Normalette Surprise
180 gram LP version. 1980 the zeitgeist played into the right hands. And who held the aces? In Bureau B's game, Moritz R®, Frank Fenstermacher and Pyrolator aka Der Plan. Tired of convention and full of enthusiasm, they encountered an audience who felt just the same. And with record companies too ponderous to sign up Der Plan, the wonderful Ata Tak label was born of necessity. Normalette Surprise is the second album by Der Plan, released in 1981, a good year after their Geri Reig debut. It i…
Rekkez
Limited edition of 250, with full color 23 by 33 poster designed and painted by G.Loli. Mutamassik (= tenacity in Arabic) is the musical avatar of Giulia Loli, who merges Egyptian percussions with hardcore breaks. The result, sometimes dubbed Sa'aidi hardcore & Baladi breakbeats is a mutant, syncopated form of instrumental hip-hop. The history of Giulia Loli herself is marked by fluid borders, being born in Italy of an Egyptian mother, moving to the United States in her childhood, staying in Egy…
Phantom Horse
Phantom Horse is the duo of Ulf Schütte and Niklas Dommaschk from Hamburg and Kiel (home of seminal Digitalis Recordings artist Jürgen Müller). Schütte is a (part-time) member of Datashock, Black To Comm, Aosuke et al and has recently released his modular synth explorations under the Alien Radio moniker on a (sold-out) Dekorder split-LP with Keith Fullerton Whitman and a 4-way split 7" with Köhn, Ducktails and Peaking Lights on Kraak. Dommaschk plays guitar, synth and electric piano.
With…
Dawn Undefeated
Failing Lights self-titled album on Intransitive Recordings marked a turning point in Noise Music's one-way street of loudness, aggression and primal chaos; a tendency that can also be detected in the recent solo and duo output by his bandmates Nate Young and John Olson (Regression, Stare Case, et al) and the latest albums by contemporaries like John Wiese and Spencer Yeh.
As Marc Masters observed in Pitchfork: "If this is a trend, pinpointing when it began is probably impossible. But for …
Hylyt
Tomutonttu is the solo disguise of Tampere's Jan Anderzen, head of Kemialliset Ystävät and (part-time) member of Avarus, Tuusanuuskat and the Islaja band. Anderzen is one of the focal points of Finnish underground music for the past 15 years with a zillion releases on some of the leading underground labels worldwide (Fonal, Ultra Eczema, Ducktails/Real Estate member Matthew Mondanile's New Images, Beta-lactam Ring, FatCat, Beniffer, etc.). Tomutonttu is one of his longest running …
Emergency Stairway
Emergency Stairway could have been Thought Broadcast's debut vinyl full-length. In fact, when commissioned in early 2012, only one 7" and two super-limited tapes were in existence, until some other label snapped to the finish with an even older commission. So, let's say an "almost-debut." Confused? Well, yes, that's probably the point. Ravi Binning's Thought Broadcast project oozes out a dank and confused audio experience isolated way beyond the city limits. A glance at the titles suggests…
Deltas
Kassel Jaeger is a French-Swiss artist based in Paris and a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). Deltas is his fifth album, and first on vinyl. "Campo Del Cielo" (2012): Commissioned by Espace Mendes France for a performance at The Planetarium in Poitiers, France, diffused on an 8-channel system. The sound material is exclusively derived and processed from stone recordings. The first part, "Aerolite (flying stone)," is mainly based on aerial field recording of stone manipulat…
Let's Build A Pussy
Editions Mego is happy to announce a vinyl reissue of the long out-of-print and impossibly rare final Harry Pussy album, the monumental Let's Build a Pussy. Originally released in 1998 after the band broke up, this has always been an elusive release. "You cannot buy this anywhere and you will never find one!!!" was what one writer exclaimed. Consisting of an hour-long piece of Bill Orcutt time-stretching a second of Adris Hoyos' voice into a slow, shifting drone. A piece of music you will lo…
Songs About Nothing
Stunning double disc collection of mind-erasing loops, avant classical drone and minimal cold wave threat from Jason Lescallett, presented as a back-handed tribute to Big Black’s notorious 1992 album Songs About Fucking: Songs About Nothing is the sound of pure entropy, moving from ear-scalding feedback sculptures through nod-out minimal synth repetition through scrambled choral works and widescreen soundtrack drones. The first disc unfolds in a series of stately movements linked by a form of ob…
Granular Modality
In many respects Earl Howard’s (b. 1951) music is an anomaly that resists categorization and the seductiveness of genre. He is an important force in improvised music and yet his work employs complex structures and rigorous transitions of sound and texture. His electro-acoustic music is realized with a K-2600 Kurzweil that for Howard is not merely a keyboard synthesizer but an open system, a computer with a most effective interface with modules and a key map that enable more freedom in the compos…
Proscenium
** 500 copies ** Tom Recchion’s Proscenium, released by Elevator Bath, is a beautiful piece of ambient/drone that was originally created for Janie Geiser’s play, Invisible Glass. Proscenium is a subtle and remarkably controlled collection of atmospheres. The air of mystery, deliberate pacing, the deep tones and unidentified sounds of Recchion's 2006 album Sweetly Doing Nothing have been explored even further here. It's a logical development but the results are unexpected and strikingly original,…
Audience of one
Gatefold double LP version. On Audience Of One, Oren Ambarchi presents a four-part suite which moves from throbbing minimalism to expansive song-craft to ecstatic free-rock. His previous solo albums for Touch exhibited a clear progression towards augmenting and embellishing his signature bass-heavy guitar tones with fragile acoustic instrumentation. Audience Of One, while also existing in clear continuity with these recordings, opens the next chapter. Remarkable in its confidence and bread…
Nilmonic Process
Phaserprone head honchos Jonas Asher and Jochen Hartmann return with a new collaborative effort as NIL, a synth-patch noise project destined to undermine any and all genres experimental sound. Previously as UW OWL and especially on their untouchable New Birth of Old Death tape, Asher and Hartmann created a decrepit sequence of nihilist voids featuring post-apocalyptic industrial noise with abandoned/discarded electronics. It’s easily one of the most bizarre and unknown documents ever recorded. I…
Wannsee
Limited edition of 200 copies housed in spot gloss jacket with art insert... Sound artist and field recordist Fabio Orsi presents the 3rd edition on Italian label Ricerca Sonora, complementing meditative LPs by Philip Corner with three augmented location recordings. Immersive sonics sourced from Wannsee lake outside of Berlin form the basis for a trio of dense, drifting pieces rich in microscopic and macroscopic detail. Wildlife sounds ring clear and true across muffled low end murk and subtle, …
Soft Power Memento
Embody Problematic Behavior. These are the three words that Co La uses to describe “Soft Power Memento,” his follow-up EP to 2011′s “Daydream Repeater” debut LP on NNA. Something to mull over while immersing yourself in Co La’s vivid and constantly-evolving world of sound. The spectrum of source material is widened and focused, with an emphasis on acoustic instrumentation and jazz palettes, all diced up and run through the New Anything sound system. Concréte percussive molecules are tenderly arr…
A Star Maker, Strange Dreams, and Clairvoyance
Naturalist visionary Lieven Martens brings us along the latest voyage of his musical vessel, Dolphins Into The Future. “A Star Maker, Strange Dreams, and Clairvoyance” induces a state of lucid dreaming where we experience tales of romance, stargazing, cosmic motion, and eternity. Not unlike a painter’s brush, Martens utilizes a sound palette of colorful, synthesized organics to bring the listener directly into the vivid and exotic world that Dolphins has spent years cultivating. After muc…
I Don't Want To Die
After self-releasing four previous full-length albums, it’s finally time for the long-overdue debut vinyl offering from Burlington, VT songwriter and producer Ryan Power. “I Don’t Want To Die” is a collection of constantly shifting, well-constructed and unique pop songs, teeming with existentialism and groove. Content-wise, this is perhaps not your average pop record. Ryan’s candidly personal lyrics meditate on the fear of death, hypochondria, soul discrepancies, depression, and the lustf…
Somewhere There (Drone Compendium Two)
There is a tribal element to Arc's 2 long suites that feel somewhat like being stoned in Cologne in 1971. The trios of Aidan Baker, Christopher Kukiel, and Richard Baker return to the quiet with hushed tribal timbres, however, these ambiences are riveting in a way that that other ambiences are not, probably because the group does not think with an ambient attitude. This is the sound of mining midnight. In a universe where experimentalism is often just a nice way of saying "boring," hearin…
Computers S.p.A. / Com.SA
Released 2010 by At War With False Noise: Second in the At War series of early CD issues of tapes by noise legend Maurizio Bianchi. This has been a long time coming and I promise the next installment (Mectypo/Blut since you ask) won't take so long and should surface early next year. Both these albums are lofi, featuring very primitive use of synthesizer, tape loops and tape manipulation. There's a real charm and otherworldly feel to them, There's something very prescient about MB's explorations …
Ludium
A long and almost solemn track built with reverberated piano notes, a slow and rhythmical flow leaned on a background made of clashing hisses and vague, distant, rustling ambient noises. A brief interval based on obscure drones moving in circles, inexorably entangled on themselves. Then another long piano-based track, this time more dilated, confused, ethereal and prim, so much that it takes the distinguishing features of an indecipherable sonic mass, abstract and booming, estranging, deep and …