Lots of late titles as of… late. I’m told the Beak LP is en route, as is Sumac. Maybe the new Mudhoney is in there too, oh and the Rick and Morty soundtrack. Maybe they’ll show up tomorrow. The new Tim Hecker has a later vinyl date for Canada for NO REASON AT ALL, but should be here mid-next week. But that’s ok because there’s loads of other stuff here that is awesome too.
Also…. in case you missed it… WE ARE HIRING! If you’ve dreamed of slinging records and have a great grasp on alphabetizing things please drop off or email your resume along with your top 10 albums of 2018 and of all time by October 14th! But sooner is better!
….pick of the week…..
Popera Cosmic: Les Esclaves (Finders Keepers) LP
Finders Keepers present a reissue of Popera Cosmic’s Les Esclaves, originally released in 1969. For the few people lucky enough to have heard the entire album in the five decades since its release, the mythical Popera Cosmic album is now considered to be France’s first dedicated psychedelic album and the shrouded blueprint for the hugely influential Gallic concept album phenomenon that followed — including Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire De Melody Nelson (1971) and Gérard Manset’s La Mort D’Orion (1970). Spearheaded by François Wertheimer (songwriter for Vangelis, Barbara, and BYG Records), composed with future Jodorowsky soundtracker and genius all-rounder, Guy Skornik, and based on an embryonic concept co-conspired by a teenage Jean-Michel Jarre, this instantly deleted 1969 recording is a true essential for any outer-national-radicalized record collection. With credentials that mark the birth of the cosmic funk (later disco) that helped shape the influential sound of France today, this LP also includes the first pressed instrumentals by members of Space Art, some of the best orchestra rock arrangements by William Sheller — Lux Aeterna (1972), Erotissimo (1969) — and orchestrator Paul Piot (Jean Rollin), as well as sitar psych benchmarks courtesy of uber legend Serge Franklin — all pinned down by the rhythm section that would later be known to prog aficionados as Alice. Subtitled Les Esclaves (“The Slaves”), this street theater/rock opera (influenced by the work of Julien Beck’s Living Theatre) now celebrates its 50th birthday standing firmly as a sonic tome to the birth of the no-no era (that rebuked France’s yé-yé hamster wheel) leading directly to the thematic progressive network of Wakhévitch, Manset, and Magma while comprising an inter-Gallic intergalactic super group from the early annals of France’s pop psych revolution. Imagine a rock opera where the cast of Mister Freedom perform Clash Of The Titans at the foot of The Holy Mountain — then pinch yourself…
File Under: Ambient, Drone, Classical, Minimalism
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…..new arrivals…..
G.B. Beckers: Walkman (Music From Memory) LP
Music From Memory’s latest release sees the reissue of Gunther Beckers’s Walkman album from 1982. A painter and musician from Aachen, Germany, Beckers created his third album Walkman to coincide with an exhibition of his latest body of artwork in 1982. Released on his very own Milky Music label with a run of just 500 copies and original pieces of artwork included with some copies, most copies of the album nonetheless remained amongst art collectors and with the painter himself. Rediscovered a few years ago through a friend of Music From Memory in the archives of a local radio station where all but one of the stations copies had been destroyed, it has been an album the label have been in love with since the first listen. Touring as a guitarist with ECM-affiliated jazz musicians such as Alex De Grassi, William Ackerman, Ralph Towner, and Larry Coryell to name but a few, Beckers also would record on a number of releases of Klaus Schulze’s cult electronic music label Innovative Communication. Always exploring new ideas and the possibilities of technology within his music, Beckers would record Walkman utilizing the Kunstkopf technique of sound recording. Kunstkopf, or ‘dummy head’ recording is a 3-D audio recording technology that enables listeners to define each source of sound as if they were in the original recording situation itself. Using two microphones which are usually mounted in the ears of a mannequin, the technique exploits certain basic principles of human spatial hearing. Listeners to Kunstkopf recordings are in fact encouraged to listen to such recordings on headphones, as the 3-D perception is often greatly diminished on speakers. With the title Walkman, Beckers was very much hoping the album would be enjoyed on headphones, even portably through a Walkman. Minimalist variations around an acoustic guitar, guitar synth, rhythm box and with wordless female vocals, Walkman drifts in and out of moods; it is a unique and at times hauntingly beautiful album, which the Kunstkopf recording technique further adds to the album’s often-otherworldly feeling.
File Under: Ambient, New Age
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Distant Sky (Bad Seed) LP
For one night only in April of 2018, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds shared a show from their celebrated 2017 world tour on cinema screens worldwide. Now, they present Distant Sky: Live In Copenhagen, a special 12″ EP of audio from that extraordinary show. Filmed at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena in October 2017, Distant Sky captured an extraordinary and triumphant live concert from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds where the band performed new album Skeleton Tree’s beautiful compositions alongside songs from their essential catalogue.
File Under: Rock
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Jean Cohen-Solal: Flutes Libres (Souffle Continu) LP
Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Jean Cohen-Solal’s Flûtes Libres, originally released in 1972. In a dreamlike fictive and windswept Brittany, hippy pirates and wild women more or less inspired by Gérard de Nerval fight it out in a theater, the magic of which brings to mind Cocteau, and where musical improvisation has an important role: this is Noroît, a cursed film which was never released in cinemas at the time (1976), directed by the great Jacques Rivette, where Jean-Cohen-Solal, his brother Robert and Daniel Ponsard can be seen and heard playing. The scene is every bit as inventive as that featuring the Art Ensemble Of Chicago in Les Stances à Sophie (1971). The same magic and invention can be found on this first album by Jean Cohen-Solal: Flûtes Libres. A magic which can be keenly felt on “Quelqu’un”, a long contemplative mantra which takes up the whole of the B side and which anticipates the future collaboration in the mysterious universe of Jacques Rivette. Jean Cohen-Solal studied flute from all angles, and became one of the great French virtuosi, along with Michel Edelin who at the time was with Triode. This was a period (1972) when flutists were very popular with the public, most of whom had been influenced by Roland Kirk, including Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Whereas Jean Cohen-Solal tells a different story, richer and centered on the instrument itself, using the magic (yes, that again) of overdubs. Perhaps Paul Horn rather than Roland Kirk could be an influence but stripped of a classical background which was too audible and a tendency for easy listening. In fact, in terms of comparison, “open music” by Bob Downes would be the closest to the electroacoustic experiments of Jean Cohen-Solal, who, by the way, was also close to the GRM and Bernard Parmegiani for whom he occasionally provided sound sources. These are the qualities which probably explain why Flûtes Libres figures (and justifiably) on the famous Nurse With Wound list. Licensed from Jean Cohen-Solal. Includes eight-page booklet. Highlighter yellow vinyl; Obi strip; Edition of 700.
File Under: Jazz, Experimental
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Coil + Zos Kia + Marc Almond: How to Destroy Angels (Cold Spring) LP
Cold Spring Records present the complete recording of A Slow Fade To Total Transparency. Recorded on August 24th, 1983 at the Air Gallery in London, UK. Personnel for the performance: John Balance (Coil), John Gosling (Zos Kia), Marc Almond (Soft Cell), and live mix by Peter Christopherson (Coil, Throbbing Gristle). Features: “How To Destroy Angels”, the complete 23-minute piece; “How To Destroy Angels (Zos Kia Remix)”, a nine-minute, unheard remix by John Gosling; and “Baptism Of Fire”, an unreleased recording of Zos Kia/Coil at Recession Studios, London, England on October 12, 1983. Liner notes by Michel Faber (Under The Skin (2000), The Crimson Petal And The White). All audio, previously unreleased, has been remastered from the original tapes and is exclusive to this release. Michel Faber: “Imagine how out-of-step with the dominant culture Coil were when they unveiled themselves in the Air Gallery to perform A Slow Fade To Total Transparency. Subtitled: How To Destroy Angels, the music — a backing track prepared by John Balance, John Gosling and Peter Christopherson — bears only scant resemblance to the How To Destroy Angels 12″ that Coil would release as their debut vinyl the following year. Instead of the meditative ritual gongs of the 12″, what we hear here is a restless, queasy melange of industrial noise, its eerie whistles the perfect backdrop for Marc Almond as he recites a bitter tirade against an ex-lover.”
File Under: Industrial, Experiemental
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Colored Music: s/t (WRWTFWW) LP
WRWTFWW Records announce the reissue of the 1981 self-titled album from cult Japanese duo Colored Music. Includes liner notes in English and Japanese by digger, curator, connoisseur, writer, and legend Chee Shimizu. An incredible mix of cosmic new wave, unconventional disco, avant-garde synth pop, and hybrid electronic funk, Colored Music is enchantingly unique, a sort of experimental and magnetizing take on David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy with a psychedelic Haruomi Hosono touch. From the groovy post-punk glam title track to the proto-house dance floor killer “Heartbeat”, Ichiko Hashimoto and Atsuo Fujimoto hit all the right (and sometimes not-exactly-right-but-truly-genius) notes to create the odd and beautiful, an unparalleled audio escape to the best elsewhere you can think of. Also playing on the album are celebrated musicians Mansaku Kimura, Shuichi “Ponta” Murakami — 1978’s Pacific (V 25AH426), 1981’s KI-Motion by MKWAJU ensemble (WRWTFWW 026CD/LP), collaborations with Jun Fukamachi, Yasuaki Shimizu, Haruomi Hosono… — Kiyohiko Semba, Tamio “Doyo” Kawabata, and Tatsuhiko Hizawa.
File Under: Japanese, New Wave, Avant Garde
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Al Doum & The Faryds: Spirit Rejoin (Black Sweat) LP
Listening to the music of Al Doum & The Faryds is always like staying in the pristine nature of an exotic island, in the sacred harmony of a new organic society; imaging all brothers and sisters singing and dancing in the unity of the brotherhood. This is the message of love and joy that pervade this fourth album, Spirit Rejoin. Moving towards accents of jazz ancestry, the Faryds absorb and re-elaborate — with remarkable insights — disparate elements and influences of electric jazz of the ’70s (Miles Davis, Dr. John) and spiritual jazz (Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry), marrying them with the forceful instances of Afro-free (Pyramids, Alkebu-Lan). The music celebrates a new collective soul, a dancing cathartic ritual with birds, plants, and all the animals, together in the circle of devotion. A journey in the total pranic breath.
File Under: Jazz, Psych, Spiritual
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Jean Dubuffet: Experiences Musicales de Dubuffet (Cacophonic) LP
If ever a phonographic accomplishment could encapsulate the precise modus operandi of the Cacophonic label, then the Expériences Musicales sessions made by French born painter, sculptor, music maker, wine merchant and founder of the Art Brut movement, Jean Dubuffet would be a prime candidate. Originally released as an impossibly rare six record box set containing Dubuffet’s first long anticipated forays into sound sculpture and spontaneous artistic noise, these intimate early 1960’s recordings show a lesser-known side of this important artist’s personality and stand up as a vital document in both fields of contemporary art and experimental music. Finally released to a wider audience and presented complete with Dubuffet’s signature style artwork this abridged vinyl edition includes specific selections curated by the artist himself, in conjunction with experimental music pioneer Ilhan Mimaroglu, and showcase what the two leading lights of modern art consider to be the best moments of this historic session. On this limited vinyl pressing Dubuffet succeeds in translating his unique spontaneous creativity and active support of Low Art into musical forms, a process with which he would also collaborate in his dual compositions with Danish avant-gardener Asger Jorn (for a separate series called Musique Phénoménale). Utilising a wide range of orthodox acoustic instruments ranging from violin and open piano to duck whistles and not musical apparatus this set of eight pieces (culled from a potential twenty tracks made under the Expériences Musicales banner) sees the work of the artist approaching music from the perspective of “a man of 50000 years ago”. Recorded at Galleria del Cavallino in Venice Italy during the first months of 1961, these primary experiments with music followed over twenty years of Dubuffet developing his own unconventional artistic persona as an instantly recognisable pioneer of post-war artistic abstraction. His visual art alone, which would go on to inspire and genuinely motivate artists to feed on there rawest spontaneous instincts (hence the translation of Art Brut, meaning Raw Art), would also have huge influences on writers, performers and musicians (from punk to jazz) to this very day. It is surprising, however, how the fruits of Dubuffet’s short-lived anti-career as a non-musician have never fully filtered down to some of his greatest champions. From an original gallery promoted artifact (which can now command fees of up to 5000 euros complete with its original art-prints intact) this highlighted version of Expériences Musicales is now available again on authentic vinyl to the wider public. The recordings you will find within the grooves of this LP were created without any reference and in the artist own words “without any discipline, without anything that would present the artist from expressing himself freely and for his own good pleasure.” Almost sixty years have passed since this sonic objet d’art was first realised, and with all the technology and the advanced science-of-sound, decades of so-called experimental musicians are still struggling to find that Brut energy within their creative endeavours making this early example one of vital existence.
File Under: Avant Garde
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Earthless: From the West (Silver Current) LP
On the eve of the release of Black Heaven, their debut for Nuclear Blast Records, Earthless turned in this incredible live performance in San Francisco on March 1st, 2018, captured and released on vinyl by Silver Current Records. Since their inception seventeen years ago, this band has become an icon of 21st century heavy music and a cult unto themselves. On From The West the band’s signature high-volume drive and unbridled horsepower create an almost mantra-like repetition as a framework for infinite improvisation. That, and beer-can crushing, fist-pumping riffs and solos delivered by an unstoppable rhythm section. This album is a complete, hypnotic, psychedelic experience in a way that remains totally unique to the band’s virtuosic expression. A live album that captures the band at peak powers and a quintessential fan piece from one of the best live rock bands in the world. Album tracks includes looser, rawer versions of Black Heaven favorites, a nearly twenty minute version of their instrumental titan “Uluru Rock,” and a blazing cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown.” The album jacket is also a meticulous reproduction of the band’s favorite TMOQ (Trademark Of Quality) Zeppelin bootleg.
File Under: Psych, Metal
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The Field: Infinite Moment (Kompakt) LP
Two years on from his last outing, The Follower, Axel Willner puts on his Field suit again to present his sixth full-length effort for Kompakt, Infinite Moment. Infinite Moment sees him striding further across the deeper, richer rims of the hue cycle. In Willner’s own words, “the threshold of creating something new had to be broken”, as had been done with his past albums, including his acclaimed debut From Here We Go Sublime. For Willner, “stepping outside of the studio opened up fresh perspectives on the creation of new music”; it was the opening cut, “Made Of Steel, Made Of Stone”, that got him into the flux of things, “making of the rest of the album easier as I went”. Substituting the up-tempo vim of his previous pieces for a sense of mind-expanding horizontality, Infinite Moment is an album filled with hope and draped in a diffuse, appeasing light, easing the pain and troubles of the human soul through a lushly forested recital of shoegazing modular, complex textural interplays and solar, atmospheric fractals. “Made Of Steel, Made Of Stone” gets the ball rolling on a thumping down-tempo note, which as Willner explains, “gives me a lot of hope”. “Hope is something I’ve been missing in the nowadays climate and this album is a relief to me, a type of comfort, like a moment that feels good and you don’t want to end.” “Divide Now” is a sonic mitosis, engaging the metamorphosis to come; like a larvae pupating and reemerging weeks later from under rough bark in the form of a butterfly – fluttering breaks shed their skin to make way for a more intimate and hypnotic second chapter. “Hear Your Voice” propels the lavish, pad-upholstered glamour of its melodic lines in a bolder syncopated re-visitation of 1980s-indebted pop harmonics, while “Something Left, Something Right, Something Wrong” returns to a flaring post-euphoric daze. A more arrhythmic affair, “Who Goes There” spins out into orbit wildly, fusing acid bass moves with a haunting motorik, playing with the listener’s mind intensely before the ten-minute-long epic “Infinite Moment” ushers its listener into a highly immersive final ballet of buzzing chords, trampling drums and all-consuming drones. This album is a direct soul-to-soul transmission, aiming no further than at finding the right balance between contained emotion and an expressive eloquence.
File Under: Electronic
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Dave Grohl: Play (RCA) LP
Dave Grohl’s Play is a new two-part mini-documentary and corresponding recording featuring a 23-minute original composition written and filmed by the Foo Fighters frontman in which he plays no fewer than seven instruments. Directed by Grohl with assistance from Sound City and Sonic Highways collaborator Mark Monroe, Play is a celebration “of the rewards and challenges of a life dedicated to playing and mastering a musical instrument.” The entire song was played by Grohl, each time on a different instrument, live for 23 minutes. Beginning with the recording of the entire drum track purely from memory, with no sheet music or guide tracks, followed by guitar, then bass, then keyboards, and so on…Grohl tasked himself with a one-man-band recording session that was forced to start from the very beginning of the 23-minute song any time the slightest mistake was made or if Grohl felt he could do a better take.
File Under: Rock
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G.I. Gurdjieff: Improvisations (Fantome Phonographique) LP
Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Improvisations. G.I. Gurdjieff was an Armenian and Greek philosopher, spiritual teacher, and musician, whose teachings of The Fourth Way influenced thousands worldwide and created communities that still exist to this day. His goal was to teach humans to reach a higher consciousness out of the “waking sleep” he considered most to be living in. Music was an important part of his teachings and these brilliant harmonium improvisations were recorded in 1949 in Paris, just a short time before his death. Droning and ethereal, these beautiful pieces mark a pinnacle in the work of a legend of human spirituality. Comes in a heavy sleeve with a hand-numbered sticker.
File Under: Ambient, Minimalism
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Laurel Halo: Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency) LP
“What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled. Laurel Halo presents six instrumental pieces that form a meditative, cinematic listening experience. Inspired by recent film score work for Metahaven and Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Featuring cello work by Oliver Coates and percussion by Eli Keszler. Working in abstraction leads to a deeper longing for touch and closeness. The tactile sensation of struck organ keys and bowed strings, wood and felt on drum heads. Smoke and dirt and stone. Febrile and tactile, hairy and hissy. A clover of highway onramps, a continuous flow, like old leaves melting on their way down a stream at the back of a house. Constant contradiction, the truth’s nowhere.”
File Under: Ambient, Classic, Electronic
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Sarah Hennies: Embedded Environments (Blume) LP
Through a remarkable and singular body of work, over the course of the last decade, the composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies has slowly emerged as one of the definitive voices of her generation. Initially coming to focus as a member of Austin’s experimental music scene during the early 2000s, before relocating to upstate New York, with a delicate, clattering grace, she has continuously offered vision, conceptual armature, crucial understanding for the contemporary proximity of avant-garde, and experimental practice. Entirely of her moment, she defies what we know and expect, owing allegiance to none. Hennies has been darting around the edges of modern composition for years, but that world has never been an entirely comfortable fit, nor is it the best framework and context within which to approach her work. She is better understood in the proximity of figures like Jim O’Rourke, a creator of a countercultural music, which incorporates everything, while owing loyalty to none. Hennies could equally be framed with composers like Steve Reich, Arthur Russell, Julius Eastman, and Mary Jane Leach, all of whom struggled to create more inclusive musical hybrids, attacking the institutions as they stood. As these figures once were, Hennies’s position within the contemporary landscape is challenging and requires work to understand. Her music isn’t always what it seems. What is unquestionable is that it is entirely of this moment and not a product of appropriation or pastiche. Comprised of two site-specific compositions — “Foragers” and “Embedded Environments” — recorded in a silo in Buffalo, New York, these recordings are a crowning moment within the long arc of Hennies’s practice. Each work is composed for a quartet of percussionists — Jason Bauers, Tim Feeney, and Bob Fullex, with Hennies contributing on vibraphone and percussion. While “Foragers” and “Embedded Environments” are products of Hennies’s quest for elemental meaning and relationships within sound — those which lay beyond traditional understandings of structure, beat, and tone, here there is a third and unfamiliar actor in play: the space itself. Activated by the silo for which they were composed, Hennies’s broken, staggering rhythms and resonances are offered new freedom through a seductive Trojan horse, pushing them toward even more complex and jarring depths. “Foragers” and “Embedded Environments” delves into a realm of ideas, proximity, and place, offering a new vision for our sonic present, and what may be to come. Edition of 300.
File Under: Experimental, Drone
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Arve Henriksen: The Height of the Reeds (Rune Grammofon) LP
The Height Of The Reeds started as a commissioned work to the city of Hull, Great Britain´s cultural capital 2017. Composed by Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang, the work celebrates the longstanding seafaring relationship between Hull and Scandinavia. It was originally the musical companion to a sound walk that took place in April, May and June 2017. Those who took part could listen to the music on headphones while crossing the Humber Bridge. Initially intended for April only, the arrangement proved so popular it ended up selling out three months. Only minor adjustments have been done to justify the transition from sound walk to album. Other than Henriksen, Aarset and Bang, the work includes important contributions from Hull sound artist Jez Riley French, providing field recordings from the bridge itself: the river below, the noise of engines, the creaking of steel wires, wheels against asphalt and the song of the reeds in the wind. Opera North´s choir and orchestra provides the necessary musical space for the soloists, and two actors and a child read from translated poems by Norwegian poet Nils Christian Moe-Repstad.
File Under: Jazz, Electronic
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Arve Henriksen: Composograph (Rune Grammophon) LP
Recorded at the same Rainbow Studio sessions, and with the same top musicians and legendary engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, this can only be seen as the rightful twin companion to The Nature Of Connections from 2014. One can easily understand how Arve Henriksen must have found it difficult to select tracks for The Nature Of Connections, leaving these on the shelf. Composograph is standing rock solid as a top notch Henriksen album. There are the typical folk music ties, courtesy of fiddlers Nils Økland and Gjermund Larsen, contemporary chamber jazz, nods to avant free music and atmospheric tone poems. All in all, twelve exquisite originals from one of the world´s leading trumpet players.
File Under: Jazz, Electronic
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Pierre Henry: Orphee Ballet (Fantome Phonographique) LP
Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Pierre Henry’s Orphée Ballet, originally released in 1964. Scored for Maurice Béjart’s choreography to the Orphée Ballet, based on the Greek god, Orpheus, this is one of Pierre Henry’s finest works of musique concrète, the genre in which Henry was an early innovator and to which he devoted his career. After years working for the French national radio (RTF) and honing his studio chops on radio spots and editing/composition, Henry formed his own studio in 1958 and began working on modern dance and ballet and soundtrack work. Incorporating percussion, industrial soundscapes, nature sounds, spoken French narrative, and synthesized tones, Orphée Ballet is a beautiful piece that while less known than what is perhaps his most famous work, also for Béjart’s ballet production, 1967’s Les Jerks Électroniques De La Messe Pour Le Temps Présent Et Musiques Concrètes Pour Maurice Béjart, is equally compelling and groundbreaking. Following his passing in 2017 at age 89, Henry’s work has found renewed interest, and this is a welcome reissue of one of his rarest and finest works. Truly brilliant. Comes in a heavy sleeve with a hand-numbered sticker.
File Under: Avant Garde, Musique Concrete
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Jay Glass Dubs: Plegnic (Ecstatic) LP
Jay Glass Dubs sublimates Athenian distress and ennui into plasmic dub ether on Plegnic, his lushly evolved first collection of new material for Ecstatic, following from on from Dubs. Where Dubs was a set of his earliest, hard-to-find tape releases, deconstructing and rebuilding Jamaican dub with Musique Concrete production methods and a lingering air of inspiration from classic 4AD, new age and laïko, or Greek popular music, on Plegnic Jay Glass Dubs fascinatingly evolves his sound with richer melodic and harmonic arrangements in a concerted effort to expand the nostalgic, esoteric and dance floor dimensions of his unique sound world. Plegnic is an extinct word meaning “to strike like a hammer”, and offers a palpable sense of nostalgia. In this archaic context, JGD uses vintage machines and obsolete samples in conjunction with vocals from Yorgia Karydi — former beau of his childhood neighbor, and Andreas Kassapis, one of his oldest friends, who provides the cover art — to conjure a mutated take on classic and well-trodden styles, metaphorically and anachronistically renewing their purpose while connoting his newfound dance floor drive in the process. Recording took place at his mother’s house in the Athens suburbs, with Fugazi’s Steady Diet Of Nothing on repeat. It was here that he dug out an old Juno, a Yamaha RX5 drum computer, and some “crappier equipment” that provides the structural scaffold to his array of nostalgic, melancholic Laïka samples, which could be considered the diffused soul of this superb five part-crop. On the A-side he sets out to spook with the desiccated, stepper’s motion of “Temple Dub” featuring heavily processed vocals by Karidi, but heady nostalgia takes over with a sublime tactility in the vaulted chorales and reverb tails of “Umbro Dub”, and again in the aching sehnsucht of “Mouthless Dub”, where traces of Laïka’s bouzouki melodies glimmer. However, the B-side is far more upfront and up-for-it, putting weight behind the cranky skank of “Dry Dub” with its hexagonal drums and acidic bass squirm, then in the super-squashed swagger of “Fearless Dub”, the near-ten-minute pinnacle of his dance floor output to date. Ultimately, Jay Glass Dubs’s music is riddled with the kind of nostalgia that can make an unfamiliar piece of music feel like an intense déjà entendu, like you’ve heard it before in a dream or some altered state; that’s a rare and precious thing. Limited to 500.
File Under: Electronic, Dub
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Laurent Jeanneau: Music of Southern Laos (Akuphone) LP
Music of Southern Laos, subtitled Provinces of Champasak, Attapeu, Sekong and Saravan. One part of Akuphone’s collection of Laotian music. Includes liner notes in English, French, and Japanese and a download code. Akuphone presents a collection of recordings of various musical practices from the Laotian provinces of Champasak, Attapeu, Sekong, Saravan, Luang Namtha and Phongsaly. These documents are a perfect introduction to the traditional music of South Laos minority groups. Popular modern music is widely spread but visitors are barely ever exposed to ancient acoustic practices from villages. As a matter of fact, mouth organs of various sizes exist among the Hmong and Bit as well as amazing vocal techniques among the Lantene, Ahka, or Khmu who combine simultaneous singing and flute notes. This collection also compels one to discover the Brao gongs, the Triang bamboo flutes, the Lao, Ta Oy, Alak, OI, Pacoh, or Nyaheun mouth organs as well as the powerful singing accompanying these instruments. Caught on the spot, these outstanding testimonies were collected between 2006 and 2013 by Laurent Jeanneau, aka Kink Gong. Through his researches, this self-taught ethnologist has gradually become one of the specialists of the field, building up a collection of complete and fascinating sound archives which contribute documenting parts of this immaterial heritage. Music of Southern and Northern Laos brings some light on a region of South East Asia still largely unknown from the general audience as well as the recently reborn ethnographic musical industry. This compilation will delight both molam/khene lovers and beginners unused to South East Asian sounds.
File Under: World, Asia, Field Recordings
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Laurent Jeanneau: Music of Northern Laos (Akuphone) LP
Music of Northern Laos, subtitled Provinces of Luang Namtha et Phongsaly. One part of Akuphone’s collection of Laotian music. Includes liner notes in English, French, and Japanese and a download code. Akuphone presents a collection of recordings of various musical practices from the Laotian provinces of Champasak, Attapeu, Sekong, Saravan, Luang Namtha and Phongsaly. These documents are a perfect introduction to the traditional music of South Laos minority groups. Popular modern music is widely spread but visitors are barely ever exposed to ancient acoustic practices from villages. As a matter of fact, mouth organs of various sizes exist among the Hmong and Bit as well as amazing vocal techniques among the Lantene, Ahka, or Khmu who combine simultaneous singing and flute notes. This collection also compels one to discover the Brao gongs, the Triang bamboo flutes, the Lao, Ta Oy, Alak, OI, Pacoh, or Nyaheun mouth organs as well as the powerful singing accompanying these instruments. Caught on the spot, these outstanding testimonies were collected between 2006 and 2013 by Laurent Jeanneau, aka Kink Gong. Through his researches, this self-taught ethnologist has gradually become one of the specialists of the field, building up a collection of complete and fascinating sound archives which contribute documenting parts of this immaterial heritage. Music of Southern and Northern Laos brings some light on a region of South East Asia still largely unknown from the general audience as well as the recently reborn ethnographic musical industry. This compilation will delight both molam/khene lovers and beginners unused to South East Asian sounds.
File Under: World, Asia, Field Recordings
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K2: The Rust (Hospital Productions) LP
Hospital Productions presents a reissue of K2’s The Rust, originally released in 1996. From its imposing cover featuring massive Japanese characters fading from red to orange to yellow in a descending gradient to the title itself, rust would not have been enough for this edifice of decay. It is the rust, the final rust, the purest rust. The presentation only reiterates that this work is process driven, that it does not stop moving, clinging, falling, eroding, and covering its subject. As moisture turns metal to dust, this is Kimihide Kusafuka’s grand mastering of decay. The Rust is a four-part cut-up metal junk noise classic. Not to be confused with the typical high octane ’70s psych rock-obsessed outpourings by many of Japan’s more well-known noise elite, K2 has settled on a physical process of his own that gets at the inner workman surrounded by the urban accumulation of not-so-precious metals. Like the towering waterfront refinery, or the wrought iron fence outside one’s door that they may pass on their way to a busy morning routine, The Rust grinds away and piles on multi-track recordings that are violent and caustic and physical yet totally arcane in their construction. How was this made? Was K2 the executor of a junkyard? Has he lived among the ruins of automobiles, or perhaps locomotives based on the sheer dynamic range and scale of the rust? But that would be too misleading as when the gates open, naked moments are heard of isolated scraping and the unmistakable clutter of metal on metal sounds, pounded by human fists. The beating of metal is coated in feedback solvents and slashed with flange by Kusafuka’s self-described “Friktor” device that apparently exhumes the soul of any aluminum, steel, and cast-iron sheets. These liberated industrial ‘neighbors’ that we live among and construct our dwelling places with ascend to spheres and cities of their own. The rust will crush you with its weight, it will question the scale of your body, and it will cut away at your patience of watching water erode metal to dust. Recorded 1996 in Chiba, Japan for Kinky Music Institute, The Rust appears here on vinyl for the first time, faithfully remastered by Kris Lapke (Alberich). Gatefold sleeve with the original artwork; Rust-colored vinyl; Edition of 250.
File Under: Japan, Noise, Experimental
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Roland Kayn: Simultan (Die Schachtel) 3LP Box
First in the series of LP boxsets documenting the birth of Roland Kayn’s cybernetic music. One of the great pioneers of electronic, computer, and instrumental avant-garde music, for the majority of his life, the German composer Roland Kayn remained almost entirely unknown, a founding member of the legendary ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, heralded as a singular genius by a small number of figures like Jim O’Rourke. Though the composer was included within Deutsche Grammophon’s seminal Avant-Garde series during the early 1970s, it wasn’t until 2017, six years after his death, that the ranks of his fans began to noticeably swell, following the release of his monumental work, A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound by Frozen Reeds. Die Schachtel present a reissue here of Simultan, an overwhelmingly important work in his canon, from 1977, stretching across three LPs. While Roland Kayn might be easily described as a composer of electronic, electro-acoustic, or computer music, the majority of his career was in fact largely dedicated to the revolutionary sculpting of an entirely new territory of sound: cybernetic music, a generative process of composition through programming. Simultan was among the first of the composer’s works to emerge from this process. Cybernetic music grew from Kayn’s longstanding engagement and fascination with data processing theory. This territory of creativity was the composer’s attempt to allow sound to be self-sufficient, stripping away notions of harmony, melody, and rhythm, deploying complex networks of electronic devices. Created during the period in which Kayn was living in the Netherlands and recorded with the assistance of electronic music legends Jaap Vink and Leo Küpper, Simultan is filled with a remarkable sense of humanity and touch. The sounds on Simultan range from seductive ambiences, grinding swells of atonally and pure texture, to buried tone clusters. “The mystery, the grace, the boundless invention — Kayn’s machine music is a vast catalogue of very human wonder.” –The Guardian Remastered from the original analog master tapes. Includes booklet with new liner notes. Includes printed inner sleeves. Standard edition comes in an edition of 400.
File Under: Electronic, Avant Garde
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Konstrukt & Keiji Haino: A Philosophy Warping, Little by Little That Way Lies a Quagmire (Karlrecords) LP
Second album by Turkish free jazzers Konstrukt and the Japanese avant-garde/noise icon Keiji Haino, this time recorded live in concert. Celebrating their tenth anniversary these days, Konstrukt have since been creating an impressive catalog including collaborations/performances with significant musicians like Peter Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Akira Sakata, Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Michael Zerang, Alfred Harth, or Alexander Hawkins that gained them an ever growing audience and media attention (e.g. a recent feature in the Wire), and they keep exploring new grounds. Like in 2016 when Konstrukt invited Keiji Haino to their home town of Istanbul for a recording session that resulted in a quite unique album: A Philosophy Warping, Little By Little That Way Lies A Quagmire offered — besides all the elements you may well expect from such a musical meeting like Konstrukt’s “acerbic razor-edged sound” (Mark Corroto, AllAboutJazz) and Haino’s unmistakable voice/guitar explosions — some actual surprises like the really groovy opening track with a funky feel and a kind of ’70s fusion style album closer. Two days later the free jazz quartet and the Japanese avant-garde icon continued their adventure with a public performance at SalonIKSY, pushing things further and raising the level of energy and rawness. Carrying the same title, A Philosophy Warping, Little By Little That Way Lies A Quagmire proves a condign sister release to their previous studio effort (KR 043LP, 2017). Or, as the famous Asian phrase goes: “same same but different!”. Recorded and mixed by Deniz Sağdıç at SalonIKSY, Istanbul. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Cover painting “Solar” by Artur Trojanowski. Personnel: Korhan Futacı – alto and tenor saxophones, zurna, kaval, sipsi, instant loops, voice; Umut Çaglar – Moog (MicroMoog), Korg (X-911), gralla, bamboo flutes, xylophones, percussion, tape echo, Vermona (Retroverb); Berkan Tilavel – Nord (Drum2) electronic percussion, tef, cymbal; Erdem Göymen – drums, cymbals, percussion; Keiji Haino – electric guitar, percussion, voice, air synths. Includes download.
File Under: Jazz
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Loretta Lynn: Wouldn’t it be Great? (Legacy) LP
One of the most deeply personal albums of Loretta Lynn’s career, Wouldn’t It Be Great communicates in song the hard truths and spiritual insights the music icon has gathered throughout her life and reflects the resilience that sustains her still. Comprised entirely of songs written (or co-written) by Loretta, the album premieres new compositions alongside soulful reinterpretations of enduring classics from her catalog. Like its predecessor, the critically-acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Full Circle (2016), Wouldn’t It Be Great was mainly recorded at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, TN, with producers Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash. “Wouldn’t It Be Great?” is the last song Loretta wrote for her late husband (Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn). “Well,” Loretta observes, “my husband liked to drink a lot and that’s where that song comes from…’Say you love me just one time, with a sober mind’… I always liked that song but I never liked to sing it around Doo.” “That song just always meant so much to me,” continues their daughter (and album co-producer) Patsy Lynn Russell, “because of the lyrics, you know, ‘when my fancy lace couldn’t turn your face,’ it was just so powerful and was a song that needed to be recorded for this album with Loretta. It shows just how masterful my mom is with writing down her feelings.” An exploration of Loretta’s songwriting, Wouldn’t It Be Great finds her communicating the universality of human experience – love in all its intoxication and heartbreak, the abiding things of soul and spirit, the transformative power of music and connecting to the world. Wouldn’t It Be Great debuts new songs – “Ruby’s Stool,” “Ain’t No Time To Go,” “I’m Dying For Someone To Live For” – alongside newly recorded renditions of recent compositions (“God Makes No Mistakes,” from Lynn’s 2004 Grammy-winning Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose) and immortal classics like “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (the song Loretta says she’s most proud to have written, also the title of her 1976 memoir and subsequent Oscar-winning 1982 film adaptation) and “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind),” her first of 16 career No. 1 country singles.
File Under: Country
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Pixies: Come on Pilgrim… It’s Surfer Rosa (4AD) 3LP
30th anniversary edition of the Pixies’ very first release, the eight-track mini-album, Come On Pilgrim (1987) and the band’s first full album, Surfer Rosa (1988). The triple CD and LP editions feature new artwork re-imagined by original designer Vaughan Oliver and the bonus disc, Live From The Fallout Shelter – one of the earliest recordings of the band, a radio concert that first aired in late 1986 on WJUL-FM in Lowell, MA. It’s been three decades since the release of Surfer Rosa – a record made up of rage, religion, gore, incest and superheroes named Tony – a debut album so good that it’s since seen as a masterpiece. A year prior came Come On Pilgrim, a mini-album released in 1987 which contained cuts culled from their first ever studio session, where they famously recorded seventeen tracks in just three days (in full, this session makes up the band’s much bootlegged and now officially released The Purple Tape). These formative records showed the Pixies to be an alien breed; four oddball outsiders from Boston blending US underground thrash rock, indie surf pop and Spanish-language flamenco with the Biblical mythology of Black Francis’ childhood.
File Under: Indie Rock
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Michael Price: Tender Symmetry (Erased Tapes) LP
Emmy award-winning composer Michael Price returns with Tender Symmetry, his second album with Erased Tapes. The ambitious musical project takes in a series of iconic National Trust locations across the UK as its inspiration, turning them into unlikely recording spaces. Michael and a host of musicians and collaborators – including soprano Grace Davidson (featured on Max Richter’s Sleep) and Shards (the choir on Nils Frahm’s All Melody) – traveled across the country in pursuit of places far removed from the traditional recording studio to create seven unique and moving pieces, straddling the past and the future. The diversity of Price’s choices range from the ruins of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire to the Fan Bay WWII shelter, cut deep into the chalk cliffs of Dover. All owned by the National Trust save one, each venue became both the inspiration and the recording studio for Michael Price and his accompaniment of renowned musical ensembles, choirs and soloists. Acoustics varied wildly as the artists moved from places designed with sound in mind to locations which demanded the use of miners’ helmets for light and battery-powered sound gear. Produced by Price and Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths, the final recordings carry the genuinely unique sonic blueprints and spirit of each place – from the birdsong in the courtyard at Speke Hall to the steam-driven cotton mill accompaniment at Quarry Bank. “When we recorded the piece at Fan Bay in the World War II shelter deep inside the chalk cliffs of Dover, Peter Gregson’s cello wasn’t at all happy with the clammy, dank conditions; but to be in the tunnels where young soldiers spent months on end, constantly on alert for incoming bombers, gave the recording an extraordinarily intimate, moving quality,” explains Price. “At each site, the human mixed with the historical, and the natural environment of each space comes through with each piece. I tried to leave an imprint of each location on the record.” While each piece of music is named after the location in which it was created, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience courses through them as well. Soprano Grace Davidson sings Blake’s poignant words about nature, religion and the industrial revolution on several of the pieces including the astoundingly beautiful album closer “Shade Of Dreams,” written after the birth of Michael’s daughter. “The final piece, Shade of Dreams, is part of a group of pieces I wrote for the birth of our daughter, Emilie. It, like all the works on the album, takes its text from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, in this case, A Cradle Song. As much as Tender Symmetry is about the past, it is firmly about the future, and all our of shared futures,” adds Price. Alongside soprano Grace Davidson and Shards choir, other performers include virtuoso cellist Peter Gregson, new music experimentalists Immix Ensembleand Manchester Collective.
File Under: Modern Classical
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Probot: s/t (Southern Lord) LP
Circa 2004 Southern Lord’s brother in metal Dave Grohl told the label about some metal songs he had written and recorded with the dream of getting some of his favorite metal vocalists from the’ 80s to put their pipes on. The instrumentals they heard were legit bangers and Southern Lord could not wait to hear the result of what this insanely sick project would manifest itself as. Probot was that result and the eponymous album under the moniker is absolutely one of the favorite releases the label ever had the honor of being involved with. Grohl wrote, recorded and played most instruments on all tracks while heavy metal’s most upper crust like Cronos, Max Cavalera, Lemmy, Mike Dean, Kurt Brecht, Lee Dorrian, Wino, Tom G. Warrior, Snake, Eric Wagner and King Diamond burned their vocals onto these raging tracks! Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil also appears on a few cuts.
File Under: Metal, Foo Fighters
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Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes: Ame Debout (Anthology) LP
“Anthology Recordings is pleased to announce the reissue of the long out of print — and never before officially issued in the US — trilogy of albums by Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes, 1970’s N°2, 1971’s Âme Debout, and 1972’s Paix. Anthology’s presentation of these foundational LPs, arguably the group’s finest hours on wax, fills in a crucial missing link in the canon of psychedelic and experimental music of the 60s and 70s. In a lineage with other uncompromising women singers such as Edith Piaf, Nico, and Diamanda Galas, Ribeiro’s is a sound of possession, of ritual. Her approach shares more with performance art than it does with pop music. It’s the sound of love and madness and political tumult, stripped bare and emerged from dark recesses. With her weighty voice, she emphasized expression and meaning over immaculate, adventurous musicality. Each LP includes its own insert featuring photos and original press material culled from Ribeiro’s personal archive. Limited first run of 750.”
File Under: Psych, Experimental, French
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Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes: No2 (Anthology) LP
“Anthology Recordings is pleased to announce the reissue of the long out of print — and never before officially issued in the US — trilogy of albums by Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes, 1970’s N°2, 1971’s Âme Debout, and 1972’s Paix. Anthology’s presentation of these foundational LPs, arguably the group’s finest hours on wax, fills in a crucial missing link in the canon of psychedelic and experimental music of the 60s and 70s. In a lineage with other uncompromising women singers such as Edith Piaf, Nico, and Diamanda Galas, Ribeiro’s is a sound of possession, of ritual. Her approach shares more with performance art than it does with pop music. It’s the sound of love and madness and political tumult, stripped bare and emerged from dark recesses. With her weighty voice, she emphasized expression and meaning over immaculate, adventurous musicality. Each LP includes its own insert featuring photos and original press material culled from Ribeiro’s personal archive. Limited first run of 750.”
File Under: Psych, Experimental, French
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Catherine Ribeiro & Alpes: Paix (Anthology) LP
“Anthology Recordings is pleased to announce the reissue of the long out of print — and never before officially issued in the US — trilogy of albums by Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes, 1970’s N°2, 1971’s Âme Debout, and 1972’s Paix. Anthology’s presentation of these foundational LPs, arguably the group’s finest hours on wax, fills in a crucial missing link in the canon of psychedelic and experimental music of the 60s and 70s. In a lineage with other uncompromising women singers such as Edith Piaf, Nico, and Diamanda Galas, Ribeiro’s is a sound of possession, of ritual. Her approach shares more with performance art than it does with pop music. It’s the sound of love and madness and political tumult, stripped bare and emerged from dark recesses. With her weighty voice, she emphasized expression and meaning over immaculate, adventurous musicality. Each LP includes its own insert featuring photos and original press material culled from Ribeiro’s personal archive. Limited first run of 750.”
File Under: Psych, Experimental, French
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Akira Sakata: Fisherman’s.com (Trost) LP
Trost have unearthed another gem from the Japanese jazz maestro Akira Sakata, together with Bill Laswell, Hamid Drake, and Pete Cosey. Fisherman’s.com was released originally on CD, Japan-only, by Starlets Records in 2001. This release marks its first time on vinyl and available worldwide. Fisherman’s.com is Sakata’s ode to folksongs of the sea — an intense personal statement on the fluidity of tradition. Personnel: Akira Sakata – alto saxophone, vocals, synth; Bill Laswell – bass, synth; Hamid Drake – drums; Pete Cosey – guitar.
File Under: Jazz
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The Sha La Das: Love in the Wind (Daptone) LP
The musicians and production team behind the great Charles Bradley present Daptone/Dunham Records’ newest sensations! Direct from Staten Island, The Sha La Das (a play on their surname, Schalda) are a musical family in every sense of the phrase. We’re talking real-deal, shoot-from-the-hip group harmonies of the highest order. The band is comprised of Patriarch, Bill – who honed his skill and cultivated his ear for harmonies at an early age, singing on the streets of Brooklyn with other neighborhood kids – and his sons Will, Paul and Carmine, all musicians in their own right (The Extraordinaires, Swivs, Paul And The Tall Trees). The genesis of the Sha La Das came to fruition when an old friend, Tommy Brenneck (Dunham/Daptone producer and musician), called upon the Schalda boys to sing back-ups on Bradley’s now classic Victim of Love. The second Tommy heard the four Schaldas sing he knew he had to make a record with them. This idea soon developed into a passion whose fruits have been cut into the 12″ masterpiece presented here. From the opening atmospheric guitar strum of “Open My Eyes” via a walk along the Coney Island boardwalk catching the last glimpse of sunlight at dusk of “Carnival” to the sublime crescendo of harmonies of the winsome “Love in the Wind,” each song evokes a deeply personal yet universal yearning that none of us can escape. Quite simply every song yields magic. So sit back, close your eyes and take in The Sha La Das Love in the Wind. Let the full realization of their harmonies wash over the lush instrumentation of the Menahan Street Band, and float into the starlit summer’s night.
File Under: RnB, Soul
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Archie Shepp Meets Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio: Conversations (Black Sweat) LP
If Conversations celebrates the memory, the artistic and spiritual heritage of bassist Fred Hopkins — a historical member of the revolutionary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of Chicago — who died in January 1999, it also marks the amazing collaboration between the Ritual Trio of Kahil El’Zabar (with Ari Brown and Malachi Favors) and the intrepid veteran Archie Shepp, the great voice of the ’70s Afro-free-jazz. Being a tribute that invites to an intimate memory, almost an antidote to exorcise the loss of a brother, the music is a spiritual hymn to life. Between ballads, hard-bop, and free-improvised accents, blow winds of vibrant pianistic chiaroscuros, which are reminiscent of the best McCoy Tyner in the great blinding quartet of John Coltrane in the ’60s. Furthermore, when an angular rhythmic base decisively follows the typical hypnotic ostinato of the ancient tribal rituals, the voice is expressed in the purest black spirituals (Big Fred and Brother Malcolm), pervading some moments of that “Holiness” culture dear to the dawn of Afro-American identity. Here, Shepp brings back the flaming shivers of the golden age, when his message of freedom resonated the true spirits of primordial Africa.
File Under: Jazz
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Midori Takada & Lafawndah: Le Renard Bleu (K7) LP
Le Renard Bleu, the new musical and cinematic collaboration between Lafawndah and composer Midori Takada, and filmmakers Partel Oliva, takes a cross-generational echo as ground zero for recovering a crucial myth for uncertain times: the blue fox. As transmitted by Takada, the fox appears in both ancient Senegalese and Japanese folktales as the trickster archetype. Above all else, the fox is famous for its cunning nature. Renard Bleu marks the first new music released by Takada in nearly twenty years. Her first solo record, 1983’s Through The Looking Glass, has been rediscovered and heralded as a lost classic; the influence of her percussion trio, the MKWAJU Ensemble, continues to permeate and inspire a new generation. Takada has performed in numerous film score orchestras, including the ensemble for Akira Kurasawa’s Dreams (1990), coincidentally a key influence on Renard Bleu. In the ensuing years, Takada has worked closely with theater group the Suzuki Company of Toga on productions of Electra and King Lear, an experience, she says, that allowed her to pursue “a unity of music, body and space.” Equally, it is Lafawndah’s freedom of tone, decentralized maps of ancient and modern music cultures, and alloying of devotional intensity with modern songcraft casts her as a distinct relative of Midori Takada’s. One can trace the influence of artists such as Meredith Monk, Carlos Sara, and Andy Kaufman as much as musical antecedents AR Rahmann, Missy Elliott, or Geinoh Yamashirogumi. It is in a mutual commitment to this unity that Lafawndah, Takada, and Partel Oliva find fertile aesthetic common ground. The music of Renard Bleu originated in Takada’s preoccupation with the legend of the fox; after constructing a vivid instrumental composition dramatizing the spirit animal’s journeys through waterphone, bells, marimba, and various forms of drums, Lafawndah responded — in her inimitable mix of fairytale and undertow — with melodies and lyrics capturing a dialogue between her and the fox himself. Eventually, the duo met in Tokyo for a week of communing with the material at Avaco Creative Studios, where new elements were composed on site. Created in partnership with KENZO and premiered today via their channels, it was Partel Oliva who imagined a contemporary cinematic frame for the myth of the fox to reappear, creating a hybrid of choreography and narrative around Takada and Lafawndah’s performance of their joint composition (also titled Le Renard Bleu). 20+ minute project/track.
File Under: Ambient, Experimental, Percussion
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Traden (Trad, Gras Och Stenar): s/t (Subliminal Sound) LP
A brand-new studio album from Träden (“The Trees”), formerly known as Träd, Gräs och Stenar (“Trees Grass and Stones”) in different incarnations, but often just called Träden for short. Through long, crescendoing improvisations, Träden has found their own unique path in the music world for decades, creating a music with room for everyone. Many younger musicians and friends of minimalist, experimental music have been inspired and followed, astonished that a bunch of Swedish hippies made the planet’s most hypnotic, moss-fragrant psychedelic trance rock. Today, Träden consists of Hanna Östergren (Hills), Sigge Krantz (Archimedes Badkar), Reine Fiske (Dungen, The Amazing), and originator Jakob Sjöholm. Nisse Törnquist (Amason) also plays on three of the songs. In this latest, celebrated edition, the band has played for sold-out houses all over Sweden and other parts of the globe. “When we decided to record and release a new album it’s the people who are now in the group that plays on it. We have become a band again in the way that we can once again get out and gig more regularly. The name change is a way of freeing ourselves from the old band and its idiom, thus opening our minds to let the music find new ways, simply giving us more artistic freedom,” explains Jakob Sjöholm. The new album was recorded at Träden’s countryside music workshop and in good old TGS tradition, much of the material emerged by jamming. Then there are some songs that demanded some toil and despair. It has been a process where everyone in the band has been deeply involved throughout the course of work, in all stages of the production; from the first musical notes to the last choice of colors and images for the album sleeve. The music on the new album makes one to let go and be swept along in a soaring, endearing ecstasy, and be thrown into a wild but safe forest. Even though the band constellation has changed successively, the majestic roar continues. Sometimes the loudness is lifted out to the big, eccentric carpentry and chopped down to a nice “tree porridge”. Or on contemplatively growing songs, where the guitars’ winding and whirling calls to the very highest air bearings. Many fans describe Träden’s rough-cut music in almost spiritual terms. Träden answers with some mighty songs where the band reaches the mind-expanding oscillation that seems to only occur in their music.
File Under: Psych, Prog
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Univers Zero: Ceux du Dehors (Sub Rosa) LP
Ceux Du Dehors is the third album by Belgian band Univers Zero, originally released in 1981. The title alludes to the short story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft; the players read the story in studio, then proceeded to record the piece. A key release for the band, Ceux Du Dehors sometimes suggests a darker and more complex version of the motorik minimalism of classical music contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich. It finds the group continuing to evolve and return to the more general and varied chamber music sound of their first release, 1977’s 1313 (SR 399LP), except with more precision and skill. The tricky charts of percussionist Daniel Denis and new keyboardist Andy Kirk are executed with great panache. The labyrinthine compositions are typically filled with unexpected twists and turns, and angular repetitions of jagged riffs that accelerate, decelerate and mutate in passages of acute tension or quiet but ominous dread. Vinyl comes on clear/red vinyl.
File Under: Prog
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Various: B-Music of Jean Rollin (Finders Keepers) LP
Rising out of the smokey Parisian Mai 68 shrapnel and claiming his stake as the first French vampire movie director, the inimitable father of European Horrortica, Jean Rollin (1938-2010) has smudged the painted face of surrealist cinema for over five decades. Dragging his roots from beneath the Letterist/Situationist movements, avant-garde theatre and Belgian fine art groups and entwining them around the minds of sexual revolutionaries, the European comic book cognoscenti and the Parisian free jazz and rock scenes, Rollin stopped at nothing to bring his macabre phantasies of zygotic vampyrism and backwoods blood cults to Gallic cinematheques and beyond. Celebrating the immortal legacy of the late director Finders Keepers Records compile a detailed and comprehensive music cabinet of some of the finest musical moments from his initial directorial decade between 1968-1979, which provided a m much needed platform for the freak rock and free jazz that mirrored the distorted erotic visions in his own mind’s eye. Imagine Gong-gone-wrong meeting the Art Ensembles Of Châteauroux… Fantasy pop groups mutate and thrive within…
File Under: OST, Psych, Jazz, Experimental
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Various: Britxotica! Goes Wild!: Percussive Pop & Crazy Latin (Trunk) LP
Trunk presents Volume Five of the killer Britxotica! series, looking this time at 16 super-rare and brilliantly bonkers Latin and percussive pop cues from the wild British Isles! Britxotica! (pronounced “Britzotica”) neatly describes an odd and yet-undocumented pre-Beatles British musical scene where famed UK composers as well as unknown singers and bandleaders threw away convention on holiday and went wild, wild, wild! Put together by Jonny Trunk with DJ/tastemaker and Smashing nightclub legend Martin Green, these groundbreaking new compilations shine a light on lost and forgotten corners of British culture and sound. For Britxotica! Goes Wild!, part five of our planned Britxotica! series we head to lively Latin-tinged dance floors where Brits could cha-cha-cha to the Kirchin band, “Jump In The Line” with Frank Holder and mambo with Ido or Don. This killer collection of British dance obscurities brings us lively sounds from the rarest UK record bins, including this time an amazing cover version of the legendary lounge-core hit “House Of Bamboo” plus the stunning “Jonny One Note” by Ted Heath, the track that originally introduced John Craven’s Newsround. To sum up, this is another exciting, wild and occasionally bonkers compilation by Jonny Trunk and Martin Green, two of the UK’s most wild record collectors. Also, there are men in underpants on the sleeve, what’s not to like? All cues mastered and sequenced by Jon Brooks, aka The Advisory Circle. Also features: Marion Ryan, Chico Arnez, Eve Boswell, Neville Taylor, Tony Scott, Frank Chacksfield, Charles Blackwell, Edmundo Ros, and Victor Silvester.
File Under: Exotica
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Various: Killed By Death #15 New Zealand Rare Punk 77-82 (Redrum) LP
Another installment in this legendary series, this time centered in the obscure and extremely interesting early New Zealand punk rock scene. 13 tracks of pure Killed By Death mayhem by the likes of kiwi luminaries such as Suburban Reptiles, Scavengers, Toy Love, The Spelling Mistakes, and many more. No hippie shit, no disco, just pure punk rock bliss. Enjoy, mate. Also features Proud Scum, The Terrorways, Superettes, Features, Marching Girls, The Androidss, Riot 111, Dum Dum Boys, and Desperate Measures.
File Under: Punk
Various: Zamaan Ya Sukkar (Radio Martiko) LP
Zamaan Ya Sukkar is a rich musical portrait from the time when Cairo was the vibrant cultural heart of the Middle East and the grandeur of the leading orchestras was incomparable. Unearthed Latin and jazz-tinged tracks will let your mind drift off to the glamorous nightlife of ’60s Cairo. Meet some forgotten souls of the Egyptian music scene and cinema world. Sensual voices and Bollywood-like orchestra sounds inflame the senses of the body with an intangible exotic twist! All music is remastered from original 45s produced by Sono Cairo. Features Salim El Baroudi, Sayed Salamah, Abd Al Fattah Mansi, Soad Mohamed, Al Thourathy Al Mareh, Taha Al-Ugayl, Mohamed Fawzy, and Magda Ali. Includes download.
File Under: World, Jazz, Exotica
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…..Restocks…..
Leon Bridges: Coming Home (Columbia) LP
Dylan Carlson: Conquistador (Sargent House) LP
Conan: Existential (Napalm) LP
Billie Holiday: Lady In Satin (Legacy) LP
Khotin: New Tab (Pacific R) LP
Low: Double Negative (Kranky) LP
Abul Mogard: Above All Dream (Ecstatic)LP
Kevin Morby: City Music (Dead Oceans) LP
Willie Nelson: Troublemaker (Columbia) LP
Paul Page: Pacific Paradise (Subliminal Sounds) LP
Sarah Shook: Sidelong (Bloodshot) LP
Sarah Shook: Years (Bloodshot) LP
Snail Mail: Lush (Matador) LP
St. Paul & The Broken Bones : Young Sick Camellia (Records) LP
Jean Claude Vannier: L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches (Finders Keepers) LP
Wire: Chairs Missing (Pink Flag) LP
Young Fathers: Cocoa Sugar (Ninja Tune) LP
Various: Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles (Numero) LP
Various: Son Cubano NYC (Honest Jons) LP
Various: Spider-Jazz (Trunk) LP