Rank Sonata
"Colin Potter has been a central figure in the UK's DIY and post-industrial underground since the late '70s. His ICR label, founded in 1981, blurred the lines between post-punk experimentation, crude pop, Krautrock-inspired drone work and contemporary electronica, with releases by everyone from DIY legends The Instant Automatons through Chris & Cosey of Throbbing Gristle, experimental composer Trevor Wishart, drone soundists Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate and Bryn Jones's Muslimgauze. He has also …
Albums And Rarities
Following last year's instantly sold-out set, Colin Potter's ICR label piece together six tapes of sought-after, unreleased and remixed material from his late '80s phase, just as he was really getting to grips with his gear. After topping our reissue best-of list in 2014 with the last batch, he's likely to repeat the trick with this collection, staking out more spacious, celestial dimensions and subtly elevated production/engineering values.
This lot look to 1989-1990 (the last set scanned…
Triptych
2024 small repress. "Back to music after three years of silence... On the suggestion of Robert Ashley, Douglas Dunn commissioned this piece from Éliane Radigue for choreography. Only the first part of Triptych was staged at the premiere at the Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy on February 27 1978. Recorded in the composer's studio in Paris. After the premiere of Adnos I (IMPREC 028CD) in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Éliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned t…
Endless Autumn
Each new album by Fabio Orsi is an experience apart. The atmospheres created by the Apulian artist, who lives in Berlin since few years, penetrate the smallest gaps of the cerebral cortex, just where the memory lives. Backwards is proud to present, in collaboration with Puglia Sounds, "Endless Autumn", a work that draws inspiration in its title from "Endless Summer", by the acclaimed Christian Fennesz, but shines with its own light anyway. Entirely recorded between Taranto and Berlin, it embodie…
Earth
EARTH is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore's foremost artists. The visually arresting film has been live-soundtracked by a number of artists (including Oren Ambarchi) in several locales, and after Black to Comm, a.k.a. Marc Richter's accompaniment at Berlin's Asian Film Festival and the Unsound Festival in Krakow (both in 2010), he decided to commit it to record. In Marc's own words: 'Most of the music was composed under the influence of heavy pain killers while recover…
Fogh Depot
Fogh Depot is not just a collaboration between three musicians weaving a cozy melancholic cocoon in the midst of a looming, cold, unwelcoming metropolis of Moscow. It’s a creativity lab where complex cryptoanarchic ideas rigidify in the viscously flowing Phrygian mode, while the simple and naive piano melodies sweep the listener right back to childhood. Fogh Depot’s debut album contains eight stories told by different people in different places. "Anticyclone" feels like a massive hedge-maze amid…
Que Sucede En El Tiempo?
Behold, a cultishly coveted slab of freeform new wave dance/tape music from 1984 Madrid, Spain, reissued by Andy Votel, Sean Canty, and Doug Shipton's Dead-Cert label. Notable not only for including Beppe Loda's Typhoon favorite, "La Edad del Bronce" -- which sounds uncannily like a cut from Craig Leon's Nommos (1981) -- this album also features the beguiling concrète funk of "Galilea: Centro de Datos," which, by any measure, bears a striking, prototypical resemblance to Photek's "Ni - Ten - I…
Face Disappears After Interrogation
Face Disappears After Interrogation is the first vinyl release from Mick Travis, a wandering noise deconstructionist based in the UK who was previously responsible for cassette transgressions issued by his own Medusa label and Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson Records. An occasional member of Dilloway’s rotating extreme ensemble The Nevari Butchers, Travis loosely orbits the Michigan <-> Ohio underground circuits that spawned the dense network of projects branching out of the Bulb/Wolf Eyes/Hanson family …
Obsolete Systems
Recordings of ambient music proliferate like cancer cells, and many merely consist of the innocuous burblings and the banal meanderings of stunted imaginations. Obsolete Systems by Red Math (Nashville, Tennsessee producer Lance Dibblee) delves deeper and soars farther out than the work of most musicians working in the beatless realm. Dibblee began as a drum & bass producer in the ’90s, but his recent output is eons away from the uptempo propulsiveness of that style. Reference points for …
A Lion's Baptism
2013 Release. Even if you pride yourself on your boundless appetite for weird music, Innercity’s A Lion’s Baptism will ruffle the cilia in your ears in novel ways. On his debut for Further Records, Innercity (hyper-prolific Antwerp Belgium producer Hans Dens) shoves typical notions of rhythms into the abyss and conjures a murky mystique. Endlessly fascinating bafflement ensues. A Lion’s Baptism starts with deceptive conventionality, as “the essence of the earth as arch as arc” fades in wi…
Where All Is Fled
Double LP version. "Steve Hauschildt's new album is his first since the late 2012 release of Sequitur. Although Where All Is Fled sonically harkens back to his earlier albums such as Rapt for Liquid Minister and Tragedy & Geometry, it slowly becomes apparent that it is also a divergence from those recordings. Both the artwork and the music on this new work were heavily inspired by surrealist landscape paintings, early alchemical emblems, and recurring visions Steve had from dreams. The resul…
Cardinal
Philip Jeck writes: "To make this record I used Fidelity record players, Casio keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony MiniDisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer and it was edited it at home with MiniDisc players and on a laptop computer." "...and they sparkled like burnished brass" "Out of the depths of our complaints, it could be all so simple. To be never fooled by the finesse of a long-yearned for solidity, but in the momentary aplomb of a sle…
Tape #4
**never before released archival material from Chicago's answer to Germany's 70s kosmische/electronic scene, longform excursions of minimal synthetic music reissued for the 1st time** VCSR existed between 1978 and 1984. They weren't a band or a group so much as it was a collective. They never had an official release but recorded over 60 reels of tape from which cassettes were mixed down for their own use or to give to friends. They were to be the first record on the Waxx Traxx label with Al …
Norberg/Apondalifa
**shipping the next week** Two of Hecker rarest and most sought after EPs, finally reissued in LP, both of the releases have been out of print ever since selling out almost immediately after being released, so this reissue should be a treat for those longing after these two EPs having missed out the first time round In 2015, Room40 celebrates 15 years of editions and events; as part of the celebrations, the label is reissuing a number of editions in various formats that are out of print…
Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains
On Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains, Tokyo's Chihei Hatakeyama evokes an instrumental poetic grace that marks him out as one of the icons of his generation. Drawing upon a broad swath of aesthetic references, he seamlessly melts glacial ambient drifts with richly harmonic guitar strata that echo the gliding motions of My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Cocteau Twins. Never resolving to clear melody, his interest in unrestrained harmonics creates a depth to his compositions and moreover a pr…
Manbait
Manbait is a survey of Regis's 2010-'15 productions and remixes for Blackest Ever Black. In addition to three originals (in several different versions) and his celebrated remixes of Raime, Vatican Shadow, Ike Yard, and Dalhous, it features three previously unreleased tracks: a Regis take on a lost song by his own teenage synth-punk group Family Sex, an alternate mix of Tropic of Cancer's "Plant Lilies at My Head," and an edit of his own "Blinding Horses." Regis -- real name Karl O'Connor -- requ…
Live
Atsuhiro Ito, visual artist and sound performer, has held live show many times. This CD is consist of his two performances selected from them in Tokyo. Track 1 is at Hara Museum in 2009. Ito used his hand made 'fluorescent lamp' instrument OPTRON and some junk objects that they were exhibited as installation. Track 2 is at Harajuku Vacant in 2010. This performance was acted with a female actor and tech-noise unit Miclo Diet. Ito's junk noise by OPTRON and industrial rhythm of Miclo Diet were mix…
Dans L'Herbe
Montreal-based sound artist Anne-F Jacques utilizes the possibilities of degraded technology and incidental sound to create mechanical resonances out of tape assemblage, rotation devices, and DIY amplification systems. With an emphasis on technology versus nature, dans l'herbe centers on the mechanical rumble, field recordings and discarded sounds of the current industrial age.
Profuse, Comfortless And Antique
A key figure among the burgeoning Worcester, Massachusetts noise scene, Seamus R. Williams crafts crude electro-acoustic sound collage made of murky tape loops and low-end electronics. Profuse... emits a cavernous sound of static debris, magnetic atmospherics and barren frequencies that all shift in unison.
Corrugated
An intricate collage of manipulated found and appropriated sounds taken from a series of concrète reel to reel tape experiments recorded throughout 2012 and 2013 in White's hometown of London.