★Smeraldina-Rima
The Safety Machine
310 copies. Drenched in a frozen, hypnotic melancholy, "The Safety Machine" is a double-LP tour de force by London-based musician and producer Alex Monk. Incorporating seventies kraut-synth psychedelica, cosmic ambient drones and haunting melodies into an ambitious framework of multi-layered sonic bleakness with hints of early Brian Eno, Klaus Schultze, Robert Wyatt and Moondog, Monk creates a haunting world that's filled with loss, loneliness and ethereal beauty — staring into the abyss while t…
Felt Like Old Folk
**LP comes in screen printed open sleeve on heavy 630 gsm kraft stock, insert and heavy PVC outer sleeve. LP art comes in A, B and C-varieties A, B and C are cut out of one whole screen printed work by artist Ante Timmermans. LP edition includes complimentary CD (disk only). Edition of 167 ** The music of Linus does not have a fixed trajectory which stifles the imagination. Nor does the duo engage in obvious grandeur or cheap effects. On the contrary, the music is sketched, patiently and with d…
Cushion
**Screen printed edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. High-quality open screen printed sleeve, and heavy outer screen printed PVC sleeve. Comes with a bonus CD** For their third album Jukwaa expands to a quintet : 1 piano, 2 double-basses, 2 drums. This exceptional instrumentation led to an exploration and investigation of the instruments themselves, their roles and their timbral range. «Jukwaa embodies a central paradox of today’s modern music: the double bass is a bass and not a bass, the drum…
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…
Ik, Steven H
This 12" is by a rapper called Steven H from Kaster, Belgium, who sings in Kaster dialect, a dialect incomprehensible by anyone not living in Kaster.
Stench
The Gate is Dan Peck, Tom Blancarte and Brian Osborne. Formed in 2008, and originally named Dan Peck Trio, the band has developed an aesthetic that is unique and uncompromising. Dividing time between improvisation and Dan’s compositions, the music ranges from bleak landscapes of near-silence to massive, horrifying sound sculptures. The Gate seeks to break down and confuse the conventional roles of a horn-bass-drums ensemble, revealing the most raw and elemental aspects of organized sound. "Poi…
Souls Stream
Amazingly beautiful limited edition of 500 screen printed LPs of this classic, individually handcoloured by artist Manor Grunewald. A master of reeds and horns, Joe McPhee is a bonafide free jazz icon who refuses to play the elder statesman in spite of his half-century-plus career. McPhee continues to hone his improvisatory skills by venturing far from his upstate New York home to perform with cutting-edge instrumentalists the world over. The phenomenal Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is one…
JK's Kamer +50.92509° +03.84800°
At +50.92509° latitude and +03.84800° longtitude Niels Van Heertum recorded his first solo record, in the familiar warmth of his living room in a windmill in the East of Flanders. On the one hand the record explores the sonic possibilities of the euphonium, tuba and trumpet. On the other hand it creates a place without haste. Pure intervals are superposed and moved in order to avoid tension and agitation. Meanwhile the amplified horns circle around the rounded windmill room forming a dense …
Un Jour Tu Verras
Limited edition of 300 screen printed LPs, individually handcoloured by artist Wouter Vanhaelemeesch. Loyal followers of the late Paris Transatlantic will definitely recall the tour diary of a 2005 live adventure shared by Dan Warburton (and his violin) with blasphemous trumpeter Jac Berrocal and cassette wizard Aki Onda. To those not familiar with that story I suggest to give it a serious read. At least one can get a picture of what happens when artists not warmly greeted by the stylish cliques…
The jungle he told me
Joachim Badenhorst (1981) is a Belgian reed player who divides his time between NYC and Belgium. Over the last 5 years Joachim has released a number of albums with different projects, such as Baloni, Han Bennink Trio, Rawfishboys, Taro, Tony Malaby’s Novela, Thomas Heberer’s Clarino, Mogil, Polylemma, Os Meus Shorts, International Trio, Red Rocket and Equillibrium.The Jungle He Told Me is Joachim's first solo album. It consists out of nine pieces on clarinet, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone. B…
Jack Allett / Kalbakken
"Relay I" is the first in Smeraldina-Rima's Relay Series. An artist for the A-side is chosen by the Smeraldina-Rima clan, after which the A-side artist decides upon who will get to fill the B-side. For every Relay 7" a different artist will be chosen to create the outside artwork. The A-side of "Relay I" fell to Jack Allett, the fingerpicking whirlwind formerly known as Spoono. Allett chose Kalbakken for the B-side. A great choice, Kalbakken, with its shamanistic folk, offers a great supplement …
Throw Down Your Hammer And Sing / Sheldon Siegel
Split LP by Throw Down Your Hammer And Sing and Sheldon Siegel. Throw Down Your Hammer And Sing is the trio of Nate Wooley, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Jason Roebke, Sheldon Siegel is the trio of Erik Heestermans, Gerard Hermanand Gino Coomans. Two sides of grainy textures and truly happening improv. This album was a co-production of Smeraldina-Rima and croxhapox. The artwork was made by Berlin-based artist Hannelore Van Dijck resulting in two different LP-sleeves, each sporting two different drawings…
Indiscreet mirror
According to its creator, Alex Monk‘s fourth album —the follow-up to 2010′s wonderful The Safety Machine— “explores the tension between innocence and experience that late adolescence can evoke.” I would say, however, that this is a very personal exploration of a very specific adolescence; one endured in a rural village or small town, introverted and largely alone, one more absorbed in nature, landscape and the changing seasons than social pressures, career ambitions and drunken nights out. Not t…
Spiral Mirror
Formerly Boy+Girl, AG Davis created an unrelentingly aggressive disk. Stripped-down dark electro-noise sprinkled with some kinder moments… You’ll need to go outside for a minute after this one. Incredible artwork/cover!
Spirit Of The Positive Wind
featuring Brian Sullivan & Nate Nelson (Mouthus), Pete Nolan (Magik Markers, Spectre Folk) and Karl Bauer (Axolotl). The LP features two side-long tracks of bubbling, meandering noise-drone collages. "What the hell is this madness? After the Georgia Sea Island Singers took me somewhere nice it’s up to this super-group to drag me back to the fierce, nightmarish industrial landscape from whence I came. Then again this isn’t the sound of Bradford. I don’t know what it’s the sound of actua…
Outside The Great Drought
NY-based multi-instrumentalist Colby Nathan delivers a debut that contains a jumpy and highly neurotic form of outsiderpop combining bebopdrenched rants and surrealistic torchsongs with lush arrangements that constantly test the limits of self-control and good reason. “Outside, The Great Drought” offers baroque exuberance and teenage angst through sixties inspired craftsmanship that keeps spiraling out of this worldly realm. Think Jonathan Richman, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
Twilight Peaks
LP version. "My mentor for mind liberty and overall follow-your-heart, and guitar maestro Robbie Basho has a new album. Well, not exactly, he’s been dead for 25 years, but about a month ago, the Smeraldina Rima label had reissued his brilliant 1984 release Twilight Peaks album.Little known upon its release on cassette only, TP quickly vanished into the great amnesia of the world, the reissue does a great justice to one of his truly great albums.The sound is full of reverb, huge like the mountain…
A Dragonfly For Each Corpse
A Dragonfly For Each Corpse is a record that stands no daylight. A feverish nightmare of an album, dragging us into a brown paper bag —ferocious cannibal jungle ambience seeping through— till we're cast down some stairs into a cellar made out of spit. A twirling folkballad sung by a ghost made out of chewing gum turns into a symphony of typing fingers, ticking clocks and slamming car doors, like a noirish soundtrack to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, accompanied by squeaking …
Peeesseye + Talibam!
Talibam! (Kevin Shea on drums, Matt Mottel on keyboards) and Peeesseye (Jaime Fennelly on electronics, Chris Forsyth on guitars and Fritz Welch on drums) have been pals and Evolving Ear labelmates for a while now, so it was only a matter of time before they all got together and let it rip. And rip this certainly does, driven on by the double-barrelled percussion attack, underpinned by Fennelly's drones and scribbled all over by Mottel and Forsyth, whose wild gonzo soloing is a happy and healthy …
Trumpet/Amplifier
RESTOCKED: Last copies, reduced price...Everyone's well into big circles at the moment. Check the new Autechre album, Sunn's Monoliths and Dimensions, that No Age 12" and now this. Circles are pretty cool I guess, but personally I'm more diggin' the net form of the dodecahedron at the moment. What this guy's doing reminds me a wee bit of Florian Hecker, albeit with a completely different tool set. Here he spends half the LP exploring the pure sound capabilities of the trumpet in a series of craz…