★Superior Viaduct
Slates
* 2021 LP edition * compiles the six tracks from the original EP release, their March 1981 Peel session and an early '80s studio outtake. Liner notes by Brian Turner. If The Fall truly is a cult band, then Slates both benefits from and reinforces such shrouded obsessions. In presenting these six particular songs as a 10-inch EP, the inherent and attractive difficulty of The Fall's sound is made physical, framing the urgency of their singles from this period (notably How I Wrote 'Elastic Man' an…
Suburban Lawns (12")
If your brain has a shortlist of bands that instantly evoke New Wave, Suburban Lawns deserve a slot right next to the likes of Devo, Talking Heads and the B-52's. After putting out two singles on their own Suburban Industrial imprint, the Lawns signed to I.R.S. Records and released their debut LP in 1981. While the band gained cult status thanks in part to a Jonathan Demme-produced music video which aired on Saturday Night Live, their self-titled album would sadly be the five-piece's only full-l…
Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977
** small repress available ** Black vinyl version. "These songs were recorded a few months after the Los Angeles punk scene began. These five statements of intent transcend Punk and project forward into the future: to the analog synth wave of the late '70s and beyond, to the present day, four decades later, when they finally receive an official release. Sourced from the original reel-to-reels, they are a revelation compared to the countless copies that have been circulating by multiple generati…
Dignity of Labour
** This first-time vinyl reissue (configured as single LP) comes with 24-inch x 18-inch poster and 24-page booklet ** In 1981, The Ex started squatting Villa Zuid, an estate overlooking abandoned Van Gelder paper factory in the village of Wormer, Netherlands. Formerly the home of the factory’s manager, the Villa briefly served as the band’s base of operations and would inspire one of The Ex’s most impactful, enduring albums in their 40+ year history. Originally released in 1983, Dignity Of Labou…
Tumult
** This first-time vinyl reissue comes with 28-inch x 39- inch full-color poster ** While awaiting the release of Dignity Of Labour, The Ex headed back into the studio in early 1983; this time with a new friend—The Mekons’ Jon Langford—helping produce. Originally released in April 1983 (only a month after Dignity Of Labour), Tumult marks a major evolution in Ex-sound. Opener “Bouquet Of Barbed Wire” emerges snarling out of post-punk atmospherics with Terrie Ex’s glacial guitar, Bas Masbeck’s lop…
Four Organs/Phase Patterns
Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in 20th century music. Though he studied at the prestigious arts institutions Julliard and Mills College, by the mid-1960s Reich set about dismantling the very orthodoxy that he had been trained in. Forming a new musical language based on repetitive processes, Reich became established as part of the so-called "Big Four" of New York minimalists (along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass). Reich's influence can easily be seen toda…
The Avengers
In the late '70s, The Avengers established themselves as one of the US's preeminent punk bands. Fusing incisive guitar hooks, explosive rhythms and adolescent venom, the group forged some of the most in-your-face songs of the era. Their live shows were legendary, playing up and down the West Coast and even blowing Sex Pistols off the stage at the latter's final performance. As Byron Coley writes in the liner notes, 'Of the best bands of San Francisco's first wave in 1977, The Avengers were by fa…
Model Express
* Edition of 500. Gold LP * Cindy Lee, the performance and songwriting vehicle of Canadian artist Patrick Flegel (who fronted influential indie group Women earlier), previously stunned listeners with Act Of Tenderness, a heart-wrenching statement informed by the noirish core of celebrity, and has continued to enchant with every album, including the startling What's Tonight To Eternity released earlier this year.
Model Express originally appeared as a self-released edition of 100 gold cassettes. …
A Monastic Trio
**2020 repress** Born Alice McLeod into a musical Detroit family, Alice Coltrane began playing piano at age seven and later studied with Bud Powell in Paris. Upon returning to the States, she joined vibraphonist Terry Gibbs' group and eventually shared a bill with the John Coltrane Quartet. In 1965 the two wed in Juárez, Mexico, and played alongside one another until her husband's last performance in May, 1967.A Monastic Trio, created in the year following her husband's passing, is Alice Coltran…
Disturbing Domestic Peace
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex -- a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall -- have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. Disturbing Domestic Peace, The Ex's debut album, appeared mere months after their first single, 1980's 'All Corpses Smell The Same'. Originally released on the band's own Ver…
History Is What's Happening
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex -- a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall -- have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. Originally released in 1982, History Is What's Happening features one of the most harrowing title/cover art combinations in recent memory. What at first glance looks like a f…
All Corpses Smell The Same
**few copies available** Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex -- a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall -- have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. All Corpses Smell The Same, The Ex's first single, marks the beginning of this DIY odyssey -- appearing in June 1980 on Hé Records, a precursor to th…
Cleveland Confidential
**Shipping the next week. Limited edition translucent orange vinyl**"When I say 1980 was a kind of dead zone in the Cleveland music scene, I can hear a collective, 'Isn't every year a dead zone in Cleveland?' Go ahead, take your Johnny Carson-era jokes and see what they buy you. Puff your chest about NYC in '75 or London in '76 or L.A. in '77 to some 27-something today. Allow me to save you face and remind you to add in late '70s Cleveland. Because when you revisit this comp of struggling, strag…
Night After Night
**Limited edition translucent red vinyl** New York no-wavers Ike Yard are perhaps best known for being the first American band signed to Factory Records, and it isn't difficult to hear why: the group's music has much in common with the existential frigidness of Joy Division and early New Order as well as the mutant noise-funk of Section 25 and A Certain Ratio. That said, the sound of Night After Night, the band's debut EP, is one that could only have emerged from the lawless dystopia of '70s New…
Brigitte Fontaine est folle
2020 repress. French poet and chameleonic vocalist Brigitte Fontaine's career spans over four decades. Only a few years before her 1968 debut, Brigitte Fontaine Est Folle, she moved to Paris to become an actress and took her prodigiously mature voice into the studio. Rich in the drama she brought to theater, Fontaine synthesized chanson (French pop song) and world music, which eventually won her international acclaim as a performer and collaborator with a variety of artists from around the world…
Comme A La Radio
**2020 Repress. In process of stocking** Sensational reissue!!! In 1969, a French chanteuse, an Algerian multi-instrumentalist, and a Chicago jazz quartet undertook an experimental, exploratory, revolutionary musical voyage; a redrawing of musical parameters that, to this day, stands as a glittering beacon, glowing in the dark abyss of 'out' music. Featuring Areski Belkacem and Art Ensemble of Chicago, Comme a la Radio is the sophomore album in Brigitte Fontaine's prolific career. Four decades o…
La Planete Sauvage - Original Soundtrack Recording
**2020 Repress** Animated sci-fi masterpiece La Planète Sauvage (a.k.a. Fantastic Planet), winner at Cannes Film Festival in 1973, is a bizarre and beautiful film. Towering blue-skinned figures, tiny humanoids in the midst of revolt, and drug-induced Tantric sex transport viewers to a truly magical setting. Composer Alain Goraguer creates an equally hypnotic score from a palette of effects-laden guitars, flutes, Fender Rhodes and strings. While the lush arrangements are reminiscent of Goraguer's…
Flaming Tunes
**Limited edition clear vinyl with color sleeve (a nod to the original release's hand-colored covers), in process of stocking** Post-punk, rising like a phoenix during the second half of the 1970s, was a movement that few could have anticipated or foreseen. Sophisticated, and impossible to nail down, bands like Wire, P.I.L., The Pop Group, The Fall, A Certain Ratio, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, and dozens of others, wedded forward thinking radicalism and the focused energy of punk, with revitali…
Seke Molenga & Kalo Kawongolo
Over the years, they would come to say that the Africans just appeared one day in Jamaica. That two Congo men somehow materialized on the streets of Kingston sometime in 1977, almost as if by magic, speaking not a word of English or patwa. The duo, they say, were musicians brought in by a Jamaican promoter – a woman who ditched them, leaving them to fend for themselves, stranded in a strange land.
What really happened is harder to fully divine. The two young Africans – Molenga Mosukola (aka Seke…
Totale's Turns
Given The Fall's penchant for iconoclasm, it's no surprise that they decided to say goodbye to the '70s with a series of gigs at Northern England's gruffest halls. The band's formidable live show was met with even more derision and disorder than customary during these late '79 and early '80 performances, and they skillfully amplified such sentiments back at the crowd. Totale's Turns, The Fall's first live album, was released on Rough Trade just prior to their pivotal third album, 1980's Grotesqu…