New Arrivals
Overloaded Ark
A sequel to last year's eponymous debut as a duo, this new Drag City LP from Espers cellist Helena Espvall and Ghost's Masaki Batoh delves even deeper into traditional and ancient musics, making use of an armoury of instruments that extends beyond 'mildly obscure' (renaissance harp, sho, hurdy gurdy, etc) and enters into the realm of 'are you sure you haven't just made that up?' (auschpfeife, crumhorn, cornamuse, rig and darbuka). On hand to assist in this piece of instrumental archeology is anc…
Vanilla Call Option
Packaged in a pro-press color jacket and a silkscreened pvc sleeve, Jeff Witscher, aka idiosyncratic electronic musician Rene Hell, presents a typically considered, challenging debut release via PAN. Those who've encountered his acclaimed albums for Type, or his NNA Tapes split with OPN, will hear a defined progress in 'Vanilla Call Option', whilst those new to his music should be prepared for a visceral, cerebral exploration of piercing timbres and sheer, hi-end computer sounds that in turn rec…
2nd Movement
Continue reprints of the amazing tapes by Pierpaolo Zoppo aka Mauthausen Orchestra released on Aquilifer Sodality in the early eighties. Tape after tape Mauthausen Orchestra constitute, in a few years, the backbone of what we will know as an alienating and extremist style, made of metal nightmares and sonic torture , often dilated, dissected and extended up to the limit of endurance. 2nd Movement carry us, once again, as real rituals of a civilization without gods, in a pure world of suffering. …
Good luck mr. Gorsky
Good Luck mr. Gorsky is a Trio formed in 2004 in Thessaloniki, Greece, by Savvas Metaxas, Spiros Emmanouilidis and Thanasis Papadopoulos. They are experimenting with a variety of instruments and musical genres to build their own sound. Their music focuses on electronic compositions, using both physical and electronic sound sources. Field recordings, analog synthesizers, prepared piano and trumpet are currently used for creating their compositions.
In this album the trio took a series of improvi…
Light that comes, light that goes
One of two new releases from Brian Pyle (the other being 'Interval Signals'), Light that comes is a rich exploration of Ensemble Economique's range and power. With a palpable sense of the sublime throughout, the listener is guided through drones like the pillars and buttresses of a cathedral for a sombre new religion, into the sounds of the ocean (somehow elegiac), flute tones springing up in the fog like gravestones, and fallen kosmische. These are followed by the wonderfully odd 'As the Train …
Antiquated Futurism
Latest release on Vatican Shadow's Bed of Nails label - initial copies on Translucent Orange Vinyl** Dominik Fernow's Bed Of Nails venture welcomes his longtime co-conspirator Kris Lapke with three tracks of haunting Gothic Techno produced as Bronze Age. Kris used to run the Hospital Productions studio when it was operating in Manhattan. It was there that he galvanized seminal records including Kevin Drumm's 'Imperial Distortion' and Prurient's 'Arrowhead' with his signature post-product…
Ensemble Pearl
Cosmic, heavy amplified rock drops and ripples, auras radiate and expand into cloud forms, through which lightning bolts. Tides rise, the moons wax upon a place somewhere between Link Wray, Hex-era Earth and early Tangerine Dream. The echoes return, leaving a trail that blows and drifts, creating a separate piece. Ensemble Pearl are Atsuo, William Herzog, Michio Kurihara and Stephen O'Malley. Their debut album also features the elemental forces of Eyvind Kang and Timba Harris. These playe…
Preplexure
John Oswald (Plunderphonics) returns with two fourteen-minute-plus tracks of sliced and diced audio assemblage. Pre and post versions of Plexure out in 1993 on Avant, 'PrePlex' (1982 - 1992) and 'Plexure concentrate' (1992 - 2009). Here some feedbacks: 'Highly recommended. Imagine playing Ôname that tune' at 5 times the speed of your ears' ability to recognize familiar sounds. This composition, made up entirely of pop music samples, deserves five stars because of its meticulous organizatio…
Entomology
A threesome of coloured vinyl by WORM Records. These records are extraordinary not just because of their appearance (bright yellow, blue and pink vinyl), but also because of their unique origins. The a-sides of the records were recorded for Soundpiece, a soundinstallation under the floor of the Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam. WORM invited the composers Machinefabriek, Pierre Bastien and Dyane Donck/Daisy Bell to compose a piece for this. The results are three soundartworks/tape compositions that a…
Frequencies
Nicolas Bernier’s Frequencies (Synthetic Variations) is his first piece made entirely of synthetic sounds. Having evolved within the musique concrète and field recording traditions, Bernier wanted to break with habit — the result being 15 short movements of warped and crackling textures, vividly articulated sine waves and rhythmic bursts of pattern. The piece is designed to be listened to at random (the sound sample above is such a sequence), offering a new duration and dynamics with every heari…
Police Water
Under the wickedly cryptic title of 'Police Water', Gary War delivers his latest psych-pop dazzler on Sacred Bones - also including the two tracks from his 'Reality Protest' 7". Just as everyone begins to catch up with his brilliant body of work from the last two years, he goes and switches up his sound with reinvigorated song structures, a broader tonal palette and far, far tighter rhythm programming. Don't worry, though, he's not lost the inexplicable post-apocalyptic weirdness, it's ju…
Bandits of Stature
LP edition, sold out at source: Darla is pleased to offer a new record of string quartets by Harold Budd. Bandits of Stature is a first as it comprises 14 compact Budd composed string quartets played by the Formalist Quartet. Harold Budd is a one-of-a-kind, modern neo-classical artist with a career spanning 40 years. Bandits of Stature has the characteristic Budd minimalism one may expect, yet in new, or classical, form. On Bandits of Stature, he has created 14 elegantly simple, av…
African Songbird
Matsuli Music is proud is announce the re-issue of African Songbird, the masterpiece from South Africa's greatest jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. Originally released in 1976, African Songbird was a debut long overdue. The splendid vinyl reissue of African Songbird opens with a cavernous, spacious, enormous sound, Bea Benjamin’s voice is introduced by Dollar Brand’s plangent, lingering electric keyboards before the ensemble joins in like rolling thunder. The vibrant plucked bass (provided b…
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…
Water mountain
On a personal note, I remember vividly when Hitoshi Kojo told me with excitement about a transhumance through UK with the specific purpose in mind of doing sessions with some of the great drone masters over there, namely : Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough and Paul Bradley...Retrospectively, I think I was as stirred as him.The resulting collected material has been shelved for years (7 actually !), and I began to fear this estimable musical heritage could get lost...this was not taking into accou…
The Invisible Hands
Limited edition 2LP. The Invisible Hands is the English translation of the band's original Egyptian Arabic name: El Ayadi El Khafeyya. Taking almost two years to create amidst an unusual and challenging backdrop, this is the new project of Alvarius B. (Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls). Eleven highly-crafted songs projected through his typically dark lens of songwriting and a band of brilliant musicians from Egypt; this special edition limited 2LP includes the English and Arabic language vocal …
Films super-8, la nature comme atelier
A book all in French about the Swiss artist Roman Signer and his work. Texts from François Bovier and Hamid Taieb, Geneviève Loup, Rachel Withers, + an interview with Roman Signer.
These Are The Good Times
The Vittelli label announces itself with this fine release of London’s highlife, lowlife, wildlife and everday life plucked from Ian Rawes’ vast London Sound Survey. At his day job at the British Library sound archive Rawes cut his teeth in archiving and explored its depths. Field recordings and studies by acoustic ecologists came to his attention around the same time that he was looking to create his own capital-based project. At this time the internet promised to be the great equaliser a…
Phantom Horse
Phantom Horse is the duo of Ulf Schütte and Niklas Dommaschk from Hamburg and Kiel (home of seminal Digitalis Recordings artist Jürgen Müller). Schütte is a (part-time) member of Datashock, Black To Comm, Aosuke et al and has recently released his modular synth explorations under the Alien Radio moniker on a (sold-out) Dekorder split-LP with Keith Fullerton Whitman and a 4-way split 7" with Köhn, Ducktails and Peaking Lights on Kraak. Dommaschk plays guitar, synth and electric piano.
With…
Pan Am Stories
Tape-warped phantom band Rangers finally unleash the lush, soaring, expansive prog-pop opus we always knew was floating inside the fretboard (and imagination) of multi-instrumentalist mystery maestro Joe Knight. The north Dallas-raised, San Fran-residing head Ranger grew up taking classical guitar lessons from a dude who claimed to have 'toured with the Dead,' and some of that brain-wonked jam agenda obviously seeped into the young Knight, who began recording his own loose, lo-fi jangle s…