★MIE Music
The Union | A Hem of Evening
Named one of the ten best solo acoustic guitar albums of the year by The Out Door and a top ten album of the year by The Liminal, Tom Lecky’s debut album as Hallock Hill elicited a powerful response when it was first released on CD by Hundred Acre Recordings last May. The album’s unique assembly of stacked and layered acoustic, electric and lap steel guitars delivered a new kind of studio improvisation: pieces that were spontaneously made, yet feel composed, pieces that glide from harmonious to …
Gmaj7
300 copies. Epic guitar drones and roiling, focussed post-rock minimalism for fans of Stephen O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi. Hand-numbered edition limited to 300 in hand-screened jacket with download coupon redeemable from the label. About Gmaj7: This G rooted nondominant seventh chord presents itself as a major/major seventh consisting of root (G), major third (B), perfect fifth (D), and major seventh (F#). The appearance of movement is created here by emphasizing different dials present in various v…
Closer To Stranger
Closer To Stranger is the new solo album by Pakistani-born dream-folk musician Ilyas Ahmed. Drawing on a wide range of influences, his songs incorporate classic singer-songwriter gestures alongside more experimental leanings. Recorded to tape in the studio by Justin Higgins in the fall of 2016 and finished in the spring of 2017, Ahmed's instrumental palette includes: acoustic and electric six- and 12-string guitars, Fender Rhodes, multiple keyboards, tanpura, and percussion. Closer To Stra…
Split
A label and tour exclusive split 10" from Pelt and Mike & Cara Gangloff with Matt Peyton. The 10" sees Pelts first new release since Effigy on MIE back in 2012, a long time ago. And Mike & Cara Gangloff in a much more stripped back version of their American Popular songbook form accompanied by Matt Peyton.
Panisperna
MIE unveils, after long gestation, Panisperna, the first long player by Jantar, an outer-borough ensemble historically known for their creeping strain of easy-listening, most often heard in empty lots and abandoned diners. Chad Laird and Tianna Kennedy have grown an experimental cover crop since 2009, gently cultivating a soil rich in ambient leaf rot and organic art-world chemical compounds. With the addition of Kirsten Nordine, Jantar began to run it through with speculative roots and melodic …
Music For Small Ensemble & Computer
"Music for Small Ensemble & Computer is a collection of what I call the “DIY shitty classical” pieces me and Linda have been working on for a couple years. Using an inherited piano, freeware, and the basement floorcore spirit of discovery to trespass into a typically more rarefied style. And thankfully a few actually-trained friends lent their skills to the mess. To me, it’s the sound of the two of us struggling to find peace and stability for ourselves, family, and small community in an often c…
Gallarais
Delayed to June. After releasing the "minor epic" (the Wire) of Music for Church Cleaners a few years ago we're extremely extremely excited to be able to bring to you Áine O'Dwyer's new record 'Gallarais' on MIE Music. And thi sis David Toop, on hearing Áine O’Dwyer’s Gallarais and the subsequent conversations between November 2016 and January 2017..."Twenty-six letters were sent, not far to travel, from Proust, hypersensitive writer to his upstairs neighbour, Marie Williams – ‘I was rather t…
Dedicated to Uri Klangers
In 2015 Hey Colossus released two albums on Rocket Recordings, In Black and Gold in February and Radio Static High in October. Dedicated to Uri Klangers is a look back. It's best summed up by the 3000 words that can be found on the inner sleeve of the record, the tale begins: "The 2xLP comp that's in your hands now was initially released on cassette by S.O.U.L for our 10th anniversary show, September 2013, about 50 tapes were made and sold on the night. We thought a BEST OF would be hilar…
Knock On Life's Door
There’s a particular twinkle in the great expanse of American songwriting. This has seen countless nostalgic exploitations over the years – collections of popular songs strung together under the banner of the so-called Great American Songbook that have reiterated the form of many of these songs without contemplating their depths. In terms of thoughtful, emotive synthesis, few have understood it in the way that Cara and Mike Gangloff understand it on this new album. They take have taken older Ame…
Dreamboat
Dreamboat is the collaboration between dream-folk singer / guitarist Ilyas Ahmed and the lunar-inclined analog synthesizer/processed bass clarinet duo Golden Retriever (Matt Carlson / Jonathan Sielaff ). The collaboration between these long time friends began with a shared admiration for each others' work as well as a commonality in approach to making music, which one day begged the question, "What if our individual sound worlds intersected?". The result yielded a unifying love of exploded modal…
Floating
In most European cities you can find many canals that have been covered. Often though, underneath the cement and our frenetic lives, they still run. Constantly flowing water, unknown to us. Maybe we feel it. Maybe it influences us and we do not know it. It would be nice to lie down in between a 19th Century tram track among the windows of stores up for rent and wine bars offering refuge and put an ear to the cobblestones, like they used to do in the prairies to hear if a train was coming. I am s…
Navigating by Starlight
"Navigating by Starlight is the elegantly distended fourth LP by a New York band known for its fine taste in bourbon as well as its ability to explore strangely forested nooks of space. Composed of two side-long excursions of heavily bearded improv, this is what Bruce Dern should have been listening to throughout Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running. The first side is called 'Lovejoy Vapor Trail,' after the recently discovered comet said to be releasing enough alcohol to fill 500 bottles of G…
Saturday Night Fever
"Saturday Night Fever takes the concept of the movie of the same name and stretches the night a bit later, the fever a bit higher to the point where the party ends up blending into something much more sinister and wild. What starts out as a disco drumbeat with funky guitar swagger and melodic horns may slowly deteriorate into some sort of corroded ambient loop that eventually morphs into melodic horn samples. Basically every track is subverting its own gestures, carving out a narrative of …
Curious Aroma
"The comet Kohoutek was first seen near earth by a Czech astronomer in March of 1973. David Berg, founder of religious cult Children of God, predicted its passing would cause armageddon the following year. A more welcoming family, the Sun Ra Arkestra, performed a concert dedicated to Kohoutek on December 12th, just two weeks before it came as close to our globe as it ever would. All of this could be insignificant trivia surrounding the name that Philly-by-way-of-D.C. band Kohoutek chose fo…
Music for Church Cleaners Vol. I and II
** few copies back in stock ** 2015 repress, don't miss it "Over the course of several months, Áine O'Dwyer was given access to the pipe organ in St Mark's Church, Islington, while the cleaners were at work. Primarily a harpist, this was a rare opportunity to grapple with the 'king of instruments' and apply her sense of melodic, structured improvisation in a new context. Since it's impossible to exert complete control over such a recording environment, she entered into the sessions with a C…
Presage
Limited to 300 copies."Presage is an LP less split than twinned, like stars, each side pulled into a mesmerising gravitational dance by the other's backspin. Black Dirt Oak and Jantar, siblings of sibilance and site, complete one another's sentences in a dark and uncanny psychic psalmistry. For their part, Black Dirt Oak stomps out a series of chthonic ur-grooves, filthy bare feet splintered by silicon shards and splashing in puddles of molten rare earths. They kick up a black angel dust of deca…
Black Ribbon of Death, Silver Thread of Life
Mike and Cara Gangloff’s "Black Ribbon of Death, Silver Thread of Life" is the third in a series of loosely connected melodic investigations released by Mike Gangloff over the past two years. All three were recorded around the Gangloff home in rural Floyd County, Virginia, and were engineered by Joseph Dejarnette (Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bruce Greene, Curtis Eller). And all three feature the far-reaching improvisation familiar from Gangloff’s work with the old-time stringbandBlack Twig Pickers…
Four Infernal Rivers
*restocked* "Tom Carter and Pat Murano, two figures with decades of history behind them, offer Four Infernal Rivers, their new double long player. Four Infernal Rivers illuminates their interlocking styles in a light that blurs their individual identities. The music breathes its own life, and consistently eschews the normal meanings of its own potential descriptors. To think and act intuitively across 80 minutes in real time, without falling into boring or wasteful modes, should be taken as …
Wawayanda Patent
The needle lands on the vinyl surface of Wawayanda Patent, and the room appears in your mind’s eye. Black Dirt Studio sits empty, the sunlight still caught in the west-facing window, while an array of strings, drums, bells, and wooden bodies waits in expectant silence. In time-lapse, each performer appears in the space before your eyes, channeling the experience of unnumbered past collaborations into a new chimera: heart of Pelt, head of Gunn, neck of NNCK, legs of Rhyton, wings of Pigeons. To e…
Cuckoo live life like Cuckoo
Now in their tenth year the band have been gathering plaudits and accumulating new fans with every release, and after playing to thousands at Supersonic Festival last year, things are accelerating at an even faster pace. As with each album release, Hey Colossus continue to mutate and for their eighth album they have enlisted the support of a new drummer, Part Chimp guitar/vox man, Tim Cedar, who has undoubtedly brought a whole new kind of energy that has reinvigorated the band. When the rhythm s…