New Arrivals
Nervous Hydra / All This Has Passed Forever
Stunning split release between Maurizio Bianchi, godfather of the Italian industrial noise scene, and Abul Mogard, the much loved and hyperstitious synthesist, conjuring a spellbinding testament to the transcendent and transportive energies of electronic music. Although appearing to starkly contrast on the surface, both artist’s work patently shares a lust for the suggestive abstraction of raw current and its pareidolia-like capacity to generate rich and uncanny emotional responses from the end…
Art Record Covers
Since the dawn of modernism, visual and music production have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1925 double-sided discs Rotoreliefs, the 20th century saw ever more fertile exchange between sounds and shapes, marks and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance. In Francesco Spampinato’s unique anthology of artists’ record covers, we discover the rhythm of this particul…
Everywhere At The End Of Time
2017 repress. Everywhere At The End of Time is the first in a series of six albums by The Caretaker, aka James Leyland Kirby, slowly cataloguing the stages of early onset dementia. Each album will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration, progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness. Viewing dementia as a series of stages can be a useful way to understand the illness, but it is important to realize that this only provi…
Wtc 9/11
Steve Reich composed WTC 9/11 in 2010 in homage to the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, September 11th, 2001. First performed on March 19, 2011 at Duke University in North Carolina by the Kronos Quartet, WTC 9/11 would be played for the first time in New York, at Carnegie Hall, in late April of the same year.WTC 9/11 is written for a string quartet playing live, on which are juxtaposed pre-recorded voices and two string quartets. With a playing time of 16 minutes, the work is in …
London Taximi
The "London Taximi" cassette consists of some tracks recorded by Greek experimental musician Tasos Stamou and international artistic explorer Mike Cooper. These recordings took place from 2014 to 2016 in London. Although they have been playing together for some time, this is their first joint record attempt. In 66 minutes we hear the two authors "talk" in a very special musical language, whose vocabulary is derived by their common (and not) influences, using lap steel guitar, bouzouk…
Songs We Taught the Lord Volume One
"As I recall, the idea seemed pretty reasonable at the time. It was late 1996. I'd met Fahey a couple of years earlier, and partly as an outgrowth of that meeting he had decided he wanted to meet and play with 'noise musicians.' This resulted in a lot of music that made his olden fans weep, but who was I to argue with The Great Koonaklaster? Anyway, it was late '96 and Fahey wanted to play some gigs on the east coast. He also wanted Thurston to be on the bill with him, and so Mr. Moore asked…
Security Besides Love
Security Besides Love is the first vinyl album from Philadelphian artist Gabi Losoncy, who was one-half of the now-defunct Kye related Good Area. This album is an account of the artist’s life. The first side voyeuristically and objectively documents Gabi’s external experiences and habitats; in this instance, a conversation heard while riding public transportation. The second side of this record turns back in on the artist herself with an associative monologue, in which an understanding of her ow…
Brotzmann Box
"Brotzmann Box" is a beautiful box set containing 3 albums by German free jazz master Peter Brötzmann. The first volume of the album is "Full Blast" (JW 1) with Brötzmann (alto and soprano sax, tárogató) playing in a super Swiss-German trio with Marino Pliakas (electric bass), a member of Swiss Steamboat, and Michael Wertmuller (drums), one of the best musiciand of the Berlin music scene and member of the group Alboth. Together these three musicians create a truly unique musical cosmos that lies…
Channelled Messages At The End Of History
Demdike and Votel's label delivers this incredible, ancient-but-modern sound collage painstakingly constructed over a number of years out of Youtube samples - total mind-bender this one, somewhere between New Age meditation tape and the sound of your nightmares...Totally stunning record from the elusive Tongues of Light, drawing cosmic, primordial vectors between glossolalia, sound poetry and improvised music via the nebulæ of Youtube for Demdike Stare & Andy Votel’s Pre-Cert Home Entertainment.…
Heads Or Tails
Two different duets between reedman Sylvain Kassap and percussionist Hamid Drake – one live, one studio – recorded six years apart, but sounding wonderful together in this double-length package! The first section is live – and features some very long, open improvisations – with Kassap on a range of clarinets, mostly in the bass range, plus chalumeau as well – as Drake opens up his drum kit with that special sort of magic that's made him a key percussionist in the legacy of rhythm-free drummers l…
Electric Ascension+Cleaning The Mirror
"In Rova's translation of Ascension into contemporary practice, Coltrane's Ascension remains as a great gift for the energy it presents, for the sheer unfailing intensity with which it fights toward its collective freedom. The original is a major work of art, not merely an episode but a larger process. Rova's substantial achievement consists in assuming the responsibility of Coltrane's great original, treating it not simply as a memento of liberation but as a tool for it as well."(Stuart Broomer…
Soul Travelers
"So, listen closely, and savor the sounds: treat them with delicate abandon, indulge in their intricately measured poignancy; but don't forget to relax (a little) and enjoy: You are in the hands of a master soul traveler."(Steven Loewy, excerpt from the liner notes).
Trombonist Steve Swell is one of the stalwarts on the NYC free jazz scene as both a player & an educator. This studio recording from June 2015 features a top flight band comprised of Swell’s longtime collaborators (William Parker &…
Forest Structures
Thé Déluge is the new moniker of French musician Vincent Caylet. While Caylet’s previous outings as Cankun (released on Not Not Fun and Hands in the Dark) were blissful psychedelic sundrenched jam sessions, Forest Structures sees Caylet largely jettison cosmic tropical islands and guitar twang. Thé Déluge deals in moonlit electronics and nocturnal transmission that consistently bleep into each other and overlap. Recorded mostly on analog gear and inspired by both nature and urbanism, Thé Déluge …
Dame Ningen
Mukqs is the solo moniker of Max Allison from Chicago trio Good Willsmith. ダメ人間 ("dame ningen," which translates into "useless person" from Japanese) comes off the heels of Good Willsmith’s well received Things Our Bodies Used to Have (their third release with Umor Rex). For ダメ人間, Allison assembled his analog rig (four-track tape player, two EHX2880 loop pedals), and recorded the full 40 minute suite in one live take with no overdubs. The goal was to make a piece of music just as dense / intense…
Old Speakers
Missing Organs is Tristan Bath, a British musician and writer based in Vienna, Austria. Old Speakers deploys a bottomless variety of instruments, beats, and techniques, all refined and rewritten —somewhat accidentally— into a document of the period of personal and international upheaval during which they came to life. Old Speakers is his Brexit album; a document of the dread, quiet chaos, and bitterness in European society which came to the surface in 2016. Field recordings and improvisations fo…
What's Your Sign?
Four years after their inaugural union at Ecstatic Music Festival inside New York City’s Merkin Concert Hall produced a cosmic din for the ages, two genre-obliterating renegades who’ve made indelible marks in the experimental music pantheon—the NYC-bred, Paris-based avant-garde guitar legend and minimalist composer Rhys Chatham and long-running psychedelic free-rock juggernaut and Brooklyn institution Oneida—have joined forces on their first collaborative album proper titled What’s Your Sign?, d…
Amalgam
2016 release. A wild and exciting duo between cellist Okkyung Lee and legendary turntable improviser Christian Marclay performing live at London's Cafe Oto for a single long track that runs through an astonishing dynamic of invention and atmospheres in a gripping and spellbinding set. "May 2014, arriving home after hearing the Café Oto performance now released as Amalgam, I began to write. Over time the text developed, augmented by relevant dreams, literature and boxing metaphors, to become inte…
Land Of Look Behind
Originally issued in 1982, The Land Of Look Behind soundtrack returns to vinyl in a remastered and expanded edition that includes a download of three previously unheard and unreleased tracks from the original sessions. Alan Greenberg, who wrote and directed this film documenting the funeral of Bob Marley, provided K. Leimer with location tapes which were used to originate many of the rhythmic patterns for Land Of Look Behind. Loops of the monologues and phrases that exhibited more distincti…
dHrAaNwDn
Another multifaceted, all-out release from percussionist Jon Mueller, whose tribal trajectory has exploded since the release of Tongues. This album is a percussion fan’s dream. But it’s much more than that: it’s also a historical tribute, and has the potential to send listeners into a meditative trance, connecting them with their forebearers (A Closer Listen). "On May 23, 2016, Jon Mueller played four drums for over six hours in the Meeting House at the Shaker Historical Society in Albany, …
Drumbar And Basspear
Free-rock cosmic feedback by way of acid folk explorations. This feels like a classic Westcoast styled psych version of Amon Düül II. 70 copies.