Trademark Ground
A new album from pioneering multi-instrumentalist Charles Hayward (of This Heat and Camberwell Now legendary fame) , on Otoacoustic. Four songs and five percussion interludes, laced through with field recording interventions. This is a very special production, with Hayward's music on one side and his original graphics laser-etched into side 2. The albums are being pressed in 180 gram CLEAR vinyl, with a full-color sleeve also featuring original Hayward graphics.
Tragic Pote B/W Jerusalem Stone
Aviram Cohen is a jerk. Who cares if he was in SIlk Flowers, Soiled Mattress and The Springs, or that he has a new project called Volunteers Park ? You can tell that his parents are immigrants. He’s a suburbanite from New Jersey, and now, another New Yorker with an attitude, who learned how to use a sequencer to program synths and drum machines, so that he can sing about how boring life can be. It’s like he’s creating all this atmosphere because it’s lacking in his life. It sounds like someone i…
Transitions
Having rattled the hinges with last year’s “In the Blink of an Eye†7-inch, C S Yeh (C. Spencer Yeh) flings open the door and steps inside with Transitions, his first full-length album of songs after years of establishing himself as one of Earth’s top humans in experimental music and unbound improvisation, both alone and in collaboration, on record and onstage. The effect Transitions has on you may or may not depend on your familiarity with Yeh’s past work; regard…
Wavelength
First Lady of Winds and Stars Samara Lubelski returns to her once and future label home for her sixth album, Wavelength, and the spheres harmonize at the news. Wavelength comprises a dozen new arrowed whispers, Samara's feathery touch on guitar and microphone now so at balance with the elements that the whole, her music and the air it enters, become inseparable. Don't be fooled by the persistent "psych-folk" labels she gets -- oh, they may be accurate as far as modern usage goes, and that scene …
Sound Dimensions
RESTOCKED, very last copies around, and price reduced! A lovely reissue of a collection of rare experimental, avant-garde music that was composed/recorded in 1972 by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai for the RCA catalogue. It was entitled "Dimensioni Sonore" and was issued across 10 LPs and created to be used as library/background music that film-makers could licence to use in their productions. The music of each track was created in order to give, in a series of expressive dynamic work throu…
Ever And Anon
The mythical LAFMS collective Smegma really needs no introduction, where would we all be without them? How many bands were so ahead of their time (1973!), and have been for so long, like Smegma have? Well, here they are with a brand new LP of their famous mix of free jazz, industrial noise, improvisation, straight-up weird music so typical of these masters / US freaks. On the opening track, they are riding on the amazing drums of historical member Dennis Duck (of Dream Syndicate) to pay h…
Damned Revolutions
SUPERB! Dead C guitarist Michael Morley is finally back with a new Gate LP, after two years, and what a comeback! “Damned Revolutions” has all the traits of Gate’s classic LPs like “Guitar” and “The Monolake”: it starts with dark and fuzzy guitar drones, that build up to create a dense wall of distorted resonance, at times accompanied by sparse electronics and sustained by spectral beats and bass pulses. When vocals break in, it’s magical and poetic, his moaning reminiscent of pre-war blue…
Still Insane After All These Years
Eleven new & previously unreleased songs from BeNe GeSSeRiT, the cult Belgian minimal synth duo of Alain Neffe (various instruments including synth, beats, loops, strings…) and Nadine Bal (vocals). Alain started his Insane Music imprint back in 1981, he is a key figure of the European cassette culture and has been making some of the most creative and cross-boundary music since the early 80’s, also with other numerous projects like Pseudo Code, Human Flesh and more recently, his and Nadine’s duo …
Cracked Refraction
Cracked Refraction ties its complex knots with infectious vigor and a predilection for playfulness. Wrack’s melodies are slithering and serpentine, and the music is built of smaller segments assembled in what can seem a slapdash manner, with all sorts of jutting ends and unexpected collisions. What Bruckmann’s done, though, is intentional, placing his players on different planes, with straight lines failing to meet, runs of notes ricocheting at impossible angles, and expected avenues folding in …
Segments
A deep investigation of a very few simple principles: acoustic instruments rub ambiguously up against electrified objects and electronics, but these in the main provide atmosphere and harmonic complexity. Taking its cue from John Cage, the trio began sticking contact mics to anything that sounded and amplified their raw sounds. Awesome! "New release for Alvin Curran, Paolo Tofani and Mauro Tespio : Electrifying all the objects is the common interest of those three artists. We could say that repr…
Love will make a better you
Number six on the Japrocksampler Top 50, available again for the first time in over a decade! Phoenix Records releases a fully-remastered edition of the 1971 sole album by Love Live Life + One. There were several progressive psychedelic groups in Japan in the early '70s including the short-lived Love Live Life + One. The band played a few live gigs and released this lone album before disbanding. The group consisted of 9 musicians and the "plus one" seems to refer to vocalist Akira Fuse who h…
In C
Definitive remastered edition with extensive liner notes* 'In C' is one of Terry Riley's best-known and loved compositions, and essentially the first ever "minimalist" composition. It's a semi-aleatoric work - basically open-ended - written by Riley in 1964, and here performed in 1967 by the composer, and leader on saxophone, with members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo, featuring Jon Hassell and Margaret among other notables in th…
Los Autodisparadores
A soft immersion, leaving the surface behind,knowing that on the inside, wide horizons are waiting.In the mines of matter: laboring and exploring, searching and will-o‘-wisping, but always with compass and sextant at hand.Ample discoveries are the prize – never boastfully on display,but tended with archeological care: larger molecular aggregates, atoms, elementary particles; interacting or alone.A journey, seemingly documenting itself through close observation. Land surveying through experiencin…
Three sixteens
Limited to 200 copies. 'Karlstad' was commissioned by Dutch new music ensemble DASH! as a remix track for their CD release 'Bangalore' in 2008. Bum teinas took very short snippets (no longer than 1 second) of breathing noises of the ensemble's vocalists and used it as loops to build the instrumental harmonies upon them. Short remix version of this 'remix' with guest violinist Lina Lapelyt was featured in Wire Tapper 22 compilation. The title of this piece is derived from the sofa brand of…
Casse-tete
Composed in 1979 and edited on LP in 1984 by Amaryllis. Reissue on cd by Oral, 2008. Contrary to an electronic music delighting itself in soaring above reality in self abstraction, the concrete music of Bernard Bonnier has a down on earth hearing, and a dancing too, altough now and then out of beat. Bernard Bonnier has defined chameleon-music as: '...a mime* trying to beat its parth through the puzzle (casse-tête: literally 'head-breaker') of soliciting madness, sundowns, violence, science, love…
FRKWYS Vol. 9
LP version: for the ninth volume of FRKWYS, a music and film series pairing contemporary artists with those that may have preceded them in style and/or approach, Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras meet The Congos in Jamaica.
Postcards
Gen Ken Montgomery, a New York-based Visual Artist and Sound Composer is absolutely genuine; he has no training in traditional music or art. He was never a follower of any direction or school. Instead he founded his own school of off-beat DIY-electronics, driven by irresistible curiosity and ingenuous enthusiasm for sound experimentation and process-oriented performance.His music is dense and full of polyrhythms and counter harmonies with singular control over layers of randomly pul…
Grass
Eyvind Kang’s newest CD collects quiet new compositions spanning the past five years, which he considers to be among his truly breakthrough works. Music for solo piano, string quintet and more take the unique sonic environments of Morton Feldman to an entirely new place via the metaphors of agricultural poetry, Chinese medicine, sweatlodge and Ikat weaving. Mesmerizing work from the elusive and ever-stimulating mind of Eyvind Kang!
Dreaming the Magic of Your Maya
Recorded in 1968 and issued as a very limited run private pressing this psychedelic raga freak-out is the brainchild of multi disciplinar artist Loren Standlee plus his partner Ziska with the cooperation of Daevid Allen and Gilli Smith in what was an early incarnation of Gong. Loren and Ziska had been involved with the crowd of avantgardist free thinkers that settled in Formentera in the sixties, and back home in N.Y. they had also been connected to experimentalists such as Angus Maclise, Maria…
You're Next
I am not sure if I ever heard of Massimo Pupillo, who plays 'low end bowel chainsaw' on this record, but since a lot seems tongue in cheek here, it might also be a guitar with effects. Everything here says: we poke fun at those who play with the stereotypes of the world of industrial music. One side is called 'First Offence' and has titles as 'Necrophiliac Cunnilingus', 'Rope For The Undead' and 'Vomit Buffet', while 'Second Coming' has 'Rib Cage Of Rotting Horror', 'Broken Spine Crushed Cranium…