aural panoramas which can only be described, in the truest sense of the word, as fantastic. Had Claude Debussy not already composed 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun,' then Qluster would have been ideally placed to do so, their transparency and polymorphism so reminiscent of his high Impression…
Improvisation Sep. 1975
Originally released on the Iskra label in 1975, Improvisation Sep. 1975 is a mind-bending slice of drone improv from two of Japan's post-war heavyweights; former John Cage student, Juilliard graduate, and Yoko Ono's former husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Takehisa Kosugi, considered by many to be the father of what some called "Japanese Krautrock," and Stockhausen percussionist Michael Ranta. Heavy layers of reverbed ring modulators, threaded vocals, melodicas, pianos, violins, gongs and Japanese biwa…