Twilight Furl
"We must show social conditions, not just songs." a wise music ethnologist once said. But how to transport environments into song sonics? The enigmatic duo Greymouth found a creative answer and sent their conceptions to Berlin Neukölln, right at the steps of the bustling Kashual Plastik office, where an unclear corpus of operative's fashion new sounding crypto currencies 24/7. Four tranquilized speed ballads waxed on 7inch vinyl, carrying drunken melodies, kraut-intoxicated grooves, and outlandi…
Avoidance Language
*2023 stock* "There have been some very cool guitar duo LPs over the years -- Bert Jansch & John Renbourn's Bert & John, Danny Kalb & Stefan Grossman's Crosscurrents, Jody Harris & Robert Quine's Escape, Charalambides' Joy Shapes, Bill Orcutt & Michael Morley's Electric Guitar Duets, any comp of Kansas Joe McCoy & Memphis Minnie, etc. -- but there has never been one quite like Avoidance Language. It is a wild-eyed classic from start to finish. Ostensibly a meeting between two guitarists lurking …
You Can Can
You Can Can is an echoed affirmation, an album which traces song forms around silence, field recordings, and degraded analog memories. This is folk music transmogrified and mutated, as if recorded and reconstructed in Pierre Schaffer’s GRM studio.
Absolut Gehör
*321 copies limited edition. In process of stocking. 2023 stock* Origami Arktika is one of Norway’s best kept secrets. They serve a mutated folk music, rooted in the county of Telemark, interspaced with drones, noise, electronica and undefinable elements. They mix the archaic with the modern. Paper folding with frozen fingers.
"People forget that noise music is just as much grounded in subtlety and elusive sophistications as in deafening roars and colliding atonalities. I cite Morphogenesis' fi…
Grenselos
*200 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* Origami Arktika is one of Norway’s best kept secrets. They serve a mutated folk music, rooted in the county of Telemark, interspaced with drones, noise, electronica and undefinable elements. They mix the archaic with the modern. Paper folding with frozen fingers.
OA moves along the axis of time by using Old Norwegian folk songs and folklore, combined with modern inspiration and technology. OA is a knotty time machine, hotwired by haystack-pol…
Fleur De Chagrin
*300 copies limited edition* Pauline Marx, formerly of the fantastic duo La Fureur de Vouivre, seems like a being from another time and place; namely, an escaped marauder lurking in the forests of a Bruegel painting and integrating the surreal flora and fauna of a Boschian creation into the scenery and lore of deep Brittany. Her invented mythology is loaded with murky rituals and contorted mantras, backed by the surprising sounds and textures of terrains so earthly and so unreal. Where do you th…
The Grove
Big Blood are Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin who live in South Portland, Maine, where they make and record experimental music at home. They have made twenty-something records since 2006. The music is a vehicle for dealing with what is going on in their heads, which runs the gamut from friends they have lost, to frustrations during the day, and the larger world picture. Without sounding insincere, they make music for themselves, that at times can be wildly inconsistent.
In 2007, they releas…
Its Own Phantom
Tip! Edition of 100 copies, with risograph printed j card "Five years after the magnificent Valosta Valoon LP (FTR 331LP, 2017), Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Niko Karlsson is back with a new swab of sound that is even more organic than its predecessor. This time out the focus is more on acoustic strings and percussion, with a minimum of machine-driven sounds, even when things get cinematically tense (especially on the B-side). But the bulk of Niko's new tape (which he had first suggested be re…
Headdress
'I’ll set the scene – we’re all passed out face-down in the lawn of the first Bush term, scratching our heads after 9/11 and wondering how much more dystopian it’s about to get. Ash hangs in the air as we march toward endless war, and the activities of the post-hippie, post-beat, post-punk, post-jazz, post-industrial, post-experimental bohemian underground flail against the avalanche with a mystic fire you can’t get your arms around, let alone bottle up for consumption. Jars of tears, rockets fr…
The Sounds of VÖ
From the opening seconds it’s clear that the debut recording of the improvising sextet VÖ is not just another free improv session. The deeply meditative sounds may conjure disparate folk traditions from around the globe, whether Scandinavian fiddle tunes or the way Alex Zethson’s meandering pump organ evokes the exploratory harmonium lines in Pakistani qawwali music, but these associations are mostly coincidental. The ensemble members are devoted to improvised and experimental music mostly as an…
Encore 72 Hours
"Encore 72 Hours is a special project including some remarkable Chinese domestic musicians. This release is a live recording compilation of the project. All mixing and mastering are done by famous mixing engineer Liu Ying’s studio thus possess extraordinary quality. The album is not only a recording and a reproduction but also a necessary supplement to a live performance, even an artistic reinvention of acoustic. We hope to strike resonance among some listeners." - Tu Fei
Landscape Man
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Robert Desnos dreamed: I saw Davey Williams and Johnny Shines playing dice with Fred Lane; Isaiah Owens and Andrei Tarkovsky witnessing to a UAB anthropology graduate student; at one point Diogenes the Cynic leaned his head in the door, then moved on. Fred Shuttlesworth, trumpet in hand, kept shouting, “Where’s the one? Where’s the one” Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Cherry, dressed in immaculate white Sufi gowns, whirling and whirling and whirling. …
Froggy’s
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Pleased to announce that after two years as a digital only release Little Wings' Froggy's is now available on vinyl!! We've been fans of Little Wings for 20 years now so to be able to release a new record from the brilliantly prolific Kyle Field is a dream come true! Not to mention Froggy's is one of the weirder and most amazing Little Wings albums we've heard and we're thrilled to have it here on Astral Editions. Based on a now defunct res…
Slap Happy Humphrey
*2022 stock* The world of Doji appears and disappears through the stormy noise like sunlight through a tree... Slap Happy Humphrey is the world's only cover band of noise-tinged Doji Morita, and the world's only cover band of Doji Morita. Folk and noise - at first glance, these two seemingly contradictory elements create a miraculous space. Itakura Mineko's voice is also good. Morita Doji is definitely present, albeit vaguely, behind the noise... Mineko Itakura of Angelin Heavy Syrup, Hiroshi Fu…
Arbor
Stoned to Death is happy to join forces with Stefan Christensen. Stefan is a huge inspiration for our label and our musical trips. He is based in New Haven, Connecticut and if you don't know his work yet, you are up for a nice discovery. His solo outfit is guitar based and very prolific, very idiosyncratic and very surprising. Stefan's discography is a journey through various forms and styles ranging from minimal drones through outsider folk to loud guitar improv and broken free rock anthems. S…
Who Remembers Light
*In process of stocking. Limited edition 340 copies.* "Four years after their magnificent, eponymous debut, this Connecticut trio returns to vinyl with another brain-blurring set of tunes. Picking up where that last LP left off, drummer Michael Kiefer, guitarist/vocalist Jon Schlesinger and guitarist/bassist/mandolinist/electronics/mark tree-rep, Steubs, dig ever deeper into the pulse of the Earth. The first track here, 'Hot Peace,' sounds like stuttering, shimmering emanations from the core of …
Nova
Erlend Apneseth is one of Norway’s foremost Hardanger fiddle players and folk musicians. After being widely recognized with the award-winning and critically acclaimed Erlend Apneseth Trio, he now returns with an acoustic soloalbum. This is the first time since his debut album “Blikkspor” (2013) that he has put the soloistic performance in focus, and this time the unique acoustics in Emmanuel Vigeland’s Mausoleum sets the scene for his improvisations and compositions. “The Hardanger fiddle is tra…
Bridge Variations
On Bridge Variations, the now Stockholm-based English guitarist Jon Collin changes his guitar for a keyed fiddle. Mostly recorded to tape under different bridges around Stockholm during 2021, partly for the sound but also because of their importance to the geographical make-up of the place, the album is like a modern take on traditional Swedish folk music made by an outsider looking in. The sound is pretty much a continuation of the palette explored on 'Dream Sequence, End Of Summer', Collin's c…
Fleeting Adventure
*In process of stocking.* Andrew Tuttle's Fleeting Adventure is a musical adventure through a reimagined journey from the Australian ambient producer and banjo player. A crew of fellow travellers - including Steve Gunn, Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider and Balmorhea - help navigate a cosmic trip into subtropical landscapes. Golden plucks of banjo, gauzy electronics and cosmic guitar shimmer into gloriously expansive melodies that conjure peace and space, comfort and wonder.
A deepening sense of lif…
Cardamom & Laudanum
Tip! Emerging from a thick spiralling haze, is the debut album from Mystic AM - a new project from Rod Modell and label founder Ario Farahani. Conceived as an immersive fictional soundtrack piece, the release tells the story of a traveller, some centuries ago, and the rather intense metaphysical experience he unexpectedly stumbles into whilst taking shelter on a hot desert night at Zein-o-Din Caravanserai, near Yazd in Persia. Dusk envelopes the vast barren landscape as the protagonist enters th…