New Arrivals
Concordance (LP)
Concordance is Susan Howe’s and David Grubbs’s fifth album in the fifteen years of their unexpected and richly satisfying collaboration. Here they’ve pared down their materials to voice and piano, aspiring to the hushed intensity of their live performances. What had previously resulted from Grubbs’s recomposition of recorded materials now arrives as unadorned duo performance.
Helicotrema Index (Book + 7" flexi)
Helicotrema is a non-profit festival curated by Blauer Hase and Giulia Morucchio. Started in 2012, it presents a program of recorded audio pieces, with the aim of investigating the possibilities of an environment and a form of collective listening, as happened in the first decades of radio broadcasting. The festival is structured in a series of listening sessions, in which the audience is invited to immerse themselves in listening to compositions by international authors. Over the years the fest…
The Intimate Landscape (LP)
At the invitation of KPM Music, guitarist Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs of Admittance) whips up an emotive suite of psych-folk library music on "The Intimate Landscape". A sharp and lushly cinematic set of acoustic vignettes for fans of John Fahey, Robbie Basho et al. Since the late 1990s, Chasny's name has been synonymous with the resurgence of American folk wyrdness that saw a grip of artists across the continent pick up where John Fahey and his contemporary accolytes left off. "The Intimate Lan…
A Mirror Holds The Sky (Book + CD)
* Matt laminate and embossed sleeve, insert card, CD and 48 page perfect bound book featuring photographs by Lawrence English, taken on location in the Amazon * From Lawrence English: "In late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez's Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had . . . Living in Australia, tropical rainforests are not foreign to me. I would even say I am …
Ormeology (LP)
Mimsy describes himself as someone with many interests and few skills, and sure, you can put it that way. But more precisely, he is a seeker and finder who has always felt more at home in the intermediary spaces. Since his first releases on Karaoke Kalk under the names Saucer, Motel and Wunder in 1997, he has mostly been active as Wechsel Garland, working with samples beyond recognition and thus blurring the lines between his own songwriting and the musical material he uses. In 2011, he ended t…
Stretch (Lp)
Forty years ago, on July 8th and 9th in 1981, a group formed by the splintering of some of Bristol's essential post punk bands, entered the hallowed studio at Berry Street in London to record their debut single. What would emerge was not only an exuberant post funk classic on the A-side, but also a wildly influential dub workout on the flipside, whose reverberations can still be heard today. Both songs have proven essential in very different ways. A focal point for the unique punk-funk that was …
Hey (7")
Sometimes a record comes along that is a wonderful anomaly that really is all about the music. Silver Leaf recently appeared on the radar via obscuro diggers on both sides of the Atlantic and landed with a Hey! What is known about Silver Leaf, beyond that it was a short-lived mid-80s project out of Cincinnati, Ohio, is that it features ex-Zephyr keyboardist John Faris, working alongside the mysterious vocalist Silvia Leaf. The difference between the blues and occasional psychedelic rock of ear…
Future Form, Functionless (LP)
* 350 copies * Introducing a brand new label of mutant, fusioneering styles from Edinburgh's Firecracker Recordings. The maiden voyage by Healing Force Project traverses further into the wormhole first explored in his Gravitational Lensing EP on Firecracker. A full panoply of bubbling, semi-submerged, electro-acoustic abstraction, lysergic drones and oblique, polymetric time signatures recalling the work of Italian avant-jazz outfit Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza while simultaneous…
Brace / Mend (10")
Tip! Theatric melodrama from Glasgow’s Lucy Duncombe, making a grand debut on 12th Isle sure to appeal to fans of Julia Holter, Lyra Pramuk, Enya Sibling piece to a longer, self-released tape (‘The Rapture of Cellular Accretion’), the two works of ‘Brace/Mend’ accomplish a lofty scope with soaring, consonant strings, organ and skilfully operatic vocals enacted by Lucy Dumcombe and co-produced by the artist with Kenneth Wilson and William Aikman.
‘Brace’ sees Lucy’s elegiac vocals deftly spi…
Especially Songs
Conjure in your mind’s ear a conference room with a reverberation time of 0.6 seconds. Now forget all that because The Mighty Cloud creates an entirely alien sense of time, both collapsing and expanding acoustic behavior until your conference room is a parking structure, your childhood bathroom, the Voynich Manuscript, a field. A remarkably poetic debut of subtlety and finesse, the sound-worlds meticulously fabricated by Portland’s Dave Quam (FKA Massacooramaan, Modern Melodies) and Seoul’s Joe …
Naga (2 CD Box)
Fairy tale opera has been a challenging genre for composers, with even some of the musically most successful examples, like Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel of 1893, more often presented for children than for adults. Scott Wheeler’s (b. 1952) Naga, working from a text that lies between fairy tale and mythology, stands much closer to Mozart’s marvelous exemplar, The Magic Flute, in its musical account of a restless man setting out on a spiritual quest in a world polarized between good and evil for…
About Time (LP)
* In process of stocking * Repressed for the first time in LP, 1971’s ‘About Time’ was the Ping Pong debut album. Founded by Alan Taylor from The Casuals it was one of the first bands in Italy (based in Bologna) to be inspired by the British sound of the period moving between late ‘60 psychedelic rock and the jazzy prog such Jethro Tull, Tonton Macoute, Camel and Caravan. 10 tracks all sung in English delicate and exceptionally well performed with warm precision, enthusiasm and greater energy in…
Mais El Rim - Highlights - Piccadilly 1975 (LP)
A Fairuz classic! A musical play by the Rahbani brothers and originally released in 1975. Zayyoun (Fairuz) is driving to her village “Kahloun” for the wedding of her cousin, bringing the wedding dress with her. But her car breaks in a village called “Maïs El Rim”. She tries hard fixing it to continue her journey, looking for Naaman (Elie Choueiri) the mechanic. But Naaman closed his shop because of an on-going dispute between his family and the family of his beloved Shahidi (Hoda Haddad), both f…
Bayaa El Khawatem (LP)
In a peaceful village, the Mayor (Nasri Shamseddine), invents the mystical figure of Rajeh, telling stories to villagers about the exploits and harms Rajeh is willing to do and that he is heading to the village. The mayor claims that his bravery and constant fight with Rajeh are preventing the latter from reaching his goals. The Mayor informs his niece Rima (Fairuz) of the truth. Rima, who did not agree on it, went with the fable as it was not causing any damages.
Two smart men, Fadlo (Joseph N…
Con-struct
LP version. About the Con-Struct series: Conrad Schnitzler liked to embark on daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. Finding exceptional sounds with great regularity, he preserved them for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances. He thus amassed a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When the m=minimal label in Berlin reissued two Conrad Schnitzler albums at the outset of the 2010s, label honcho Jens Strüver was granted access to…
Demo Tapes 1984-86 (LP)
Demo Tapes 1984-86 by Heiko Maile includes a selection from his beginnings of electronic music and the bizarre sonic worlds he inhabited. Most of the tracks on this album were recorded with a basic stereo (2-track) cassette recorder. The studio set-up looked more or less like this: a drum computer (no Midi) and a sequencer were connected to each other and synchronized rhythmically. I crafted melodic sequences and rhythms and usually transposed them to the desired pitch manually, using the keyboa…
A Stone's Throw (LP)
A then obsessed teenaged devotee of John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke at a time when Punk and New Wave were ascendant, Russell Potter harnessed a similar DIY ethos to his own ends by starting his own label & self-publishing his first record, 'A Stone’s Throw’, while a freshman enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont in 1979. Assembled at the legendary Boddie Records in Potter’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and sprinkled liberally with references to his heroes, from the initial record label…
The Beyond - Music Inspired By The Lucio Fulci Death Trilogy
Lucio Fulci, born in Rome in 1927, remains as controversial in death as he was in life. A gifted craftsman with a sharp tongue and a wicked sense of dark humor, Fulci achieved some measure of notoriety for his gore epics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Abandoning his early career as a med student, Fulci entered the film industry as a screenwriter and assistant director, working alongside such directors as Steno and Riccardo Freda. Fulci quickly established himself as a prolific craftsman adep…
While Whirling (LP)
On While Whirling, French-Japanese violist Frantz Loriot unleashes the essence of the viola as an explosive expressive force. Pushing the instrument to extremes, he ceaselessly explores its most subtle and unexpected sonorities. From a single acoustic string instrument, he miraculously teases and evokes hallucinatory impressions of harpsichords pounded, bells struck, electronics cracked, dirt shoveled; Loriot has created a unique, personal music filled with moments of textured transcendence and …
Salamanca (LP)
** Edition of 300 **Salamanca, the fifth and darkest moment in Sexores discography, is a journey through the different passages of its sound history. The Mexico-based duo creates a tribute to all the witches who were persecuted and serves as an introduction to various types of magic. The lyrics are the result of an exhaustive investigation that collects elements of folklore from various parts of the planet and absorbs an unusual power and meaning when music enters some darker passages explored b…