So Unreal
Episode two in season one of the LA Vampires Collab Chronicles finds her joining forces with elusive alien discotech-head Matrix Metals of the nomadic Outer Limits Recordings cabal. Blurry ornate cassette-loop architectures groove and grind under jazzy Casio canopies while Ms. LA Vamps screws it all down and layers in additional square wave keyboard lines, echo chamber FX, drum machine detailing, low-end throbs, and sings lead on a gold spraypainted microphone. The entire LP's got that '…
Into the Night Sky
Into the Night Sky is the sixth album from avant guitarists Alan Licht and Loren Connors, the first after 2003's In France (FBWL). Since 1993 these New York City artists have evolved an instrumental dialogue merging shades of electric blues and minimalism. These two epic pieces -- one from 1996, the other 2006 -- recorded live in concert clearly show far their desolate sound world grew over a decade of collaboration while the core of layered guitar complexities and alien melodies remain. T…
Henzai
Tokyo-based guitarist/singer Hisato Higuchi presents his fourth full-length and first LP release. Henzai is Higuchi at his most bare. Each song appears like a spectral poem -- sewn together with hushed electricity and whispers. This recording is wholly intimate, recorded in seclusion, and washes over the listener like a hazy, day-break dream. Higuchi splits these 12 torch-songs between slow-motion improvisations and the composed, yet each is sung with a mix of beautiful wordless/Japanese languag…
s/n
A split LP with Harappian Night Recordings 6 reviews in psychopathic alchemy and Kommissar Hjuler Karawane from Hugo Ball. Limited to 300 copies. Yellow vinyl. "Der krazy Kommissar recites a Hugo Ball nonsense poem from 1916, written the same year Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto & founded the Cabaret Voltaire. Harappian is a one man UK bedroom string plucker & droner who cuts together, mimics, & plays along to his international records. He pulls off some pretty flamin' rock tunes here, full of t…
Les ambulants
Original copy, lucky warehouse fine: Recorded august 1984 at Souterrain Scientifique. Experimental music from France by DDAA (acoustic guitar, bass, tape, piano, saxophone, effects, drums, voice, guitar, percussion - Jean-Luc André , Jean-Philippe Fee , Sylvie Martineau. Recorded by Bernard C.).
Music For Shakuhachi
nprecedented music for Shakuhachi by Frank Denyer (releases on Tzadik, Mode) with Yoshikazu Iwamoto on shakuhachi and Paul Hiley joining Denyer on percussion.
Complete Rec. V2
Fantastic kosmigroov band from the 70s based out of Philadelphia. Catalyst made 4 albums (this second volume collects the last two "Unity" and "A Tear And A Smile"). Instrumentation consisted of keys, sax/flute/obe, bass, and drums. If you are a fan of electric Miles and Mwandishi era Hancock you need to check these discs out. Bassist Alphonso Johnson split from Catalyst to join Weather Report. Highly recommended.
Complete Rec. V1
Fantastic kosmigroov band from the 70s based out of Philadelphia. Catalyst made 4 albums (this volume collects the first two "Catalyst" and "Unity"). Instrumentation consisted of keys, sax/flute/obe, bass, and drums. If you are a fan of electric Miles and Mwandishi era Hancock you need to check these discs out. Highly recommended.
Make It Real
Wait, this is the new Pocahaunted album cover? Gone may be the days of cassette cases featuring creepy collages and hand-dyed bags with feathers attached, but this is something else entirely. I mean, there’s a parrot with blue Ray-Bans, a giant dollar sign, a “He’s on fire!” NBA Jam-style basketball…What is going on? After the shock of the cover art, I waded into the unfamiliar soup that waited within. From the opening thrums of “Touch You”, the lo-fi recording aesthetic seemed to be held …
Split
Finely dressed in a full-colour Maya Miller sleeve, this split release from Ex Cocaine and Yellow Swans captures two wildly differing bands on great form. Ex-Cocaine is the collaboration between guitarist and vocalist Brian Ramirez and percussionist Mike Casler, who fashion psych-heavy instrumental jams leading way out into oblivion, even having a go at a Meat Puppets cover on 'Sexy Music'. Yellow Swans meanwhile don't come nearly so close to that sort of song formatting, instead offering…
Oltracuidansa
Oltracuidansa is the radical questioning of the relation between the performer’s body and instrument: What is the language of the contrabass? How to give voice to the thought? In the variety of the contrabass voices, how to find “The Voice”? And finally, if “the voice’s flight in the language must come to an end”, if “the achieved thought has no more thought”, doesn’t one arrive at the abyss of silence? Stefano Scodanibbio — regarded as one of the great interpreters of the contemporary con…
Mineral orange
Vanessa Rossetto is a composer and painter living in Austin, Texas. She uses primarily chamber instrumentation, field recordings, electronics and a wide array of different objects, exploring them through extended and traditional techniques. In 2008, she launched her own CD-R label, Music Appreciation, and through this imprint has released four solo albums: Misafridal, Imperial Brick, Whoreson in the Wilderness and the award-winning Dogs in English Porcelain. Her most recent release, the PDD-NOS …
2 seconds / b minor / wave
Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto are not generally closely associated, but have quite a bit in common. Both are composers whose primary instrument is the guitar, both have close ties to the Wandelweiser collective (Pisaro is a longtime member), and both have pursued their unique paths without much concern as to how the rest of the world will perceive them. 2 seconds/b minor/wave marks their first collaboration, but these aesthetic overlaps allow their independently conceived recorded parts to fi…
Fields Have Ears
Fields have ears 1' (2008) - for piano & tape. 'Fade' - for piano (2000). 'Fields have ears 4' - realisation for 14 players (2009). Philip Thomas: piano + members of the edges ensemble. 3 varied works by the US-based composer Michael Pisaro. Fields Have Ears 1 interweaves a surprisingly lyrical piano part with layered field recordings and sine tones. Fade is a beautifully austere minimalist piece for solo piano, expertly played by Philip Thomas. Fields Have Ears 4 is a prose score, realis…
Expanded Slam
Expanded Slam and Extended Slam, two new compositions by one of America's most consistently explorative and radical artists. Presented in a blazing gatefold package designed by Jupitter-Larsen, including an essay on the permawave, the polywave and the hoopla. Utterly delightful. GX Jupitter-Larsen is an media artist, based in Hollywood, California, who has been active in a number of underground art scenes since the late 1970s. He has been involved in punk rock, mail art, cassette culture, the no…
The Immeasurable Gift
The Immeasurable Gift is a testament to cathartic possibilities and the role of creation/release as a means of understanding. Recorded throughout the past three years in a variety of locations and personal moments; encapsulated by a common, unrelenting concern. Beautifully delicate, elegiac melodies concealed within curtains of dense electronic ambiance reveal themselves like the light at the end of the tunnel; a signifier of the temporary vessel form. Balancing recklessness with care and…
Warmth
Even though Warmth main man Steev Thompson still appears to be incommunicado, totally epic recordings continue to surface. Before Roxanne Jean Polise was officially over and Steev still lived in Chicago, he joined up with another then-Chicago resident Branden Diven of Quilts/American Grizzly Records. The jams that were created filled a couple of CD-Rs and the Warmth side of the split with Quintana Roo on Not Not Fun. This LP consists of a remixed and edited version of the original CD-R ru…
Off Duty
As if the music of lysergic, lo-fi drugdub one man band Sun Araw wasn't flipped out and damaged enough, on this latest joint, those already tweaked and twisted sounds get even more far out, the vibe WAY druggier and spacier, a 26 minute blast of crumbling wah-guitar laced psychdub comedown in the form of three skull caving soul freeing innerspace excursions."Last Chants" begins with a dense swirling cloud of white noise and damaged effects, shot through with barely there melodies, and loose detu…
False Flag
"When witch-gods collide, it might sound something like this. Six Organs of Admittance...Richard Bishop...Chris Corsano. Riders of the apocalypse, it's them vs. us. After absorbing their über-holy dynamo, you'll be prepared to join up with these wraiths, making it all of us against...well, whomever's fool enough to stand in our way. To evil! Rangda's been building up behind the scenes for some time now. As label mates and members of an exclusive mutual admiration society, Sir Rick …
Completed Rotations of the....
When one thinks of the musical centers of New Zealand, the city of Tauranga doesn’t have as celebrated a history as Dunedin, Auckland or Christchurch. Which is apt, in a way, as the artist known to us only as Rotate The Completor makes music that sounds unconnected to any scene in NZ or elsewhere. A chance encounter with an enthusiastic passerby while busking on the streets led to the receipt of a home-recorded cassette, which caught the ears of the outsider music community, although any attem…