New Arrivals
ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
Starring’s ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ combines minimalist musical patterns with dreamy poetry to create a new style front-woman Clara Hunter likes to call “sparkle prog.” It captures the frenetic energy of the band’s live show, but here it is overlain with a new palate of synthesizers, delay effects, drum processing, aux percussion, and vocals that create delicate, but sometimes radical juxtapositions between the lyrical and the experimental. Though songs like “the best” and “aphonia” …
Afro Noise I (Volume 2)
Volume 2. A bludgeoning mix of machine and vaudou / Central African percussion plus other acoustic instruments combine to create one of the most physically intense musical experiences ever. Songs featured in VBS's films 'Vice Guide To Liberia' and 'Mandingo'. Since 2007's Whitehouse album Racket, and after his original 'Afro Noise' mix became one of the most downloaded experimental mixes ever made, William Bennett's remarkable Cut Hands album has seen 4 long years of meticulously obsessiv…
Seches Abstände
Five dense movements from abstract composer, Ralf Wehowsky, co-founder of the great Wahrnehmungen & Selektion labels. Recorded in 2008.
Ancestral star
Finally reprinted...Returning with a brand new album of arid, dustbowl blues and slow-motion desert-scapes, Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras resume duties as Barn Owl for a third album. Previously this band has tended to court associations with the sound developed by Earth for their Hex album; the overall effect is resolutely bleak and doom-laden, yet not entirely without some grounding in the language of grassroots Americana. Ancestral Star takes the Barn Owl sound to a new level of refinement, spe…
Live In San Francisco
Astromero is the psychedelic synth-noise project of Japanese pioneer Hiroshi Hasegawa (Astro,CCCC), and LA's Damion Romero (Speculum Fight). Side A is a Live show in San Francisco, a total scorcher with an immense level of energy where shifting walls of synthetic sound produced by Hasegawa are complemented by the signature rumbling low end frequencies coming from Damion's custom electronics. Side B is a new studio track, full of brain melting tones and showing the more compositional side of this…
The Fugitives
**Limited edition of 300 housed in handmade silkscreened sleeve. Tipped for fans of Atelecine, Carter Tutti Void, Factory Floor** Ninni Morgia and Silvia Kastel make their first appearance as Control Unit on Italy's freshly minted Backwards label. Guitarist Ninni Morgia is a respected member of the New York underground scene, known for his work with La Otracina for Holy Mountain and Ultramarine Records. His co-conspirator Silvia Kastel was a willing participant in his Ninni Morgia Control …
Nero\'s Expedition
Tetuzi Akiyama - guitars. Johan Arrias - saxophone, electronics, no input mixingboard. Leo Svensson - cello, organ. Henrik Olsson - drums, electronics, piano. Artwork and screenprint by Peter Larsson. Mixed by Giuseppe Ielasi. Mastered by Daniel Karlsson. Produced by Johan Berthling. Album and songtitles are inspired by the lyrics of Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin). Recorded in Stockholm 2006. Limited edition of 250 hand numbered copies. The cover is hand printed by its author on recycled covers c…
Discovery
Clear and Discovery were originally released as two companion CDRs by James Ferraro (of the whole Skaters / Lamborghini Crystal / 90120 / Splash / Nirvana axis) and comprise the August 1974 (Taj-Mahal Travellers) of his discography. Both albums contain absolutely beautiful whirling hall-of-knives-style synth drone that makes one want to reference Klaus Schulze or Bobby Beausoleil. Clear bursts with flam beats and a cluster of melodies muffled like a calliope wrapped in a soggy tarp, while Discov…
The Man-Machine
LP edition of Kraftwerk's 7th album, from 1978, and perhaps their most commercially successful album -- a non-offensive synth-pop classic. 'The album has 'classic' stamped all over it... in time it would acquire the same ageless quality as The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper or The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds...' -- Pascal Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man Machine And Music"
Kiri No Oto
Lawrence English's epic masterpiece - finally available on vinyl for the first time. Strictly limited edition - Initial copies come on white vinyl* One of the most memorable and absorbing albums released by the wonderful Touch label in recent years, "Kiri No Oto" was first released by them on CD in 2008 and has spent much of the intervening time lodged in our minds as one of the finer drone/field recording albums to have been made this century. Kiri No Oto (a Japanese phrase meaning 'sound…
Russian mind
Amazing! Transcribed by the Material Eye Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya nab. 1, St. Petersburg, 199034, Russia. 6 baseless marble pillars not yet completed, covered in white strata against the backdrop of a simple three-dimensional plane with soft edges. 1. Synesthesia outside venue. 2. If you lived here, you'd be home right now. 3. Lopatin designs preset Prismata ascribed to Trujillo, 2003 and goes downstairs for air. 4. He comes from a long line of shovelers. 5. Life …
Ausland
Just two years separate Pyrolator's 1979 debut Inland and the 1981 album Ausland. Nevertheless, they could hardly be more different from one another. If Inland reflects the industrial decay and politically-explosive atmosphere of 1977 and the years thereafter in the Federal Republic of Germany, then Ausland is a buoyant, playful and yet groundbreaking pop album. There had been some significant developments since 1979. The Ata Tak label, which Pyrolator had co-founded, had hit a rich vein of…
Oppenheimer Analysis
The first release from Minimal Wave, Oppenheimer Analysis, is back by popular demand. The EP is a second pressing limited edition (500 copies) on 180 gram vinyl of selected tracks from the Oppenheimer Analysis cassette entitled “New Mexico” released in 1982, as well as two others that were previously unreleased. Andy Oppenheimer (nuclear weapons consultant) and Martin Lloyd (previously involved in the Survival Label, also known for his project “Analysis”) formed Oppenheimer Analysis in the early…
Hallway Of Mirrors
VHF is releasing a bunch of solo guitar dudes over the next few weeks. Here's one of 'em! It's an album from New York's Alexander Turnquist called Hallway of Mirrors. It says that above so it's kinda pointless me saying that. Having said that the New York thing was a new bit of info so it's not all filler! I've not heard this chap before but I was rather taken with him on first listen. It's not a million miles away from the likes of James Blackshaw.... ie extreme 12 string fingerpluckery which i…
Ancestral Songs
Daniel Higgs has an unparalleled presence in both body and voice. This, combined with hypnotic repetition, gives the material on Ancestral Songs both a loose discipline and an immense yet serpentine power. Ancestral Songs is comprised of apocalyptic tunes, a banjo raag, mellifluous birdsong, and the sci-fi-sounding duet of a searing Jew's harp and toy piano. "Are You of the Body?" brings out the electric tamboura tone and an accompanying acoustic guitar to melt the spine. A distorted motorik gui…
Alphabet 1968
Black to Comm's Marc Richter is an artist that perpetually seems to be on the verge of releasing an absolute masterwork, always creeping closer and closer but never quite nailing it. Alphabet 1968 does not quite buck that trend completely, but it is an oft-brilliant and unforgettable album nonetheless. Richter's impressive artistic evolution is showing no sign of slowing.
Piano Recital (Teatro La Fenice In Venice)
Sun Ra was an extremely prolific artist and while hundreds of recordings exist of Sun Ra, there are only a handful where he can be heard playing solo. This amazing and rare solo performance recorded live in 1977 at the world-famous La Fenice opera house in Venice, and featuring Sun Ra playing a mix of standards as well as his own material on piano, is a rewarding journey into the repertoire of one of the most controversial and unorthodox musicians in the history of jazz.
Live at the Storyville, NYC - 24 October 1977
Quite simply one of Sun Ra's best live albums. This rare recording (originally on Horo records) finds Ra, along with a 19-piece Arkestra, playing a mix of his own compositions ('Images' and 'Lights') along with several jazz standards (including Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp' and Duke Ellington's 'Lightnin''). While Ra's own compositions were usually more avant-garde affairs, he always revelled in playing the classics as well in an effort to give his audience a lesson in jazz histo…
Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy
This disc brings together the Sun Ra recordings "Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy" and "Art Forms Of Dimensions Tomorrow" (recorded in 1963 and '61-'62 respectively). Cosmic Tones functions as a kind of blueprint for the sort of large-scale jazz weirdness that would inform much of Sun-Ra's subsequent works, featuring the woozy reeds of 'And Otherness' and the afro-jazz experiments of 'Thither And Yon'. On 'Adventure Equation' a space echo treatment on the recording which is reprised for the sax f…
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…