New Arrivals
Guitars From Agadez Vol. 7
In October 2012, the Tamashek community lost one of its most luminous voices when Koudede's life was cut short by a car crash during his trip home to Niger from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Koudede was a leading light among the myriad musical groups that have recently proliferated in Niger and Mali to voice the Tuareg struggle against exploitation and to exalt their proud but waning nomadic heritage. His outstanding reputation and corpus of songs garnered the respect of his contemporaries, and his…
Music for Sick Queers
The German Shepherds, formed by Sandy Stark and Stephen Scheatzle in Nov. 1981, released a three song ep in early "82 with "Booty Jones" -- to child molester and kidnapper Kenneth Parnell; "I Adore You" -- an offering of prayer and submission and "Message from JJ" -- a rousing sermon by Peoples Temple chief Rev. Jim Jones. Later that year a dub version of "I Adore You" and "The Earthquake Has Come" appeared on the "You'll Hate This Record, Record" compilation lp. In 1983 the Shepherds began work…
These Hidden Hands
Double LP pressed on 180 gm vinyl, Includes download code redeemable from the label** Tommy Four Seven and his buddy Alain present striking gothic techno architecture as These Hidden Hands on their excellent debut album. Converging a brutalist aesthetic with studio dynamism, their eponymous debut cycles eleven crushing blends of wrecking ball bass hits and pulverised noise rent with super wide and spacious production. It's a sound that's steadily attracted a lot of listeners and producers alike …
(no thing-ness)
"(no thing-ness)" comes hot on the heels of Brian Pyle’s latest highly acclaimed Ensemble Economique album on the Not Not Fun label. While "The Fever Logic L.P." saw him head diving into a sort of ambient goth pop this brand new 12“ appears to be more influenced by industrial, almost EBM-ish textures. The atmosphere seems more aggressive with an almost militaristic touch, and titles like "New Banking System" hint at the source of this anger. Combined with Pyle’s cinematic tension this makes for …
Ununhexium/Collapsed
Ununhexium is the sixth release in Raster-Noton's Unun series. Emptyset is a Bristol-based project formed by James Ginzburg, director of the Multiverse Studios and the curator and electronic artist Paul Purgas. Collapsed is Emptyset's first release on Raster-Noton and investigates the threshold where sonic structure is destabilized to the point where a chaotic order emerges. Across the four tracks a structural grammar is defined and then pushed to excess to the point where it reforms from re…
Almanac
Dragon Turtle Almanac is a heavy trip; a document of transformation, entropy, and causality. Dragon Turtle evokes Morricone landscapes as if painted by Glenn Branca, where dream atmospheres meet brutal realities of nature and relationships. These forces are both beautiful ("Causality", "Belt of Venus") and destructive ("Moon Fallout", "Burn the Leaves"). The textures and layers move with a sense of urgency and purpose ("Hometime", "Hourglass"). The duality of Tom Asselin and Brian Lightbody's mu…
Curse of the Bodysnatchers - Tape-Recordings 1980-86
Gerald O'Connell and Mark Harvey began recording as Mystery Plane in 1980, although they had worked together since 1978 in two other more conventional five-piece bands ( The End and 3D5). The very early stuff ( for instance Death Sentence contained on the bonus 7" for members) was recorded in Gerald's living room on a two-track Akai reel-to-reel with a primitive internal overdub facility. For the most part Mark wrote and sang the songs, while Gerald created the backing tracks. In 1981 they were …
Vibrant Forms
Double LP version. Kostas Soublis' productions under the Fluxion moniker helped define legendary Berlin imprint Chain Reaction, and with 1999's Vibrant Forms, the Greek producer released a milestone in the dub techno genre. Hazy and distant, there was still more than enough dancefloor push to propel Soublis into the (very short) list of genre legends, and make Vibrant Forms one of the very rare techno albums that works from beginning to end. Out of press for far too long, this new edition of…
Mimikry
2010 edition, long out of print, few copies resurfaced. Box Set, Limited Edition, Special Limited Box Edition - Album comes in a cardboard sleeve with tracks 11 and 12 as bonus tracks and as part of a box set including inserts. Having nicely set up the release of this album with their Ret Marut Handshake EP a few months back, Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld (of Einsturzende Neubauten fame) deliver a set that exceeds all expectations. One of the most strikingly obvious comparisons to arise from …
Greek Rhapsody - Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956
Greek Rhapsody -- Instrumental Music from Greece 1905-1956 is a 2CD collection featuring 42 tracks meticulously remastered from 78rpm recordings of Greek instrumentals (1905 to 1956). Many tracks are rare and never previously reissued on CD or vinyl; some are taken from the only known copies, while previously reissued tracks are here offered in far superior sound quality. This compilation offers, for the first time, a unique panorama of the instruments and styles of the Greek music of the…
An extended meaning for something meaningless
Francisco Meirino's An extended meaning for something meaningless uncovers deep hidden contexts from the decaying fringe of the auditory spectrum. Here we find ornate beauty in the subtle demise of electronic systems and explore the arcane apprehension of existential degeneration. The recording looks at how to create something out of almost nothing-basic field recordings, static electronics and failed tape experiments. A 16-channel multi-track piece where reel-to-reel tapes juxtaposition with mo…
Quanta Of Light
Limited, hand-stamped white label edition** Highly disciplined master of visceral intensity, Daniel Menche, presents a one-off album for Touch's great white label series. Daniel's work is gladly accepted by both noise and more "musical" spheres, releasing on a wealth of labels including Important Records, Editions Mego and Sub Rosa among many others. Taken as a whole, they capture and play with a timeless sense of drama and direct emotional rawness that's hard to ignore. For Touch, 'Quant…
This is folk music
Raphael Lyon is the enigma known as Mudboy. From the incredibly detailed art/packaging to bizarre mp3 releases attached to scrap metal or plant matter to Freddy Krueger-inspired art installations, Lyon has always been one of the strangest cats on the scene.This unique perspective also infects his music. Whereas many of today's kosmiche-influenced artists bubble up from the noise scene (with knob-twiddling pedal pusher seemingly a prequisite to sequencing synth jammer these days), Mudboy's work h…
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
Barn Nova
After five years and 20-plus albums-- most released on their own Child of Microtones label-- MV & EE's 2006 move to Ecstatic Peace began on a high note. "East Mountain Joint", the opening track on Green Blues, is a hypnotic hymn to unscheduled freedom, and it's catchy without losing the duo's loose, do-what-we-feel-like vibe. In fact, it's so entrancing that it's made subsequent work by Matt Valentine, Erika Elder, and their various colleagues seem like insufficient attempts to recapture…
Bamboo for two
"A Hypnagogic supergroup of sorts with a blast of hallucinatory and tropical rhythmic synth adventures - new on OESB! Comes with free download coupon redeemable from the label** Seductively heavy-lidded inter-species avian-eroticism from the hypnagogic allstars Spencer Clarke (Skaters), Lieven Martens (Dolphins Into The Future), Eva Van Duren (Orphan Fairytale) and James Ferraro (CEO Airhead Entertainment) on the ever-compelling OESB imprint. Monopoly Child Star Searchers is usually the reserve …
Systemisch
The extremely influential 1994 classic album from Oval is finally re-issued on vinyl. Freshly cut to vinyl by Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering the two LPs are pressed on clear vinyl and housed in black paper inner sleeves, packaged in a jacket replicating the original. Included for the first time is a free download coupon. Limited to 1,500 units worldwide. Systemisch was the debut Oval album released on Thrill Jockey. On this recording Oval was Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzge…
Gridshifter
Stefan Nemeth: synthesizers. Steven Hess: drums (on B-Side). Bernhard Breuer: drums (on 'Dedispersion I & II'). Innode enters the world with an audacious debut of rhythm and sound, space and silence and an astonishing blend of the acoustic and the electronic. Spearheaded by Stefan Németh (cofounder of Radian, Lokai) in close collaboration with Steven Hess (Locrian, Pan American, Cleared) and Bernhard Breuer (Elektro Guzzi, Tumido), Gridshifter is an intense, astonishing sonic experience which na…
Testacoda
Jérôme Noetinger is an improviser and composer of electroacoustic music based in Rives (near Grenoble), France. He plays Revox, tapes and radio. SEC_ is the moniker of Mimmo Napolitano, an electronic musician and sound engineer from Naples, Italy. He plays Revox, no-input feedback, laptop, electronic devices. Together these two play the kind of improvised electronic mayhem that put Europe on the map. Testcoda features two separate recordings of shapeshifting electronics. One side recorded…
Trente belles annes
Triumphal new CD, the first new recordings in an age, from one of the greatest bands on the goddamn planet, the trio of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller aka Borbetomagus: this is a roof-raising performance, recorded live at Instants Chavires, France, 19th December 2009. Borbetomagus combine the elevated amplifier violence of Jimi Hendrix at his most combustible with the spontaneous free music polyphony of Ascension-era Coltrane and the ‘guitar smashing’ h…