New Arrivals
Somnambulance to Dream General
"Somnambulance" is a reworking of an album of odd and obscure tracks that was released in a microscopic edition on CD-R before. For this CD, Mr. Liles has provided his funniest and possibly most controversial artwork as of yet. You get an hour of music of many different styles: Andrew Liles' trademark of eerie and spooky sounds is there; also electronics and a whole range of instruments are placed in between sketches and longer tracks. And if all this weren't enough, you get three bonus tracks t…
Anyway Your Children Will Deny It
After excellent reviews and endless touring all over the world, supporting bands like Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu and Sic Alps, the Italian weirdos Father Murphy are back with a brand new album titled “Anyway your children will deny it”. It is the latest, boldest installation of an ongoing series of albums investigating the band’s favorite themes: life, death, love, religion and even more death. For this album, the Italian trio comprised of Reverend Freddie (vocals, guitar), Chiara Lee (vocals, keyboards,…
On Patrol
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010! CD edition "If a tree falls in a forest and no one's around, shit still gets crushed. If Cameron Stallones holes up solo-style in a suburban cave and wah-riffs over canned bongos for five straight months, double LPs still get dropped. These are basic life laws. The latest from Mr. Araw is easily his least compromising audio self-portrait to date. Three minute rhythm sketches are stretched into ten minute loop pedal odysseys. Organ solos last for entire vinyl sides.…
Drifters Sympathy
Brand new full length from Grails/Om member Emil Amos. While burying himself in old books on Cold War espionage and '70s Italian horror soundtracks, Emil Amos logged many hours into the night layering endless tracks of improv and then editing them into a cohesive sonic blanket over 2 years time. He emerged with his sixth full length record under the name Holy Sons called Drifter's Sympathy. Listeners will recognize Amos' signature hallucinatory/LSD-inspired mixing-style, heard on records like Bl…
Oort
David Chiesa - double bass. Jean-Sébastien Mariage - acoustic guitar. Recorded by Pierre-Henri Thiébaut at école Britten in Périgueux.
Marvellous Boy: Calypso From West Africa
endlessly satisfying' (Boston Phoenix); 'Blending cheeky calypso with rocking highlife — and by turns breezy, wistful and downright uproarious' (Daily Telegraph); 'gems at every turn... weaving highlife, swing, military brass bands, Afro-Cuban jazz, into a hell of a compilation... Honest Jon's have added to the highest order of this simple music of heartbreaking celebration' (Brainwashed). The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orche…
featuring Ginsberg, Hentz, Irmler
Bob Rutman has invented what may well be the largest stringed instrument ever made. with a bow made of fishing line, he bows the suspension of a gigantic steel sail and in this way creates drones whose volume is not unlike the noise of a plane taking off. we might be reminded of russolo and 'the art of noise' by the futurists, or of machine music or industrial. and we're right and wrong there. of course, simply the look of rutman's steel cello gives a martial impression. so, it's not surp…
Durée
Back in 1999, on the forefront of the Japanese electronic/acoustic microsound scene, was the then two-piece live improvisation band Minamo (two more members were added in 2001 to make the current four-piece lineup). Their live concerts helped pioneer this hybrid of delicate and natural instrumentation with microscopic electronics and subtle digital processing bringing an organic richness to a genre that threatened to remain coldly digital. Fans of Minamo not lucky enough to see them create their…
Große Gartenbauausstellung
Sven-Ake Johansson, Andrea Neumann and Axel Dörner formed the trio Barcelona Series in the end of the 90's. Their music was utterly important for the development of the new improscene, the new ways of improvising by using your instruments more as acoustic bodies than traditional instruments. Johansson had since the 70's been experimenting with a music with less gestures but anyhow keeping the emotional pressure. Both Dörner and Neumann were pioneers in their ways of playing their instrume…
In Celebration Of Knowing All The Blues Of The Evening
Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia is the project of Jaime Fennelly (of Peeesseye, Evolving Ear Records) and Shawn Hansen (who also has releases on Evolving Ear). The two join their forces here for an epic ride through the volatile moments of twilight. A synaesthetic kind of excursion, inspired by the deepening shades of light and dramatically rendered through the warm, swelling tones of Farfisa organ and analog synthesizer. In Celebration... in all its moody and cinematic drive could be the quin…
Live
Magnificent reissue of this tape obscurity from 1980, Cluster's eighth album (the first of three live LPs) originally released on the YHR label (which was curated by Pump's David Elliott), also including archival material never before issued on CD. With so much stuff from this era coming to the surface recently it's sometimes easy to get blasé about it all, but this is one you really ought to give your fullest attention to. As the title says, this was recorded live in Vienna in 1980 at th…
13 Japanese birds: Kamo Vol.6
Merzbow's 13 Japanese Birds is a 13 month series of releases inspired by Olivier Messaien's Catalogue D'Oiseaux. Beginning in January 2009 one volume of 13 Japanese Birds will be released each month. The 13th and final volume will be released January 2010. Each volume will be a one time pressing of 1000 copies. Available from Important Records is a deluxe hand made numbered bamboo box to hold the 13 cd collection. Cover art by Jenny Akita. Author, activist, painter and sound artist Masami Akita …
Live installation at Loop-Line recorded by Toshiya Tsunoda
USW56, USW57, USW59, USW61, USW113, these five hand-made electronics hanged from a ceiling have an ultrasonic wave transmitter, a reciever and an amplifier. Each frequency of the ultrasonic wave is about 40khz but slightly different. And when each instrument swings, each frequency changes a little caused by the Doppler effect. On thier instruments we can hear beat signals between transmitted and received ultrasonic waves changed in frequency. (Manabu Suzuki) Where does art work appear? How do pe…
Hairdryer Peace
Finally available on CD. Ranked 3rd best album of 2008 in The Wire magazine. Intensely psychedelic and mixed for maximum hallucinations, this marks a pretty heavy departure from the Hospitals of old. Heavy tranced-out riffs, weird pop, cracked folk, disorienting noise, paranoid vibes. Main Hospital Adam Stonehouse with Rob Enbom & Rod Meyer from Eat Skull and Chris Gunn from The Hunches. The most forward-thinking album of 2008 but also an album of songs with actual emotional intensity. Not a par…
Lo-lee-ta
Vladimir Nabokov: the master of "chamber music in prose" (literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki) and composer of crackling word sonatas. Franz Koglmann: a commuter between jazz/avant-garde and literature, and writer of intimate sound novellas. It was only a matter of time before Koglmann would create "Music on Nabokov," and transform literary motifs and characters into music. Together with his Monoblue Quartet (Tony Coe, clarinet/saxophone, Ed Renshaw, guitar, Peter Herbert, bass) the trumpeter K…
Ekhnatòn - Ricerca Italiana Semplice Numero Uno
This compilation, originally released in 1984 as a vinyl LP by Multiple Configuration in collaboration with the legendary ADN label, is finally available again in a completely remastered CD version. "Ekhnaton" collects tracks recorded by the most daring and remarkable bands that were active in the experimental Italian scene during those years. "Simple Italian Research Vol. 1" was (and still is) the subtitle of an album that includes two tracks from each of the following bands: Maze 1066, Tasaday…
Implosione tra le pieghe dell\'anima
A sensational CD release of an awesome tape (originally published by Multiple Configuration) that includes live tracks recorded between 1983/1984 and comes in a completely remastered edition. Tasaday are a "cult" band active since the early Eighties. Born from the merging of Die Form and Nulla Iperreale, they are probably the most eclectic and groundbreaking representative of an Italian experimental scene that used to blend elements of rock, noise, experimental and industrial music with great co…
Llum moll
Llum Moll is a multilayered composition made with a manipulated AM radio receiver subjected to interference by LED lamps. The combination of the lamps in tandem with the radio tuned to certain frequencies creates a phantom organ' sound, turning the receiver into an instrument with a peculiar timbre and pitch. The composition was made in two parts. The first was to record and then select fragments with different lengths, pitches and textures. The second was to readjust the pitch of the chosen fra…
Concentration of the Stare
Spend any amount of time in the company of Keith Rowe and the names of certain painters will arise in conversation with some frequency. Caravaggio, Twombly and, among others, most definitely, Mark Rothko. Just as, long ago, he'd imagined what the guitars in Braque's cubist painting might actually sound like, so, I think, he did with Rothko, often referring to the way the "tinged" the space in which they were hung. For some time, in the early oughts, Rowe tried to place his music in a similar are…
Megafauna
Dispenses a sinister frailty of howling swells in hissing static that combusts into crawling shock heaps, to the effect of Mayhem performing Twin Peaks incidentals in a prairie recorded by The KLF. A brief description casts them as black metal's answer to Throbbing Gristle.