Lift Your Toes
Another Di Domenico project, again with Lobo in two, along with Daniele Martini (saxophone, percussion) and Bruno Ferro Xavier da Silva (electric bass, electronics, percussion). Miles circa “Bitches Brew” once again hovers over the proceedings on the first of two tracks, with the warped Rhodes and the snare beats; generally, it’s in the same area as the Going recording. Side 2 ventures into entirely different territory, percussion and electronics to the four, constructing odd and intricate rhyth…
Dark Souls Need Light
"When Jersey teen Marianne Nowottny arrived on the scene in the late '90s, she had the looks of a typical NJ gum-snapper but possessed a voice that was way beyond what you'd expect to find hanging out in the parking lot of White Castle trying to bum cigarettes. Her vocals had the rich, smoky maturity of Marianne Faithfull's late-'70s work, hauled into an off-center bedroom pop universe that was almost impossible to decode. Her subsequent studio recordings have investigated magnificent nooks of p…
Melpomene
Dan Melchior has become an unlikely 21st century experimental music icon. As the forms, signifiers and 'experiments' of the last several decades have become increasingly codified, one naturally begins to ask the question what the term in a contemporary setting means to the listener. If the performer and the audience both know what to expect before, during and after a record or performance, can it be considered an experiment? At the start of the century, Melchior was known in NYC as being a studi…
Road Not Driving
Last time we checked in with Dan Melchior, he was Playing The Greys. What has he been up to lately? Melchior is as aesthetically restless as he is endlessly creative, so in between recording an album with Austin TX art-punk trio Spray Paint and a myriad of tape and vinyl releases, Dan found the time to gift Ever/Never with another classic slice of Melchiorcore (please, shoot the messenger for that one). Road Not Driving is a 12” EP that covers a fair amount of ground during its runtime.“I Got A …
Seattle Symphony
Kye is proud to present Seattle Symphony, the new LP by Poughkeepsie's Joe McPhee. 'Seattle has become my home away from home, my second city, since first being invited to join trombonist Stuart Dempster for duets in 1984. When the opportunity for a solo concert arose, I learned of the passing of Bill Dixon and Fred Anderson and decided to make the focus of the performance a celebration of the lives, and music, of these two legendary heroes, who both passed away in June of 2010, within 8 days of…
Gag Flag
After scrawling his name on releases with close affiliates the Mannequin (Laugh Tool, MNQ 080LP, 2016) and Unknown Precept (A-Tranquility, PRECEPT 003EP, 2014), new Brussels transplant Maoupa Mazzocchetti finds good company among the oddballs on Editions Gravats for Gag Flag's blend of avant-dance music and absurdist experimental pop. For Gag Flag, Mazzocchetti adopts the persona of Snippet Boy, a fictional avatar who first came to life in his live shows, and now on the album sleeve. Lurking beh…
Unlimited
Naphta was born in 1978 but differently from the most of other bands from Bologna (in the same manner of Confusional Quartet) at that time, they came up with a very peculiar jazz-rock formula mixed up with elements from the almost "out of time" progressive genre. The result was unsettling; their music was mostly improvised with no apparent distinctions between rhythm section and soloists, in fact everybody in the group could have taken a solo at any time but in close relation with the others. Al…
Pansophical Cataract
John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and writer who is perhaps best known as the drummer for Oneida. Man Forever, his vehicle for exploring the outer limits of drum performance, was created to overwhelm, to investigate the nuances that bloom in the midst of repetitive music, and to act as a pure sound experience.Originally based on the idea of creating a sort of punk-infused Metal Machine Music for drums, Man Forever has evolved from a five or six …
The Hum
Anne La Berge, flutes and voice. Joe Williamson, double bass and voice. Flutist-composer Anne La Berge, an American living in Amsterdam, and bassist Joe Williamson, a Canadian based in Stockholm, have formed a new duo. Both artists are known for their eccentric approach to text, either in song writing, or music compositions. With two intriguing text/music pieces that sound like odd radio plays, they introduce the listener to the ambiguities of their unrestricted fantasy. A pleasurable, sometimes…
Clear and Cloud
Kye is proud to announce the release of Clear and Cloud, the debut LP by Alec Livaditis. Recorded over the summer of 2015, Clear and Cloud showcases Alec's unique vision for extended cello technique across two varying settings. Side A's 'Clear and Cloud' presents Livaditis (cello, objects) and Killick Hinds (Vo-96 guitar) live in an extraneous sound environment, where music and conversation seek to undermine each other in a morose and thrilling tussle, whereas Side B's 'Through The Open Window' …
Otona No Kagaku
Otona No Kagaku (“experiments for adults” in Japanese) is Kalimi’s first LP album. It brings a composition that doesn’t start and doesn't end, a soundscape that plays with non-expectation, contemplation and the illusion of being in a timeless bubble. kalimi is: Giovanni Di Domenico: fender rhodes, electronics and Mathieu Calleja: drums.
Loopworks
Originally released by Wounded Wolf Press as a limited cassette in 2016, Loopworks compiles Turkish visual and sound artist Koray Kantarcıoğlu's (b. Ankara 1982) loop-based work composed of samples taken from Turkish records released in '60s and '70s as source material. Loopworks impacts almost instantly mainly because it shows some familiarity with the recent work of Leyland Kirby as The Caretaker, particularly with the "haunted ballroom" effect. Koray explores the usage and the dynamic of thes…
New Works For Realistic Mixer
2016 release. Following 2015's Teaspoon To The Ocean, Jib Kidder delivers an uncanny dance LP featuring no-input mixer sequenced together with drum machine. It steers the chaotic atmosphere of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (1975) towards an emotive tide of information that, whether too much or too little, makes it hard to grasp but easy to eat up. If electronic music has been made familiar (through musique concréte or Lee Gamble) with the conversion of noise into dance, New Works For Realistic …
Dogs' Ears Are Stupid
Mental Experience presents a reissue of Care Of The Cow's Dogs' Ears Are Stupid, originally released only on cassette in 1983. The album is a fascinating blend of psychedelic folk, minimal electronics and post-punk weirdness. Acid fuzz guitar, incredible vocal harmonies, drum machines, and analogue synths make it one of Chicago's best kept secrets, with a history that goes back to 1974. A trio formed by Victor Sanders, X Baczewska, and Sher Doruff, they had a very unique and eclectic sound, expe…
Spiralling
Mental Experience present an expanded reissue and the first ever vinyl reissue of The Momes' Spiralling, originally released in 1989 on the Woof label. Featuring Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow, The Work) on Hawaiian laptop noisy guitar and keyboards, Mick Hobbs (Family Fodder, The Work, Officer!) on bass, and Andy Wake (Unrest, Work & Play) on drums, The Momes were a unique power trio with an abrasive sound channeling post-punk, psych-prog, and avant-rock. Spiralling is their sole album, recorded at …
If I Die Before I Wake
After three years Suzuki Junzo returns to Utech Records with If I Die Before I Wake, his fourth full-length release for the label. Junzo is joined by Ikuro Takahashi of LSD March, Kousokuya, Fushitsusha and High Rise. If I Die is a record comprised of roaring space blues and empyrean haze. Nothing less than imposing and exquisite, If I Die is conceivably Suzuki Junzo’s greatest recorded work.Released initially on cassette, the expanded vinyl adds one unreleased track and offers the two live reco…
Earth To Momma
Hairbone is a New York-based power trio of artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple, formerly known as Haribo. Functioning mainly in the art world, Hairbone has inflicted audiences from museums to decrepit basements with their carnivalesque live shows for nearly a decade. Each unique, thematically pointed multimedia performance narrative features frontman de Nieves inhabiting new personae in a sculptural actionist mode, brandishing oversized text-emblazoned props as if they were …
Tiergarten
"Walter Benjamin begins his Berlin Childhood around 1900, a book in the form of a series of vignettes, with the following two sentences: "Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling". Entitled Tiergarten, after the eponymous park in central Berlin, this passage from Benjamin's memoir written in the 1930s which refers to the city as a sometimes alien piece of nature that you moonwalk through c…
II (Machinery)
Going is a double duo: 2 drums, 2 keys. They bring fat groovy beats, warm and distorted rhodes, mixed with dirty organ sounds and silly 80’s synths. Odd rhythms and polyrhythms go hand in hand with free improvisations and loose compositions.313 hand-numbered copies, laser-printed covers, hand-folded and hand-packaged
Kalash Tirich Mir
German Army is a duo from somewhere just outside of Los Angeles, CA, in the dehydrated and dilapidated outskirts of San Bernardino County. Little is known about them, but what you need to know is this: a prolific non-stop stream of countless releases in all formats in less than four years for labels like Opal Tapes, Handmade Birds, Belten and Chondritic Sound. A truly weird approach that mixes up early industrial and exotic infatuations, cheap gear electronics and world music soundbites, obnoxio…