That's Understanding
Having listened to this disk 20 or so times over the past week, I have been struck time and again by the gently naif quality of Dan Beckman-Moon's songwriting. I keep thinking of Neil Young's earliest solo tunes, particularly 'Sugar Mountain,' as a sort of spiritual touchstone, although truthfully the music doesn't really sound anything like that. Still, the emotional core of the material has a similar sweetness and simplicity, while managing to steer clear of mawkishness with a nimble delicacy …
Ulyap Songs : Beyond Circassian Tradition
Ulyap is a village in the Caucasus, where one can find an enormous number of accordion and harmonica players. “Ulyap Songs: Beyond Circassian Tradition” represents an attempt to document ancient bards‘ chants and their entanglement with popular rural heritage as well as Soviet culture during modern times, through a critical prism. Interacting with a rich book on the subject, this issue reflects on a music phenomenon involving talented female and male musicians, performing in lively (and sometime…
Chris Rainier Sings the Music of Harry Partch
Tip! *200 copies limited release* Chris Rainier is a South African musician and performer, raised in Australia but now based in London. He earned his PhD in Music there last year with a thesis on American composer and instrument builder Harry Partch. Accompanying that PhD is an album of renditions of compositions from Harry Partch's (little-known) early "Americana" period, from the 1930s and 1940s. At the time, Partch wrote these compositions for his homemade "Adapted Guitars": acoustic guitars …
Plays A Word For Wind
Christina Carter, David Menestres and Andrew Weathers
Recorded at Tablelands Center for Bio-Regional Art, Shallowater, TX, March 30, 2022.Mixed & Mastered by Andrew Weathers at Wind Tide, Littlefield, TX
You Are Clearly In Perversion
"We are assembled in the throes of a long-awaited ecstasy" Dorian Wood: voice, synths, Knoxville birdsCarla Bozulich: voiceThor Harris: frame drum, air drum, clarinet, congas, box of blood, scary bells untuned in the Devil's key, marimbaDavid Coulter: musical sawHeather Trost: violin, synths, with engineering by Jeremy BarnesMichael Corwin: guitar
"En el ojo de un dios la última lanza"Dorian Wood: voice, synths, Knoxville birdsJarboe: voiceThor Harris: clarinet, trombone, baritone horn, vibrapho…
5amSky
Skyler Rowe - Drums, Percussion, Vibraphone, Sam Wagster - Pedal Steel, Drum Machine
featuring:
Chelsea Bridge - Violin, ElectronicsMatthew Lux - Bass VIAndrew Scott Young - Bass Guitar
Cycles Of Tonite
*300 copies limited edition* Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song with simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent Janet’s Song weaves mirror elements alongsi…
Message
Tip! *Limited edition of 199 copies. White vinyl 2023 repress* Grim is the one-man project of Jun Konagaya - formed from the ashes of White Hospital, his legendary early 1980s noise duo with Tomosada Kuwahara - which, accepting a long hiatus in the middle, has bridged the worlds of industrial music, power electronics, and noise for nearly three decades. Belonging roughly to the first wave of Japanese noise, Konagaya is particularly noteworthy among his peers for casting an eye further afield, dr…
Ebb-Tide
*70 copies limited edition* 'EBB-TIDE' is the first release in an upcoming series of limited-run cassettes focusing on Ameel Brecht's "sleep" compositions; music inspired by the vulnerability of sleep, by dream levels, Kleitman and the Wander Company, by sleep's alienation and by the time jungles in the dreaming part of us. As a first CS, 'EBB-TIDE' is about the hushed slow-motion waves of falling asleep, about the moment in-between waking and sleeping, when conscious life ebbs off, daytime rush…
Imerro
Canadian bowed guitarist and multi-instrumentalist C. Diab announces his fifth album Imerro, out February 16th, and presents the trip-infused lead single 'Lunar Barge'.
Biarrezgaur
*300 copies limited release* Biarrezgaur (not tomorrow, today) is a blissful and misty set of guitar tones entangled with effects and reverberation. Dreamy and reflective proto-blues-folk sketches that suggest a sense of matured serenity that only comes with years of practice. Spontaneous, gentle and free-flowing in equal parts, Biarrezgaur is a perfect autumnal recipe for those looking in the direction of Six Organs of Admittance, Loren Connors with Alan Licht, or even Robbie Basho or Albert Gi…
Sprecato
First album in seven years from Maple Death Records founder James Jonathan Clancy (Italy/Canada), and the first under his birth name following previous ensembles His Clancyness (Fat Cat, Maple Death) and Brutal Birthday (Total Punk, Improved Sequence). In the interim between those projects and this latest, ‘Sprecato’, Clancy has refined and honed his vision —steadily and carefully drawing from a host of disparate influences to create a new kind of singer-songwriter album that bridges the divide …
Vibrações de Prata
This is a presentation of Xexa's different sensibilities as a composer, musician and sound designer, mapping what are in effect her initial explorations with voice, rhythms, synths, ambience, ever searching for an organic final result. As a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London) between 2019 and a still fresh 2023, she presented in her third year a portfolio that included what we can now listen as "Clarinet Mood", the final track on "Vibrações De Prata". Her intention was to…
Musik Für Animierten Tonspurfilm
‘Musik für animierte Tonspurfilm’, the twelfth album by Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung (or DAAU, as they are commonly known), is the soundtrack to a series of short, abstract animation films by Rudy Trouvé, who also acted as a creative director during the recording process. The music originates from acoustic improvisation sessions by accordionist Roel Van Camp, clarinetist Han Stubbe, double bass player Hannes d'Hoine and percussionist Jeroen Stevens. These took place according to concep…
Rice Field Silently Riping In the Night
*2023 much needed repress!* Reiko Kudo first appeared on the Tokyo underground music scene in 1980 with Noise, a duo which consisted of Tori Kudo on organ and herself (then under her maiden name Reiko Omura) on voice, guitar and trumpet. Their only album "Tenno" (1980 on Engel) is probably one of the most outstanding and uncompromising records of all time. Besides other pioneering female producers from Japan such as Non (of Non Band), Phew and Haco, who all had started their startling careers in…
Synthetic Bird Music
When you listen to birds, they usually talk about food, sex/family, or anxiety. If they knew about the true nature of humanity's cruel and exploitative relationship with birds, they would be discussing rebellion. Humanity's current trajectory about birds is to cause the extinction of one-third of all bird species by the end of this century. This record crystallises the borders between memory, beauty, and anxiety. At the core is an amalgam of all the birds we have met and heard, their sounds synt…
Adage Vestige
*200 copies limited edition* Roxane Métayer is a french musician and artist based in Brussels. Embracing both folk and experimental music, her project mostly builds on sound recordings taken in nature, violin, wind instruments, percussion, and her own voice. Her albums have been released on labels like Kraak, Morc, Primordial Void, Wabi-Sabi, Marionnette and Matière Mémoire.
The Dream My Bones Dream
*2023 stock* Riding the rails down to the past and back to the future, Eiko Ishibashi considers the unknown lives that her own family has lived, set to expansive pop travelogues evoking the work of pioneers like Joni and Scott Walker, while pushing further, always further....
Fae Transit
*200 copies limited release* Fae Transit is an expedition into a realm of faerie music Sam McLoughlin introduced us to in his contribution to Folklore Tapes’ Swifter than the Moon’s Sphere. If Green and Brown was a sighting of a faerie parade, Fae Transit is a full abduction, a journey through a woodland inhabited by spirits and haunted by the living.
The album is written entirely for harmonium, nylon guitar, hand percussion and dictaphone, with harmonium and finger-plucked guitar continually ex…
For The Colleagues Of Ubu And Their Authorities
*2023 stock* What once started as a series of mixes has been expanded into this compilation, which brings together genres like electronica, modern minimalism, folk, post-rock, avant-garde or modular music. Compiled by Martin Riedler