New Arrivals
Cold Soup
First release from this duo of Tokyo-based guitarist, Tetuzi Akiyama, and New York's Che Chen. Akiyama is in rare "Don't Forget to Boogie" form here; his heavily distorted, locomotive guitar lines chugging away as Chen's electrified fiddle drones, screeches and scrapes. Sine wave generators and a modified tape delay round out the mix. Sidelong live track on one side, studio jams on the flip. Released on Jozef Van Wissem's Incunabulum Records.
Vilke
Julian Cope Review on Head Heritage Site: VILKÉ is the particularly fine and sprawling new 2LP by American composer, field recordist and hiker Daniel Menche. Inspired by the wolves of his travels in the N. West and named for the Lithuanian for ‘she-wolf’, VILKÉ presents us with four side-long pieces of haunted and eerie atmosphere music whose dilating post-industrial rhythms, and seemingly ever-decaying, ever-degrading, cicadas-driven post-industrial drone-o-drudge inhabits a parallel half-world…
Late
New York's "...premiere improvisatory, vocal-and-electronics cosmic beat-box band..." return to Woodsist with a brilliant side of loopy hypnotics, including an insert code for free digital download of the 2007 cassette-only release for Tank Tapes redeemable directly from the label. All four tracks are previously unreleased, arms-out eyes-shut wanders through darkly tinted terrain. 'Oboh' opens up with what sounds like reversed field recordings made inside a washing machine at a Native Am…
Spiraltendenz
After ten years from the date of its recording (2003), this surreal jam between kaleidoscopic Stuttgart's collective Metabolismus and evergreen American improviser Eugene Chadbourne, is finally turning into a wax. You'll have the cheerful feeling of listening to Sun Ra jamming with Stockhausen while together on a trip to Stonedland! What's on this record is basically high lysergic psychedelia meeting crazy free jazz, with some spared funky grooves and fragmented tapes manipulations. You'll be…
Scales
*Orange Vinyl* Like a would-be soundtrack to some forgotten Wagnerian saga, Mythical Beast's debut full-length unleashes sonic elements akin to trudging minions in an epic struggle for tonal supremacy. This bloodless battle is for hearts and minds though, and is shot through with majesty and pathos. It's no wonder that a trio commanding this type of simple yet nuanced compositional energy would risk life and limb crossing the New Orleans "security" perimeter one month post-Katrina to rescue thei…
The complete 15th August 2001
Derek Bailey: acoustic guitar. Simon H. Fell: double bass. This is the full recording - freshly remastered - of the 2001 duo gig, an excerpt from which appeared in 2002 on a long-deleted Sound 323 mini-CD which was voted a record of the year by The Wire magazine. Here at last is the full performance in all its exhilarating acoustic power; an unplugged (but very intense) set from a hot and summery Wednesday afternoon, recorded in the basement of Sound 323 in London by Tim Fletcher.
I Love It When You Snore
Mats Gustafsson is perhaps the pre-eminent saxophonist of this post-free jazz/improv era. A perfect combination of Peter Brotzmann's fiery passion, Evan Parker's extended technique and Ken Vandermark's willingness to explode genre boundaries, Gustafsson's discography spans over two decades and sports numerous must-hear recordings with a long laundry list of collaborators, including such luminaries as Brotzmann, Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Jim O'Rourke, Derek Bailey, Sonic Youth and The Ex. Illustrio…
An extended meaning for something meaningless
Francisco Meirino's An extended meaning for something meaningless uncovers deep hidden contexts from the decaying fringe of the auditory spectrum. Here we find ornate beauty in the subtle demise of electronic systems and explore the arcane apprehension of existential degeneration. The recording looks at how to create something out of almost nothing-basic field recordings, static electronics and failed tape experiments. A 16-channel multi-track piece where reel-to-reel tapes juxtaposition with mo…
Asphalt And Delay
Awesome brand new LP that marks the band’s first full length album foray in to the exploration of duo improvisation. Recorded over an extended period of time, in a secret midtown Manhattan location high above the city streets, this is their first record devoted entirely to duo improvisations. The LP also features striking silkscreen cover art by Yoko Tack.Since their late-1990s inception, White Out - as comprised by multi-instrumentalist Lin Culbertson and drummer Tom Surgal - have been one of t…
Caim in Bird Form
Opal Tapes' visionary bossman Stephen Bishop synthesises spellbinding post-techno ecologies on his debut slab of wax as Basic House. 'Caim In Bird Form' is an engrossing refinement of the arcane, buckled structures and textures best heard on his 'I'm Not A Heaven Man' album and an excellent split with Prostitutes for Blowing Up The Workshop. It's a sound that was conceived in relative isolation, yet feels intrinsically plugged into the zeitgeist and highly aware of fringe actions in the wake of …
Eselsbrucke
Cristian Vogel is a composer, music producer and music theorist. His work is known worldwide through state-of-the-art DJ and Live performances to compositions for choreography and many studio productions. Born in Chile 1972 and raised in the UK, he is now based in Berlin. Cristian Vogel has been a long-term innovator in the composition, mixing and performance of electronic sounds. Over a 20 year career at the vanguard of European electronic music, his work has been highly acclaimed for its quali…
The Stargate Tapes
"Sharing social circles and spiritual ideologies with artists such as Iasos, Connie Demby and Deuter, whilst splitting label release schedules with Laraaji, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos, the unique Florida raised soul mate duo known as Emerald Web released their privately pressed debut LP at an axis where post-prog rock met proto-new age and ambient electronic music. At the turn of the 1980s Bob Stohl and Kat Epple embarked on a ten-year spiritual journey playing at planetariums and laser sho…
Gagged In Boonesville
French globe-tourist High Wolf has hand-rolled his way up Mount Fuji, trainspotted every corner of Europe, hitch-hiked across America and Australia, chugged Ganges water, and crouched on all manner of smoke-stained prayer rug since first looping a bongo back in ’09. His apprenticeship in the House of Wah nearly complete, he’s hinted at a potentially seismic shift in the High Wolf third eye doctrine lurking in the near future; perhaps his Away Team exfoliation moment is nigh. Fortunately, …
Armed Courage
With nary a praising documentary, coffee table photo book or tribute band to their name, The Dead C are nonetheless one of the most respected, longest surviving groups in the history of rock. Still sporting the original band members (Michael Morley on guitar, vocals, Bruce Russell on guitar, Robbie Yeats on drums) from their first assemblage in 1987, The Dead C's renown has a lot to do with their stubborn unwillingness to compromise in any form. With a varied and challenging discography, the ban…
Open
"Following on from their two track LP release, Mindset (2011), Open sees legendary artists-in-resonance The Necks return to the territory they are best known for, a single piece running for over an hour. The piece emanates a calm, immersive stillness throughout. Already The Wire has said that Open "(displays The Necks') astute handling of pacing and momentum, finely honed collective sense of timing, (and) their shared ability to balance at length a group equilibrium". Here the band returns…
Minimal Milan
Lovely compilation selected by Xiu (Oksana Rodionova) consisting of contemporary minimal electronic and deviant-techno artists based in Milan, Italy. Here's the label's mission statement as you could say: "The musical aesthetism defended by the label admits connections with post-modern qualities and challenges conventions for an innovative musical conversation between analogue instrumentation and technologies." The label will host various types of electronic music always seen throught a dark and…
Bits & Pieces
The history of - behind which we find Nico Selen of O.R.D.U.C, E.M.M. and many other guises - and Freiband, the name of Frans de Waard when it comes to all sorts of computer based, goes back for over 20 years. Selen was the first to release a LP by Kapotte Muziek (De Waard's other music enterprise, among many!), in 1990 and they have been off and on in contact. Earlier 2013 released a very limited CDR, which De Waard quite liked and in the next days he kept returning to it, eventu…
Under A Single Banner
It's been a busy couple of years for the producer behind the Shifted project. On top of an extremely well-received album for the Mote Evolver label, the producer has edged further out into the fringes of electronic music under a number of aliases, taking in noise/ambient variants as Covered In Sand, as well as more distorted, technofied productions under the Alexander Lewis moniker, a sound described by the Blackest Ever Black label as "S-M techno." His new album as Shifted, Under a Single Ba…
Bulletproof Brass
The HBE family are in full effect on this 6-track mini-album. Forming like a brass-plated Voltron, they spin from swaggering Hip-Hop funk on 'Starfighter' to sparky, feel-good breakbeat funk on 'Touch The Sky' and more sultry, jazzed up styles for the Sun-Ra sampling 'Pluto' on the A-side. Flip it for the more brooding, cinematic themes of 'Kyptonite' feat Crow, and the record's highlight 'Black Boy' easing off the punchy percussion for a more spiritual vibe with spoken words by their pat…
Lieu
FaravelliRatti is a duo comprised of Nicola Ratti (guitar) and Attila Faravelli (computer) who play with a tower of different prepared speakers and a taper recorder in between them. The idea is to fed speakers with different languages in the same space and have them resonate with the phisical space. Every speaker is prepared and positioned so the resonance can be controlled by the players, moving their bodies around the sound totem in between them. Their live set represent this idea, of building…