New Arrivals
Refuse This Gift
The third album Refuse This Gift from Bear Claw is one of two records that ended up being part of a double whammy of releases from Sickroom Records just recently for me. Paired up, at least in my mind, with the excellent Conformists record (which you can find a couple posts below) Bear Claw gives a bit more of a traditional spin on the Chicago math/noise-rock sound compared to their label mates. With their third album Refuse This Gift the band hasn’t deviated all that much from their pr…
10 Tears Of Sound
DVD all regions. Celebrating the first 10 years of the festival, this set contains over 11 hours OF audio, a beautiful booklet and a feature length documentary! 20 incredible performances were painstakingly selected by committee from the rich festival history to be shared on one DVD as .wav files (the best way to fit so much high quality audio). The artists featured on this disc are: David Grubbs, Lee Ranaldo + Dean Roberts, Martin Tétreault, Oval, CiNdy (Sam Shalabi + Alexandre St-Onge), Tomas …
Dordogne
Benjamin Bondonneau (clarinet) and Fabrice Charles (trombone). This double CD has been recorded in 2006 near the river called Dordogne. The two musicians are really integrated into the landscape, and they even manage to make it becoming the third musician. A great release limited to 1000 copies with a nice cover.
Silver Bells
New holiday themed single from Moon Duo. Erik and Sanae add more lilt to the season than any combination of egg nog and booze ever will. On the B side the duo wrap a coat around the classic "Goat Head Soup" deep cut "Winter."
Acoustic solo percussion-vol.3
Following his two previous 7“s with ‘acoustic solo percussion’ (see Vital Weekly 687 and 706), here is the third volume. Like before it’s hard to believe its percussion music. But this time we get a detailed notes on the proceedings: side E has ‘two cymbals bowed together with one cello bow’ and side F has ‘a snare drum rubbed with a ring of styropor and two cymbals bowed together with a cello bow’ (and made me wonder how many hands Wolfarth has?). Oh, did I mention ‘no overdubs, electronics and…
Politico/Zytol Automation
De Stijl's excavation of The Parasites Of The Western World turns up the lead single for their second album in the form of an exact reissue. Originally released circa 1980-81, 'Politico' opened the B-side to Substrata with a rippin' new wave roller full of glam stomp, proggy arrangement and punky attitude. The synth-fueled instrumental B-side was exclusive to the single, and as tradition dictates, far more interesting, featuring Terry Censky and Patrick Burke in an ebullient symphony of s…
At
UNEXPLORED CHINESE MUSIC: 'all tracks: live recording during 2010 May Ð July. recorded from desk. mastered by Taku Unami.' (label info)
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Always well worth picking up, a new edition of the Yeti magazine/journal/compilation CD arrives. As ever, it's full of exclusives too: on the music front the CD includes rare and unreleased material by Woodsist band The Art Museums, US Girls, Ko Melina (of The Dirtbombs), new Captured Tracks band Aias, Teenage Panzercorps, Murder City Devils frontman Spencer Moody, new Mississippi Records artist Marisa Anderson and a selection of mightily obscure vintage cuts - the most notable of which …
Oral works
'Initiated by Hong Qile of BWC, then continued by Yan Jun, now finally out after 3 years With Lin Zhiying + Zhong Minjie, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Li Zenghui, Torturing Nurse, Xiao He, Zheng Shijia, Yan Jun, Mai Xiao Guo Da Shi, Lao Yang." Label info
Omicron, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, chi, psi, omega
A certified masterpiece! One monumental box set containing 10 (ten!) unreleased before LPs: an adventurous, spacious and varied oxet blossoming into the label you have known and loved ever since, always on the move; forward, sideways, upwards, backwards. Spread over the 10 LPs, you get the finest selection of rarities and previously-unreleased tracks. Not only that, the package itself is nothing short of excellent, with its newly-designed handmade box, and individual handmade cove…
Para Pacem Para Bellum
Para Pacem Para Bellum” is the first CD release with the great music of Svyatoslav Lunyov's. That serious, highly emotional and spiritual work is the result of two general methods of creating music: academic tradition (scores, acoustic instruments and playing of the real musicians) and the contemporary/experimental way (generating, synthesis, editing with computer tools). Needs to say that this electro-acoustic work combines the well-known traditional elements of the Requiem, Passions and the Ma…
Black Box
Axel Dörner (trumpet) and Erhard HIRT (electric guitar). Recorded live on 7-30-2007 at Black Box, cuba Münster, Germany, released 2009. Axel Dörner and Erhard HIRT met first at a network radio concept, curated by Jens Brand for WDR puclic radio Cologne in September 2006. A special music project during the Münster Sculptur-Projects 2007 gave the chance for the duo concert you can hear on this CD. Both musicians created a unique musical language far beyond the tradition of their instruments using …
Oscillation III
Along the lines of the prior subscription CD EP series, Purposeful Availment and Modern Containment, Oscillation III consists of ten CDs by ten different artists which were released over the course of 2008. These discs were previously only available through Three Lobed Recordings as a complete set and not a la carte. The only way to get this set was to subscribe to the series via mailorder. Each CD is at least 25 minutes long (or longer in most cases) and features new, exclusive material f…
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Another indispensable tome from Yeti publishing: 192 pages, featuring a brilliant Eliane Radigue interview, plus text on Harry Partch (with photographic accounts of the instruments he created), Bishop Perry Tillis, the late Southern American musician/producer Jim Dickinson, Explode Into Colours and Zola Jesus. On the maxed-out, 27-track CD you'll find rare or previously unreleased tracks from Vaselines, White Rainbow, Inca Ore, Pete Swanson, Little Claw and Ty Segall among a good many others.
Solo - Conversations with Franck Médioni
'The unique voice of double-bassist Joëlle Léandre moves back and forth between the worlds of theatre, poetry, dance, improvisation and composition. With passion and fire, she recounts her main sources of inspiration, encounters with John Cage, Peter Kowald, Giacinto Scelsi, Steve Lacy, Philippe Fénélon, Betsy Jolas, Derek Bailey, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton among others... CD: 38 minutes bass solo, Piednu, France, 2005. DVD: 33 minutes bass solo, Guelph Jazz Festival, Canada, 2009.' la…
Some Other Dream
Malcolm's latest release Some Other Time on Swedish label Kning Disk is an exquisite CD and DVD box set. Each disc features different compositions and improvisations that document Malcolm's work with solo simultaneously played multiple guitar performance (SSPMGP for short). Some Other Time continues Malcolm's journey with three guitars and a suitcase as he revisits and reworks material from previous releases including Homesick for Nowhere, Hung, Swimming in it and Leather and Lacy. The DVD was s…
Reflex
Reflex is the fifth solo album by Switzerland's Reto Mder (Ural Umbo, Sum of R, Pendulum Nisum) as RM74. A creepy, paranoid record of sinister melody and complex structure. Electronics, organ, synthesizer, guitars and other instrumentation drifts in and out of bizarre atmospherics. The tracks gain emotional resonance as they move among vexing swells of dense, rotting psychedelia. Presented in a heavy matte sleeve printed with dark metallic ink. Includes fold out insert. Photograph by Phill…
The Legendary Pink Dots
Limited friends edition of 50 copies in black box with silver embossement. Tape recordings from 1980-82 including Kleine Krieg (originally packaged with a model kit of a tank or an airplane, intended to be assembled while listening to the music), Chemical Playschool Vols. 1 and 2 (the original cassette edition of which had 24 copies), outtakes, and Live in Cologne 1983.
Mining Our Bid'ness
A revelatory debut album by a 64 year old pianist/composer may beg the question: where has Carei Thomas been all this time? Born in a culturally diverse neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Thomas cut his musical teeth in Chicago during a particularly fertile period for that city: gigging with Sun Ra as an improvising vocalist in 1959-60, joining up with the AACM for one hot minute in 1966, co-founding a group called The L…