New Arrivals
New Music For Old Instruments
Curated by Jozef van Wissem the “New Music For Old Instruments” festival took place all over the world: in Brussels, New York, Paris, Utrecht, Antwerp and other cities. The idea was to rid traditional instruments of their clichés. When one thinks of a lute for example the Robin Hood image comes to mind of the player standing under a balcony serenading a lady and getting a flower pot thrown at him. In order to update the instrument, to make it mature and give it it’s recognition it deserves, one …
Sepsis
Large ensemble Sissy Spacek recordings featuring the cream of LA. The line-up: John Wiese, Mitchell Brown, Joey Karam (The Locust), Peter Kolovos, Rick Potts (LAFMS), Damion Romero, Corydon Ronnau and Shannon Walter (16 Bitch Pile-Up). All the source recordings used for Sepsis were taken from a group improv session recorded for the Dublab radio in 2008. The recordings from each individual channel were later chopped and rearranged into audio collages byWiese without any regard to preserving group…
Life Is People
Bill Fay is one of English music's best kept secrets. At the dawn of the 1970s, he was a one-man song factory, with a piano that spilled liquid gold and a voice every bit the equal of Ray Davies, John Lennon, early Bowie, or Procol Harum's Gary Brooker. He made two solo albums but his contract wasn't renewed, which left his LPs and his reputation to become cult items. But he never stopped writing, the music kept on coming. Now, in his late sixties, he has produced Life Is People, a brand …
Parallel World
Originally released in 1976 by Nippon Columbia, this is the final album by legendary Japanese space/psych-rockers Far East Family Band. Droney and far-out electronica influenced by German producer/electronic music composer Klaus Schulze is more pronounced, merging prog rock with electronic music to create something rather weird and wonderful. Although Schulze oversaw the production of the album rather than playing on it (which he definitely didn't!), the synth star here is Masanori Takahas…
Postepeno
poSTepeno is inspired by a multi-part collage created circa 1890 by an anonymous schizophrenic patient (known only as Frau ST) at the Viennese Oberdöbling asylum. The compositions (for piano and sine tones) morph musicalthemes through continual microtonal modifications. Sine tones are unstable, but nevertheless they consistently keep their individual frequency direction (up or down). In the chordal sense, the distance between the tones is subject to alteration. In this way the harmonic indicatio…
Crookt, Crackt Or Fly
Crookt Crackt Or Fly is a 1994 album by Gastr del Sol released on Drag City. The album was written and performed by David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, with John McEntire (percussion), Steve Butters (percussion) and Gene Coleman (Bass Clarinet) also contributing. All tracks were recorded by Brian Paulson in October 1993 at King Size studios.
Improvisation Anarchy
With a title like ‘Improvisation Anarchy’, you pretty much have the blessed assurance that the record will be either a right-on, spontaneous surge of electricity, or at least an entertaining disaster. Recorded in 1978-79, this patchwork quilt of straight-arrow punk and meandering synth-assisted psychedelia manages to be both at the same time. It should be noted that this kind of music was not common for 1970s West Japan before the ‘bubble economy’ of the 80’s allowed for more impulsive consumpti…
Sublunar
Sublunar is the first full-length release from Kane Ikin who is also known as one half of the duo Solo Andata. Sublunar follows Kane’s solo debut Contrail (7”, 12k2022) picking up where that EP left off and pushing the boundaries outward in every direction into denser, deeper, wetter and more decayed terrain. The word “sublunar” can be read to contain many conceptual layers important to the album. It is music about moonlight, darkness, the faintest hint of light and shadow.... Moons locke…
Aeral
In working with sound, video, and installation, Richard Garet has made an artform of interference. In previous work, he's employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film. He's flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. And here on AreaI, Garet continues his ongoing research with electromagnetic disturbanc…
The Very Heart Of The World
On the very heart of the world, Burning Star Core (BXC) has created an incredibly heavy record, built on dense, layered drones, pulses, splintered vocals, and deep rhythms that euphorically build to total overload. With a line-up including the Hair Police front line and other luminaries from across the exploding Midwestern psych-noise-folk underground, BXC's C. Spencer Yeh has assembled a group that seamlessly shifts through epic movements and pushes pure electronic-concrete-physical-ock energy…
Townsville
The Necks in quiet mood recorded at a concert recording in Townsville, Thuringowa, Northern Queensland. Though many Necks' pieces open with - or eventually arrive at - some discernable groove, Townsville just floats in a state of suspension from beginning to end. It's like watching the ocean as wave follows wave follows wave: each the same; each different; assymetric. Bassist Lloyd Swanton who, on this occasion, provides the motif that set Townsville running says he had had no idea where it woul…
Under The Couch
The booklet contains an essay by Lucia Farinati. - This recording was made under the famous couch of Dr. Sigmund Freud at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of the Psychoanalysis, lived here 1938- 1939. The house is now the Freud Museum. From the museum's website: 'Freud's couch, upon which his patients would comfortably recline during psychoanalytic sessions, was normally covered by an Oriental rug throw. Underneath the throw, it is a plain and simpl…
Musica Metaphysica
Mauricio Reyes was born in Mexico City in 1969 and composes music under the name Robol. Musica Metaphysica is his debut album. When he was 14 years old he started to create music with dual tape recorders, two turntables and experimented with different records playing simultaneously at times in reverse. Later he collected rare samples of early electronic music and started to study a wide range of electronic music. One year ago he started to create this album and used sound samples that were recor…
Blueprints
Over the past 10 years 12k has established itself as a label on the forefront of minimalist music and has become home to some of the most important artists of the genre. It is label that time and time again has not been afraid to release debut albums from new artists, drawing on the new energy they interject into both the scene and the label.With the release of Blueprints, 12k presents 2 tracks each from 6 artists new to its roster and showcases some of the new sounds and influences that will ca…
Hum Crackle & Pop
"The 2nd Digital Primitives release (Cooper-Moore, Assif Tsahar, Chad Taylor) digs in deep to fuse a new sound from blues, folk, jazz & funk, with accents from the music's African antecedents."
Live in concert
Denman Maroney (piano) & Mark Dresser (bass). Vision Festival NY - June 11, 2008. This is the third duo album by bassist Mark Dresser and pianist Denman Maroney, after Duologues and Time Changes. In contrast to some of the other material by the two players, this one is fully improvised in three long pieces. The first 30 minute track was recorded live at Vision Festival on June 10, 2008, the two other pieces date from a performance in Chicago in 2001. It's hard to call this jazz, since none of th…
The Sleeping Bag Sessions
You already know about Arthur Russell from disco classics like "Is It All Over My Face" and "Go Bang" (maybe you even watched the recent documentary), but do you know about all the early/mid-80's work he did on his own Sleeping Bag label? This awesome compilation collects the gems you might've slept-on or never came across. Whether its early hip-hop boogie (Sounds Of JHS 126 Brooklyn's "Chill Pill(1)"), left field electro beats (Bonzo Goes To Washington's "5 Minutes(2)"), or underground disco ba…
Bell Trove Spools
Northern Spy is proud to present two of John Butcher’s most recent experiments in moving sound waves through space. On Bell Trove Spools we hear Butcher in two distinct situations: Richmond Hall, a Houston art gallery housing a permanent Dan Flavin collection that has been compared to a bowling alley; and the high-ceilinged marble room in Brooklyn which is the new home to Issue Project Room. Butcher is heard on his two saxes of choice, the soprano and the tenor, and suspended in space, fluid, ch…
Bufo Alvarius (2010 Reissue)
Deluxe remastered version, this was Bardo Pond's 1995 debut album, taking its name from the official Latin for a hallucinogenic toad indigenous to the Western United States. That's a fairly appropriate association to make with the band's severely zoned-out stoner-psych sound, something pioneered on this album, a record that brought the band to the attention of Matador Records who snapped them up for their next album. Amongst all the fuzz-soaked weirdness of the instrumentation on these ear…
Gallipoli 1915 e le altre storie
Another double OLBM CD that testifies the remarkable work carried out within the New Wave phenomenon by Viridanse (from Alessandria, Piedmont) between 1983 and 1987. Despite its short existence, the group has left an important trace in a time when the world of music was already full of proposals. Influenced by the English Wave and the Florentine scene, Viridanse debut with a split-tape shared with The Art of Waiting. In 1984, Contempo Records produces their 12” EP "Benvenuto Cellini" and - the f…