Experimental / Psychedelic

Prompt 1: Pascal Comelade's toy piano falling down the stairs , Hector Zazou pushing from behind, laughing Prompt 2: Cool jazz played on antique mellotron, low in fidelity, and sad, Glenn Miller‘s grandma crying silently Prompt 3: A hippie commune version of jazz as played by a cheap computer fed by Chat GPT with medieval buisine fanfare information and samples, trained on the entire Amon Düül II history, heavily looped yet unsynchronized Prompt: 4: Same, but flutes and synths and trance and cha…

*2024 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Setting bookmarks... That's maybe the most effective description to explain Roy Montgomery's trajectory into a guitarsound which is recognizable from thousands. The titletrack features Emma Johnston vocals lifting that distinctive guitarplay into heavenly blossoming maram grass protecting and treasuring your faith in music pur sang. 'Birthday Piece For Varia' breaths closely into his past with Dadamah/Hash Jar Tempo clashing with the 'Scenes From South Is…

*150 copies limited edition* Jabbering people, a dry bassline, nagging punks, the bassline again, a dry cough, the U-1 passes by a guitar starts weeping: welcome to Schickreich, a rare recording of a super group that cut short into a duo. Comprised of bass, hurdy gurdy, Jew’s harp player, DJ, Intermedia-artist Udo Erdenreich, and Berlin’s cosmic kraut legend Günter Schickert. They were bandmates in Ziguri and played since the late 1980s off and on as Schickreich. Marmo now brings to life an albu…

NM presents 'Soundtrack', the second album from LOU (aka. Sarah Hardiman - ex-Deaf Wish, Moon Rituals, Brick Head). Taking huge leaps onward from the eternal glimpses of reduced rock washout on their much loved debut 'For The Morning' (2021), 'Soundtrack' offers us a more plaintive, intricate set of arrangements and unexpected instrumentation. First and foremost a wildcard guitarist in the truest sense, Hardiman's sequencing on 'Soundtrack' sways between wicker basket/pastoral acoustic picking a…

Tip! *300 copies limited edition* Andy Ortmann owns Nihilist Records, of whom we also reviewed The New Blockaders and Diana Rogerson's works last week. And before I say anything about the music on this album, I would love to show you a bit of the inside of my head. Because when I read the title of this impressive triple vinyl totalling over two hours of music, I was thinking about something completely different. So: What is psychoacoustic music, and how do psychoacoustic electronics fit into the…

Pascal Comelade, Lionel Limiñana and Marie Limiñana reunite for a new album entitled 'Boom Boom', the follow-up to 'Traité de guitarres triolectiques à l'usage des portugaises ensablées', their first trio work released in 2015. The new recording by this short-lived trio is built on common sonic lines: the riff, repetition and melodic prestidigitation. "Boom Boom' contains 12 previously unreleased tracks, recorded in early 2023 during a break in their respective activities. After his album releas…

*70 copies limited edition* Arise from the slumber of vegetable earth into translucent timeless nowhere clouded forests and drink from the crystal fountains of Uejima Onitsura. Shanyio weaves the tongues of Romania and Japan into a wondrous expansion and contraction of dulcimer, zither, psaltery, kantele etc.

*80 copies limited edition.* Kult Masek is moniker for Michael Nechvátal, who is long time alam of Stoned to Death. His new album Walnut Instrument / Ballet for Skeptics is his first release for the label under Kult Masek, but he has made quite a humongous mark on the labels catalog already - namely with his other projects such as Jasnovidec, Raw Deal or M-N. In his latest two compositions Nechvátal further explores possibilities of his modular synthesizer. His main source of inspiration and sou…

*80 copies limited edition.* Sítě is project of Jan Tomáš and his several collaborators (on this album Jan Kašpar and Tomáš Vondra) who went onto pilgrimage through hypnagogic valley, devoted minimalist landscapes and lost corners of furniture music. With its now combined album (partly live and party studio recorded) Sítě is coming back onto Stoned to Death field, where they released their acclaimed and sought after split with Obelisk of Light in 2014. Ever since then, Sítě has been mainly sendi…

*120 copies limited edition.* "I'm on a jet ski. The river I'm on is dirty. Not like it was clean before, but there was some rain up north and now the mud got in the stream. Bunch of birds are hanging out on the piece of driftwood. The splash of dirty water from jet ski disturbs them from their limbo. They fly away, they squeal with displeasure. This river is all mine. Rain starts pouring. Jet ski is on full speed now, spitting the brown mud water out. Sound of a collapsing engine brings the jet…

*Limited Edition* This is the first full-length by the genovese based experimental collective TRÓNCO. Originally live recorded in studio during the summer of 2020, the album has been mixed by Tommaso Rolando and mastered by Domiziano Maselli. It’s a collection of seven pieces that are somehow a multidimensional expansion of the same seed, placed in the ground in an ageless period: a trans-genre and trans-geographic recklessness growth by a wild resonance moving through the body as a spiraloid ar…

This is the first vinyl issue of Temple IV, arguably Roy Montgomery's finest solo album, originally released in 1996 on CD. The original album has been enhanced with two newer tracks that constitute side four of the album. Montgomery states: "The two new tracks recorded in 2018 were about asking the question "Can you step into the same river twice?" Heraclitus said you cannot. I say you can ..."

The second volume of the Air series is even more abstract, stringing together eleven untitled chapters in a zero gravity journey aptly dubbed “Traveling Without Moving: The Trip.” The album lives up to that loose aforementioned tagline, imagining an ever-elusive search for meaning in the interzone Namlook never really abandoned. A lot of live recorded percussion in conjunction with environmental sounds is giving this album a more human touch. Over 60 minutes in one go, eleven "trips" on this wor…

In August 2022 the Australia-based, French born new age musician and electronic music composer Ariel Kalma was invited to participate in BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction series of special collaborations. The program pairs artists who have not previously worked together to create new music cooperatively. Kalma was quick to suggest working with two musicians whom he had never met – International Anthem recording artists Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, whose critically-acclaimed duo debut Recordings …

"The Oakland bandʼs darkly psychedelic country-folk suggests things on the verge of collapse… appealingly overwrought, its sweetness curdling into menace like Twin Peaks gone spaghetti western..." - Pitchfork

An atmospheric journey through psychedelic, gothic, and ambient motifs on this new instrumental album from Eric Angelo Bessel (half of Lore City).

*175 copies limited edition* NEY, a self-titled debut, is an unbridled exploration of a band’s beginning, a tapestry of intimate field recordings, deconstructed fragments and spontaneous encounters, pieced together in two long-form recordings. During the isolated years of the pandemic, Lisa Fabian, aka Mondlane on ‘The Blue Hour’, traced thoughts, sung melodies and fleeting sentiments into an archive of extemporary field recordings and scattered written notes. In dealing with the loss of a loved…

*300 copies limited edition* Based on the rereading of the famous tale by Jorge Luis Borges “The Circular Ruins”, the Peruvian composer, percussionist and painter, Manongo Mujica, takes a new look at some of his great obsessions: the desert on the coast of Peru and the pre-Hispanic ceremonials found there. For years the impressions of these places have mobilized a very personal aesthetic, arising from understanding the desert as a space for inner listening, and the ceremonial centers or huacas, …

*300 copies limited edition* This album compiles a series of sound pieces produced by the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1933 – Lima, 2021) during the 1970s. It includes works created by the artist that were part of various artistic projects, mainly sound installations, as well as pieces commissioned to musicians and inspired by her work. This album thus embodies an approach to a sound universe that has accompanied Burga's very personal work, which has transcended the limits of the artis…

*300 copies limited edition* Nod invites you to Fly, Fly, Fly with their latest release, the brand new offering from the long-running Rochester, New York-based trio Nod. Equal parts jazz, groove, lo-fi, raw psychedelia, and driving VU-inspired rock, Nod’s 8th full-length release adds some rock grit to the previous Band Room Janitors. This set of fresh experiments from Nod’s laboratory create a new casserole from their ad lib cookbook. So dig in to the new Nod.

A journey across desperate continents and human worlds in freefall. Between psychedelic electronic music, tortured melodies with hints of weeping arpeggios that crash on ambient industrial waves. Occasionally, a male or female voice… some french occult electronic !?

*2023 stock. 300 copies limited edition* Pengo enters it’s 24th year of existence with a new full-length recording, their 18th. A CD called Escape To Never (Program For Melting). This CD was recorded all in one night this past June in Pengo’s long time headquarters The Bunker in Rochester New York. Pengo exists in it’s own sonic reality. Slowly snaking it’s way through multiple deep international undergrounds, yet always remaining distinctively a singular odd beast. This CD sounds like a 10 foot…

*2023 stock. 300 copies limited edition* Ankylosaurus' tracks on this split CD were all improvised, each in one take. No edits or overdubs. One amp, cab, a couple pedals and a franken-bass. These are seriously thick and heavy slabs of low-end meditations. Think Earth 2. More of an Awareness thuds along, fuzz drenched, with subtle phaser, like walking thru a blizzard, or a sun-drenched highway, ever searching for a reprieve from the onslaught. Ceased to Exist, steady and crunching, gets interrupt…

*100 copies limited edition* Headlights Recordings presents Manuel Mota's new work Isocèle. Manuel Mota is known for the personal vocabulary he has developed for the guitar. His music draws inspiration from a multitude of references loosely rooted in the blues tradition to craft a sound which was highly regarded by Derek Bailey. Actual but transmitting an enigmatic sense of timelessness. The moment of creation- composition, and the instrumental execution- playing, are to him indistinct, and that…

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 …

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…

Michael Atherton is a writer, composer and educator from Sydney, Australia. Originally born in Liverpool, England, to Welsh-Irish and German parents, his family later migrated to Australia in 1965. Moving to the suburbs in La Perouse, he grew up in a mixed, multicultural community, where he fostered friendships with existing indigenous members and Iberian migrants. His formative migrant experience and his curiosity about vernacular, as well as notated music, led him to study music formally where…

Started around a decade ago, "Overcloseness" has been a long time coming. It is Colorist's debut album on paper, but already has a magnum opus feel to it. The beginnings of Colorist lay in the Cologne music community. Being small, it was always influenced by the art and the film scene. (In fact, the label Magazine originates from the same crossing point.) The large cast of guest appearances underlines how much Antonio de Luca and Caroline Kox are in the center of that Cologne community. On "Over…

*2023 stock. 300 copies limited release* Composed and played during summer 2020. Recorded at NGHE (Brussels) between september '20 and march '21. Mix by Valentin Noiret with acurate advices from SSM. Mastering by Manuel Duval. Artwork by Fanny D. Touchemoulin. Layout by Todesangst

Tip! LP release by Fougère honcho Kévin Orliange. Repetitive music made with tape loops, which tell the bad weather and deep industrial forest of the place where he lives called Le Plateau de Millevaches (who inspired Deuleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux).

*2023 stock. 100 copies limited release* "“Warmth and woozies,” that’s what Meadow Argus is made of! Tynan Krakoff of Columbus, OH recently revived that ol’ solo moniker for a followup to his tape from over five years ago. And yeah, there’s already a Meadow Argus III on the way! But today, we’re looking at the Meadow Argus II self-release from back in April. It’s a simple C35 kind of affair; one that is legitimately keeping me on edge as I type this up. You see, I recently swapped boomboxes and …

*2023 stock. 50 copies limited release* Fresh off their April cassette, Meadow Argus returns with "III," 34 minutes of tape manipulation soundscapes in an arrid region that was once a lush forest. Tape loops made from field recordings collected in Summer 2009 while on a freight trainhopping journey up & down the west coast. Backwards metallic drum circles unspool into industrial muck of monsters struggling. There is no water in the fountain but that doesn't stop the mirage. Side A contains eight…

*2023 stock. 100 copies limited edition* "I’ve been a big fan of Tynan Krakoff’s Meadow Argus project for a while now, but Peristera is my favorite album so far. Dust-covered loops tug at memories buried deep in our subconscious, coaxed out by operatic samples and the increasing glassine electronics. Urgency fights against a current of clanging, broken down chimes and toy piano skeletons. Krakoff has an uncanny ability to push old, broken-down sounds up an ever-rising, the palette continuing to …

*2023 stock. 37 copies limited release* "The first side of the new Meadow Argus tape has unsettling creaking and crunching noises and looped layers of decayed piano melodies, turning potential distractions and irritants into something oddly comforting. The best part is the last few minutes, when it turns into a gentler ambient part that could almost be an outsider house track stripped of its beats and left outside to dry in the breeze. The other side incorporates clips from what I assume must be…

*32 copies limited release* "[This] Meadow Argus tape is the project’s most evocative recording yet, making the listener feel like a stowaway on a haunted ship on the path to total disappearance from civilization. The album extensively incorporates field recordings run through a delay pedal, with the first stretch of the first side taken from the banks of the Ohio river under a bridge, while a spooky backwards voice bleeds through from the other side of the master tape. Then there’s “It’ll heal …

*27 copies limited edition* "The newest Meadow Argus tape melds his usual field recordings and tape loops with a particularly soothing set of organ drones, possibly made by a harmonium. The fuzzy organ rolls throughout, and cheerful conversations, birds chirping, and thickets full of insects enter the sound-picture. It’s all a pleasant stroll that gradually gets trippier, as you realize when a crowing bird echoes deep into the ether, and other sounds feel out of balance. The second side gets par…

Tapes, field recordings, synth and other tape manipulation magic. Recorded 2022 at Lilleypad Studios, Ohio. Art by Pearl Morgan/Purple Akronym

*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…

He claims to originate from a parallel universe and be in possession of alien technology that he uses to create self-discovery music for your listening pleasure. Introducing Tomo with his Mini CD single Plays - a love letter to the sound of the 80s Yamaha synths & drum machines and Fostex tape-recorders in a cosmos-peppered stylistic blender. The album was recorded directly to the 4-track cassette recorder. We gave up with describing this music, but perhaps the way Tomo classifies it could help:…

*2023 stock* Tales from the Skinny Apartment is somewhere around the 20th or so Painted Faces release...Drucker has long lost count. He runs/curates gigs (and records at) the Skinny Apartment, his dwelling place in Ridgewood Queens, which some folks have called the "realest DIY zone in NYC." He also rips in Dead River Company, Big Hiatus, Shecky, Canyon River Blues and countless other unknown subterranean improv zoner outfits. "Ripping" involves keeping it freaky and weird and ripping sets where…