Back in stock
Issue 82: The Genius of Tom Tom Club (Magazine + 7")
Devoted to the art of moving butts, our latest cover stars are the fabulous Tom Tom Club, the band that started out as a Talking Heads offshoot but rapidly turned Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz into global musical heavyweights in their own right. We have an exclusive blue vinyl seven-inch featuring two awesome remixes of the group's 'Genius Of Love' to accompany the magazine too.
La Vie Electronique 4
The third in Klaus Schulze's series of three-disc compilations of live and rare material (all of it previously released in his 50-disc Ultimate Edition box from 2000) is pure bliss for fans of early-'70s analog synthesizer music. The melodies swoop and whoosh like comets passing by a slowly drifting space station manned by dudes and ladies in unisex jumpsuits with long, perfectly coiffed hair, and beards on the men. Close your eyes and you're there. Many of these tracks are grouped into half-hou…
Ethernity
Simona Zambolis first album on Mille Plateaux "Ethernity" is a piece of haunting music - vibrating, pulsing and cutting through the concrete and the chaos at the same time, when you listen close enough. The album is a journey through trans-reality, not only as a melancholic drama, but also as a travel to alien worlds, hence as a necessity of an electronic intervention. "Ethernithy" is radical fictioning in a non-expressive, non-melancholic and ultrablack sense. Profound music demands blackness, …
Say Laura
The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on Say Laura bring Chenaux’s semi-improvised but keenl…
First Flight Redux (Harrington Dub)
On “First Flight Redux” Dave Harrington takes a scalpel to the multi-tracks of "First Flight" (LP/DL, Algorithm Free) remixing the raw material into something else entirely.
Maquishti
Mexican born, New York-based vibraphonist, marimbist, improviser and composer Patricia Brennan has confirmed the release of her debut full length album Maquishti, January 15, 2021 on the Valley of Search label. The twelve original instrumentals that make up the album were composed and performed solo by Brennan on vibraphone and marimba. Employing unusual performance techniques and occasional electronics, many of the compositions were borne from improvisations created live in the studio at the ti…
Valley of Search
** 2021 Stock ** The first ever reissue of the 1975 free jazz album originally released on India Navigation. What we know of Downtown New York comes from the countercultural and creative flowering that emerged in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, attributable to cheap live-work spaces called lofts. These were often abandoned and disused small manufacturing spaces and they became a nexus for artistic practice and life. From a jazz perspective, lofts were alternatives to the club scene, and they gaine…
The Fire Still Burns
** 2021 Stock ** 45 years after his debut album Valley of Search (1975/India Navigation), jazz saxophonist Alan Braufman returns. The Fire Still Burns has that gritty, forthright sensibility we hope to hear in sonic collaborations borne out of beauty and struggle, but there’s a populist ease that comes with age and reflection. Put simply it’s natural music – complementary, individual, and full of the sweet, hot taste of celebration.
Mantras
*Triple LP.* In June 2016, the great-outdoors music festival Echos asked Ernest Bergez aka Sourdure to produce a series of "Mantras" set to be diffused in between each concert of the twenty-four hours event taking place in the french Alpes. These pieces were played on the festival's gigantic speakers/ horns system in the afternoon, evening, night, morning, noon... and reverberated fully in the rocky valley. This triple vinyl edition gathers the field-recording-like captures of the tracks deliver…
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Smells Like Teen Spirit is premised in a haptic interrogation of each of the label's previous editions. Berlin-based and Mexico City-born multi-disciplinary artist Mario de Vega occupied the gallery space of Rumpsti Pumsti (Musik) for three consecutive days in October 2016 with a hitherto complete Tochnit Aleph catalog, sanding machine, hammer, and recording equipment. Conflating acts of "playing" with destruction, de Vega took to the recorded works and assorted media with his Spartan too…
Yesterday + Today, A Music Of Time
"Vincent Wrenn works with a microtonal system of seven octaves and each octave being divided into 360 notes, with Saturn being the lowest and the sun being the highest octave. That may sound also pretty esoteric, but the six pieces here are excellent studies in what seems to be sine wave like sounds. Each of these pieces appears to have very few variations and when played very loud may burst an eardrum, or destroy your relationship with your neighbour. I would think these pieces are best enjoyed…
Exploratorium
Swedish experimental outfit White Stains created five highly influential albums. Band members Carl Abrahamsson and Thomas Tibert later on went on to form the equally influential act Cotton Ferox. Their improvisational approach and dark musical atmospheres created a following which remains to this day, and which even led to a one-off reunion gig in Gothenburg in 2013 together with long time collaborator Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV). The album Exploratorium is a compilation of…
Defragmental
Cotton Ferox key members Carl Abrahamsson and Thomas Tibert have composed, performed and produced groundbreaking music since the late 1980s. After their time in White Stains and several solo projects, Cotton Ferox have been their main mothership. Always producing cutting edge stuff, they have also always made an issue out of collaborating with other interesting artists. In both White Stains and Cotton Ferox, they’ve worked together with industrial pioneer/legend Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Some ex…
Solo Etudes I
"We begin with the flickering, fire-like erraticism of the first track. Despite bearing the title of “Snow”, I’m drawn to imagine the very opposite: an intense heat that billows and dwindles across the stereo frame, suddenly erupting from left to right as if devouring an oil slick, promptly receding through oxygen exhaustion. To what extent are these fizzing, crackling chords – presumably electronics, but ultimately too distorted to accurately identify – under Hahn’s control? To what extent does…
Nuclear Family
2016 release. Multi-instrumental master Joe McPheeand his longtime colleague, French saxophonist and clarinetist André Jaume, joined forces for this studio recording in 1979 that was prepared but never released. It is primarily structured around pairs of tunes by Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington (or Billy Strayhorn), adding Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" for good measure. The results are stunningly intimate and show the twosome's capacity for creative interplay at a fairly e…
King Alcohol
A reissue of King Alcohol, recorded for the German FMP label in 1972. King Alcohol is one of the landmark recordings of free jazz in Europe, a mind-blowing studio session featuring Rüdiger Carl on tenor saxophone, Günter Christmann on trombone, and the astonishing Detlef Schönenberg on drums. Volatile and precise, anticipating much of the future sound of free music in Europe but also paying homage to American antecedents like Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp, King Alcohol is truly a lost jewel. Fir…
Sounds of Liberation
Hailing from the Germantown section of Philadelphia, well known as the site of the Sun Ra Arkestra communal homestead, Sounds of Liberation were at the forefront of '70s Black liberation music. After a series of gigs in elementary schools, prisons, and community centers, the band travelled along with their manager George Gilmore (father of Linc Gilmore of Breakwater fame) to NYC in 1973 for a recording session at Columbia University. This five-song session has never been heard until now. Had it …
No Time Left for Sadness
Despite having worked together in innumerable settings, including the longstanding Survival Unit III, with drummer Michael Zerang, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee have never released a CD of duets. In an extra intimate studio setting in upstate New York, where both players reside, No Time Left for Sadness demonstrates their incredible musical understanding. Recalling some of McPhee's landmark records with Marseilles musicians in terms of telepathy and trust, it's a…
Distinction Without A Difference
A reissue of the long out-of-print first solo record by American violinist Billy Bang (1947-2011), recorded at Gaku Gallery in New York on August 12, 1979. Originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1980. Distinction Without A Difference features Bang's own compositions, extrapolated at length in an intimate live concert, as well as traditional and improvised material. Remastered from original tapes and augmented by newly discovered recordings from the same concert. Part of the large cache of his…
Brace For Impact
Some recordings, the world is just not ready for them when they're made. In 2008, Swedish born, Austrian resident saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and Poughkeepsie, New York multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee made a suite of studio recordings, Brace For Impact that they loved so much they immediately culled, mixed, and mastered them. A decade later, when the original label for which they were planned had not yet issued them, Gustafsson and McPhee offered them to Corbett Vs. Dempsey, and when the label …