New Arrivals
A history of every one
'A History of Every One' by Bill Orcutt is an album of songs: minstrel songs, holiday songs, hymns, marches, cowboy songs, Disney songs, work songs, delta blues. The original tunes themselves are nothing special, well known, but not particularly well-regarded. Most would be filler on a mid-60's Doris Day or Burl Ives LP. What Orcutt does with them however is remarkable: expanding upon techniques developed on 2011's 'How the Thing Sings' and incorporating ideasforged since his recording of 'The S…
Erm
In the summer of 2011, I wrote to Francisco López to ask him whether he would be interested in working together on a project. He agreed but on condition that we worked on two separate tracks but using the same sound sources. These sound sources could be processed any way we liked, or even used in their original form, so as to highlight the aural roots of the tracks while at the same time exposing our different sonic approach. LUCA SIGURTÀ The end result is a split album comprised of …
In Sirenis
A deluxe edition LP, documenting and salvaging the sonic particularities of the Ravenna harbour."By “noise” we mean all the sounds that surround us every day, but the idea of an uncontaminated natural landscape, or of a singular sound event isolated from the context is impossible to realize and undeniably limiting. The artificial is now an integral part of contemporary sound and image landscape, sometimes almost a synonym thereof.In Ravenna harbour area, largely industrialized spaces intermingle…
Footnote(s)
Originally published as a cdr in 2005, limited to hardly any copies on Feater one's Nest, in the period Joshua Burkett visited Europe for the first time, it was about time these beautiful recordings saw some day light again on wax! I've met various people on other planets that i could compare to friends closer to home, Bill Nace calls himself a "fat Vaast Colson", Vladimier looks like Phillip Quehenberger, Tarp's Conrad Capistran's laughter sounds simular to W Ravenveers grinning and so on…
Barca beach
Live recordings from Barcelona, summer 2009. Frankensteins Ballet features Mik Quantius (Embryo) speaking-in-tongues and Thomas Hopf on drums. Other members have played with Damo Suzuki, Michael Karoli, Michael Rother etc. Some serious damaged krautrock jams happening on this one, not to mention the weird dub space some of this is floating into. Edition of 70 copies.
Made in China
special artist multiple signed edition, limited to 150 copies, this is a collaborative record by swiss artists Marc Zeier (G*Park), Luigi Archetti, and Ian Anull. Released for their Exhibition 'Made in China' at Hans-Trudel-Haus, Baden, Switzerland, April-May 2009. The music consists of (manupulations of) recordings the three artist made during their travel to China in 2008. Traditional instruments and field-recordings with electro-acoustic treatment.
Isometrie sonore
Postface by M.B. - An isometric sound ineluctably holds a thematic notion which generalizes that of the rigid motion of noise, combining with a psychometric and cacophonous object. Formally, it is a modulatory function between two metric spaces preserving their silent distances. In the example shown here, isometry moves along electronic pathways and captivates the listener's mind through rotations and reflections in plane or in spatial sound, maintaining the geometric concepts of experimental su…
Imaginational Anthem Vols. 1-5
"Since 2005, Tompkins Square label's Imaginational Anthem compilations have featured some of the greatest acoustic guitarists in the world, with recordings spanning five decades. More than mere samplers, these albums have served as state-of-the-art dispatches from the front lines of the art form. Imaginational Anthem Vols. 1-5 is a specially priced 6CD box set, limited to 999 copies, featuring the first five volumes in their originals packaging, plus an exclusive live bonus disc from Willia…
Processes & potentials
So much music claims to capture the moment. But as Processes & Potentials proves, in-the-momentness can be a malleable concept. The result of three years of studio work, the album sees Bjarni Gunnarsson following his longstanding interest in exploring liquid states, transformational activities and the complex relationships between cause and effect. It is music which behaves differently, unexpectedly, veering off into surprising directions and never staying in one place for too long Ð it is certa…
Brokeback And The Black Rock
In the fall of 2010, when Douglas McCombs convened a new version of the band, Brokeback hadn't played a live show for more than two years and had not recorded any new music for eight. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. McCombs's idea was not to start over, exactly, but to start fresh, approaching similar harmonic content from a different directio…
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…
the 15,000 day boat trip
november 2009 release ; pristine electro-acoustic work from cenotaph’s john w. fail (responsible for both a criminally under-appreciated quadruple tape-box on c. spencer yeh’s dronedisco &, partially, the “lied music vs. boy-band tax returns” lp on ultra eczema ... as well as full-length collaborations with spiral joy band & ben reynolds) ...inhabiting similar head-space as graham lambkin’s recent “softly softly copy copy,” the piece in question here takes it source material from live-played ins…
Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh
Restocked, few available..."If the pentagrams and moccasins and ponchos of the now nearly bygone “freak folk” era made listening to Fairport Convention cool again, Helena Espvall and Masaki Batoh’s self-titled collaboration serves as a reminder that British longhairs of the ’60s were nerds, nerds, nerds. Cellist Espvall, best known for her work with Espers, and Batoh, the guitarist of Japanese psych band Ghost, deploy an arsenal of exotic stringed instruments. They play earnest cover…
Eye of the microphone
A somewhat surreal audio rendition of the sounds of The City of London. BJ Nilsen (b,1975 Sweden) is a sound and recording artist. His work is based on the sound of nature and its effect on humans. Heprimarily uses fieldrecordings and electronic composition as a working method. He has worked for film, television, theatre, dance and as sound designer. Track notes: In 2012 I received a scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust for a one-year Artist in Residency at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, …
Split
Debut vinyl release for both of these great artists who collectively have had releases on a host of excellent underground labels such as Stunned Records, Housecraft, Sturmundrugs Records and Digitalis. Black Eagle Child is the musical project of Michael Jantz, and this release is his second outing for Blackest Rainbow following his excellent Kite Excursions CDR a while back. Here he presents us with 4 tracks of skillful guitar finger picking layered with glockenspeil, accordian and some perfectl…
Cinema
Diverse musical elements - coruscating cymbal scrapes, shimmering amplifier hum, melancholy saxophone circlings, sharp hits of snare, string and reed, slow motion guitar riffs, deep tam-tam surges and floor tom rasps, hypnotic prepared piano figures, and hovering fragments of song-like melodies - fracture and coalesce in this single intense improvisation.
Featuring two of the foundational figures of free improvisation alongside a younger arrival, this recording captures the first meeting …
I am the Center: private issue new age music in America, 1950-90
One of the best things about Seattle label Light in the Attic’s new new age compilation I Am the Center is that it doesn’t try and pretend that new age music was something that it’s not. Look at the album’s cover illustration and you’ll see an angel-like creature carrying an orb of yellow light through the clouds; open the gatefold and you’ll see what appears to be a bird made of stars launching itself out of the ocean. Press play and be delivered into over two hours of mind-numbingly mellow mus…
Cover Versions
Andrew Pekler selected 300 different covers from second-hand records and, using colorful geometric elements to cover over all titles, performer’s names, and label logos, removed traces of the covers’ original contexts. The sunsets, couples in silhouette, alpine panoramas, roses on pianos, female faces in close-up, and seascapes no longer serve as the packaging for easy listening and exotica. Instead, the romantic, bizarre and intriguingly bland images of the original covers are free to lend thei…
Ripatti 02
Sasu Ripatti links with the legendary Max Loderbauer (NSI., Sun Electric, MvO Trio) as Heisenberg for two knotty, complex riddim trips on his \"studio diary\" imprint. Adopting the mantle of the eponymous fictional meth chef*, the duo conduct fevered but controlled experiments in frayed, often frantic grooves eaten up with dissonant, freeform electronics. A-side is a 125bpm techno tunnel groove with offset bass hits embedded in a swarm of combustible modular chain reactions that dissolve to a gu…
Psychedelic Sax
Grey-area exact LP repro edition, originally released on Fahey's Takoma label in 1967. Charlie Nothing was the fractured-psyche pseudonym of author, organic farmer, beekeeper and philosopher/clown Charles Martin Simon, inventor of the dingulator (guitar sculptures made out the metal from American cars). The Psychedelic Saxophone Of Charlie Nothing made a minor splash in the European free jazz melting pot upon its initial release, but the album's non-dingulating psych sax improvisation, acc…