New Arrivals
Knot Invariants
Rotated and submerged. Drawn tight below the surface. Remnants of hair, string and wood.Tied across and back. Knot Invariants is Helena Gough’s third album. It was created using source material derived solely from recordings of cellists Anthea Caddy and Anton Lukoszevieze.
Trees Have Cancer Too
Duo of Pedro Sousa and Pedro Lopes, two portuguese young musicians, and some of the most exciting in the plastic, tonal and energic exploration of sound in a long time. Using sax (Sousa), turntables (Lopes) and a communal use of electronics, their music is admittedly nervous, obsessively bent over the following moment. Unlike other past forms of improvisation more concerned with listening and a certain purity of sound, this search is as focused as much as frantic in the pursuit of a new d…
Suspension
Half High is Lucy Phelan and Matthew Hopkins, the duo at the centre of the group Naked On The Vague. In their musical lives the two members have explored the realms of rhythm/song based music in Four Door and Lucy's recently released solo outing under the name Lucy Cliche, as well as the complete outer bounds of music in Hopkin's solo work and as a member of The Bowels and Vincent Over The Sink. Whatever they're doing it's always quality stuff. ALWAYS. Half High create eerie, disorientating pass…
Air Museum
Air Museum blurs the lines between acoustic and electronic music even more without sacrificing melody or the delicacy of their sound. It is an album of firsts. It was the first album that the acoustic instruments were not processed via a computer. Instead, the processing of the instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitar, cello, accordion, piano, bass etc.) was done using a variety of pedals, modular synths, and other analog techniques. While acoustic instruments were used extensively, …
Stranded
Since 2002, Idea Fire Company has performed and recorded as a quartet with core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust (me!), joined by Meara O'Reilly and Jessi Swenson. (Meara and Jessi, along with Matt Krefting, start in my finally completed feature-length film Here's To Love!). I feel this LP is as strong as any I've been involved in, and I feel pretty strongly about my body of work. Stranded is the perfect companion to Anti-Natural. Excellent Karla Borecky cover. 180 gram luxury object.
Financial Glam
Jar Moff returns with his second full-length, Financial Glam, a follow-up expanding on ideas first presented by the excellent Commercial Mouth debut LP PAN released earlier this year. Continuing with themes established on his previous LP, Financial Glam reflects the flux and tension of his home city, a gripping opus of grandiose crescendo and collapse, broken rhythm and disquieting calm. These intricately-composed collage works, constructed from hundreds of archived samples, provide a fitting…
Graft
Graft is an album by Japanese noise master Masami Akita aka Merzbow. This LP album is pressed on lime-green vinyl in a "bootleg"-style sleeve and sealed with a sticker. Limited to 300 regular copies. According to the Merzbow blog, the design was inspired by a '70s Jethro Tull bootleg called My God, and the recording was inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. Recorded in November 2009 at Munemi House, Tokyo.
Tbriz
Reinhold Friedl, inside-piano, prepared piano, piano. Hannes Strobl, electric bass guitar, electric upright bass, electronics. Hayden Chisholm, alto saxophone. Composed and produced by Hannes Strobl and Reinhold Friedl, Berlin 2008 - 2013. P.O.P. (Psychology of Perception) Which sounds are similar to each other, which different, which repeated, which varied, which altered? Instrumentally played repetitions, digital repetitions in the effect path of the electric bass, repetitions in another posit…
Soul Translation - A Spiritual Suite
A beautiful little record – and one that definitely earns the "suite" distinction in the title – given the thoughtful longform approach of the set! The album's got a more composed feel than other spiritual jazz sessions of the time – not in a stiff way, but in a style that shows that leader Donald Alexander Strachan really has a strong vision in his music – not just in the compositions he spins forth on the record, but also in the way he directs the rich energy of the ensemble! The lineup featur…
Exile in Paradise
Established in 1978 by Truus de Groot in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, she tinkered with toy and electronic instruments in her flat - amidst the explosion of Punk Rock. Even though Truus was very active in that genre and “New Wave” as well, the more experimental side gradually took over and the concept of Plus Instruments was born. Plus Instruments released their first e.p. single in 1979 on Dutch label Plurex:
Playing odd electronic instruments, Bass and vocals, most of their performances were im…
Introjection
The collaboration between Israeli electronic musician Shay Nassi and German media artist Nicolas Wiese began in 2008, with the exchange of some raw recordings of feedbacks and everyday objects, via internet. During the following years, several compositional sketches have been sent back and forth and so have been refined step by step, in multiple sonic layering and construction processes. The result is a 45-minute-long collection of dense, dynamic, ambiguos and twisted atmospheric pieces which ca…
Stridulum EP
Zola Jesus didn't need to clean up to stand apart from the lo-fi horde-- they already had Nika Danilova's voice, which tends to cut through a track and leave an indelible impression no matter how it's recorded. Whether it's wordless yowling, an extended cover of "Somebody to Love", or something as disarming as The Spoils' "Clay Bodies", her singing has a way of sticking in your memory. Even so, the Stridulum EP represents a large stride forward, not just in production quality, but in the …
The Dew Line
Deluxe gatefold sleeve reissue of this all-time classic of deformed rock song and avant guitar downs from Michael Morley of The Dead C: originally issued in 1994 by Table Of The Elements/Precious Metal, this new edition re-masters the original while adding five bonus tracks from the same time period and re-jigging the running order for maximal wipe-out.. Michael Morley has trawled through his extensive collection of unreleased tracks from the original recording period to integrate a furth…
Spectral arrows : Rotterdam
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and preparations to lend an aura to the per…
Kugeln / Wallerfangen
Here's the 2nd part in Dekorder's brand new series of highly limited Hybrid-Vinyl 12“ releases to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the label. It comes out simultaneously with parts 3 (Ensemble Economique) and 4 (Kemialliset Ystävät). The 1st part by Pye Corner Audio has been a massive success and sold out within two weeks (remaining copies are only available to subscribers).
Future contributions will feature new & exclusive recordings by Leyland Kirby, Excepter, Sonic Boom (EAR), Bill…
Traces Two
2014 repress, Recollections GRM presents four "forgotten" and compelling electro-acoustic pieces from the institute's world famous archive. Recollection GRM, a label within the Editions Mego family of labels, offers a second selection from the vast archives of Groupe De Recherches Musicales (GRM). "The idea of the Traces series is to unearth from the GRM Archives short, forgotten, or ignored pieces of music. This second volume, which gathers works prior to 1976, features the 'early' works of f…
No Visible Means
Originally self-released in 1984 on Pterodactyl Records, No Visible Means is the work of Canada's own Lou Champagne. Lou Champagne was active the Ontario music scene and also performed with other local musicians from that region as well. The Lou Champagne System was the real-time guitar synth solo act of Lou Champagne. Due to his knowledge of electronics, he was able to link his guitar, synth, and synthetic drums into a working one-man solo act that was playable with floor switches and …
Linge
Michel Doneda, soprano saxophone and radio. Joris Rühl, clarinet. 'Le Linge was my grandparents' old farm in the East of France. It is there, in the barn full of old hay, abandoned wasp nests, murmurs and memories, in its sweltering, dusty heat, that we played for three days and recorded several sequences. We had no precise direction in mind for the record. We focused on the present moment, and then on the next. The barn's structure elegantly cracked with the wind, and the church bells brought t…
Palimpsest
It’s no secret how much we’ve loved Stephan Mathieu’s sublime drones and Sylvain Chauveau’s delicate compositions in the past, so to see these two pillars of experimental music collaborating has got us hot under the collar. But that’s not the half of it – not only did the two decide to work together, they had a very specific concept - ‘Palimpsest’ finds the duo reframing the timeless songs of Bill Callahan (aka Smog). Those familiar with Callahan’s writing might struggle to work out just how two…
Teenage Tapes
Following on from releases from the likes of Powell, Mark Leckey and Merzbow, The Death Of Rave is buzzed to present the exceptional debut album from L.A.-based upstart Delroy Edwards. Combining combustible little noise sessions made with guitar pedals and reel-to-reel tape at Art school, together with shocking recent productions, 'Teenage Tapes' showcases a lesser-heard aspect of Delroy's highly aware and divergent tastes owing more to Minimal Wave, Noise, EBM and Black Metal than the Ch…