Never Been In A Riot
No band captures the DIY punk ethos better than The Mekons. As one critic wrote of the group, "Those who couldn't play tried to learn and those who could tried to forget."Their debut EP first appeared on Fast Product in 1978, featuring the collective's original six-piece lineup and delivering three startlingly original songs – "Never Been In A Riot," "32 Weeks" and "Heart And Soul" – that never appeared on any of their albums. Like fellow Leeds misfits Gang of Four and Delta 5, The Mekons form a…
Where Were You / I'll Have To Dance Then (On My Own)
No band captures the DIY punk ethos better than The Mekons. As one critic wrote of the group, "Those who couldn't play tried to learn and those who could tried to forget."The Mekons' second 7-inch stands as a lasting monument to the punk era. "Where Were You," an anthem with chiming guitars, military-style drums and snotty lyrics, may be one of the most epic songs written with just two chords. The angular spasms and up-front bass thump of "I'll Have To Dance Then (On My Own)" would become tenets…
More Moondog
Dating back to 1957, The Story Of Moondog followed up the previous year's More Moondog LP, setting its course for adventurous new sounds and homemade percussion meditations.The music is never a slave to any one fixed agenda and much of the material here sounds as if its gathered from some undiscovered culture - it's all-but impossible to compare this with anything else from the era, but when the longer-form pieces arrive they augment the more primal, outsider aesthetics with visceral, jazzy arra…
Misztériumok
Misztériumok is the third full-length record - their first on three:four - of Italian duo Amuleto, composed of Francesco Dillon and his cousin and three:four’s artist Riccardo Wanke. Following the route of previous releases this new album emerges as the fusion of composed and improvised forms and moves between contemporary and electronic music mixing acoustic, electronic and real world sounds. The music takes shapes from a progressive disclosure of sonic material that gradually manifests i…
Estrela
Estrela is the third chapter of Norberto Lobo’s solo records on three:four. If it is easily identifiable by the black and white photography by António Júlio Duarte on the front cover, the music brings some newness: for the first time under his own name, Norberto Lobo is playing with a trio composed of Yaw Tembe (trumpet), Ricardo Jacinto (cello) and Marco Franco (drums). Paradoxically, it's accompanied by these experimented musicians that Estrela sounds like his most personal record to da…
Eudaimon
Delphine Dora, fresh from recent collaborations with Sophie Cooper and Mocke, presents a new album of solo material. Dora’s approach to the piano, her voice, and her compositions embraces the strangeness and intimacy of everyday life and one’s inner thoughts. Eudaimon lets her pure songwriting side sign brightly and clearly. Vinyl release on three:four.The twentieth century has had its share of poets exploring magic and mysticism. However, it is Kathleen Raine who has articulated the deepest s…
Fingerprince: Preserved Edition
Produced with The Cryptic Corporation, and with full access to The Residents' extensive tape archive, this package explores and expands the Residents classic third album and related 1976-1977 material, as well as the album's evolution on the live stage. Including the album restored to its original conceptual running order, plus long-forgotten unreleased material, live-in-the-studio tracks and concert recordings, this is The Residents as we've always wanted to hear them. Remastered, expanded…
Ahead Of Two Thoughts
Melbourne's ExEk began as a studio project with frontman Albert Wolski before the 2014 formation of the four-piece line up with Andrew Brocchi (synthesizer), Henry Wilson (bass) and Sam Dixon (drums). With the addition of Nell Grant on saxophone, the group's sound entered another dimension that reveals EXEK to be conjuring the ghosts of PiL, This Heat and Swell Maps. Ahead Of Two Thoughts, EXEK's sophomore release, pushes headlong into haunted, post-punk territories. Opening track "U Mop"…
Act Of Tenderness
Cindy Lee is the diva alter-ego of singer / guitarist / drag queen Patrick Flegel, the one-time captain of heralded Canadian experimental guitar pop act, Women. In Flegel's working on / as Cindy Lee exclusively over recent years, their songwriting makes a move toward high atmospherics, often achieving a mysterious sweetness rooted equally in beauty and ache. As Cindy Lee's first long-form statement, Act Of Tenderness makes use of antipodal themes to create a living sound: static with grace…
Étant Donnés
A six-track album based almost entirely on samples (from Curtis Mayfield to John Carpenter). "The really striking thing, though, is the kinship between Pisaro’s approach here and his other music. Many of his previous compositions have taken simple, granular sounds as raw materials, building blocks to be arranged into larger constructions through a combination of the composer’s parameters and the performer’s choices. On this album’s sister work, Shades of Eternal Night, piano chords played by Rei…
Shades of Eternal Night
Field Recordings from Syros, Greece and Southern California in 2015 and 2017. Piano performed by Reinier van Houdt, recorded in The Wild Beast, CalArts, June 2015Inside image by Michael Pisaro / Thanks to Keith Rowe.The sounds come and go against a backdrop of silence and stillness; the silences aren’t long but there’s a definite sense of a canvas only partially filled. Frequently, sounds are allowed to reverberate and decay into nothingness. It’s perhaps this quality that most communicates a se…
Mosquitoes and Crabs
Chulki Hong, turntables, guitar, electronics. Will Guthrie, drums, percussion, electronics. Recorded by Taku Unami, Mullae Arts Village, Seoul, South Korea, 20-22 October 2016. Mixed and edited by Taku Unami.Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer/percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics. Born in 1976, Hong Chulki …
Communion
LP version. 180 gram vinyl; Includes download code. "I don't want to play only traditional music. I want to play my own music... my own stories." --Park Jiha Over the last few years a rising tide of new Korean artists have staked a place in the global music conversation. Groups like Jambinai, Black String and Park Jiha's earlier duo 숨[suːm] have created exciting soundworlds that deftly combine the instrumentation and complex expression of Korean traditional music with an array of contemporary so…
À Travail Égal Salaire Égal
À Travail Égal Salaire Égal was Un Drame Musical Instantane's third album, originally released in 1982 on the group's own GRRR label. Since its creation in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé, the group has decided to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they try to renew every time they play.Un Drame borrowed their sources from rock (synthesizer player Birgé and gui…
Ginparis Session
For the better part of the 50s and 60s, Masayuki Takayanagi was among Japan's best-respected jazz guitarists. But it wasn't until his experiments with tabletop guitar led him down the seductive path of sonic experimentation that he became the stuff of legend. “Ginparis” (literally translated as Silver Paris) was known as the chanson cafe in Tokyo, Ginza, and the performances often centred around chansons but eventually became the session venue for young jazz musicians. They left their mark on a…
Mouvements
Mental Experience present the first ever reissue of Mouvements, originally released in 1973. An impossible to find artifact from the Swiss underground avant-garde scene of Geneva, originally released as a private boxset limited to 150 copies in 1973, only sold at art galleries. A unique, instrumental mix of free-jazz, classical, psych-rock, folk, improv, kraut, funk, and musique-concrete with tape effects. In the late 60s, musician/guitar player Christian Oestreicher, "a savage in the era …
Plant
**Screen printed edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. Edition comes packed in inner cardboard disco sleeve, high-quality open screen printed sleeve, and heavy outer screen printed PVC sleeve.** Working the sweet spot where noise communication decisively rubs up against textural experimentation are the verdant improvisations that make up Plant, the new LP from Rimouski-based electric bassist Éric Normand and Australian alto saxophonist and bass flautist Jim Denley. Don’t be fooled by the title, t…
Zonder Webben
After years of scheming indoors, the duo Leroux + Vanderstraeten now presents its first album: ‘Zonder Webben’. The sounds speak for themselves and develop in an unconventional way. The improvisations are gossamered at times, and on other occasions they are closely interwoven by different elements that happen at the same time and without hierarchy. This album maintains the spontaneity of the moment - the duo always starts from a blank canvas - however without being isolated from the environment…
When The Shade Is Stretched
A split album is a marriage of autonomous partners. On each side of the vinyl, one artist presents a limited selection of music. Both sides relate to each other, but they do not intertwine. On Aspen’s first split, guitar brothers Ruben Machtelinckx and Frederik Leroux each contribute twenty minutes of solo performance. Both Machtelinckx and Leroux make use of the oating sounds of the banjo, but in a quite distinct way. While the former presents a determined and solid selection of music, the latt…
Evergreen
Belgian euphonium player Niels Van Heertum leads the acoustic quartet Veder. After the minimalism of his solo album JK's Kamer +50.92509° +03.84800° (on Smeraldina-Rima)—on which he also played tuba, trumpet & electronics—Van Heertum turns to the sort of chamber jazz played on his previous collaborations with guitarist Ruben Machtelinckx. Felt like old folk (Smeraldina Rima, 2015) and especially mono no aware (Aspen Edities, 2017) presented him as part of an acoustic, often improvisational ensem…