New Arrivals
Akashic Record (Events: 1986-1990)
Outer Space is a rapidly evolving sound entity headed by John Elliott and joined by a constantly rotating cast of midwestern U.S. electronic figures. Akashic Record sees the project grow in many different directions from the self-titled Arbor album created throughout 2008 and 2009 while retaining similar aesthetics of synthesizer experimentation and it's esoteric relations. Recorded over the course of a year with close engineering assistance and compositional contributions from Andrew Ver…
And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees
A flop-eared rodent frolics in a lush field. In from the horizon sweeps a black cloud, kicked up by an army of similar-looking rodents. That's the basic set-up of Varmints, a 24-minute film by Studio AKA animator Marc Craste, based on a book written by Helen Ward and illustrated by Craste. Jóhann Jóhannsson draws the title of his latest album from the book, and this is the music he composed for the film's soundtrack. There's quite a bit of extra material-- the album is a full 1…
Beguiled Entropy
Expo '70 has garnered a great deal of notoriety over the last few years in certain circles in which the moniker is usually mentioned to describe types of cross-genres. After completing a couple US tours and a handful of limited releases and re-releases in 2010, a short hiatus was in order. During this time last year Justin Wright, sole operator of the project, recorded tracks for an upcoming release. Wright entered a basement studio and improvised over two nights layered recordings for the first…
Stone/Water
With any sizeable Brötzmann group, the temptation is always there to compare it to his classic Machine Gun unit. This new tentet doesn’t match up to the unbridled ferocity of that earlier grouping, but then what has? Perhaps the greatest sea change since the heavy-drinking glory days of 1968 is that ecstatic playing is now as much an idiom as an instinctive response. For all its supposed iconoclastic freedom, this idiom now has its own traditions, its own heroes, and its own stock cliches. Youth…
Sacred & Profane Love
We haven’t made any secret of our love for Estonian Producer Maria Minerva, and this latest offering for 100% Silk might just be her finest yet. She’s had to bat off plenty of comparisons with Nite Jewel, Glass Candy and others from the nu-disco set, and this collection of six tracks should be where those comparisons end. Here Minerva explores a wider range of dancefloor styles, beginning with woozy late night Chicago gloom on ‘A Love So Strong’ with its detuned vocal hook and punchy bas…
Primitive North
A mighty split release from two of today's most progressive underground metal bands, bringing together the formidable post-doom of Brooklyn's A Storm Of Light and the luminous sludge of Canadian duo Nadja. The real question here is whether or not the music can come anywhere close to the awesome sleeve art, and while that may not even be possible, the twenty-two minute epic from Nadja has a decent go at it. While A Storm Of Light throw everything at their plodding, Wagnerian outings 'Bro…
…On Sea-Faring Isolation
"A casual interweb cruiser could be forgiven for confusing Dolphins Into The Future the “band” (aka the one-man tape-loop blue-age ambient project executed by Belgian Cetacean Nation ambassador Lieven Martens) with Dolphins Into The Future the book (written by dimensional traveler Joan Ocean concerning her 20-year-long real life spirit quest to commune with a school of 200 wild Hawaiian Spinner dolphins). And, to be fair, they’re a LOT alike. Both deal heavily in trippy, drifting logics, vibrati…
Tweek
"since the last senking album "pong" (r-n122) was a great success in 2010 and sold out quickly raster-noton swiftly asked for a follow-up of massel's sound cosmos. on "tweek" senking again reveals his sense of cineastic atmospheres and dark abysmal depths of sound, which are subordinate to extremely slow choky basses and delayed beats. references to dubstep are rather the result of testing the outlying areas of the frequency spectrum than a direct relation to the genre. nevertheless it se…
Le viandier de taillevent
for almost 10 years, the québécois collective napalm jazz gets its hands dirty with its unorthodox approaches to improv.' 'mostly activ as a duo with erick d'orion and philémon they like to get different guests like for example a_dontigny, arnaud rivière, erikm or erik minkkinen. limited to 181 copies and coproduced with notype from montréal." (label info)
The Ann Steel Album
Repressed! "Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian electronic composer who's made albums using every possible permutation of the same six notes, right up to modern classical, with The Ann Steel Album as the weird anomaly. Made with an American model who moved to Italy to make it big in fashion, Roberto took her languid, Laurie Anderson-esque voice and created a detached futurist popstar. The odd sound of these European futurist pop songs make it sound like the machines are breathing, creatin…
Live at the Storyville, NYC - 24 October 1977
Quite simply one of Sun Ra's best live albums. This rare recording (originally on Horo records) finds Ra, along with a 19-piece Arkestra, playing a mix of his own compositions ('Images' and 'Lights') along with several jazz standards (including Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp' and Duke Ellington's 'Lightnin''). While Ra's own compositions were usually more avant-garde affairs, he always revelled in playing the classics as well in an effort to give his audience a lesson in jazz histo…
Blue eyes are my reward
Jawdropping new collection of crop circles etched in sonic candy-floss by New Zealand’s beardsmith / noise-farmer Campbell Kneale. Rated by the horses mouth as the best thing he ever made, EVER, ‘Blue Eyes Are My Reward’ shimmers like an icicle-clad forest resplendent in its own crystalline magnificence. Snakecharming groove, dublike boomph, and bleary eyed strum blast the path out of a decidedly greying world of so-so metalized myspace drone, into a miniaturized drone-prairie of superpow…
Live in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, July 25th, 1970
White vinyl LP release of saxophonist Albert Ayler's quartet with pianist Call Cobbs, bassist Steve Tintweiss, and drummer Allen Blairman performing in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France in 1970 (LP 1 of 2). Just a few months before Albert Ayler presumably jumped to his death from the Statue of Liberty ferry into the frigid November waters of NYC's East River he was on stage for two energy filled nights at the Fondation de Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Little did he know at the time tha…
Foetus
An internationally known artist, Franco Battiato has been everything in his long career, from beat singer to avantgarde performer, producer, contemporary music composer.His beginnings lay in the mid 60's, with many singles released with no particular success, the first two under his real name of Francesco. He had left the native Sicily (he was born in Jonia, near Catania in 1945) moving to Milan around 1965.Fetus, housed in a outrageous cover (reproducing a foetus) was definitely a prog al…
Don't Ollie On Thin Ice!
Hand-numbered edition of only 100 copies LP from Belgian visual artist Dennis Tyfus’s Vom Grill project: two tracks of non-spazz electronics, keyboard and profoundly deformed tongue, moving from scraping, skittering sound werks that come over like Blood Stereo play John Cage’s cartridge music to a fantastic fat, doomy synth solo that makes like Heldon hymning Lucifer. Less madman and a lot more moody than you might expect, this makes for a consistently bent atmosphere from start to finish.…
Throat
In view of the band's assertion that this is a program designed to be listened to in one sitting, it seems a little impertinent to discuss highlights. The seven tracks that make up "Throat" seem a little arbitrary in view of the overall discontinuity of the release, but in as much as this is music which has no time for a lot of preconceptions, that might be an inherent part of the band's intentions. The opening is where the Brotzmann reference comes into its own, but before the piece is o…
s\\t
Great & rough Split-LP with both sides recorded 1996. Beast People (Dilloway, Harper, Young ?) with tracks pulled off very rare tapes. Schimpfluch side features collage of (previously unreleased) R&G studio material and Schimpfluch Group-Actions performed live. Highly recommended! Edition of 300 copies with cover-art & photography by Rudolf Eb.er.
Abandoned In Sleep
For his second album Jonathan Lee draws on two years of recording and performance - and it's not just his own material that's used for the record either. 'Abandoned In Sleep' features studio recordings, sample edits and collaborative work with artists including Xela, Jasper TX, Svarte Greiner, Stephen Vitiello and Gareth Davis among others. This album is all about dark, nocturnal ambience and combines a variety of half-dreamed soundscapes together for every track: Xela's falsetto murmur…
Live at the Storyville, NYC - 29 October, 1977
Day two of this rare live concert at the Storyville finds Ra and a 19-piece Arkestra again giving the audience a lesson in jazz with tracks like Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'My Favorite Things', Tadd Dameron's 'Lady Bird' and Miles Davis' 'Half Nelson', as well as a taste of his own classics ('Englight(en)Ment' and 'The Satellites')." Clear red vinyl in clear plastic sleeve with blue lettering (limited edition 500 copies).
Occupied With The Unspoke
Golden Retriever was started in 2008 by Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson whose paths first crossed in the early 00’s when Sielaff and Carlson were in experimental pop bands that frequently worked together, Au and Parenthetical Girls respectively. Through collaboration, they developed a deep understanding of each other’s musical voice and sensibilities. After exchanging a few solo recordings, it became clear that they had remarkably similar aspirations for and theories on music, th…