New Arrivals
Black Mill Tapes Volumes 1 & 2
Not much is known about the shadowy figure of the Head Technician, the man supposedly behind Pye Corner Audio. There are rumors that in another life he was an engineer to the stars, and while that can't be verified, there's certainly an air of expertise in this bumper set of productions. Black Mill Tapes Volumes 1 & 2 were originally released by the Technician himself, and have been picked up for a very special vinyl release. These collect the first handfuls of tracks from the Pye Corner A…
Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads
Dustin Wong's second LP Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads, is a departure from Dustin's previous methods but more closely a distillation of his live show into recorded form. The pieces are so intricate and detailed that we've asked Dustin to explain his process and he happily obliges us: "When I begin to explore and to build a song through a series of pedals, I begin with the tuner. It helps keep my guitar's pitch consistent. An octave pedal and the distortion pedals allows me to …
IIron
It would be too easy to simply call IIRON the COH metal album, as it goes way beyond that. True, this album of classic Pavlov stompers contains more than its fair share of guitars both acoustic and electric, yet it still maintains that sense of power and purpose through electronic music which stands out as the COH ‘raison d’être’. Coming 11 years after IRON, which also tackled the sound of rock with alarming results, the new album features not only recent guitar tracks recorded at Music Research…
A Long Way Around To A Shortcut
Ever shrouded, serpentine by design, the legend of the Sic Alps has at last made its way to the gates of Drag City. The new, first-time-ever-on-vinyl 2xLP reissue of A Long Way Around To A Shortcut is somehow a 'greatest hits' of the golden not-quite-decade of Sic Alps. Well, not quite golden, either. Can gold be tarnished? Can it be done on purpose? If so, Sic Alps are artisans of the highest order -- for their music is the bright, surging sound of ye olde rock and roll radio (and the garages t…
ØØ Void
Double LP edition: Lengths of stretched distortion rattle the grey matter, unnervingly slow and severe. With Sunn O)))’s second album, ØØ Void, the sonic misery nurtured to functionality by Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley stays simple and repetitive, a tabula rasa having yet to realize the full scope of its potential. With this album, Sunn O))) worked as a three-piece, collaborator Stuart Dalquist coming up with its opener, “Richard,” which is a solid fourteen and a half minutes of be…
Space finale
The follow up to the well received ‘Man From Deep River’ Space Finale is another surreal slice of heavy listening from these legendary north Europeans. The material included here was realised on analogue equipment, with a Revox 2-Channel tape machine as their main instrument. Maintaining the analogue spirit of the audio this release is now available as a double LP vinyl set, after being previously released as a C90 cassette. The tracks presented here are long form excursions into intense s…
Second Original Silence
Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke and Mats Gustafsson last convened for the monumentally noisy Diskaholics Anonymous LP, Weapons of Ass Destruction. Now the trio have returned to Smalltown Superjazz for yet more sonic carnage, this time joined by ace drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, guitarist Terrie Ex and bassist Massimo Pupillo. There's a tremendous breadth to the kind of ground covered by these musicians. At no point do you feel as if the ensemble is running out of ideas or stagnating on one particular …
Life...The Best Game In Town
After releasing several albums in the 90s, Harvey Milk are celebrating their own renaissance by lauding the virtues of "Life...The Best Game In Town". Spearheaded by the alternately burly and angelic vocal stylings of Milk mastermind Creston Spiers, "Life" is both tumultuous and grueling, resonating with the glorious slow-motion radiance of Total Dirge Power. They've since been joined by Thrones legend Joe Preston.
Lessness
Following in the tradition of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Yoshi Wada, and Charlemagne Palestine, Sun Circle exemplifies a contemporary focus on long form drone music. Members Greg Davis and Zach Wallace have shown their interest in the field most recently with extended works on Kranky and Root Strata respectively; together on Lessness, they show a deep-rooted interest in the power of simple forms. Building upon themes from their recent solo work (Davis’ subtly shifting tonal w…
Rocky Mountain Low
Few critics in their right minds would hail Colorado as a hotbed of early punk rock, but the vigor of our state’s late-’70s punk and new wave scene should not be forgotten. Joseph Pope and Dalton Lawrence Rasmussen give it a proper salute with “Rocky Mountain Low,” an exhaustive, lovingly assembled compilation on CD and double LP. Like countless music scenes of the time, we had our own versions of the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and others. And while locals like the He…
Just To Feel Anything
Just to Feel Anything, the new album by Emeralds, surpasses all expectations, just as its predecessor, Does It Look Like I’m Here, did in 2010. This expertly recorded new album sees the band deliver plenty of their distinctive aesthetic for old fans to enjoy while offering a new range of fresh, exciting ideas for newcomers. 'Before Your Eyes' begins the record with a steady build-up, which bleeds into humid layers of synthesizer pads and warm guitar. The track sets the tone perfectly for…
Live in Germany, 1983
In some ways, Commitment was typical of many bands of their time. Between 1978 and 1984, they enjoyed a modest success by the subterranean standards of the Lower East Side. They struggled for gigs during the waning years of the New York loft scene, enjoyed higher profile gigs at several Kool Jazz Festivals, made one short European tour, and recorded one LP. But their music is more significant than this story might indicate. Hwang was among the first improvisers to emerge out of the Asia…
Old news #8
More archival works from Jim O'Rourke see the light of day on Old News #8. Recorded in 1991-1992. Originally released as part of Disengage by Staalplaat. Special thanks to Geert-Jan Hobijn and Frans de Waard for their years of support. Jeff Cortazzo (trombone), Sue Wolf (cello), Michael Prime (shortwave), Geoff Fontaine (voice), Gretchen Wells, Matt Guerierri, Scott Shell. "Merely" recorded live at DePaul University, 1991 -- Carrie Biolo (percussion). Remastered in 2012, Steamroom Tokyo. This on…
The Emotional Plague
Includes digital download voucher redeemable from the label** "Jagjaguwar is proud to reintroduce the first ever vinyl pressing of 'The Emotional Plague' from 1996. Supreme Dicks put out one single in their career, Ia double B-side. Maybe they had a sense of humor, but in hindsight it's hard to tell. Falling somewhere between Captain Beefheart, Throbbing Gristle and SALEM in the lineage of musicians who've found a muse in the nasty, brutish brevity of life, Supreme Dicks chose to cloak d…
Mimikry
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 that first batch of material was the Alan Vega/Pan Sonic collaboration, yet Mimikry goes much further than combining the established aesthetics of its constituent parts and creates something that actually feels very new. Car…
Nova\'Billy
"I want to be a rocker. everybody else has walked away from rock. I wantto walk towards it." - Henry Flynt Taste the magic! Nova’Billy is another edible audible from Henry Flynt's dusty lower Manhattan bunker and it stands as one of the fullest, most beauteous document of Flynt's tenure with a full working rock band to date. For less than one calendar year between 1974 and 1975, Henry Flynt's hard driving, heavy jamming agit country rock band, Nova'Billy embraced bareknuckled deep fried groove a…
Live At Praxis 1984
Decades before his time, political and musical revolutionary, Sun Ra, developed a new plane of cultural existence where black people were all-powerful beings from outer space, sending their intergalactic message through jazz music. Recorded live in 1975 at Cleveland's legendary jazz club, the Smiling Dog Saloon, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra descended on the city for a week-long residency. You can imagine how the uninitiated's jaw must have dropped when Ra and his 15 musicians marched out onto th…
Bag It
double Vinyl edition with additional tracks: The Thing with Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haaker-Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love covering 54 Nude Honeys, The Ex, Duke Ellington and Albert Ayler, intense modern improv. Swedish reed-chewer Mats Gustafsson is probably bored to tears by now by the Brötzmann comparisons that so regularly greet his work with the Thing. Even so, the elder German icon remains a central pillar of reference, most noticeably through a gnarled horn language that balances mach…
Reverse Atheism
Barbara Manning and S. Glass lead a small army of guest readers and musicians through barely musical versions of tunes, texts, and tracts. A survey of the exceptional, the eccentric, the feverish, and the pathologically peculiar within popular religious faith, to paraphrase William James, made by others, communicated by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. 70+ minutes of music fragments leached of melody and harmony, looped, hacked, noisified and depas…
Tidings / Amethyst Waves
Mark McGuire has been a member of triadic mega-unit Emeralds since their inception. Besides contributing to their ever growing catalogue, he's also worked with Daniel "Oneohtrix Point Never" Lopatin as Skyramp and a prolific number of other solo projects. His most recent album for Weird Forest (originally released on Cassette by the Wagon label) has been hailed as his most definitive to date, crossing astral lines and psychedelic boundaries between noise squalls, lush-out synth washes and …