A MASSIVE week for shipments, and another week with the site not syncing to the news letter site so almost everything this week is just list formatted below. If i get a chance and it’s working tomorrow, I may redo this all as it SHOULD be. Everything is up on the site though, so I recommend checking it out there. The website landing page blog also will have the complete news letter, so maybe hit that up. Anyway, LOADS of stuff! Come on down for a dig!
Current operations…..
– in-store shopping/pick ups – 11 – 6 pm Monday – Friday, 11 am – 5 pm Saturday
(if you don’t want to come into the store for a pick up, call and/or use the back door)
– We will be wearing masks, if you want to, great! If not, that’s also fine, but please be respectful of other people’s space and decisions.
– Sanitize your hands (we’ll have some)
…..picks of the week…..
Carcascara: Carcascara II (Hegoa Disk) LP
Like a rare comet crossing these pages every so often, Ugarteburu’s lissom classical Spanish guitar strokes are always welcome, and found here in blissed union with vocals, harmonium, bells, marimba, ukuleles, futes, synths and field recordings by Carcáscara’s Fernando Aguirre and Xabier Iriondo. The original recordings were made in 2014, marinaded a few years, and mixed down in 2020, distilling their hybrid Spanish-Americana to a hypnotic essence in eight succinct parts revolving heavenly strums, puckered chamber pieces and immersive, almost raga-like drones that will sound lovely on slow summer evenings. The music is given to an elegant, lilting appeal, swaying from the waltzing meter and softest coos of ‘Makila Da Eroa’ to a more fully fledged songcraft in the closing beauty ‘En Ese Muro De Piedra’ in a gentle way that shows how they got there across the album. There’s a little more spice to proceedings in the purposeful drive of ‘Apakipo’ that peels away to duet for classical guitar and ukulele sparkling with bells in ‘Laboa Grúas Y Andamiaje’, and a real sunset moment in the hazy harmonium of ‘Aries Resurrection’, while ‘Sano Bueltatu Maitia’ makes haunting use of choral sample and field recordings in the chamber piece ‘Ciervo, Burro, Txitxarro’ that triggers a sublime finale movement recalling everyone from Six Organs of Admittance to Hood.
File Under: Experimental, Folk, Kris’s Picks
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Jack J: Opening the Door (Mood Hut) LP
Vancouver’s Jack J (Pender Street Steppers) channels Arthur Russell and Ned Doheny on his long-awaited return to solo mode with a suite of yacht-ready groovers. ‘Opening the Door’ is Jack’s first dolo shot since 2015 and sees him ditch the deep house to scroll perpendicular thru the mists of time toward a smeared Rayban-lens perspective on yacht boogie and balmy disco burnished with his own vocals. Nice and easy does it for all eight tracks, encompassing his brief between the strolling, folksy disco lilt of ‘If You Don’t Know Why’ and three Caipirinha-high bop of ‘Opening The Door’ thru to the VHS-hazy jazzbient reminiscence of ‘Closing The Door’, taking in the clipped disco of ‘The Only Way’, an AOR pearl ‘Only You Know Why’, an the airport reggae of ‘Clues’ in his linen-clad stride.
File Under: Electronic, Pop, Kris’s Picks
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Contortions: Buy (Superior Viaduct) LP
Soon after their 1978 debut on the Brian Eno-produced No New York, a compilation that defined the No Wave scene, James Chance’s group Contortions had already evolved—getting sharper, tighter and just plain faster. Despite the loss of keyboardist Adele Bertei and bassist Geoge Scott (who refused to sign a new contract demanded by Chance and his then partner, band manager Anya Phillips) Contortions were firing on all cylinders, and their first full-length album, 1979’s Buy, is a marvel of hot-wired energy. Led by the brash yelps and free-sax squawks of Chance, Contortions spit out fiercely rhythmic tunes charged by the wiry guitar lines of Jody Harris and the dizzying slide guitar of Pat Place. With drummer Don Christensen slipping in pointillist beats and David Hofstra’s infectious basslines, the songs on Buy crackle with both precision and abandon. Opener “Designed to Kill” shoots sparks of sound in all directions, while “Contort Yourself” is a nihilistic dance number wherein Chance instructs listeners to twist into knots, physically and mentally. “It’s better than pleasure, it hurts more than pain,” he snarls, later imploring, “You better try being stupid instead of smart.” Heavily influenced by the showman funk of James Brown (whose “I Can’t Stand Myself” the band had covered on No New York) Contortions coined a downtown dance-punk sound that had immediate influence on subsequent No Wave bands—including Place’s Bush Tetras and Bronx trio ESG—as well as the burgeoning disco movement. On Buy, Contortions’ self-invented template is imprinted so hard into the grooves that it sounds like they’re about to break, capturing a combustible band in all its fiery fury.
File Under: Punk, No Wave, Ian’s Picks, Kris’s Picks
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…..new arrivals…..
Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat: Chasing the Phantom (Black Truffle) LP
Dewa Alit, Bali’s master of contemporary Gamelan composition, returns to Black Truffle with Chasing the Phantom, presenting two recent works played by the composer’s Gamelan Salukat, a large ensemble that performs on instruments specially built to his designs, using a unique tuning system that combines notes from two traditional Balinese Gamelan scales. Alit explains that the ensemble’s name suggests “a place to fuse creative ideas to generate new, innovative works” and both compositions demonstrate the composer’s ability to wring stunning new possibilities from variations on the traditional Gamelan ensemble. While using familiar elements of Balinese Gamelan music, such as unison scalar melodies and stop-start dynamics, Alit’s music is overflowing with harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral inventions, the latter often facilitated by unorthodox playing techniques. “Ngejuk Memedi” (Chasing the Phantom) results from Alit’s reflection on the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Balinese culture, particularly in the way that belief in the phantoms or spirits known as “memedi” are shared through social media using digital technologies. Embodying this uncanny co-existence, the opening passages of the piece are at once immediately recognizable in their use of the metallophones of the Gamelan ensemble and strikingly reminiscent of electronics in their timbre and movement. At points, what we hear seems to have been fragmented with digital tools, or even to originate in some incessantly glitching DX7. After several minutes of this manically tinkling metallic sound world, the metallophones are joined by drums for a meditative passage of lower dynamics, as the uniformly high pitch range explored in the opening sections gradually opens up to include resonant low gong hits. “Likad”, written during Covid-19 lockdowns, channels anxiety and uncertainty into musical form, resulting in a piece that, even by Alit’s standards, is stunning in its complexity and the virtuosity it demands of Gamelan Salukat. Its opening section is perhaps most remarkable for its mastery of texture, with rapid transitions between dry, muted strikes, and metallic shimmers calling to mind the use of filters in electronic music. At points, the complex irregular repetitions of short melodic patterns, where the music seems to get stuck or be suddenly interrupted by a skip, recall the mad sampler works of Alvin Curran or the skittering surface of prime period Oval more than anything familiar from acoustic percussion music. Moving through a dizzying series of twists and turns, the piece ends with a majestic sequence of chords possessing an almost hieratic power.
File Under: Gamelan, Avant Garde
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Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto: Insen (Noton) LP
Originally released in 2005, Insen is the second collaboration album between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto and the second installment of V.I.R.U.S.’s five album series. Remastered in 2021 in collaboration with Calyx Studio, the album’s recordings are accompanied by an unreleased composition titled “Barco.” Initially composed for Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2005 Insen tour, the audio material used in this piece is based on the subtle sounds of Barco projectors, whose tonalities served as a ground for the artists’ live improvisation. In Insen, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto explore the potential for interaction and tension between electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Across eight compositions, the echoes of the cascading piano combine, collide, and dissolve with the tapestry of digital breakages in sheer vibrancy. This relationship lies at the album’s core. It subtly continues Vrioon’s calm melancholia, becoming a vessel for all the emotions and memories nourished by the listener. As you hear the opening, lonesome notes of “Aurora,” you realize that the pair have once again conceded an ambition to embed elaborate disciplines into an archetypal sound of soul-searching beauty. Album art designed by Carsten Nicolai. Mastering by Bo at Calyx.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient
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Oren Ambarchi: Live Hubris (Black Truffle) LP
Black Truffle announce Live Hubris, documenting the hypnotic and electrifying live performance of Oren Ambarchi’s 2016 LP Hubris (EMEGO 227CD/LP) by a fifteen-strong band at London’s Café Oto. Over three days in May 2019, Oto toasted Oren Ambarchi at 50/Black Truffle at 10 with Ambarchi and a large group of close friends and collaborators in a series of performances that interspersed existing projects with new collective endeavors, culminating with this: fourteen members of the extended Black Truffle family together on stage, joined by one special virtual guest, to translate the intricately studio-constructed layers of Hubris into a muscular live band workout. Operating with only the bare minimum of pre-gig preparation after the planned afternoon rehearsal had to be wrapped up prematurely due to noise complaints, the gargantuan group lurches into motion with a 21-minute rendition of “Hubris Part 1”, powered by the pulsating electronics of Konrad Sprenger and no less than seven electric guitars spinning a web of intricately interlocking palm-muted polyrhythms. The layers of closely related but metrically distinct lines create ripples of shifting accents, flickering changes in emphasis that ricochet along the endless central pulse. Gradually building in density, this motorik continuum becomes the backdrop for the haunting tones of Eiko Ishibashi’s processed flute and an extended feature from long-distance guest Jim O’Rourke on guitar synth. After the brief interlude of the second part, where Albert Marcoeur-esque guitar arpeggios accompany a halting attempt at phone conversation, the full ensemble gears up for the epic side-long rendition of “Hubris Part 3”. Now joined by the astonishing triple drum line-up of Joe Talia, Will Guthrie and Andreas Werliin, the layered pulse of the opening piece becomes a burning funk-fusion groove. Beginning on a medium simmer, the ensemble initially sticks to its pulsating one-note mantra, over which Ambarchi unfurls a beautiful example of his signature shimmering Leslie-toned guitar harmonics, eventually joined by Ishibashi’s flute and some brooding, distorted dissonance from Julia Reidy’s guitar. Building steadily for the first nine minutes, the heat then rises dramatically with a first, gloriously loose chord change: with the all drummers now rolling and tumbling like a twice-cloned Jack DeJohnette circa 1970, Mats Gustafsson enters on baritone, his tortured roars and shrieks driving the band to peaks of insane intensity. Finally, the exhausted ensemble drops out, leaving only the jagged, skittering fuzz of Ambarchi’s guitar, brought to an abrupt conclusion at the command of crys cole. Also features Johan Berthling, François J Bonnet, Francis Plagne, James Rushford, and Adam Scheflan. Hot pink vinyl with artwork by Lasse Marhaug; includes an extensive selection of live photos by Ivan Weiss and Fabio Lugaro.
File Under: Experimental
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Arpanet: Quantum Transposition (Clone) LP
‘Quantum Transposition’ is part of an utterly seminal trilogy of Arpanet albums, along with ‘Wireless Internet’ (2002) and ‘Inertial Frame’ (2006), that pointed to a new high water mark of visionary Detroit sci-fi music at the start of this century. Where ‘Wireless Internet’ still contained club-ready traces of the electro torque that defined Gerald Donald’s preceding Dopplereffekt classix, ‘Quantum Transposition’ abstracted club music to model his fascinations with quantum physics in a breathtaking form that would come to inform his work for nearly decades since, holding a very special place in the cult imagination of electronic music. Arpanet would give a 2nd life to ‘80s electro’s obsession with the future, but with a proper darkside slant and angular funk keenly familiar to Detroit. In it, club music’s structures are reduced to essentials, funky enough to dance to, but also detailed and spatialized for a non-more-absorbing headphone experience, metaphorically enacting ideas on duality in the process. When taken in the context of pulpier sci-fi and the phenomena of electro in Detroit, you’d be a prick to sniff at the results, which have simply never been bettered for their sheer sensuality, imagination and craft. No need to play favourites here; it’s all solid gold, and no doubt an album that demands to be heard from start to end as one lot, while DJs will certainly find weapons secreted in its beguiling folds and breaker-sparking metric convolutions.
File Under: Electronic
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Felicia Atkinson: Image Language (Shelter Press) LP
‘Image Language’ is a stunning album that dips fourth-world MIDI oddness into silvery pools of cinematic intrigue, juxtaposing dislocated poetry with disorienting jazz and electronics that belong alongside works by Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Ashley, Christina Vantzou, David Toop and Colleen. ‘Image Language’ was written between La Becque in Switzerland, on the banks of Leman Lake, and at home on the coast of Normandy, and finds Atkinson keen to capture the disorientation of moving between places, and its effect on the creative process. Inspired by the concept of the “home studio” (now a reality for the majority of artists but in the past more of a prescribed choice for outsiders such as Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe), Atkinson approached the record as if she were building a house, thinking of the tracks as separate rooms, each with their own discrete functions. ‘La Brume’ harks back to Jon Hassell’s genre-defining Editions EG material, with its muted horn and slowcore Bohren-esque electric piano, acoustic and electronic elements seeping into one another without clear definition. Atkinson is a gifted world-builder who composes like a novelist – dialling back the scope and increasing the emotional resonance. She conjures a mist of ghostly claustrophobia that reminds us of Andrei Tarkovsky’s terrifying swan-song “The Sacrifice”, a film that mostly takes place between four walls on the eve of the apocalypse. On ‘The Lake Is Speaking’, Atkinson alternates between French and English narration, enhancing the qualities of each language and splitting the words into curved syllables. Slowing her voice to an inhuman groan and duetting with her disembodied self, she speaks over treated piano, reclining into Satie’s furniture music concept, allowing her world to breathe around the careful instrumentation. The landscape descends to moonlight on ‘Les Dunes’, abstracting her sounds and covering everything in a sheet of white noise. It’s here that the album’s trans-dimensional mood bellows loudest, as finely-tweaked synthesisers dance like fireflies around the room. On ‘Becoming a Stone’, Atkinson’s voice is threaded through orchestral simulations, while ‘Pieces of Sylvia’ finds her fantasy orchestra at its most prominent as she speaks fragments of Plath, scattering words around the house. ‘Image Language demands attention and focus, conveying complex feelings of familiarity, alienation, re-discovery. It feels like the culmination of a personal and creative arc – a litany of ideas and experiments realised over the last few years – that here arrive at a kind of creative apex. It’s an album riddled with puzzles, yours to untangle over time.
File Under: Ambient, Experimental
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Begrime Exemious: Rotting in the Aftermath (Dark Descent) LP
Edmontonian death merchants Begrime Exemious are back with a devastating long-player on the mighty Dark Descent Records. Rotting In The Aftermath marks the band’s fourth album, all of which were released through the Colorado label. The band’s tireless work ethic is renowned throughout the scene, with annual releases the order of the day. Yet six years have passed since 2016’s The Enslavement Conquest’—just what took them so long?! “Following the release of The Enslavement Conquest in 2016, we started to write music for its follow up. We took our time over the next couple years writing the songs, as we were still supporting the last album on the road with tours across the US and Canada,” reveals vocalist / guitarist Derek Orthner. “Naturally, the new songs made their way into our set lists, and by 2018, we attempted to record. This session was aborted in favor of further refinement, as we felt these songs could benefit from faster tempos and even lower tunings in some cases. Finally, in 2019, we recorded the nine tracks of what would become our fourth full length, Rotting In The Aftermath. We pushed ourselves deeper into the realms of death metal, and as such, we feel that [this album] is the best representation of what Begrime Exemious is all about. It was truly forged on the road, and takes our brand of filth to the next level of apocalyptic devastation.”
File Under: Metal
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Boris: Heavy Rocks 2022 (Relapse) LP
Gold vinyl! The legendary Boris celebrate a 30 year career as one of experimental music’s most forward-thinking, heavy, and innovative bands with the new album Heavy Rocks (2022). Continuing their series of Heavy Rocks records, Boris once again channels the classic proto-metal sounds of the 70s into something all new. The album, 10 pulse-pounding tracks, highlight the very trajectory of Boris and their storied career – from the driving, fuzzed out Rock N’ Roll opener “She is Burning”, to the punk, raucous “My Name is Blank”, Boris are heavier than ever before. “Question 1” is just kickass – D-beats give way to a doomed, spaced out and heavier-than-anything guitar wailing and feedback, before diving back into their metal, sending the listener into a complete frenzy. This is unmistakably Boris, and this is the band at the height of their powers. Elsewhere on the record, a more daring, “out there” side of the band begins to shine on tracks such as the aptly titled “Blah Blah Blah”, the industrial “Ghostly Imagination” and the truly wild “Nosferatou”. Noisy passages (not unlike prior collaborations with legendary artists like Merzbow,) collide with visceral vocal howls while a relentless, almost Zornian-saxophone shreds harder than any guitar solo ever could. In 2022, Boris cement what heavy rock means to them, and release one of their most captivating records to date.
File Under: Metal
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Chat Pile: God’s Country (Flenser) CS
There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “…lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.
File Under: Tapes
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Christos Chondropoulos: Relics (Death of Rave) LP
Greek genius Christos Chondropoulos’ stunning debut for The Death of Rave finally lands on vinyl – an incredibly imaginative masterwork rich with quartertone melody and meticulously chiselled production, shaped into a future-folk songbook that deeply expands on his wonders for 12th Isle and The Wormhole. Highly recommended if yr into Paul DeMarinis, Rashad Becker, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kara-Lis Coverdale’s ‘Aftertouches’, Jonathan Bepler’s soundtracks for Matthew Barney, Black Sabbath or Aphex Twin. Floors us every time! Continuing Christos’ singular fascination with, and reappraisal of, Ancient Greek modes, ’Relics’ further excavates the deeptime topography of Greek music prior to the ban of “oriental” or 1/4 tone microtonal modes nearly 100 years ago. Clandestine, euphoric, hyperreal and otherworldly; it takes shape as faintly familiar forms of new age folk, avant-techno and metal musicks, but with an alien appeal that treats the past almost like another planet, never mind a foreign land. Christos studiously raids the past for lost treasure, navigating his tuned instincts as an improvising percussionist, and lover of non-Western composition, to create a uniquely absorbing soundworld that resembles an AI’s dreams after ingesting encyclopaedia entries on thousands of years of Greece prior to 1936. In the process, the album acutely questions his and our relationship to the past, and what has become lost in translation with reliance on prelaid templates and the “wisdom” of elders. Bursting to life with the iridescent arps and new age AI chorale of ‘First Love Fereter’, and concluding with bone-clacking raverie of ‘Jungle X’, the album offers a stunning advance of the themes and aesthetics in Christos’ previous records, from the self-released free jazz of ‘Fingerpainting’ (2013) to 2021’s 12th Isle released ‘Athenian Primitivism.’ Thanks to meticulous detailing, ‘Relics’ allows a finer play of textured light and almost tangible – yet entirely generated – voices into his music: most strikingly on the sublime songcraft of ‘Regret’ and ‘I Dream Of You’, while the likes of ‘Asham’ are bathed in deeply uncanny atmosphere, and his percussive proprioceptions are most heightened in the delirious battery of ‘War Horns’ and ‘Sacrifice’, with ‘Cyber Crust’ calling up demonic, cthonic pagan spirits resembling Black Sabbath undergoing regression therapy.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient
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Crime: San Francisco’s Doomed (Superior Viaduct) LP
The legend of CRIME looms large among punk aficionados the world over. Formed in the mid-1970s, the band’s dual-guitar sound, confrontational image and sleazed methodology still serve as inspiration decades later. With only a handful of singles released during their active lifespan, CRIME’s legacy grew significantly as archival recordings began to trickle out in the early 1990s. Of all these excavations, San Francisco’s Doomed was one of the first and certainly one of the most powerful. Culled from 1978-79 studio demos and rehearsal tapes, San Francisco’s Doomed captures the frenzy of CRIME’s sound in a fittingly loose, devil-may-care framework. Side one is a gloriously unpolished assault of classic, gutter-level punk with vicious live set staples like “Feel The Beat” and “Piss On Your Dog” taking marquee placement over the more well-known singles tracks. Side two finds CRIME taking aim at the so-called New Wave, augmenting their attack with ripped odes that bear the direct influence of science fiction and rockabilly on the group. Few recordings from US punk’s first wave match the raw intensity heard on San Francisco’s Doomed. As Michael Stewart Foley writes in the liner notes, “Unimpressed with the once idealistic counter-culture and all the bands associated with it, CRIME declared itself San Francisco’s First And Only Rock ‘N’ Roll Band. Dressed in police uniforms and driving sonic ice picks through listeners’ eardrums with the volume cranked past 10, they looked more like a street gang that might take your wallet and slash your face with a switchblade just to watch you bleed. But despite the band’s best efforts to stand apart, CRIME could have come from nowhere else, at no other time.”
File Under: Punk
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Dame Area: Esto Me Pertenece (BFE) LP
Dame Area ended 2021 and has started 2022 acclaimed in the european stages with a live show praised for its power and darkness, made up of many new tracks. Some of those have been gathered in this EP. Industrial music with a touch of EBM without ortodoxy nor cobwebs, with metallic percussions performing some atypical rhythms and Suicide’s minimalist spirit overflying the scene. Probably Dame Area’s most dance-floor oriented record till the date, “Esto me pertenece” is not simply “dance music” but combat music instead. In fact it doesn’t lose sight of the fact that what’s most important are not the fat kicks, the unrelenting synths or the percussion, but the attitude. And in spite of the patent darkness of the record there is a clear call to arms to claim what belongs to us: the present.
File Under: Punk
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Danzig: 6:66: Satan’s Child (Cleopatra) LP
One of the most anticipated reissues of the year, the 1999 dark masterpiece from metal gods of the underworld, Danzig! This powerful album has some of Danzig’s heaviest and most profound songs including “Thirteen,” which was written for and recorded by Johnny Cash in 1994 and used as the opening song in the hit 2009 film The Hangover. Gatefold colored vinyl LP with beautifully restored artwork from British comic book artist and longtime metal illustrator Simon Bisley.
File Under: Metal
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Death Bells: Between Here & Everywhere (Dais) LP
Adopting a collaborative approach for the recording of their third album, Death Bells have return with Between Here & Everywhere, an effort that captures the cross-section of Southern California’s shadowy hidden interzones, outside of the lights and luxury. The record features nine new songs that represent Will Canning and Remy Veselis’ continual growth, as well as accompaniment by an experienced cast of contributors on keys, strings, piano, and operatic backup vocals. Recorded with Colin Knight at Paradise Studios, and mixed by Mike Kriebel at Golden Beat, Between Here & Everywhere bristles with immediacy and emotion, with every element tactile, balanced, and elevated. Between Here & Everywhere sets out to map the potent mess of Los Angeles. Canning cites the “vastness” of the band’s adopted home as a constant muse, and much like the city itself, the album ebbs gradually from harrowing to hopeful over its 35-minute runtime. The lyrics are categorized as “narrative, but not autobiographical,” born of intrigue, intimacy, and a sense of “looking outward.” From the highly-strung blast of “Hysteria”, to the hypnotic rhythms of “Lifespring”, and the staunchly resonant hope displayed in “Last Days”, “Space Without A Name” and “Eternity Street”, Between Here & Everywhere encompasses Death Bells’ most captivating work to date.
File Under: Punk
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J Dilla: Genius (Not on Label) LP
Another collection of early cassette recordings from J DILLA feat. more raw unreleased DILLA originals. “GENIUS” includes 14 remastered tracks showcasing DILLA’s sonic growth in the late 90s—including him rapping and singing, working out a track. Packaged in full color sleeve.
File Under: Hip Hop
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D.K.: Gate of Enlightenment (Worship) LP
Dang-Khoa Chau aka Đ.K. gives up a self-released treat, sidewinding into psychedelic realms of radiant gamelan and slow, humid bangers, highly recommended if yr into ’Forest of Evil’ period Demdike, early Shackleton, DJ Python. A pivotal presence in the Parisian scene thanks to his rounds for Antinote, L.I.E.S., Second Circle, and most recently 12th isle & Good Morning Tapes; Đ.K now takes matters into his own hands to issue some golden material, drawing on his South East Asian heritage and sultry, stylized nEuropean club music for a properly hypnotic seven track trip. In deep pursuit of atavistic urges, and modelled with electronic futurism, his ‘Gate Of Enlightenment’ calls up a spectra of spirits that invoke altered states; vocal swirls meet purposeful gamelan in ‘Enlightenment Process’, aligning for the deftly weight trample of ‘Middle Path’ with its mystic horns, and a slippery sort of dancehall swivel in ‘Sacred Creatures.’ ‘His ‘Day of Mourning’ makes room for contemplation with sound sensitive instincts heightened to unnerving degrees, while ‘Metal Frames’ yokes back to the ‘floor with something like an industrialised echo of the Ghost In The Shell OST, while the closing couplet see his percussive proprioceptions at their most devilish and immersive.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient, Fourth World
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Elektro Nova: Electro Nova (Smalltown Supersound) LP
Like a rediscovered Viking burial ship, Electro Nova compiles near-mythical drone recordings produced in 1998 and described by Helge Sten aka Deathprod as some of the most important music to ever come out of Norway. It’s the work of Kåre Dehlie Thorstad and compiles two of the earliest releases on Smalltown Supersound, back when it was basically no more than a bedroom operation. It’s taken over two decades, but finally the label have given the material a first ever proper release on vinyl, complete with mixing and mastering by Deathprod. If you’re into the ice cold swells of anyone from Thomas Köner to Harley Gaber, Biosphere, Kali Malone or, of course, Deathprod – this one’s as essential as they come. Kaare Dehlie Thorstad’s Elektro Nova produced just two releases during the late ‘90s that have since slipped into drone lore – Trans-Inter-Ference and Elektro Nova/Electro Nova. Admired not only by Deathprod and Joakim Haugland of Smalltown, but also by his contemporaries Lasse Marhaug and Biosphere, his work has evaded pretty much any attention outside of Norway these last two decades. Following a chance meeting with Thorstad at Oslo airport a few years back, Smalltown were prompted to give the recordings a second wind, presenting what is essentially a captivating new release, and crucial addition to the Norsk drone canon. As the story goes, Thorstad was studying photography in the late 90’s in Scotland, but instead of delivering a photo for his final exam he made a record – a double album (2CDs) and a 10” to be precise. That should provide some idea of the textural synaesthetic and landscaping qualities evoked by his music, which he ended up sending to a then-young Smalltown label, who were mostly issuing tapes at the time. With no proper distribution the records largely bypassed wider attention, and become a personal favourite of Smalltown’s Joakim Haugland, as well as avowed fan Helge Sten (Deathprod), who helped render its diaphanous scale in mix down, and Lasse Marhaug who describes them as “two perfect records that deserved much bigger attention”. Between its jaw-dropping opener; the post-apocalyptic vision of its untitled part; and the cinematic white-out of the 10” tracks; Thorstad comes as close as we’ve ever heard to evoking the inhospitable nature and stark beauty of the wild far north. We can hear those landscapes palpably internalised and alchemically transmuted into its coarse grained textural swells and a reverberating multi-dimensionality, variously sustained to extents that evoke an abandonment of the senses, or likewise squashed and isolated to imply the relative anxiety relief of atmospheric flux, where a few degrees temperature rise or a drop in the wind speed can make the difference between life and death. Impressively, Thorstad realised after the release of Elektro Nova and just two live shows that he couldn’t really follow up the work and instead pursued a career as professional cyclist, eventually combining his visual skills to become a pro cycling photographer. In that sense, he’s a bit like composer-turned-tennis coach Harley Gaber, whose almighty ‘The Winds Rise In The North’ (1976) is in some ways richly prescient of this work. Like Gaber, Thorstad can remain safe in the knowledge that his contribution to the drone sphere will endure for the ages, especially with this important, impressive new edition.
File Under: Drone, Ambient, Avant Garde
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JD Emmanuel: Rain Forest Music (Important) CS
Fans of deep, dark, minimal, and meditative new age music on cassette will be chuffed to learn that Important Records is reissuing three of JD Emmanuel’s earliest releases on tape. Rain Forest Music (1981), Wizards (1982), and Trance Formations 1: Ancient Minimal Meditations (1986) are all available for the first time in many years.On Rain Forest Music (1981), JD Emmanuel builds gentle, short cycles of notes into floating clouds of sound, mostly improvising around single chords. The “minimalism” in his music lies not in repetitive patterns that barely change but more in the spare arrangements that focus the listener while also taking them on a sonic journey. A tape loop technique used by Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Robert Fripp (and likely many more) called “Continuous Looping” was used in the creation of this album and a loop diagram is included in the packaging.
File Under: New Age, Ambient
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JD Emmanuel: Trance Formations I (Important) CS
Fans of deep, dark, minimal, and meditative new age music on cassette will be chuffed to learn that Important Records is reissuing three of JD Emmanuel’s earliest releases on tape. Rain Forest Music (1981), Wizards (1982), and Trance Formations 1: Ancient Minimal Meditations (1986) are all available for the first time in many years. Trance-Formations 1: Ancient Minimal Meditations (1986) was originally composed between 1981-1985 and released in 1986. These long, extended cyclic pieces were composed and recorded using delayed analog synthesizers and Emmanuel credits the inspiration of Terry Riley and Steve Reich for sending him in this musical direction. The release of this album followed his acclaimed Wizards (1982). Recorded using three Sequential Circuits Pro-One synthesizers and a Yamaha SK-20 Poly-Synthesizer. 100% analog sound. Mastered by JD Emmanuel.
File Under: New Age, Ambient
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JD Emmanuel: Wizards (Important) CS
Fans of deep, dark, minimal, and meditative new age music on cassette will be chuffed to learn that Important Records is reissuing three of JD Emmanuel’s earliest releases on tape. Rain Forest Music (1981), Wizards (1982), and Trance Formations 1: Ancient Minimal Meditations (1986) are all available for the first time in many years. “Wizards was my first deep trance electronic music album. This album was inspired by Terry Riley, one of the earliest people ever to compose and perform long, extended, cyclic pieces in the electronic format. This music was composed and performed in ’81 and ’82. I consider this album my best work. The instrumentation is three Sequential Circuits PRO-1s, Crumar Traveler One and a Yamaha SK-20, all real time recording to a Teac 4-track reel-to-reel. I mixed the four tracks to a Teac A-7300 Master 2-Track tape recorder using a DeltaLab DL-2 to create the delay track. In 2006, I used a Tascam 34B 4-track to remaster all my master tapes to digital master of 196 KHz/24 bit .WAV files using Soundforge 8 software. The original Wizards LP was published in the summer of 1982 with the black-and-white cover. The initial tracks had not names and were call ‘Movements I-V’. Several years later sales had slowed down, in an effort to improve sales we tried the color cover and I created names for each track, as shown on the samples.” –JD Emmanuel
File Under: New Age, Ambient
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Lee Evans: Animist Pools (Oryx) LP
A shifting center in a stream of rippling analog tones, the music of Lee Evans is orchestrated to transfix, echoing sounds heard in nature with modular synthesizers and the powerful element of chance. Evoking the Fourth World Music of Jon Hassel or the kosmische innovations of Cluster, Animist Pools marks its composer, Lee Evans’ first full- length release. Citing his background in painting as a chief influence on his musical approach and thought process, Evans composes with a strong sense of space –– each sound an event in a slowly expanding landscape, zooming out to reveal a world of scale in which depth and contrast take precedent over rhythm and melody. Embracing the generative compositional nature of working with the modular synthesizer, Evans himself is the final filter through which all sounds pass. The boundary between programmed repetition and human choice is subtle, but detectable, highlighting Evans’ careful, nuanced guidance of his autocompositions. The result is ultimately an improvised structure –– a living, breathing, musical creature, acting on a mixture of impulse and memory. Animist Pools is an immersive, meditative, and therapeutic experience.
File Under: Ambient, Electronic, Fourth World
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Exael: Ice That Melts the Tips (3XL) LP
Experiences Limited, now 3XL, with a sick new LP from Exael on a highly atmospheric ambient jungle tip, deploying 30 mins of percussive spasms seeping into smoked-out zoners – highly tipped if yr into anything from Lee Gamble to Malibu. Clearing their cache of stray bullets, Exael returns with a gyring plunge into percussive wormholes and low-lit mood enhancers .The tracks are broadly cleft along schisms of dark/light and demonic/angelic, switching from restive propellers to more sublime sensations in a fine testament to their practice – making for prob our favourite Exael release thus far. On the “darker” side, they commit the convulsive, fractious footwork pulses and warped tones of ‘Circle (Squishy Mix)’ in a sort of parallel to 33EMYBW’s insectoid rhythms and combustion systems, while ‘Ice That melts The Tips’ trades in rapid, ice-skating thizz and ‘Ghoul Search (Demonic Attachment Mix)’ fires up the junglist particle accelerator for a proper gauntlet of hyper techstep dynamics. The contrast is epitomised by ’Composure’, arranging flinty breaks on a luscious waterbed of floating pads, before ‘Eidolon’ renders a sort of airborne dembow pressure in the vicinity of Ben Bondy & special guest dj’s xphresh works. ‘L-theanine’ closes the session on a fine tread inside emo ambient styles and flurries on the same spectrum between DJ Lostboi and Teresa Winter, complete with a reverberating, half-buried vocal. All smoke & strobe doozies.
File Under: Electronic
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Flower Travellin’ Band: Made in Japan (Life Goes On) LP
Life Goes On Records present a reissue of the third album by Japanese rock band Flower Travellin’ Band, Made In Japan, originally released in 1972. After meeting Lighthouse at the Expo ’70 festival in Osaka, Flower Travellin’ Band were invited to visit Canada. While there, the group recorded Made In Japan with Lighthouse keyboardist Paul Hoffert helping produce. Due to George Wada becoming ill with tuberculosis, Canadian drummer Paul DeLong plays on some tracks on this album. The lyrics were written by Yoko Nomura, the wife of the band’s manager, who translated conversations she had with the group and their ideas into English. “Heaven and Hell” was written by Yamanaka in Japanese and she translated it. The song “Hiroshima” is a re-imagining of “Satori Part III” from their previous album Satori (1971). The introductory first track is an advertisement for a concert at Stanley Park Stadium by Flower Travellin’ Band, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Bob Seger, and Teegarden & Van Winkle, with a clip of “Lucky Man” playing in the background.
File Under: Psych, Japan
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Linda Fredriksson: Juniper (We Jazz) LP
Linda Fredriksson (they/them) shares their debut solo album “Juniper” on We Jazz Records, 29 Oct 2021. Linda (of Mopo and Superposition) has been working on the compositions heard on the album for several years, composing them mostly on guitar, keys and by singing. Only later have they been arranged for the band heard on the album, including Fredriksson on saxes and various instruments, Tuomo Prättälä (of ilmiliekki Quartet) on rhodes, moog and piano, Minna Koivisto on modular synth, moog and OP, Olavi Louhivuori (of Superposition) on drums, and Mikael Saastamoinen (of OK:KO and Superposition) on bass, plus featuring the Swedish artist Matti Bye on piano. At heart, “Juniper” is a “singer-songwriter album”, performed by an instrumental jazz band. The end result is unique, personal, and as Linda themself puts it “quiet and introspective”. With regards to instrumentation, those who have heard Linda Fredriksson in Mopo and Superposition are likely to be surprised by their credit listing including not only alto and baritone saxophones, plus bass clarinet, but also guitar, Rhythmic8 synths, ambience recordings and drum programming. “Juniper” can still be heard as a jazz album, but perhaps one reminding that the word doesn’t need to mean any one thing in particular. At its best, jazz music is highly personal and “of the moment”, both true on “Juniper”. The album has been made in two different studios, three homes, two summer cottages and four working spaces. It was recorded with professional studio equipment but also with an iPhone and on a basic built-in laptop speaker. With that, “Juniper” stands as a remarkable musical diary of a creative musician and composer during the early 2020’s.
File Under: Jazz
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M. Geddes Gengras & Psychic Reality: Encyclopedia of Civilizations Vol. 4: Zoroaster (Abstrakce) LP
Finally the 4th volume of “The Encyclopedia of Civilizations” is here! This time it is not a split LP, but a collaboration. Modular synth maestro M. Geddes Gengras and left-field pop priestess Leyna Noel aka Psychic Reality join forces to compose together their new project inspired by Zoroaster: M.Goddess. An exquisite modern ambient record mixing leftfield, kosmische, new age, dub vibes… Very original and rich compositions with genius arrangements combining spacey synth sequences, dreamy guitars, modular sounds, weird rhythms… Along the lines of Craig Leon, Conrad Schnitzler, or the Mecánica Clásica’s contemporary approach to the kosmische masters. “Zoroastrianism is an ancient religion that is still actively practiced today by a small population of people worldwide and has had a massive influence on western culture. Many things that appear to be integral to western thinking (and thus “wholesome”) indeed have their roots in ancient Iran. Dualities such as good and evil, light and dark, heaven and hell—even paradise is an old Persian word. For this project, we are exploring this Zoroaster moment—set in the bread basket of the Iranian plateau, six to seven millennia before the Common Era—that’s like a cross-fade. The fading of goddess worship and the first strains of the patriarchy. Not the -ism of today’s still-living religion, but the moment when this man Zoroaster came along and created a new religion that centered one god instead of the many. Forcing the divine feminine underground, if not fully occulted, obscured and engulfed into the mainstream enough to be forgotten. Goddesses that before had their own dedicated cults were converted into lesser players. We’re reviving those flames too.”
File Under: Electronic, Ambient, Fourth World
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Nico Georis: A Rainbow In Curved Air (Spiritual Pajamas) LP
“It was never supposed to happen. No one was supposed to reimagine Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air—a piece of music that, until now, has existed in its own class of expression. No one was supposed to scale the perilous heights of the citadel and come back with another document of the strange festival scenes within. With the release of Nico Georis’s A Rainbow In Curved Air it’s clear now that this piece of music is a place that you can go to, a kind of astral sanctum that can be visited again and again so long as you know the mysterious paths that lead to it. “Doing away with the production tricks used on Riley’s original recording (just intonation, mirror image delay, half-speed tracking of all lead parts) Nico Georis confronts the central seven time theme with a new transparency that gradually complexifies into astonishing Persian carpet displays of patterned musical awareness. This is music of the plenum and not the void: it is teeming with forms that behave in ways that recall descriptions of elaborately jeweled DMT hyperspace; sonic shapes that are driven by the pure uplift and force of infinite, unconstrained autotransformation. In this way it is similar to the original but the pace is way less manic, way more listenable as it rides forward on a calm surge of dazzling zero point energy.
FIle Under: Experimental
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Ghost Funk Orchestra: Night Walker/Death Waltz (Karma Chief) LP
Back in 2016, producer Seth Applebaum released two EPs that marked the inauguration of the band Ghost Funk Orchestra. Night Walker and Death Waltz were conceived as one-man-band, reel-to-reel tape recorded experiments that would bring together elements of all the sounds that Seth most adored at the time: tape-saturated drums, gratuitous spring reverb, surfy guitar, Latin-style percussion, odd time signatures, and Spanish-language female vocals. Initially released only in the digital domain and on a short run of cassette tapes, these two EPs that defined the early era of GFO are now finally available together on a single LP via Colemine Records. The tracks have been lovingly remastered by Doug Krebs. You’re invited to take a dive into the humble beginnings of a project that has continued to grow, shape shift, and accrue new and exciting sounds for its sonic palette.
File Under: Funk
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Hari Sima: Solo en Occidente (Objetos Perdidos) LP
Hari Sima is the solo project of Spanish artist Paco León (Güiro Meets Russia/Astropáramo). After his solo debut in 2020, “Fluido Tiempo” (Abstrakce Records), he’s back with a new album called Solo En Occidente which is out now via Objetos Perdidos. According to the press release, it is an LP where sequences of modular synthesizers, melodies and ethnic percussion combine to mix a palette of sounds that goes through ambient, fourth world and kosmische musik. The concept of the album stems from the social isolation and loneliness of our current way of life. Inspired by the close reality of this musician, he claims the daily life of the rural environment in which he lives as a way of escape from the vortex of society, making it evident in each cut of the album. With it, Hari Sima, raises the need to get out of society to feel further away from loneliness.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient, Kosmiche
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Harry Pussy: You’ll Never Play This Town Again (Palilalia) LP
Limited double-LP version of the 2008 CD originally issued on Load, compiling the best live and studio recordings by the final iteration of this group. “60 second bursts of chaotic rock ‘n’ roll that barbarize whole histories of freakout style, from free jazz through classic hardcore, boogie, blues, Black Flag, Germs, most explicitly through Beefheart, but all hyper-condensed into ultra-kranky riffs that Orcutt plays at hallucinatory speed, compressing Zoot Horn Rollo style avant confusion into lighting runs and metallic two note knock-outs. Hoyos’s style is so primitive that it’s wildly avantgarde, with an instinctive feel for time that confounds the most advanced improvisatory strategies with the most hysterical. And her vocals are post-Yoko in the truest sense, not directly informed by her but sharing the same spontaneous energy and a-musical appeal, sometimes breaking from songs completely to expand on barely articulated vocal rants and fever pitched bouts of screaming. The whole group existed in a zone that was constantly beyond technique. The arc of their career was perfect, the mission truly accomplished, and all that’s left is this amazing series of recordings, a body of work that has had a disproportionate effect on the minds, if rarely the actual sound of the underground.” –David Keenan, The Wire, December 2008
File Under: Punk, Noise Rock
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Cheb Hasni: Volume 1 (Outre-National) LP
Raï is the music of a youth hungover from Algeria’s recent independence. It became a space for a liberated, transgressive dialogue that told the social truths of its time — an up-front yet poetic voice that covers the taboos and frustrations of daily life, expressing emotion without detour. This voice is heard at weddings, cabarets, in the nightclubs of the Oranese coast, and casually on the street… With the boom of the audio cassette, an avalanche of raï tapes were produced in Oran and diffused all over the world. Both women and men sang and listened to the new sound, as raï is intimately tied to parties, alcohol and the night. With the spontaneous improvisation of its singers as the main part of each song, raï keeps reinventing itself. In this style, Cheb Hasni, along with Cheb Nasro, incarnates a second generation of musicians. With the “love raï”, or sentimental raï, Hasni sings about love, passion and its setbacks — moving away from the bittersweet daily chronicles of the first chebs and chebates. Having recorded nearly 150 cassettes, Cheb Hasni remains one of the most prolific and talented raï singers of his generation. Almost thirty years after his death, this three-volume compilation of rare tracks from his cassette releases on the Oriental Music Production label is a tribute to the lasting legacy of Cheb Hasni — ya raï! Volume 1 of three volumes presented here.
File Under: Rai, Algeria
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Cheb Hasni: Volume 2 (Outre-National) LP
Raï is the music of a youth hungover from Algeria’s recent independence. It became a space for a liberated, transgressive dialogue that told the social truths of its time — an up-front yet poetic voice that covers the taboos and frustrations of daily life, expressing emotion without detour. This voice is heard at weddings, cabarets, in the nightclubs of the Oranese coast, and casually on the street… With the boom of the audio cassette, an avalanche of raï tapes were produced in Oran and diffused all over the world. Both women and men sang and listened to the new sound, as raï is intimately tied to parties, alcohol and the night. With the spontaneous improvisation of its singers as the main part of each song, raï keeps reinventing itself. In this style, Cheb Hasni, along with Cheb Nasro, incarnates a second generation of musicians. With the “love raï”, or sentimental raï, Hasni sings about love, passion and its setbacks — moving away from the bittersweet daily chronicles of the first chebs and chebates. Having recorded nearly 150 cassettes, Cheb Hasni remains one of the most prolific and talented raï singers of his generation. Almost thirty years after his death, this three-volume compilation of rare tracks from his cassette releases on the Oriental Music Production label is a tribute to the lasting legacy of Cheb Hasni — ya raï! Volume 2 of three volumes presented here.
File Under: Rai, Algeria
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Cheb Hasni: Volume 3 (Outre-National) LP
Raï is the music of a youth hungover from Algeria’s recent independence. It became a space for a liberated, transgressive dialogue that told the social truths of its time — an up-front yet poetic voice that covers the taboos and frustrations of daily life, expressing emotion without detour. This voice is heard at weddings, cabarets, in the nightclubs of the Oranese coast, and casually on the street… With the boom of the audio cassette, an avalanche of raï tapes were produced in Oran and diffused all over the world. Both women and men sang and listened to the new sound, as raï is intimately tied to parties, alcohol and the night. With the spontaneous improvisation of its singers as the main part of each song, raï keeps reinventing itself. In this style, Cheb Hasni, along with Cheb Nasro, incarnates a second generation of musicians. With the “love raï”, or sentimental raï, Hasni sings about love, passion and its setbacks — moving away from the bittersweet daily chronicles of the first chebs and chebates. Having recorded nearly 150 cassettes, Cheb Hasni remains one of the most prolific and talented raï singers of his generation. Almost thirty years after his death, this three-volume compilation of rare tracks from his cassette releases on the Oriental Music Production label is a tribute to the lasting legacy of Cheb Hasni — ya raï! Volume 3 of three volumes presented here.
File under: Rai, Algeria
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Arve Henriksen & Kjetil Husebo: Sequential Stream (Smalltown Supersound) LP
Properly transcendent deep-dream jazz fantasy from prolific trumpet virtuoso Arve Henriksen (Supersilent) and Norwegian pianist Kjetil Husebø, together shaping an album that’s much, much more than the not so inconsiderable sum of its parts. Like a fever-dream comedown, it takes us from insanely rich sounding 4th world topographies to fizzing, electric ambience and fluttering prepared piano, perfectly soundtracking the humid un-reality we’re living through. If you’re into Jon Hassell, Miles Davis, Don Cherry/Codona, David Sylvian – read on. We’ve been snagged on Henriksen’s work since his ‘Chiaroscuro’ album appeared back in 2004 – it’s ‘Opening Image’ often cited here as basically the last word in cinematic framing. But It’s his work alongside Helge Sten (Deathprod) and Ståle Storløkken in Supersilent that’s perhaps thrown us furthest down the Henriksen rabit hole in the years since, his distinctive shakuhachi-style playing often accenting their finest recordings. ‘Sequential Stream’ is Henriksen’s first collaboration with pianist Kjetil Husebø, the pair assembling the album remotely from their respective studios in Gothenburg, Sweden and Oslo, Norway over the course of 2019 and 2020. Henriksen plays Trumpet alongside synths, various electronics and – on ‘Single Sentence’ – a striking vocal delivery that eschews his usual wordless/soprano in favour of a more dense Tenor. Husebø plays grand piano, synths and samplers, and veers from cascading to more abstracted styles as the album progresses. In one sense the album functions in a traditional mode of Jazz reflection, aided considerably by a beautifully pristine recording and subsequent mastering by Helge Sten. Every note skips and shimmers with abundant clarity and depth – like the most affecting Jazz, played on the most luxurious systems; it just sounds rich and impossibly clear on even the most modest setup. At the same time, the pair’s avant garde instincts gradually make an indelible mark – be it through the prepared piano backbone on the remarkable ‘Slow Fragments’ or the percolating, Conjoint-esque electronics on ‘Sonic Binoculars’, piping in atmospheric depth and disjointed detail like some seismic event rippling through the ocean. Not usually drawn to the Jazz orthodoxy, ‘Sequential Stream’ presents us with something of a paradox – it feels like Henriksen’s most approachable work in years, but also his most complex and multi-faceted. If you’re looking for a late night soundtrack to the most celluloid moments of your life – it works on that level. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll discover much more ambiguous, subterranean delights.
File Under: Jazz, Ambient
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Maria W. Horn & Sara Parkman: Funeral Folk (XKatedral) LP
Maria W Horn pairs with contemporary folk futurist Sara Parkman to re-imagine funeral music as prog-folk elegy, subliming black metal, religious music and spectral minimalism into a dense Northern European aether exploring rituals of grief and the musical phenomenology of death. Stunning music – essential listening for fans of Okkyung Lee, Pauline Oliveros, Susanna & Helge Sten, Anna von Hausswolff, Lisa Germano, The Haxan Cloak, Laura Cannell, Sarah Davachi, Christina Vantzou, Sunn O))). ‘Funeral Folk’ pairs multi instrumentalist composer Maria W. Horn with violinist, singer and composer Sara Parkman on a soundtrack commission for Mattias Lech & Lisen Allard’s dance performance of the same name. Drawing on a shared, formative background playing in the same band as teenagers in their hometown Härnosand, Horn & Parkman naturally and skilfully collapse their worlds of influence, ranging from sacred songs and minimalist spectral music to Finnish black metal and Swedish folk, into epic arrangements for synths, zithers, hurdy gurdy, guitars, mellotrons and lamenting vocals. The results patently play into XKatedral’s love of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral sounds, but also reach to far more climactic appeal than we’ve come to expect from the label, edging on the sort of musical dramaturgy one might better expect from Anna von Hausswolff, or comparable to Okkyung Lee’s ‘Yeo-Nuen’. Stirring stuff, we tell thee. Flocking around a mutual passion for the sort of progressive music coming from their native north Sweden as teenagers, as well as personal deep dives into their family’s Christian heritage of several generations, Horn & Parkman reassess the meaning of “rites of loss in a de-ritualised and dying civilisation” with a crafty blend of the sacred and profane guided by a heightened emotive intelligence. Cinematic opener ‘Evighetens Sommar’ or ‘The Summer of Eternity’ establishes a grand sound stage spotlighting hushed vocals and luminous string swells, where ‘Till Margaretha’ follows with sky-clawing Finnish black metal riffs giving way to a keening Karelian vocal lament in staggering fashion. At its core ‘kyrie’ pushes this formula to its most impressively proggy peaks, and the choral vignette ‘Mementomori’ recalls Cucina Povera’s eyrie minimalism, seemingly prepping the way for the final send off ‘Hornalaten’, an unhurried 10 minutes of glistening timbral shifts and soothing drones that feels solemn yet optimistic, and as enchanting as Pauline Oliveros’ drone prayers. Stunner.
File Under: Ambient, Folk, Drone, Experimental
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Rafael Anton Irisarri: Agitas Al Sol (Room 40) LP
Rafael Anton Irisarri’s works from Room40 have always dwelled in a place of pressure. His low frequency excursions have charted out a unique voyage into a territory in which texture and density are equally matched to create a visceral, but ultimately comforting zone of entanglement. At the same time as completing his Solastalgia edition (RM 4105LP), Irisarri recorded Agitas Al Sol. Like its sibling work, this album is an enveloping sonic drift that traces across the unsteady topographies of the Anthropocene. It moves in deep exhales, drawing from within and pressing outward into a sound vista that is effortlessly deep.
File Under: Ambient
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Jim James: Regions of Light and Sound of God (ATO) LP
Over the course of a decades-long and infinitely surprising career, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James has created the kind of mind-expanding music that transports the listener into liminal spaces: the intangible terrain between reality and dream, perception and imagination, the sensory world and the supermundane. On his 2013 debut solo album Regions of Light and Sound of God, the Louisville-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist stepped further into unknown and otherworldly territory, a journey informed by a devastating accident that radically altered his mindset. This colored vinyl 2LP reissue includes the original album plus a bonus disc with 11 previously unreleased b-sides, demos and alternate takes. It’s packaged in a deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket with rainbow foil, custom inner-sleeves, labels and a fold-out insert with new artwork.
File Under: Rock, My Morning Jacket
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O.G. Jigg: Land Dictates the Lay of the Stones (Earth Memory) LP
Previously exploring early music and more traditional folk arrangements, Jigg has now composed a contemporary suite, albeit one that seems to have slipped back into a more recent past. Drawing clear influence from post-war classical and the effect it had on soundtrack composition during the 60’s and 70’s, O. G. Jigg has composed what sounds like the lost OST for a 1970’s BBC earth mysteries drama that would have been aired just before children went to bed — early enough to tempt a few, who would have no doubt had to recover from nightmares of spirits rising from stone-circles across rural England. A quote from Malvern Brume encapsulates this feeling nicely; “Makes me think of what I wish the music for ‘Children of the Stones’ had actually been like. It’s bloody wicked!” The music is written for a small orchestral ensemble, often focusing on the woodwind section, using the balance between dissonant and consonant to create an uneasy undertone — even in the sweetest melodic sections. There are definitely more thematic structures in the music than heard on previous releases — sometimes even through the tropes of the aforementioned 60’s & 70’s era of television and cinema — but it’s never overdone. The album helps to ease the listener’s mind out of the city and into the landscapes of rolling hills and overgrown and tumbled-down chapels, probing the topographical resonance of stone circles and other prehistoric monuments of the British countryside. This record marks the first release on Will Yates’ new ‘Earth Memory Recordings’ label. A project focusing on psychogeographical recordings and artists exploring global folklore through the sonic medium. This first album is being released in partnership with Tokyo-based label Diskotopia, long-time supporters of Will’s own music as ‘Memotone’. The record has been beautifully mastered by Seance Centre boss, Brandon Hocura.
File Under: Ambient, Classical
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Kavinsky: Reborn (Record Makers) LP
Kavinsky is a zombie who came back from the dead after his Testarossa crashed in 1986. His first song, “Testarossa Autodrive”, was an instant success, and was followed by two singles. In 2007, he was chosen by Daft Punk to open their now legendary ‘Alive’ tour. In 2011, his track “Nightcall”, produced with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, became the theme song for the film Drive, and consequently a worldwide success. Kavinsky’s first album, Outrun, was released in 2013, followed by a collaboration with The Weeknd on the song “Odd Look”. In 2022, Kavinsky is back with Reborn, his second album recorded at the famous Motorbass studio in Paris. The first single, “Renegade”, has an impactful sound and a powerful chorus, whilst the second single “Zenith” has a more muted and futuristic feel. On Reborn, Kavinsky amplifies these sounds without deviating from his relentless trajectory.
File Under: Electronic
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Calvin Keys: Blue Keys (Wide Hive) LP
“Calvin Keys’ Blue Keys (Black Jazz Records, Ray Charles) is a new record on Wide Hive Records with saxophone icon Gary Bartz (Milestone Records, Miles Davis), trombonist Steve Turre, Henry Franklin, Babatunde Lea, Gregory Howe, Mike Hughes, Thomas McCree and more. Blue Keys is nine new classic songs with beautiful horns and Calvin’s ferocious guitar soloing. Limited 180 gram foil, numbered pressing.”
File Under: Jazz
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Khotin: New Tab (Pacific Rhythm) LP
Drinking deeply from the cup of Vancouver’s new age spirit, Khotin presents a lovely suite of feathered ambient chords fringed by field recordings and laced with various voices – Japanese, Russian, English – in a milky sequence of sounds, mostly beatless but with a handful of dips into effervescent breakbeats and glassy balearic downstrokes.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient
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Kübler-Ross: s/t (Suction) LP
Kübler-Ross’ self-titled LP is the debut by this minimal synth/wave/industrial three-piece from Glasgow, Scotland, featuring Craig Clark, Katie Shannon, and veteran electronic producer and remixer producer Dave Clark, best-known for his Sparky moniker, and as one-half of the production/remix team Optimo (Espacio). Standout cut “Bridges”, first released in 2015, is synthpop perfection — sitting comfortably alongside classics from the first wave of UK electronic classics by Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, John Foxx, and even early Depeche Mode. It’s not the only synthpop track on the record, but the album is dominated by a more tough, raw, and punk spirit, featuring aggressive female vocals, live drums + bass guitar, and judicious use of crude analog synthesizers and tape delay fx. Think Liaisons Dangereuses meets Suicide, and you’re beginning to get close…
File Under: Industrial, Electronic
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Mary Lattimore & Growing: Gainer (Silver Current) LP
Critically acclaimed harpist and experimental composer Mary Lattimore and big amp ambient pioneers Growing have united for their first collaboration: Gainer. Remastered here from its original release (previously digital only), Gainer is now available for the first time on vinyl in plush packaging including UV spot gloss “invisible ink”-style jacket printing. Comprised of two side-long pieces, Gainer is less a meeting point of harp and drone guitars and much more a singular creative group vision made up of elemental movements, electrically charged flow and a symphonic aura by three masters of contemporary ambient and experimental composition. Gainer is rumored to be the first record in a series of collaborative albums by Lattimore and Growing. Based on the premiere statement at hand, let’s hope it shall be so!
File Under: Ambient
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Dominique Lawalree: First Meeting (Catch Wave) LP
Finally issued on vinyl again, the impossibly gentle, sad, life-affirming ‘First Meeting’ is a record we’ve described as one of the loveliest chance-encounters we’ve ever had with music, and by all measures one of our favourite albums of all time. If you’re into anything from Erik Satie to Virginia Astley, Brian Eno’s short-lived Obscure label to Laila Sakini, or if you like the idea of timeless outsider music for piano, wurlitzer, bells, flute and voice, this precious selection of intimate wonders is ready and waiting for you to melt into. It might just change your life too. ‘First Meeting’ is an indispensable introduction to the wonderfully moving and expressive parlour music of Dominique Lawalrée – a singular figure who sadly passed away in 2019. Lawalrée had been recording music since 1976, almost appeared on Brian Eno’s Obscure label and counted Gavin Bryars a long time friend and fan of his music. It took until the first edition of this set compiled by Adrian Rew in 2017, however, for us to first encounter his work. Drawn from self-released material recorded between 1978-1982 on his own Brussels-based Editions Walrus (what a name?!), First Meeting reveals a quietly sublime and intimately idiosyncratic sound in 9 parts (15 on the expanded download version) – so quiet and intimate in fact that we feel like a privileged fly on the high ceiling of his apartment studio, twitching our antenna whilst he strokes his keys and synths into almost indescribably beautiful tapestries. In the enlightening liner notes by Britton Powell, Lawalree’s music is perfectly described as “wallpaper; ornate and repetitive” when compared with the music of Satie and Eno, with whom he clearly shares an affinity for subtle and meditative musicality, but the distinction lies in the inherent surreality of his music and its ability to entice and encourage closer listening. Lawalrée is kind and generous with memorable melodies too, but layers his recordings with incidental room sounds and touches of more exotic, Eastern influence that reveal themselves with each new listen, perhaps even more so now thanks to Rashad Becker’s exquisite remastering, which sound like he’s removed a veil of cobwebs we didn’t even realise was there in the first place. There’s a beautiful nuance of consonance to Lawalrée’s music that tantalises the ear with its warbling harmonic complexity and elegant pacing, yet it’s never challenging; conveyed with an honesty that points to his equal appreciation of Satie, Feldman and Stockhausen as much as The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, the latter of whom Lawalrée analysed for a book of second-by-second analysis, culminating in a meeting with The Beatles’ engineer, Geoff Emerick, to whom he pointed out mistakes in the classic recordings which nobody else has ever noticed. The set runs between the revelatory tape tekkers and raga-folk swoon of ‘Post-Scriptum’, to what sounds uncannily like an Arca piece in the warbling notes of ‘Please Do Not Disturb’, taking in the tear-jerking masterwork ‘Listen to the Quiet Voice’ and 14 mins of bucolic beauty in ‘Le Secret Blanc’ in its breezy stride. Ahh, this record is just a dream.
File Under: Ambient
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Liaisons Dangereuses: s/t (Soulsheriff) LP
Soulsheriff Records presents a milestone in electronic music, Liaisons Dangereuses’ legendary 1981 self-titled debut album, newly remastered and reissued for the first time since 2002. Liaisons Dangereuses still fascinates today, through its innovative sound and the mystery encompassing it. The 10 electrifying songs, produced by Chrislo Haas (DAF) and Beate Bartel (Mania D, Matador) and reinforced by Krishna Goineau’s French and Spanish speech-attack lyrics, created a unique style. The album, anything other than a typical Berlin or Düsseldorf thing, became an international favorite. Songs like “Peut Être… Pas” and “Los Niños del Parque” played a decisive role in the development of house in Detroit and Chicago, as well as various forms of European techno.
File Under: Electronic
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Kali Malone: Living Torch (Portraits GRM) LP
Contemporary drone visionary Kali Malone gathers a new, electroacoustic ensemble for her monumental first entry to the GRM pantheon, factoring her pursuit of dynamic timbral horizons with a subtly re-calibrated sense of scale and heightened emotive levity that straddles early music, 20th century American minimalism, electronic drone and widescreen soundtrack formulations. It’s a major new work from an important contemporary artist, and the first collaboration between the GRM and new label-partner Shelter Press, following the untimely passing of Edition Mego’s Peter Rehberg last year. Initially commissioned by the GRM for its fabled Acousmonium multichannel setup, ‘Living Torch’ was composed in Paris between 2020 and 2021 and played on trombone, bass clarinet, sine wave generators, Éliane Radigue’s own ARP 2500 modular synthesizer(!), and the Boîte à bourdons (bumblebee box), a custom-made motor-powered drone instrument inspired by the hurdy-gurdy and the Indian shruti box. The stereo mix renders a discretely introspective experience that imparts its presence in key with the music’s sacred origins. In purposeful staging, the composition prizes immanence over transcendence, revealing through a liberated palette of timbres the hauntingly seductive appeal of early polyphony, as much as the great landscapes that informed American minimalism, and the dematerialised, animist qualities of musique concrète and acoustic phenomenology. Surely cognisant of the greats who preceded her at the GRM, Kali doesn’t attempt to outdo them, but instead patiently opens worlds within worlds, pointing to new harmonic textures and isolating timbres with a level of insight comparable to the subtlety of Éliane Radigue or even the subharmonic traction of Sunn O))). Malone’s instrumental choices are precise and deliberate; using the ARP 2500 isn’t just notable for connecting her to Radigue, but to the very beginnings of consumer synthesis – it was ARP’s first modular unit, developed after engineer Alan R. Pearlman heard Wendy Carlos use the legendary big Moog on “Switched on Bach”. Since then, the system has been harnessed by everyone from Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre to Faust and John Williams, who used it to create the iconic sound effects in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. In 2022, it’s rumoured that there are only around 50 units left in the world. On the face of it, the music’s pace and its brassy, melancholy flavour is adjacent to Gavin Bryars’ phenomenal “Sinking of the Titanic”, but Malone’s transcendental stillness is more in line with the work of Catherine Christer Hennix or Phill Niblock. Her interest in intonation and experience as an organ tuner has allowed Malone to see tone as a colourful spectrum, working in shades and hues instead of resting on the established laurels of equal temperament. This lends her sounds the depth and resonance of the human voice, and feeds into a curiosity with early music – it feels like a step into the future that’s built on firm historical foundations. When brass and woodwind breath a muted fanfare on the beginning of the second side, feeding into soft-focus overdrive and nail-scraped hurdy-gurdy that wavers thru microtonal spectrums, it feels like we’re overhearing a conversation between Hildegard von Bingen and La Monte Young, opening up a portal to the rich inner workings of Malone’s own deeply curious music.
File Under: Drone, Ambient
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Hideki Matsutake/Chojuro Imafuji/Masashi Komatsubara: Edo (Soave) LP
Edo is a cosmic ambient experimental masterpiece conceived in 1977 by Masashi Komatsubara and developed alongside Hideki Matsutake (aka Logic System and reductively defined by many as the “fourth member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra”). As a true sound scientist, he pours all his efforts into this record, and aimed at the widest possible use of an electronic instrument that was at the forefront at that time — the Moog IIIc. He extends his research by trying to break down the last wall between modernity and the past: the union and eurythmy between artificial sounds and traditional sounds. All this through a perfect three-way collaboration together with the shamisen musician Konae Imato, and the creation of a unique and extraordinary charming work dedicated to the double soul of the capital of Japan: ancient Edo, now the current day city of Tokyo. Includes OBI and four-page inserts with text in Japanese and English.
File Under: Ambient, Electronic, Japan
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Merzbow: Magnesia Nova (Urashima) LP
Exquisitely recorded and mixed between February and May 1995 at ZSF Produkt Studio, Masami Akita’s home studio from the late ’80s to late ’90s, Magnesia Nova is stunning immersion into the world of Merzbow during one of the project’s most engrossing and important period. Inspired by the intersections between Greece and Japan and between Western and Eastern civilization along with work of Athanasius Kircher (all of the track titles have been taken from Kircher’s works), is a true blasts of noise, meticulously crafted into gorgeous sound collages. For the first time that this seminal document from Merzbow’s ’90s period has ever appeared on vinyl, in double LP, featuring last side of second LP with 20 minutes of unreleased bonus track took from the same period of the recording sessions. Like all of his work since the early nineties, Magnesia Nova is an uncompromising cascade of brutal noise. In this album you find nothing of the minimalism of his early ’80s, completely overwhelmed by synthesizers and handmade objects that become his unconventional weapons to create bursts of noise. The album begins with “Rituale Lucis” and “Magnesia Nova”, a parade of overloaded, layered and pulsating synthesizers and feedback. Two minutes are enough for the artist to take us to the territories of the most creative experimentation in the history of noise. There are sounds from a parallel universe suspended in time and straight out of an old amp that mumbles before going back to freaking out with synth razors. The sounds are unlike anything else played before or after. You find yourself in the world of dreams and the rhythm of the sound construction thickens, until the great progression of eternal noise materializes. On the second side of the first record the crashes of noise return and the gates of primordial chaos open with “Oedipus Organum”, while “Specula Naturalum” comes to an end, as if it had never begun: perhaps it has been there since the beginning of time, an explosion of synthetic sounds, which seem like the spatial drifts for minor chords by Klaus Schulze. The second record open with “Pantometrum Erotica” that begins with a dark modulation, where an obsessive rhythm alternates with screams of noise and the now familiar synthesizer sound and continue with “Sphinx Mystagoga” where everything collapses into a single otherworldly synthesizer voice that explores an uninhabited planet. Magnesia Nova is a stunning piece of work, that blur the boundaries between pure noise, performance and experimental music. Redesigned reverse cardboard gatefold sleeve LP with original paint art by Masami Akita; edition of 299.
File Under: Noise
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Mosquitoes: Drip Water Hollow Out (Ever/Never) LP
“Murk and mystery are the keys to MOSQUITOES’ unique ability to suck the listener into a wormhole that pulses with menace. Little is known about this new-ish UK unit, but all signs point to an intriguing future. The proof resides within the grooves of Drip Water Hollow Out Stone, Mosquitoes’ 5-song 12” EP on New York City’s fearless Ever/Never Records. Yes, the record’s title functions as a concise explanation of a timeless natural process—but it also reveals the name of each track, small gestures that gradually erode the listener’s sense of physical bearing. The murk radiates and pervades. ‘Drip’ tosses you into the deep end and taunts you to try to swim. Strangled vocal cries and seemingly random guitar/drum patterns suggest the disorienting tactics of avant-rock legends US Maple. There is a disturbing logic afoot, even as the sounds seem to disappear into a maelstrom of their own making. ‘Water’ quite literally buzzes with a malevolent grace as rhythms click and sounds reverberate like deep-sea sonar. ‘Hollow’ channels the throbbing and whirring anxiety of latter-day Sightings, an all-too-rarely seen influence on contemporary noisemakers. It’s a testament to Mosquitoes’ peculiar aesthetics that they can hold their own in such rarefied company. On the flip, Mosquitoes’ put their heads down and burrow deep into into the listener’s skin. ‘Out’ is an amorphous mass of distended sonics featuring short-circuiting guitars, unpredictable sound-swells and stuttering vocals attempting to communicate in an unspoken language. A perfect place-setting then, for the molten eruption of the final track, a fitting cap ‘Stone’ on a mesmerizing outing from Mosquitoes, courtesy of Ever/Never Records.”
File Under: Post Punk, Experimental
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Mosquitoes: Minus Objects (Ever/Never) LP
MOSQUITOES are back and they are deadlier than ever. On Minus Objects, their second 12” EP for Ever/Never Records, Mosquitoes challenge the abyss to a staring contest. Utilizing deep-sixed static dub imperatives over postpunk’s skeletal remains, the enigmatic trio feint & parry, duck & weave, zig & zag like they were born to slip out of your grasp and into your bloodstream. Within Mosquitoes’ all-encompassing buzz, we find a distant link to Mars’ furious caterwaul, a direct connection to the frizzle-fried no wave of Sightings, and a tense granularity that recalls Radian’s studies of disintegration. As the title implies, Mosquitoes create entrancing music using methods of subtraction. Paradox runs rampant over these nine tracks as Mosquitoes gesture towards the intimate, while retaining their forbiddingly alien textures. “Minus Object Four” overwhelms with resonant vocal hum, while “Minus Object Eight” is as desolate and haunted as any Burial track. Few bands can be convincingly accused of pushing the decrepit body of rock music into the future. Mosquitoes do so by hiding the corpse in a deep chamber where shadows lurk and mysteries abound. Elusive, unnerving, sense-scrambling—this is Mosquitoes’ modus operandi. They are a short-circuit made manifest, a cipher without decryption, a riddle without words. Mosquitoes transform the incidental movements of playing electric music (amp hum, string contact, cymbal brushes, ambient clatter) to conjure beguiling rhythmic structures. The initial impression is haphazard, but soon the mastery, and the majesty, become glaringly obvious. Mosquitoes have so thoroughly harnessed control of their close-mic’d soundworld that to observe the final result in its natural state is a thing of wonder. On Minus Objects, Mosquitoes have achieved a grand new pinnacle.
File Under: Post Punk, Experimental
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Jamal Moss: Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost (Modern Love) LP
Gnostic Chicago house virtuoso Jamal Moss unleashes the spirits of angular and rampant warehouse music on a powerful clutch of bangers for Modern Love – the first issued under his own name for five years, loaded with his deadliest energy. If yr into anything from Steve Poindexter to The Other People Place to MMM/Errorsmith and Sun Ra – this is the absolute sickest gear. ‘Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ taps into Jamal’s finest vein of tekkerz for a ribboning stream of chromatically colourful, insistently psychosexual club music for hearts, bodies and minds. By this point, readers of these pages should be very aware of Jamal’s prolific oeuvre; he’s been a GOAT to us for nearly decades now, probably listed here more than any other artist, and we’ll never tire of diving into his ceaseless stream of life-giving energies. This set of tracks for Modern Love are patently some of his most gripping, romantic, crazed and timeless; drenched in chaotic cosmic harmony and notably textured to the spirit-biting point, with thanks to Rashad Becker’s mastering which really holds up the facets of his raw cut gems to the light. Slicing off just one cross-section of his ceaseless, holistic practice, the music here speaks to the endless variation within a theme that Jamal has made a virtue of since his nascent ‘90s productions. Where those early works with legendary mentors such as Steve Poindexter and Adonis still had Jamal’s experience of the original Chicago warehouse scene fresh in the memory, he’s come to singularly carry that flame far from the original object while never losing sight of its original reasons for being, seamlessly integrating lessons of Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz and his DJ/diggers-instinct for classic synth and industrial musicks, into a syncretic roil of ideas that simply sounds like nobody else. Plainly put, opener ‘The Lust With-IN’ is an instant classic, blooming with arpestral orchestrations and cinematic string pads for the end-of-the-night, oozing a similar melancholy fire to The Other People Place’s ‘Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café’, while the psychosexual club oscillator ‘Erotic Abuse’ plays it slow to delirious & deadly effect. There’s a striking lick of tranced-out synths for the wall-slappers in ‘This Is 4 The Rave bangers II’, and frankly unhinged, speaker-worrying badness in ‘I Can’t Escape From U’ – a distorted grind of square bass x animalic synths that rattles like the hardest MMM peak-timer, while the bugged-out butterfly dance of ‘When Love Knows No Bounds’ deploys cascading drum machines and arpeggios on top of one another to fully disorienting, trippy effect. Jamal is one of the true, visionary club mediums of our time, and we reckon ‘Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ features some of his very best material – demented, soulful and restless – like nothing else.
File Under: Electronic
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Jake Muir: Lady’s Mantle (sferic) LP
Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one – a highly immersive exercise in blissed worldbuilding. sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game – from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn’t so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music. On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales. In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to ‘Lady’s Mantle’ that makes it a highly immersive and often surprising listen. Background music, it ain’t.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient
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Muslimgauze/The Rootsman: City of Djinn (Via Parigi) LP
The first vinyl issue of original material previously published in 1997 on CD by Third Eye Music (The Rootsman’s own CD imprint). The second collaboration between Muslimgauze and The Rootsman following the Amahar release (VIA 001LP). Arguably one of the highpoints from both these UK sonic pioneers (John Bolotten, aka The Rootmsan, and Bryn Jones, aka Muslimgauze). Double album housed in a sleeve designed by Oleg Galay. Limited edition vinyl pressing. Includes insert.
File Under: Industrial, Electronic, Tribal
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Anthony Naples: Chameleon (ANS) LP
Shimmering with iridescent strums and loosely harnessed to stumbling drums, Naples’ 3rd album ‘Chameleon’ is defined by a marked difference to the micro-house dub tech of its predecessor ‘Fog FM.’ It’s music for the dying embers of summer, heralding longer evenings with a carefully toned collection of 12 tracks that refine the sehnsucht of his sound into woozier shapes puckered with bluesy melodic cadence and squinted with a kosmiche gaze. For anyone following the NYC-based artist thus far, it’s surely a richly rewarding new extension of his sound that lends itself to lonesome strolls and porchside pipe puffing alike. One might not guess it from the accomplished quality of the music, but this is the first time Naples wrote music for instruments first, following his nose for a style of lissom ambient reverie that’s perhaps the most spirited and distinguished since he debuted nearly a decade ago with Mister Saturday Night Records and helped shape a new movement of para-deep house and ambient from USA via some dozen singles with everyone from The Trilogy Tapes to his own labels, Proibito and ANS. Working to a masterful sunday night sound, if you will, ‘Chameleon’ sprawls out with arpeggiated tendrils and searching guitars lines from the faded lean of ‘Primo’ to the early ‘90s ambient bop of ‘I Don’t Know If That’s Just Dreaming’ , laying down syrupy sweet soul in ‘Devotion (SSL Mix)’ and swaying from the crooked hip hop drums of ‘Chameleon’ recalliAng Dante Carfanga’s Express Rising project, to amorphous chromatic whorls reminding of BoC’s wow and flutter in ‘Bug’ and ‘Hydra’, with exquisite vignettes like ‘Full O’ Stars’ and the thizz of ‘Sizzlin’ epitomising its low-key but heady ephemeral nature.
File under: Electronic
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The Notations: Still Here 1967 – 1973 (Numero) LP
Over the course of a decades-long and infinitely surprising career, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James has created the kind of mind-expanding music that transports the listener into liminal spaces: the intangible terrain between reality and dream, perception and imagination, the sensory world and the supermundane. On his 2013 debut solo album Regions of Light and Sound of God, the Louisville-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist stepped further into unknown and otherworldly territory, a journey informed by a devastating accident that radically altered his mindset. This colored vinyl 2LP reissue includes the original album plus a bonus disc with 11 previously unreleased b-sides, demos and alternate takes. It’s packaged in a deluxe tip-on gatefold jacket with rainbow foil, custom inner-sleeves, labels and a fold-out insert with new artwork.
File Under: Funk, Soul
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Paolo Ormi E La Sua Orchestra: P.O.X. Sound (Sonor) LP
Maestro Paolo Ormi was a great arranger and orchestra director for the Italian television of the 1970s/80s that strictly worked with many important international artists and that’s largely remembered for being the personal Raffaella Carra and Rita Pavone’s arranger and conductor for a large part of his career. Beyond his contribution and work for the Italian famed singers, he delighted himself in producing some gorgeous Latin Funk albums, often covering and re-arranging Latin music classics. Sonor team was able to rescue from oblivion the lost tapes of this incredible recording, that were originally conceived in 1972 at RCA studios in Rome, and until now never officially released on any commercial/physical format. A promo Stereo-8 was only issued at the time on a ridiculous run, and only distributed for non-commercial purposes among the TV circuits. The album is a really special Latin-Funk banger that anticipates “P.O.X. SOUND vol.2” LP, issued in 1973, and clearly shows Maestro Ormi’s strong Latin-influenced take on music with tones of groovy Latin Jazz, exciting breaks and hot Latin Funk groovers. Fabulous album from start to finish!
File Under: Library
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OSees: A Foul Form (Castle Face) LP
“Brain stem cracking scum-punk recorded tersely in the basement of my home. After a notoriously frustrating eon, the knee-jerk song path was aggressive and hooky. This is an homage to the punk bands we grew up on—the weirdos and art freaks that piqued our interests and pointed us on the trail head to here / now. Bad times make for strong music is something I agree with. I would say that is evident by the past few years of output from the underground. Transmissions have been all over the map: scanning…searching…sweeping out in the darkness looking for a foot hold. “[OSEES] A Foul From represents some of our most savage and primal instincts. Fight or flight. And the importance of a sense of humor in the darkest hour. Nothing wrong with keeping it snappy in the meantime. For fans of Rudimentary Peni, Crass, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Screamers, Abwarts, Stooges and all things aggressively tilted towards your face. You can lean back but don’t flinch…it’s a brief foray into the exhausting pogo pit, so stiffen your back and jerk with your knees. Enjoy.” —John Dwyer
File Under: Punk
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Pavement: Courting Shutdown Offers (Matador) CS
We’ve also pressed up a lovingly detailed replica of the cassette Pavement used to shop ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ to prospective record labels, titled ‘Courting Shutdown Offers.’ This is an early version of the finished album with a different running order and a handful of alternate track titles. (Note: cassette tracks are the same versions as on Slanted & Enchanted)
File Under: Indie Rock, Tapes
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Pavement: Slanted & Enchanted – 30th Anniversary (Matador) LP
The first installment of Matador’s 2022 “Revisionist History” catalog series is a 30th anniversary colored vinyl LP reissue of Pavement’s landmark debut Slanted & Enchanted. First released in 1992, it remains a truly monumental album three decades later – one that defined/ruined a generation and a genre, depending on who you ask. Beneath its coils of raw distortion and screaming-for-the-hell-of-it, Pavement’s first full-length disc gets over on the strength of stellar songwriting and ingenious melodicism. Steve Malkmus’s sly, evocative word-games reveal genuine emotion (“Here”), and sometimes they just pay tribute to his favorite bands (“Conduit For Sale!” is a nod to the Fall), but these songs are unconventional in a way that set the convention for bands that came after them. NME hailed it as, “a marvellous piece of lazy rock’n’roll that does for the current American new wave what Teenage Fanclub’s ‘A Catholic Education’ did for British guitar music…Almost unintentionally they’ve forged one of the most refreshing American noises for ages” while Spin named it one of their favorite albums of 1992 proclaiming it was, “so rich in melliflluous melodies, elliptical lyrics and thrilling, avant guitar-pop seductions that it renders any and all competition meaningless.”
File Under: Indie Rock
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Plus Instruments: Februari-april ’81 (Domani Sound) LP
What PLUS INSTRUMENTS? The title implies the secondary nature of the tools used to produce the sounds, maybe even of the sounds themselves. The means of making sound are not important, but the sounds themselves are, but even beyond them there is a force, a grumbling. Maybe best represented by the first sound heard on Plus Instruments Februauri- April ’81 a sound that is more felt than heard. The grumbling persists throughout the album, not in the same sonic way but things gyrate and repeat until they are mineral and not purely auditory. Using toys, drum machines, and other homemade electronics designed by front person TRUUS DE GROOT, the band manages to obscure every song into a hard to maintain mix of No Wave drive, New Wave sheen, and dance music groove. Consisting of Truus, LEE RANALDO (SONIC YOUTH) and DAVID LINTON (RHYS CHATHAM), the trio smashes the sound of early 80s New York with the equally as progressive European experimentation of the time. Completely without total contemporaries, Plus Instruments make music free of bounds from time, labels, and place. Originally released by Kremlin records, run by Sonic Youth’s future manager CARLOS VAN HITFJE, Domani Sounds proudly presents Febrauri-April ’81 featuring brand new liner notes by Hitfje himself.
File Under: Post Punk, ELectronic
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Prime Vertical: Escapist Eschaton (Ilian Tapes) LP
Escapist Eschaton may be used as background music for the following:
Building a refuge for exiled planets. Conscious absorption of rare elements. Cloudlike observations of evaporated landmasses. A wistful emulation of escape. Preparing food for the moon. Strange situation test for non-terrestrial officers. Counterfeiting consumer electronics. Retuning GABAergic interneurons. Accompaniment for affective picture systems. Rituals of self-decompression. Inquiries into trace minerals.
File Under: Ambient, Electronic
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Princess Diana of Wales: s/t (A Colourful Storm) LP
Princess Diana of Wales, by London-based Australian Laila Sakini, is A Colourful Storm’s latest and most curious project. Someone, no one, a notion, a feeling… Sakini offers clues but no simple answers. Vocal-led pieces “Still Beach” and “Fragments of Blue” are brittle and intoxicating, contemplating recklessness and unfulfillment of a past life: “Watching the future wash away/ Giving it up to have this day”. She studies closeness and, incredulous of the feelings that emerge, wonders if detachment is impermanent. She catalogs these emotions as a series of memories, colors, and images. “Evaporate”, sedated and hushed, is a secret confession and ode to resolution, albeit, fatally, only a temporary one: “Take some form/ Later on when I can do this/ When we can do this/ Together”. Behind the album is a stage of dubwise disorientations evoking in-between states of the everyday. “Swing” and “Closer” are woozy and dreamlike, their voices summoning ghosts of fortunes past while “Exhaust” finds an aperture in our protagonist’s daydream. A perilous foreshadowing of the incantatory “Choir Chant”, whose spell pacifies her inquisition, submerging both self and feeling into the deep blue sea. RIYL: Grouper, Kali Malone, Drew McDowall. Full-color sleeve with insert.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient
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Puppet Wipes: The Stones Are Watching (Siltbreeze) LP
Puppet Wipes is the latest source of audio levitation for Arielle McCuaig (Hairnet, Janitor Scum, Vacuum Rebuilders) & Kayla MacNeill (Singing Lawn Chair, Vacuum Rebuilders) who conjure up their extraordinary odds bodkins out of Calgary, Alberta. Label fact checkers will note that Puppet Wipes are the 1st Canadian band ever signed to the Siltbreeze roster. That only took three decades. Anyway, their debut cassette from a couple years back, ‘It’s Called Punk, Are You Stupid?’—supposedly recorded in an hour—was a fetching melange of art damaged hoopla that sounded like it might’ve taken a spin around the Amos & Sara / It’s War Boys universe. On this one, the course settings remain seemingly intact, yet further realized. Plus it took a tad longer than 3600 seconds to behold. There’s a quote by the master of superfluousness, May Benot, that goes, ‘When the unconventionalists convey their art, which is by nature, unconventional, then does unconventionalism become part of a post conventionalist-conventionista?” Whatever you say, Mrs. Doublespeak. I’m not sure I even know what that means, but if I were a betting man, I’d say Puppet Wipes have it in spades. RIYL; Lemon Kittens, Your Mom Too, Doof, Dave E. McManus, XV.
File Under: LoFi, Punk
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Pye Corner Audio: Let’s Emerge (Sonic Cathedral) LP
‘Let’s Emerge!’ is Pye Corner Audio’s first studio outing for Sonic Cathedral following the acclaimed live recording ‘Social Dissonance’, and it features Ride guitarist Andy Bell playing on five of its ten tracks. From the first glimpse of the artwork to the first note of the music it’s a marked deviation from Pye Corner Audio’s more traditional shadowy sounds. Whereas his last outing for Ghost Box (2021’s ‘Entangled Routes’) was inspired by the underground fungal pathways through which plants communicate, this one is very much above ground, bathed in sunlight and acid-bright psychedelia. “This is a departure to sunnier climes, but a departure nonetheless,” says Pye Corner Audio, aka Martin Jenkins. “It’s something that I’d been thinking about for a while. I try to tailor my work slightly differently for the various labels that I work with, and this seems to fit nicely with Sonic Cathedral’s ethos.” Designer Marc Jones’ ultra vivid artwork consciously references the likes of LFO, Spacemen 3 and the early output of Stereolab. “I think it mixes together many of my earliest influences,” explains Martin. “I’ve been a long-time fan of Spacemen 3 and Stereolab. Their moments of repetition and drone have always seeped into what I’ve tried to create. “I was living in a small apartment and I’d stripped down my studio set-up when I was recording this album. This enabled me to focus on a few key pieces of equipment and explore them fully.” The recordings were fleshed out by Andy Bell, who Martin first met at the Sonic Cathedral 15th birthday party at The Social in London back in 2019 – the same show that became the live album Social Dissonance. “New alliances were formed and friendships made in that basement in Little Portland Street,” recalls Martin. “When I met Andy, we agreed that we needed to work together in some way. After I’d remixed a few tracks from his album The View From Halfway Down, he kindly repaid the favour.” The end results, mastered in New York by Heba Kadry, are incredible, from the first stirrings of opener ‘De-Hibernate’, via the glorious ‘Haze Loops’ and ‘Saturation Point’, the album slowly but surely awakens, blinking and feeling its way into the light. It all culminates in the epic closing track ‘Warmth Of The Sun’ which, with its vocal harmonies and acid breakdown, is seven and a half minutes of pure release. “That one’s about life’s simple pleasures,” concludes Martin. “The Beach Boys, tremolo guitars, infinite drones, Spacemen 3. Let’s emerge from this darkened era and feel the ‘Warmth Of The Sun’. “The last few years have seen huge changes, both personally and in a wider perspective. The album title is a reaction to this, a collective (tentative) sigh of relief. Here’s to new beginnings and a sense of hope.”
File Under: Ambient, Electronic
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Ty Segall: Hello, Hi (Drag City) LP
Hello, Hi: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, Hello, Hi pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday. Hello, Hi is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through. Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, Hello, Hi is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it—throughout Hello, Hi, Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.
File Under: Punk, Rock
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Sirom: Liquified Throne of Simplicity (Glitterbeat) LP
The Slovenian “imaginary folk” trio’s most epic and transportive album yet. Powered by acoustic and often handmade instruments, these expansive compositions echo the borderless, collective spirit of groups like Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society and Art Ensemble of Chicago. Drawing on this geography of contemplation and psychic energy, from a country previously swallowed up by Yugoslavia and before that, reaching back centuries, the Roman, Byzantine and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the Slovenian trio of Iztok Koren, Ana Kravanja and Samo Kutin conjure up an extended album of intuitive transcendence and reflection on the unique sounding The Liquified Throne of Simplicity. Finding a home once more with Glitterbeat Records’ adventurous, experimental, mostly instrumental, platform tak:til, and following on from the debut I Can Be A Clay Snapper (GB 051CD/LP, 2017), and the equally acclaimed A Universe That Roasts Blossoms For A Horse (GB 079CD/LP, 2019), Sirom’s fourth such inventive and illusionary album incorporates some aspects of the former whilst expanding the inventory of eclectic instruments and obscured sounds. For the first time the trio also ignore the time constraints of a standard vinyl record to fashion longer, more fully developed entrancing and hypnotizing peregrinations. This new, amended, approach results in 80 minutes of abstract and rustic folklore, dream-realism, explorative intensity and cathartic ritual. And within that array of realms there’s evocations of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World experiments, visions of Samarkand, the esoteric mysteries of Tibet, an unplugged faUSt, and pastoral hurdy-gurdy churned Medieval Europe. These off-the-beaten-track performances converge history and geography with untethered fantasies and ambiguous atmospheres; all of which are made even more so fantastical, and even symbolic, by both the poetic, allegorical fabled track titles and the softly surreal illustrative artwork by the small village-based painter Marko Jakse, whose signature magical, if solemn, characters and landscapes adorn the album’s cover and inlay. Music, in part, as a therapy The Liquified Throne of Simplicity offers a portal to other musical, sonic worlds: an escape route out of the on-going pandemic and its demoralizing, mentally draining effects and the crisis it has sparked in Slovenia, with certain far right groups especially taking advantage to ramp up the discourse of nationalism. By instinct, and in parts by coincidence, Sirom once more entrance with their vague undulations and illusionary echoes of places, settings, time and escapism on another highly magical album.
File Under: Folk, Psych, Ambient
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Surface of the Earth: s/t (Thin Wrist) LP
Since its release in 1995, Surface of the Earth’s self-titled first album has gradually been recognized as an unlikely minimalist masterpiece and one of the key albums to emerge from New Zealand’s 1990’s Free Noise movement. Liberated from tonal and structural convention, yet also embracing elements of drone and ambient music, the Wellington trio created an album that defied easy categorization. It has been called “one of the most important albums to ever drag the subterranean vibe of unending drone into the stifling, weirdly beautiful vista of urban decay”, and has drawn parallels with the works of Phill Niblock, William Basinski, and Éliane Radigue, as well as Tony Conrad and John Cale. It is a rare album where players, instruments, and space coexist and play equal parts — coalescing to create a new, monumental kind of music — one that is both haunting and embracing, dark and transcendent. The album began as a limited edition, self-released cassette in 1995. Later it was made available as a double lathe-cut LP in an edition of 20 before eventually being released on CD by Bruce Russell’s legendary Corpus Hermeticum label alongside works by A Handful of Dust, Flying Saucer Attack, Thurston Moore, and The Shadow Ring. It was recorded live between 1994 and 1995 with two microphones to cassette in a cavernous wooden community hall in the city center of Wellington, NZ; the music created with a shambolic collection of cheap, hardly functioning electric guitars, ancient NZ made valve amps and a scant few effects, reverb, walkie talkies, Dictaphones, and a synthesizer with its keys taped down. For all of that — the album sounds like a field recording from another world: dark tones reverberate, metals echo and clatter and electricity crackles, blooms of feedback emerge held in suspension — half floating, half driving through a dense nocturnal atmosphere. Over its nine pieces and nearly 80-minute duration it courses with an undeniably organic, human energy; it develops and sustains with a sort of terrifying beauty that evokes elation and dread, a tension and ease that transports the listener to another sort of dimension. Thin Wrist present Surface of the Earth for the first time ever in its complete form. Restored and remastered from the original tapes; presented in a deluxe tip-on gatefold with black pigment ink foil stamping on pure black tactile Reef paper. Surface of the Earth were: Tony McGurk, Donald Smith, Paul Toohey. Recorded at Thistle Hall, Wellington, AOTEAROA, 1994-5. Black Edition produced by Peter Kolovos; Mastered by Elysian Masters; Black edition design by Rob Carmichael, SEEN Studio; Executive Services: Bruce Russell; Technical Services: Peter King, Thomas Sims, John Button.
File Under: Experimental
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T2: 1970 (Guerssen) LP
This is the “lost” second album by hard-prog band T2, featuring demos recorded at Decca Studios by the original line-up in 1970, just after the release of their debut masterpiece It’ll All Work Out In Boomland (1970). Known also as T2 and Fantasy, 1970 shows T2 at their rawest, featuring the explosive guitar of Keith Cross, the powerful drumming and cool vocals of Peter Dunton, and the fantastic bass playing of Bernie Jinks. Hard cardboard sleeve; includes insert with liner notes and photos.
File Under: Psych
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T2: 1971-1972 (Guerssen) LP
Amazing unissued recordings by cult psych/prog band T2, featuring their later line-up, still with the great Peter Dunton on drums/vocals but now with Andrew Bown replacing Keith Cross on guitar and bass player John Weir on most of the tracks. There’s also guest appearances by Dunton’s friend Andrew Keeling on flute and slide guitar player Will Killeen. Similar to their classic It’ll All Work Out In Boomland and 1970 albums, this is highly recommended to any fan of underground hard-rock and proto-metal. Hard cardboard sleeve; includes insert with liner notes and photos.
File Under: Psych
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Phuong Tam: Magical Nights: Saigon Surf, Twist & Soul 1964 – 1966 (Sublime Frequencies) LP
Sublime Frequencies present the first ever retrospective of Phương Tâm, the groundbreaking Saigon teenager who became one of the first singers to perform and record rock and roll in 1960s Vietnam. By chance in early 2020, Hannah Hà (USA) learned that her mother, Phương Tâm, had once been a famous young singer, performer and recording artist at the heart of Saigon’s music scene in the early 1960s. The family had heard some mention of their mom as a singer at the time, but the extent of her legacy and the many songs she had recorded came as a big surprise. Further investigations soon led Hannah to producer Mark Gergis, compiler of Saigon Rock and Soul (SF 060CD, 2010), enlisting him to join her on a journey of discovery and recovery. The result is this essential document of Phương Tâm’s brief but prolific career, and at the same time, reuniting the long-lost music with its singer. The unique strengths and qualities of Phương Tâm’s voice, coupled with her commanding stage presence, had swiftly elevated her to top billings on Saigon’s nightclub stages. Parallel to the brutality and uncertainty of an already protracted war, South Vietnam’s music and recording industry were developing at a rapid pace in the early 1960s. Globally, musical trends with wild, ephemeral dance crazes were being thought up weekly; the twist, hully gully, the mashed potato — none of them a problem for Phương Tâm. She soon caught the attention of Saigon’s leading recording companies and composers (Y Vân, Khánh Băng, Trường Hải, Thanh Sơn, Y Vũ and Mặc Thế Nhân, among others). Her energy translated unsurprisingly well in the studio, backed by electric guitars, contrabass, drums, lush brass sections, saxophone, piano, organ and rich backing vocals. Between 1964-1966, Phương Tâm would record almost 30 known tracks, released by the three main record companies in Saigon. The teenage starlet became a vital centerpiece of pop music of the time, and one of the very first singers to perform and record rock and roll (known locally as nhạc kích động, or, action music) — though as you’ll hear, she could also transform a jazz ballad into something otherworldly. While these musical styles were undeniably influenced by contemporary trends worldwide, the musicians and composers worked to localize the sounds, incorporating linguistic adaptations, lyrical content and past artistic traditions into something all their own. In 1966, as Saigon’s music scene continued to evolve and escalate, Phương Tâm walked away from her singing career without looking back — marrying the man she loved and beginning the next rich chapter of her life. But her recorded output had laid the stylistic groundwork for the following generations of singers, and many of the songs she first sang would later be further popularized by others. Her impactful, but short-spanning career has seen her legacy remain historically understated until now. Due to the lack of master tapes or documentation from pre-1975 Vietnam, and the scarcity of records and tapes that had survived the war, it was difficult to grasp the extent of Phương Tâm’s discography. A collective effort was required in sourcing materials and information to compile this record, involving key collectors and producers internationally (Jan Hagenkötter, Cường Phạm, Adam Fargason, Khoa Hà — granddaughter of composer Y Vân, and researcher Jason Gibbs). As the veils of history were slowly lifted, the genuine thrill was witnessing Phương Tâm herself, hearing these songs for the first time in over 50 years — sometimes since the day she recorded them. At the heart of this project is a family story — Hannah Hà’s dedication to recovering and sharing her mother’s musical legacy is helping put Phương Tâm back on center stage after 55 years. But it is also a story that adds critical context to the fragmented understanding of Vietnamese popular culture during the 20th century, particularly after so much has been lost to war and dislocation. The album features 25 tracks, restored and remastered from original records and reel tapes. Deluxe double LP release comes with two 14-page booklets in English and Vietnamese, featuring extensive liner notes by Hannah Hà and Mark Gergis, exclusive photos, album and sheet music art, original magazine and newspaper extracts, nightclub advertisements and more.
File Under: Asia, Psych, Surf
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Terminal Nation/Kruelty: Ruination of Imperialism (20 Buck Spin) LP
The second split release of the year from 20 Buck Spin sees the return of Terminal Nation for the first time since the crushing Holocene Extinction album released in the bleak pandemic summer of 2020. Joining them on the split is Japan’s ultra heavy kingpins Kruelty, fresh off tour dates in both the U.S. and Europe after releasing the furious A Dying Truth and Immortal Nightmare in 2020. Reinforcing the fact of being one of the heaviest bands on the planet, Terminal Nation offer three new tracks on the A side, declaring all out war on the imperial masters pulling the world’s strings. The darkness of death metal and Bolt Thrower’s tank march matched with the ferocious power of the hardcore breakdown, the songs are teeming with a nation’s rage on the brink of boiling over into full blown chaos. Kruelty similarly have found the sweet spot where hardcore meets old school steamrolling death and doom metal. “Suppression” and “Under Your Pressure” reveal some of the bands most punishing, structure-leveling riffs and bloodied beatdowns to date.
File Under: Metal
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TIBSLC: Hypertranslucent (sferic) LP
sferic venture a new set of plasmic ambient entertainment systems by Jonas Wiese’s TIBSLC, mining that slender but heady sweetspot between the earliest Vladislav Delay productions for Chain Reaction, Japanese environmental x architectural recordings and the sort of gear you’d hear from Move D & Jonas Grossmann at the late 90’s Source Recordings heyday. sferic pick up the mantle of late ‘90s-into-‘00s ambient with a new variant primed for the times. Following the themes of their ‘Decisive Tongue Shifts – Situation Based Compositions’ album of 2021, TIBSLC (The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child) distills their sferic debut into a crystal clear, hypersensitive set of eight tracks that slip seamlessly into each other’s space, recalling the amorphous end of Jan Jelinek’s ambient shimmers. Where TIBSLC’s first album sprawled over two discs, this one relates to the same recording sessions, but glimpsed via more succinct windows of opportunity. In effect they’re like Hitchcockian, voyeurist snapshots of other lives in the urban complex woven into a melting emulation of the city at dusk, replete with infrasonic bass from streets below, and streaked with the wistful dream energy and fizzy optimism of a certain city life. In fleeting rounds of ephemeral shrapnel and synth pad washes, the eight parts evoke a sense of mental discombobulation, lending itself to ruminating on the unbearable lightness of being. Lovers of graphic sound craft, and that turn-of-the-century Ambient signature, this one’s for you.
File Under: Ambient, Electronic
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Francois Tusques: Piano Dazibao (Souffle Continu) LP
Reissue of François Tusques’s Piano Dazibao, originally released in 1970. To avoid the “Quésaco?” on the sleeve of Piano Dazibao, François Tusques explains everything: “A wall mural on which the Red Guard expressed their opinions during the Chinese proletarian cultural revolution. So much for the ‘Dazibao’, very good; but the piano in all that?” The piano, François Tusques was self-taught and his work was influenced by Jelly Roll Morton and Earl Hines before discovering Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and then… free jazz. In Paris in 1965, Tusques mixed with Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, Aldo Romano, or Jacques Thollot. He also met Don Cherry and above all recorded, with other like-minded Frenchmen (Portal and Jeanneau alongside Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin, and Charles Saudrais), the first album of free jazz in France, named… Free Jazz. In 1967, Tusques again served up Le Nouveau Jazz, this time in the company of Barney Wilen (and Guérin, Jenny-Clark, Romano). Three years later his thirst for freedom led him to isolation; between May and September 1970, the pianist recorded, at his home, the first of two albums that he would release on Futura Records: Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2 (FFL 074LP). Under the influence of Mao and Lewis Carroll, the free spirit roamed and composed seven tracks which are not so much free as libertarian. As an homage to some friends (Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Clifford Thornton but also Colette Magny, Michel Le Bris or the Théâtre du Chêne Noir), the pianist played cascading bouquets of notes, free-form wanderings, blues-ambushed dances, growls, discords, a fatal requiem… A cherished freedom, songs of hope and demands, François Tusques offers the most unrelenting of independent records. Licensed from Futura / Marge. Carefully remastered from the master tapes. 180 gram vinyl.
File Under: Jazz
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Francois Tusques: Dazibao n2 (Souffle Continu) LP
Reissue of François Tusques’s Dazibao n°2, originally released in 1971. This was of course not the first time that François Tusques was a “headline act”. In 1965, he recorded, with other like-minded Frenchmen (François Jeanneau, Michel Portal, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin, and Charles Saudrais), the first album of free jazz in France, named… Free Jazz. In 1967, Tusques again served up Le Nouveau Jazz, in the company of Barney Wilen (and Beb Guérin, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and Aldo Romano). Three years later, between May and September 1970, the pianist recorded, at his home, Piano Dazibao (FFL 073LP), an album on which he multiplied joyful escapades as a critical iconoclast. The following year Tusques recorded Dazibao N°2, which shows him as an incisive commentator of his times. Following in the footsteps of Don Cherry, who he had met a few years earlier in Paris, Tusques made a plea for “friendship between all the peoples of the world” to the sound of Universalist hymns which transported us from Africa to Asia. But it is really a song to America, evoking the assassination of the activist George Jackson and the mutiny in Attica prison, before covering “Seize the Time” by Elaine Brown — three years after the release of Dazibao N°2, she became the first (and only) woman to lead the Black Panther Party. The turmoil of Piano Dazibao, was opposed, on Dazibao N°2, by long, labyrinthine tracks with alternating discords and repetitions. Often using prepared piano, Tusques was more percussive (even heady) than ever, exposing a melody with solid hammer strikes or painting an image which radiated peace in spite of the storms. Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2 thus form the two sides of one coin, which displays the effigy of François Tusques, an international national monument. Licensed from Futura / Marge. Carefully remastered from the master tapes. 180 gram vinyl.
File Under: Jazz
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Tzompantli: Tlazcaltilizti (20 Buck Spin) LP
A Tzompantli, in bygone days, was a rack used to display human skulls, often of enemies or sacrifices, in several Mesoamerican civilizations. In 2022, Tzompantli is a beyond-crushing death doom war march built on a bedrock of Native / Indigenous themes, rituals and history, illuminating the splendor, brutality and despair within. Nearly three years after the band’s self-released EP, Tzompantli’s debut full length presents the first smoke-conjured specter to manifest materially. Tlazcaltiliztli, a ritual ceremony that translates to “nourishing the fire and sun with blood”, is imbued with the spirit of Native inspiration that dwells deep within the heart and soul of the project and is skillfully weaved into a traditional bludgeoning framework of spine-severing savagery and melancholic anguish. On the ritualistic “Eltequi” (to cut the chest open and extract the heart as an offering) the band’s unification of native / folk instrumentation and heaviness becomes one in the same, opening vast new horizons for where this sound can go. Tlazcaltiliztli is dedicated, and an offering, to the indigenous peoples, nations and tribes of the North, South, East and West of the American continents. It marks a fearsome and spirited new vision for the death metal underground.
File Under: Metal
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Vadin: Black Tortoise (Utter) LP
Gloaming, introspective, ritualist dark ambient and sound poetry by London’s Vādin, getting under the skin with oily textures, sloshed percussion and whispered intimations… ”Black Tortoise” is the second full-length album by enigmatic duo Vādin – a collaboration between sound artists and performers Christian Duka and Lucie Štepánková (aka Avsluta). “Black Tortoise” is a voyage accompanied by the uncanny, the shadow-dwelling specters and arcane symbolism derived from ancient Chinese astronomy. “Astrologia” opens the album with an eerie torrent of droning voices and glassy, percussive interventions, leading into the patiently unfolding opening of the “The Presence” with it’s ominous narrative riding the swelling, thunderous rhythms culminating in swarms of hallucinatory chaos. The doom of “Calliope” follows, infused with cavernous, beastly vocalisations which lure the listener into “The Furnace”, a drowsy kaleidoscope of rhythms weaved together with Štepánková’s mother-tongue narration. And further on still, into the make-believe world conjured up by the buzzing and swarming objects overheard on “Plateau”.”
File Under: Ambient
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Tom Van Der Geld: Small Mountain: Music for Four Marimbas (Black Sweat) LP
Black Sweat present a reissue of Tom Van Der Geld’s Small Mountain, originally released in 1986. In 1986, the vibraphonist Tom Van Der Geld composed his personal ode to creation, a tonal poem for all natural beings called Small Mountain. It reveals a pure minimalist inspiration, a vibrant style of sound variations that is decidedly more Zen-impressionistic than the mathematical-metaphysical works of Steve Reich. This music, for four marimbas and other percussion instruments, suggests an emotional osmosis with all the elements, a flow of ecstatic progressions that is more immanence than transcendence. It’s the rain that falls softly on fragrant moss or the fog that hides the frost on the grass; an exotic spectrum of multi-form colors, dances of leaves, branches, sticks, fronds, lianas, swirls of petals and bark. Ode to the wind, to the rainforest, a psalm to the waters energy that opens the portals of the temples of nature. As in the Aboriginal songlines, every place or being on planet Earth becomes, through music, space for the sacred.
File Under: Classical, Ambient, Minimalism
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Ben Vida & Lea Bertucci: Murmurations (Cibachrome Editions) LP
Longstanding figures in New York City experimental music scene—both noted for pushing electroacoustic music into highly individualized realms—Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci began collaborating during the Summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, NY. What began as a series of conversations between friends, slowly formed into the development of a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation that challenged and rethought the nature of dialog and language itself; intertwining their respective practices into a series of fluid compositions where the identities and locations of each artist become progressively obscure. Issued by Bertucci’s Cibachrome Editions, Murmurations is the first culmination of this process. Comprising six instrumental works, as well as four that place both artists’ long-standing engagement with the human voice, the album presents a fascinating, uncharted position between the efforts of experimental vocalists like Joan La Barbara, Katalin Ladik, Jeanne Lee, and Linda Sharrock, musique concrète, sound poetry, free improvisation, and electroacoustic music; abstractions and deconstructions of language that form an ecosystem unto themselves.
File Under; Experimental
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Keith Fullerton Whitman: GRM [Redactions] (17117) (Nakid) LP
A bit of a dream come true; Keith Fullerton Whitman effectively does dub jazz concrète on a deeply rewarding longform session placing him somewhere in the vicinity of Porter Ricks, Laurie Spiegel, early Vladislav Delay x Jim O’Rourke in vaporous mode. The second in a limited edition three-part series for Japan’s NAKID label. After unravelling our minds and tendons with a flux of polymetric footwork experiments on the recent first part, KFW returns with a properly eye-watering second volume containing perhaps the most captivating material we’ve heard from him in two decades. Extracted from a fathomless archive of recordings made over the past 12 years of practice with his Generators set-up (as first found on the seminal ‘Disingenuity / Disingenuousness’, and ‘Generator’ sides in 2010), these durational works, like his previous set, find him in dialogue with his system, but this time with notably deeper results; unfolding 50 minutes of introspective, highly evocative beat-less turbulence split over two extended sides. Again, Whitman is present but only makes the most minimal, intermittent adjustments to his system in-the-moment, allowing the algorithm to flex and morph its code in gloriously ribboning forms. For almost an hour (that could go on twice as long and not lose our interest), he generates a jaw-dropping swell of gritty brownian motion and reverberating dub chords, accreting the sounds of distant trains, planes overhead, and flickering spiritual jazz notes in its pitching and shearing elemental nature. As far as we can recall it’s the most sensuous and uncannily emotive piece we’ve ever heard from him, highly immersive – and a certified instant classic in our book. Stunning.
File Under: Electronic
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Patricia Wolf: See-Through (Balmat) LP
Following her debut album, I’ll Look for You in Others (Past Inside the Present, 2022), Patricia Wolf joins Spain’s Balmat label with See-Through, her second album. See-Through finds the Portland, Oregon musician and field recordist continuing to develop her signature style of ambient, balancing radiant soundscaping with a carefully expressive sensibility. But the new album is also marked by an important difference. Where I’ll Look for You in Others was largely written in response to the death of a loved one, See-Through represents a kind of rebirth. She wrote and recorded many of the album’s songs quickly, in preparation for an August 2021 broadcast on the online radio platform 9128 Live. Excited for the opportunity to play live after more than a year of the pandemic, Wolf decided to write all new material for the event, working with a lean setup of Octatrack, Roland Synth Plus 10, Make Noise 0-Coast, and Novation Summit. (In fact, Wolf was the first sound designer invited to create patches for the Summit.) She also picked up an acoustic guitar that her brother had loaned her. “Woodland Encounter”, “Under a Glass Bell”, “The Grotto”, “The Mechanical Age”, “The Flaneur”, and “Psychic Sweeping” are all products of those sessions; the through line holding them together is their exploratory spirit and clarity of vision. Other songs, like “A Conversation With My Innocence”, “Recalibration”, and “Psychic Sweeping”, wrestle with the traumas of the preceding year. Though they may linger on the heaviness of loss, Wolf says, “What I discovered is that a stronger archetype had grown inside me to steer my emotions and thoughts to a better place.” Likewise, “Wistfulness” and “Upward Swimming Fish” — her first experiments with VST synthesizers — balance the bittersweet embrace of melancholy with the freedom to choose happiness. “Pacific Coast Highway”, the album’s lone song with drums, might at first seem like an outlier. But it also signals Wolf’s interest in finding a fusion between the introspection of ambient and the togetherness of beat-oriented music. Listeners with keen ears might recognize the album’s closing song, “Springtime in Croatia”: A different mix of the song originally appeared on the 2021 digital compilation secondnature & friends Vol. II, from the Seattle label secondnature. This marks its first appearance on vinyl, however, and its spiritual home is undoubtedly here, at the close of See-Through.
File Under: Electronic, Ambient
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Working Men’s Club: Fear Fear (Heavenly) LP
Songs created in the shadow of terror and loss, but that crackle and pop with defiance Fear Fear is a record made for agitating and dancing, for heart and soul, for here, now and tomorrow. It’s a record that explores juxtaposition; that of life and death, acceptance and isolation, environment and humanity, hope and despair, the real world and the digital world. That top to bottom rigour, the complete vision is what makes the second album from Working Men’s Club such a stunning and unique achievement. Their critically acclaimed self-titled debut album, released in summer 2020, was the sound of singer and songwriter Syd Minsky-Sargeant processing a teenage life in Todmorden in the Upper Calder Valley. He was 16 when he wrote some of those songs, now 20, he had to get up and out of the Valley. “The first album was mostly a personal documentation lyrically, this is a blur between personal and a third-person perspective of what was going on.” Fear Fear documents the last two years. Yes, there is bleakness – but there is also hope and empathy. “I like the contrast of it being happy, uplifting music and really dark lyrics. It’s not a minimal record, certainly compared to the first one. That’s because there’s been a lot more going on that needed to be said.” Making the busy feel finessed and the dreadful feel magical – Fear Fear manages those feats, and then some. Or, as Syd Minksy-Sargeant puts it: “We just set out to make the best-sounding album we could.”
File Under: Post Punk
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Willie Wright: Telling the Truth (Numero) LP
Born of Harlem doo-wop roots and refined by Boston’s counterculture scene, Willie Wright arrived in Nantucket in 1976 well worn by two decades of street corner and club performing, eager to make the easy money only a private yacht clientele could guarantee. Trapped on the island over winter, a set of original songs poured into his cover-heavy set. Tales of Wright’s native roots, straight life, his abandoned four children, and the many women he had known flooded his loose leaf notebook before finally being set to tape in New York the following spring. Tracked with George “Buzzy” Bragg and Herry Jensen (of Skull Snaps and Jimmy Castor Bunch fame, respectively) in one day with minimal overdubs, Telling The Truth was, and would remain, Willie Wright’s brightest and most inspired moment. Sold from the trunk of a car and from a handful of resort stages, the humble album disappeared into the collections and garages of Nantucket tourists, taking what was left of a near-30-year career along with it.
File Under: Funk, Soul
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Various: Anthony Naples + DJ Python: Air Texture VIII (Air Texture) LP
Fair to say a certain tier of “underground” music has been dominated by Anthony Naples and DJ Python for the best part of decade thru their respective, singular melange of “lo-fi” house, ambient techno, and warm breezes of caribbean dembow emanating their shared base in Brooklyn. On ‘Air Texture VIII’ they offer a survey of their native scene and its binds with UK club music, new Miami styles, the modern ambient psyche, and fresh Afro-Latinate mutations. Tilting in with the spongiform beatdown of Parris’ ‘springtime flows in three ways’, they gather some 18 tracks that share a rhythmic urgency and special atmosphere, to various extents. On the softer end of the spectrum there’s a frayed gem from Meitei, remixing his own ‘Sankai’, and smudged ether-rock from Vertical Silence alongside the bossa shimmy of 5AM’s ‘Years’, 9 minutes of billowing ambient beauty by Huerco S. in ‘Latautii’, a slinky strip of electronica from themselves ‘Final Speaking’, and DJ Trystero’s washed out ‘Palisade’. For more gently up stuff, the curators also supply the elegant dembow minimalism of their joint number ‘Entouré’, sharing a dancehall ready pace with Mr. Curtains’ slunky ace ‘Hop’, and the serpentine winner ‘Ecotone’ by Miami star Nick León, and Beta Librae’s ambient strutter ‘Treble Stitch’. However, they don’t shirk on fast stuff either, in the form of DINA’s trance pelter ‘Skin Shed’, the frisky swing of James Bangura, and rrao’s ambient jungle-footwork stepper ‘Zindagi’.
File Under: Electronic
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Various: Cold Heat: Heavy Funk Rarities 1968 – 1974 Vol. 1 (Now Again) LP
Back in print! “15 heavy funk rarities presented as a double gatefold LP. Cold Heat is Eothen ‘Egon’ Alapatt’s a follow-up to the famous Funky 16 Corners set he curated in the early 2000s. And like that one, Cold Heat is overflowing with great bits that had barely (or never) been heard by the rest of the world at large. Egon went through a range of rare singles, masters, and demos and came up with tunes that burn with a brightness that’s undeniable. The grooves are all on the harder end of the James Brown Funky People side of the spectrum and some tracks are by names that finally got their due here, thanks to Egon, Now-Again, and some of the other funky forces doing the good work over the years.”
File Under: Funk
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Various: Eccentric Soul: Shiptown Label (Numero) LP
From a humble storefront studio located in a shoeshine parlor on Norfolk, Virginia’s Church Street, Noah Biggs built a world. Hustler by day, gambler by night, the always-in-a-suit Biggs took a gaggle of off-brand singers and combined his connections and charisma to forge timeless soul music during a period of deep upheaval. Compiled here are 25 of Shiptown’s most compelling sides recorded between 1965-1977, spread across a pair of vinyl LPs, from the likes of Ida Sands, The Soul Duo, The Anglos, Dream Team, The Grooms, Positive Sounds, Barbara Stant, Wilson Williams, Art Ensley, and yes, Flip Flop Stevens.
File Under: Funk, Soul
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Various: Eccentric Deep Soul (Numero) LP
Eccentric Deep Soul is the next installment of Numero Group’s Eccentric single LP compilation series, in the same style as their Eccentric Funk and Eccentric Disco releases. A simple digestible run-down of Numero’s favorite genre specific tracks. All killer no filler. Focusing on Deep Soul for this one. The only divorce record you’ll ever need to own.
File Under: Soul
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…..restocks…..
Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince (Verve) LP
Altin Gun: Gece (ATO) LP
Arctic Monkeys: AM (Domino) LP
Bjork: Post (One Little Indian) LP
Blood Incantation: Timewave Zero (Century Media) LP
Bowery Electric: Beat (Kranky) LP
Dave Brubeck: Time Out (Music On Vinyl) LP
Vashti Bunyan: Just Another Diamond Day (Di Christine Stairs) LP
Kenny Burrell: Midnight Blue (Blue Note) LP
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Abattoir Blues / Lyre of Orpheus (Mute) LP
Cure: Disintegration (Rhino) LP
Dope Lemon: Smooth Big Cat (BMG) LP
Brian Eno: Ambient 4 – On Land (Astralwerks) LP
Florist: s/t (Double Double Whammy) LP
F.P. & The Doubling Riders: Doublings & Silences Vol 1 (Abstrakce) LP
Fugazi: s/t (Dischord) LP
Gonzalez/Russom: Days of Mars (DFA) LP
Grouper: AIA – Dream Loss (Kranky) LP
Grouper: Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (Kranky) LP
J Dilla: Donuts (Stones Throw) LP
Jan Jelinek: Loop Finding Jazz (Faitiche) LP
Kendrick Lamar: Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City (Aftermath) LP
Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Aftermath) LP
La Femme: Psycho Tropical Berlin (Born Bad) LP
LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening (DFA) LP
Massive Attack: Blue Lines (Virgin) LP
Massive Attack: Mezzanine (Virgin) LP
Meters: Cabbage Alley (Music On Vinyl) LP
Meters: Fire On The Bayou (Music On Vinyl) LP
Meters: Struttin’ (Music on Vinyl) LP
Mdou Moctar: Ilana: The Creator (Sahel Sounds) LP
The National: Alligator (Beggars) LP
The National: Boxer (Beggars) LP
The National: Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers (4AD) LP
OCS: 1 (No Coast) 3LP
Oh Sees: Carrion Crawler (In The Red) LP
Oh Sees: Castlemania (In The Red) LP
Oh Sees: Floating Coffin (Castle Face) LP
Oh Sees: Help (In The Red) LP
Oh Sees: Orc (Castle Face) LP
Oh Sees: Smote Reverser (Castle Face) LP
Osees: Protean Threat (Castle Face) LP
Shuggie Otis: Freedom Flight (Get On Down) LP
Plosivs: s/t (Castle Face) LP
Proscription: Conduit (Dark Descent) LP
Queens of the Stone Age: Lullabies to Paralize (Music on Vinyl) LP
Reds, Pinks, and Purples: Uncommon Weather (Slumberland) LP
Roxy Music: Country Life (Republic) LP
Roxy Music: Siren (Republic) LP
Severed Heads: Rotund For Success (Medical) LP
Sister Ray: Communion (Royal Mountain) LP
Slowdive: Souvlaki (Music on Vinyl) LP
Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation (Goofin) CS
Sonic Youth: Evol (Goofin) LP
Sonic Youth: Sister (Goofin) LP
St Germain: Tourist (Parlophone) LP
Harry Styles: Fine Line (Columbia) LP
Earl Sweatshirt: Doris (Columbia) LP
Midori Takada: You Who Are Leaving to Nirvana (WRWTFWW) LP
Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats: Mind Control (Rise Above) LP
Townes Van Zandt: Flyin’ Shoes (Fat Possum) LP
Wax Machine: Hermit’s Groove (Batov) LP
Akiko Yano: Iroha Ni Konpeitou (WeWantSound) LP
Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth (Domino) LP
Various: Eccentric Funk (Numero) LP
Various: Habibi Funk (Habibi Funk) LP
Various: No New York (Lilith) LP