New Arrivals
Pre Language
Right on cue, the third annual report from Chicago's Disappears is submitted for your consideration. Following up on the acclaimed Guider album released just over a year ago, and with new drummer Steve Shelley now fully integrated into the group, these songs were again forged into proper shape during live shows before heading to the studio and the tape machine. Never ones to dither or be indecisive, it's a full-bore assault from the opening track to the last as Disappears attack these new…
Bounced Check
Wally Shoup, Chris Corsano and Paul Flaherty make up this screamin' free punk jazz liquid solid noize trio captured LIVE 'in your face' style in Seattle, WA. Totally improvised double sax and drum explosions that break down into duos and solos and re-ignite as trio howlin' paint splattered madness gone butt-naked wilder. Recorded at an art gallery with artwork melting off the walls and frightened fans nervously mopping their furrowed blood-stained brows (they were especially afraid one or both o…
New Sky Dragon
Top flight three man cosmic research team further investigations on galactic flux and refraction with two transmissions of synesthetic mind-fold. Lift off with skyward string stasis cutting through buffeted drum-clouds and synthesiser atmosphere, cosmic forever vision peaks at warp-speed rocket drone, anti-gravity percussion accents and star scraping rainbow universes. Saturating feedback zones spread webs of dimension amidst asteroid belt orbits, where two-way trips initiate zero g shimm…
Symphonie Pour Le Jour Ou Bruleront Les Cites
LP version. Sub Rosa presents this cult album that has not been available in years. Re-released with new artwork, this is the 1980 version of Symphonie Pour Le Jour Où Brûleront Les Cités (the original version was released in 1976 and was later re-recorded). Pioneering Rock In Opposition filled with clashing percussion, frenetic orchestral motifs and apocalyptic brass. Not for the squeamish. It features the line-up of Thierry Zaboïtzeff (cello), Alain Eckert (guitar), Gilles Renard (saxoph…
Birdland
This is the deluxe remastered LP edition of the previously cassette only release on Beniffer Editions. It is their third official full length, described as 'a totally peaced out collection of destructo boombox symphonies'. Sounds about right to us. This French Canadian duo, who’s output has been prolific already - two full lengths, two cassettes, a single and an appearance on the “World’s Lousy Vol. 2” comp - is mining territory similar to Chrome and Suicide channelled through warm layers…
The Man-Machine
LP edition of Kraftwerk's 7th album, from 1978, and perhaps their most commercially successful album -- a non-offensive synth-pop classic. 'The album has 'classic' stamped all over it... in time it would acquire the same ageless quality as The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper or The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds...' -- Pascal Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man Machine And Music"
Triangles
There's something almost religious about this Charlatan (Brad Rose) LP, its narrative arc swinging from light to dark and back again. From the opening chords of "Lime Beauty," we're awash in polarized-lens glinting twilight, fluorescent skies over the water. "Trace Blue Outlines" is trance-like and reflective, with long, arpeggiated figures chasing each other skyward in a fugue. Darkness creeps in around the edges of "Vodka Rocks," with almost post-rock moodiness bringing the side to a cl…
Outdoor Spell
Rhys Chatham has trail-blazed a course through late 20th century music, equally aplomb in post-minimalist composition as he is in punk. Not since Roebling laid his span across the East River has there been an artist who builds bridges in both how we hear music and how we can appreciate art. His latest album, Outdoor Spell, is a further document in that direction. Here has has eschewed 100 guitars, or even himself playing a single guitar, for the trumpet and voice, both electrified and dry. It is…
Double Demon
What mischief can be made with just cornet, vibraphone and drums. Rob Mazurek has scaled back considerably since Stars Have Shapes, the 2010 record from his Exploding Star Orchestra. His new project, the curiously named Starlicker, is a mere trio, with Chicago vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and Tortoise drummer John Herndon. But this group emits more sound and energy than do some sextets. Double Demon is Out to Lunch! for a new generation. Powered by Herndon’s hyperkinet…
Kokning
"Norway's Bjorn Torske returns with his fourth studio album 'Kokning'. Opening on a playful note with a slow-building title track, Torske strums a lone acoustic guitar against a background of shimmering synths setting the scene for a highly engaging piece of work. Throughout the course of the album a wide palette of genres are taken in and adapted to the Skrangle-House style (an open ended take on house music stemming from the Oslo nightclub 'Skansen'), and dub looms large over much of the music…
Midden
Suum Cuique (pronouned Soom Kwi-Kwe, Latin for "To Each His Own") follows the remit of Young Americans to explore uncharted, experimental, and personal synthscapes, guided by the hand of intuition with an entirely analogue array of machines. In 'Lithic Reduction' concrète textures grind like a millstone to release powdery clouds of analog dust, settling only to be dispersed by gusts of blackened distortion, whereas 'Red Binary' is distinctly electronic, revolving around muted radar bleeps…
Stellar Pulsations
Originally schooled in the foundations of hard bop, cornetist Rob Mazurek, quickly surpassed the form's conventional limitations; his multihued electro-acoustic work over the past two decades has subsequently drawn inspiration from numerous genres besides jazz. Mazurek's unfettered creativity and stalwart leadership skills have thereby cemented his reputation as a key figure in the Chicago scene—primarily as organizer of the venerable Chicago Underground Collective and several other innovative e…
Black Love
Saxophonist Carlos Garnett recorded with Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. His 1974 spiritual jazz album features an amazing line-up of Reggie Lucas (Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins), Buster Williams, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Alex Blake (Sun Ra), Charles Sullivan, Mauricio Smith (Tito Puente), Norman Connors, and Billy Hart. Exact repro reissue.
La Bamba
Over 15 years ago Daniël de Wereldvermaarde Botanicus (hat and cacti collector Cassis Cornuta) deejayed a ton of horrible la bamba versions for 2 hours in the now defunct situationist radioshow RTVS (Radio Centraal-Antwerp). The 'galdezen' of RTVS yelled-sung along, creating their own versions of la bamba while getting more and more hammered or naturally gone from a bamba trance! After telling me this short story Daniël mumbled 'I always wanted to dj all night long la bamba, I think it will driv…
United World In Outer Space
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…
The Ann Steel Album
Repressed! "Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian electronic composer who's made albums using every possible permutation of the same six notes, right up to modern classical, with The Ann Steel Album as the weird anomaly. Made with an American model who moved to Italy to make it big in fashion, Roberto took her languid, Laurie Anderson-esque voice and created a detached futurist popstar. The odd sound of these European futurist pop songs make it sound like the machines are breathing, creatin…
The Very Heart Of The World
LP version. Edition of 500 copies. 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 elect…
The Inner Treaty
With the wake of his blessed collab with The Congos and his 'Ancient Romans' side still shimmering in our memory, Cameron Stallones returns from his mystic regressions to present a sixth solo LP as Sun Araw. With his return comes a startlingly fresh-faced clarity to his sound, as though millenia of metaphysical sonic travel have dislodged the overbuild of dusty amp wax and really let some cosmic sunshine thru. It's perhaps also down to some assistance in the final process from Pete Kember…
Inland
Pyrolator is the co-founder of the legendary German label and publisher Ata Tak, was a member of various seminal post-punk bands such as D.A.F. and Der Plan and released solo albums under his artist name from 1979 onwards until today. His debut album "Inland" from 1979 features cold, urbane, disconcerting synthesizer sounds and aural collages, imbued with the post-punk/industrial zeitgeist as the seventies segued into the eighties. Yet sounding so fresh, it might have been recorded …
Leaving The Commonwealth
D. Charles Speer & the Helix came together through a shared love of musical interplay that moves the mind and body. Born from the obsessions and predilections of David Charles Shuford, strains of glassine cruelty, broken glasses and ruptured knees mixed with memories of Chet Atkins lullabies and ZZ Top vids to generate a songcraft steeped in tradition but themed for the burned. A practicing multi-instrumentalist in various New York City improvisational ensembles for the last 15 plus yea…