Bob's Drive-In
A set of twisty, forty-ideas-a-minute, niftily arranged, irredeemably eccentric, but strangely brilliant songs that skip blithely across genre borders - from Nashville through the Miskatonic by way of the Beach Boys… even the production values range across the history of recording, sometimes switching inside a single song; so it’s a high-information ride - but still engagingly listenable. So far so good: another crafted, dense, idiosyncratic studio album. Now comes the twist. Finished with his …
13 Songs and a Thing
The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob Drake undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable musical logic.
The Skull Mailbox (and other Horrors)
The strangest so far. Mostly songs; a lot of acoustic instruments, a lot of unidentifiable sounds, a lot of fragments borne on a wind from somewhere else; bizarre picking interludes, humour (maybe) and snatches of incandescent playing. You can't pin this one down; it's full of twists and turns and a geometry that doesn't quite add up. Seemingly casual, there's not an ounce of fat on it, and the production - or anti-production - is, on repeated listening, quite extraordinary. Impressive.
A Face We All Know
'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.
The Ghost Trade + The EP Collection
** Limited Edition Color Wax ** Camberwell, in South London, pops up infrequently in pop culture. Perhaps you know it from the Camberwell Carrot, the heroically sized joint smoked in cult movie Withnail & I, or perhaps – if you’re attuned to experimental music – you know of Camberwell Now. The group formed from the ashes of This Heat, the art-noise group whose catalog was reissued on Modern Classics Recordings in early 2016.
Not so much a supersession as a continuation of that group, Camb…
Sort of
*LP version. 180 gram vinyl. Includes CD. Edition of 500.* Tapete present a reissue of Slapp Happy's Sort Of, originally released in 1972. Left-wing intellectual film critic Uwe Nettelbeck, who had good connections to Polydor, had set up his own studio in rural Wümme, disrupting the mainstream with pioneering sounds by the likes of Faust, inventively engineered by the "boffin's boffin", Kurt Graupner. By the time Anthony Moore, one of Nettelbeck's charges, approached his third album in 1972, Pol…
Here Come The Warm Jets
By the time Brian Eno left Roxy Music and came to record this masterpiece of a debut in 1973, he already held in his grasp the raw tools to revolutionize popular music. Here Come The Warm Jets is bathed in his singular pop-with-a-wink aesthetic and free-associative imagination. Whether on the four-on-the-floor pre-punk stomp of Needles in the Camel's Eye' or the Spector / Velvet Underground trad-rock-ism of Cindy Tells Me,' the album displays an unabashed love of quirky, catchy pop. Savage guita…
Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Continuing the twisted pop explorations of Here Come the Warm Jets, Brian Eno's follow up album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), is more subdued and cerebral, and a bit darker when he does cut loose, but it's no less thrilling once the music reveals itself. It's a loose concept album about espionage, the Chinese Communist revolution, and dream associations, with the more stream-of-consciousness lyrics beginning to resemble the sorts of random connections made in dream states. Eno's richly l…
Before And After Science
Completing the essential quartet of Brian Eno's early vocal albums is 1977's Before and After Science. The first half is vibrant, rhythmically complex songs (No One Receiving, Kings Lead Hat etc) before slipping into gentle relective moods for the second half. Cluster's Moebius and Roedelius, Can's Jaki Liebezeit, Phil Collins, Robert Fripp, Fred Frith, Fairport's Dave Mattacks, Phil Manzanera etc are amongst the players.
Ujamt / Harmony Hammond
2025 stock ** CD edition covering the impossible to find private releases by the cult Norwegian loner "pretty much everyone who heard Nils Rostad’s stunning Ujamt LP was blown away and Harmony Hammond builds on the weirdo cultic avant/folk edge of that release with a series of guitar/percussion/organ/folk constructions that come over like a one man Faust Tapes, moving from mind-bending fuzz guitar dirges that combine squealing punk leads with weird peg-leg rhythms through aching Scandinavian psy…
The Weird Weeds
"The album's arc from patience to brightness is as natural as an orbiting planet, but Weird Weeds do that one better at the end, stuffing a miniature solar system into one seven-minute track. True to form, this closing piece builds intensity not through change but momentum, starting with a four-note guitar figure and slowly adding accents and atmosphere...What matters most about The Weird Weeds is how it furthers this band's stature as the kind that others should be compared to." - Pitchfork
"We…
Whale Heart, Whale Heart
**300 copies** A split album: Sparkle in Grey songs come from a long process of mixing and recordings from various sources, defined by Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly) as "a fine combination between that sorrowful tune played on the violin, the scraping and tinkling of sweet guitar sounds, the gentle crash on cymbal, along with time stretched field recordings."Tex La Homa songs were written and recorded around the birth of Robin Neve Shaw, the inspiration and collaborator on these pieces of music. …