Self Portrait
** Edition of 285,comes in asilk-screened tip-on/ “old style” jacket with obi (red or black), with inserts and a postcard. Liner notes by Jon Dale ** It’s been almost three decades since Japanese guitarist and songwriter Masami Kawaguchi first broke cover, with his group Broomdusters and their debut album, 23 hours 30 minutes (Purifiva, 1997). In the intervening years, Kawaguchi has maintained single-minded discipline, through his membership of some of the Japanese underground’s greatest groups …
Remains of the Light
** Edition of 285, comes in a silk-screened (2 colors with metallic ink) 3 panels foldout jacketwithobi(red or black), inserts and a postcard. Liner notes by Michel He nritzi ** Remains of the Light, the debut album by Japanese trio Usurabi, is a gorgeous thing –six generous, deftly melodic songs that stretch out slowly, breathing deeply, yet never outstaying their welcome. The members of Usurabi started playing together in 2017, but they’d known each other for several decades, meeting via their…
Traditional Heart
Traditional Heart is the second album by Gianni Brezzo - the band or the studio project – of the Cologne-based musician Marvin Horsch. The title is by no means to be understood in the sense of an authenticity pathos à la love in times of Tinder, but addresses the process of musical production itself. Says Brezzo: “This time the process of making music was more important than the product. Not to allow even a thought regarding the effectiveness of the music; pick up the instrument on impulse and p…
Hanazono
Satomimagae entrusts listeners with Hanazono, a compendium of miniature beauty, a sonic globe enclosed with subtly resonant energies. Satomi’s fourth full-length arrives as an invitation to revel in your immediate and imagined surroundings; to make time and space for guileless curiosity and garden variety enchantment. Hanazano, translated as “flower garden,” is a tribute to everyday mysticism, that sense of pure and private wonder excited by a stone, a river, or winds. Its often unplugged and af…
Retusa – Santuario de Mariposas
Santuario de Mariposas aims to explore the audio characteristics of musical instruments of pre-Columbian origin. They are complemented by a variety of instruments of an ethnographic order, associated with indigenous groups throughout Mexico. After more than 40 years of atnomusical research, Itxoneztli recorded this album trying to give life to sleeping instruments and reflect what the music of the Mexicas ancestors was like.
Madre
Alma de Nieto presents Madre by Fonemi. All tracks by Vito Santoro. Tracklist: Madre, Pietra Bianca, Cobalto, Attesa , Crepuscolo, Lungo i Binari, Uter.
A Tutti gli Uragani che ci Passarono Accanto
An introspective journey into darkness through an oblique and fascinating song form. This, and much more, in Enten Hitti's beautiful new album. There is something particularly transcendental about 'A Tutti gli Uragani che ci Passarono Accanto', the new Enten Hitti album released on 25 May 2020 by Lizard and ADN Records. It is a work that welcomes the song form, but dished out with the classic researched and experimental approach that has distinguished the band's work in recent years.
An album of…
Profana Liturgija
** 2021 Stock ** "Boris Kovac is one of a handful of modern composers and performers from the region of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia whose names reached Western Europe and America. Strongly influenced by folk music from that region (a fascination he shares with István Mártha and Ernö Király), minimalism, Bela Bartok, and the philosophy of Bela Hamvas (also influential on Hungarian composer Tibor Szemzö, Kovac's music takes multiple forms." - François Couture/All Music Guide ‘His compositio…
Ömhet & Skilsmässa
Tip! *Second press, 500 copies* Enhet För Fri Musk album, recorded in Gothenburg and Malmö 2020 by Hugo Randulv, Sofie Herner, Gustaf Dicksson, Matthias Andersson and Dan Johansson. A concept album on relationships, family values and broken promises. 18 songs.
Embedded in the ever exciting Swedish underground scene Enhet För Fri Musik continues the quest for innovation numerous legendary Swedish bands started during the 70s, Pärson Sound, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Arbete Och Fritid. Taking the idea…
Divining Movements
For this album, United Bible Studies was the quartet of David Colohan, Alison O'Donnell (The Owl Service), Dominic Cooper (The Owl Service, The Straw Bear Band), and Matt Leivers. "Divining Movements" is part of a trilogy which started with the "Cave Hill Ascension" LP. "Divining Movements" is firmly within the more meditative vein of the longer "Cave Hill Ascension" pieces. Divining movements are a way of accessing the numinous. The album is a literal movement through and a meditation on landsc…
Cave Hill Ascension
** 2021 Stock ** Four tracks, including two of epic length, on heavyweight red vinyl, on which United Bible Studies founder David Colohan is joined by Alison O'Donnell (Mellow Candle, Flibbertigibbet, The Owl Service) and Dom Cooper (The Straw Bear Band, The Owl Service). Bless Us & Break Us with Mystery Upon Mystery is meditative and spiritual yet with a dark undercurrent, pairing soaring wordless choral vocals with brooding synth drones. Ritualistic percussion signals a change in direction, wi…
Unlit Trail
Recorded over the course of three Autumn nights on the west coast of Sweden at the end of a tour in 2018, Fletcher Tucker’s Unlit Trail is a record of ritual, and an invitation to enter a ritual domain. Composed in the wake of Tucker’s intricately arranged LP Cold Spring, Unlit Trail decomposes and subsumes several songs and sonic elements from that previous work – offering them resurrection in a minimalistic and Plutonian habitat. An uncanny territory populated by trembling leaves, breathing or…
Two Years
**CD Edition** Rolling through life, an open mind like an ocean, an infinite ride that comes furiously crashing to a halt. This is Whitney K’s ‘Two Years’, a deep dive into the Canadian songwriter’s journey through vulnerability, change and ultimately letting his guard down. Whitney K is the wandering stalwart Konner Whitney, a Whitehorse Yukon resident who has spent time in Vancouver, Montreal, Burnaby and Los Angeles. We met the character in 2016 through his intoxicating 4-track recorded manif…
Lower Hope Reach
Another sublime installment from Dean Brown’s Little Skull. This 5 track 10” moves through minimal, naïve, folk/chamber territory on into darker, more twisted waters. Hand-made covers and inserts featuring three different lino-cut images. Each record comes with three inserts on transparent stock and features one of those images on the cover. Therefore there’s three variations of outer sleeve design. No requests!
I Can Wait
** Edition of 100. 2021 Stock ** Oaken Palace Records proudly presents I Can Wait, a new full-length album by Left Hand Cuts off the Right (aka Robbie Judkins), a sombre but comforting, beautifully drifting set of four pieces for zither, melodica, synth and mbira. The quartet of tracks was recorded in 2018 but appears now as a timely sonic missive that absorbs a sense of individual uncertainties amid a collapsing wider world, but provides a response that reaches out to create a haven of calm, re…
Woven Skull
** Edition of 500. 2021 Stock ** Woven Skull (alongside an extended family of guests and collaborators) explore the limits of repetition, minimal instrumentation and free improvisation that stretches the breadth between delicate silences and harsh cacophony with continuously retaining traditional elements of song and musicality. Woven Skull dedicate their album to the Eurasian red squirrel, which is facing a particular difficult situation in Ireland and England. Due to the introduction of the Ea…
Lair of the White Worm
**Limited edition of 300 audiophile 140 gr white premium vinyl. Full color gatefold sleeve with lyric inner sleeve.** This is (another) strange one. It’s a genuinely ‘lost’ album, by which I mean it is one the band and I recorded then abandoned because I couldn’t find a suitable theme when it came to writing the lyrics. The music evoked a fantasy world, but I had already covered that subject on ‘Duel’ and ‘Grimm’ and felt I couldn’t justify writing more songs about Kings, Queens, castles and dec…
Hymns from the Harbour
**Edition of 118 numbered audiophile golden CD** Best known as producer and mainman behind Dark Companion Records and the reborn Manticore Records, Max Marchini gives birth to his first solo album where he plays all instruments except for two collaborations with avant-garde singer songwriter Paola Tagliaferro and the amazing pakhawaj indian drum playing of Akhilesh Gundecha. This album was intended as a present for his friends for Dark Companion’s 5th anniversary, but eventually label insisted t…
Fragile
**2021 Stock** The rarest, and I would dare to say best, folk/psych album from Peter Howell and John Ferdinando, musical brainchildren behind Ithaca, Agincourt, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and Tomorrow Come Someday. This fifth Howell/Ferdinando album had just been completed in or around 1974 when the partnership came to an end. Howell had been working at the BBC as a studio manager since 1970 (he’d provided a stiff upper lip voiceover for John Peels Top Gear shows), but he was now offered a…
Para Castukis
* 2021 Stock * Here at last is a chance to discover why people have been willing to pay a very steep price to hear Sandhy & Mandhy, the duo who were not a duo, the band who were not a band, creators of perhaps the rarest and most expensive album from Argentina. To tell the story of Sandhy & Mandhy, we have to go back to 1967, when Alberto Infusino (Sandhy) and Alberto Vanasco (Mandhy) began their musical partnership in the beat band The New Free Men. Like many bands of that time, Los Shaker’s an…