New Arrivals
A Bridge Over The Lagoon
Dean Brown is best known as Little Skull. A basement Florian Fricke, creating grainy chamber miniatures with the same latticework intricacy as the delicate handmade dioramas that serve as the covers of his records. He was (is?) also a member of Nova Scotia, purveyors of reed-heavy skree clouds - a band whose existence feels more like a rumor than a fact and one of the final acts on Peter Stapleton's Metonymic label.
Ben Spiers mostly performs solo and has produced a spartan architecture of lonel…
Open Today
Kumio Kurachi is a Japanese singer-songwriter who has been active since the 1980's. This is his 11th solo album and only the second to be released outside of Japan following Sound of Turning Earth (2018) on bison.
Smetana
Returning to the Czech Republic with a reissue of Richter Band’s first album, Smetana (Czech for ‘Cream’), released originally in 1990. Pavel Richter gained a considerable reputation as a guitarist, playing in a number of Czech avant-garde rock groups, including Švehlík, Marno Union and Elektrobus, and became one of foremost figures of the Prague scene which opposed the socialist regime of the 70’s and 80’s. Towards the mid 80’s, he began to focus on calm music and subtle sound structures, playi…
Little Skull
*200 copies limited edition* Aotearoan expat Dean Brown has been slowly growing the Little Skull catalogue for the last 21 years. His sound belongs to the Aotearoan underground tradition, folding in elements of portastudio rock, folk and noise. As well as HoP his works have appeared on Planam, Elica, Digital Regress and Anomalous. These two tracks find Little Skull staring into space with his toes in the sand as he conjures a tumble-down cosmic blues dusted with tape hiss and distortion. As usua…
Petals
"On Petals, the pair’s haunting folk music comes into sharper focus while broadening their sonic palette. Spoken word meets chanted incantations, gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar is placed alongside spindly piano melodies, the creak of floorboards in the background mirrors the creak of fingerprints dragged across guitar strings. Woven throughout are bursts of tape-recorded radio static that reveal hardly distinguishable voices while MacDougall sings of equally fleeting phenomena. Winds, breez…
Gipping Through the Ages
This Norwich-based trio hit our radar earlier this year when we caught their third live performance in London. Gipping Through the Ages is their debut release.
Ghost In A Broken Shell
Michał Jan Kozłowski is a post-conceptual artist born in Warsaw, Poland in 1986. He began making music at the beginning of the millennium, founding rockabilly band Flymen, releasing tracks on punk labels and gigging throughout the early decade of the 2000s. Later in London he started an improvised noise duo, Unknown Unknowns, with fellow visual artist James Lander and with those who wish to remain anonymous. TV Sunset is his new retro-futurist project. According to Kozłowski, "Ghost in a Broken …
Kosmischer Pitch
"Like the cosmic compositions it delicately references, Kosmischer Pitch is proof that the higher and lower pleasures can triumphantly combine.” - The Wire Magazine
MPU105
Ilian Tape kicks on with another entry into its ITX Series, this time with a lovely hand-stamped long player from MPU101. It is a deep dive into escapist ambient worlds with plenty of grainy tape hiss and cosmic static, celestial melodies and provocative moments of introspection. Analogue machinery is really brought to the fore on fuzzy sounds like 'CreamyPORTAL-Xa' with patient and pastoral synth smears, while 'APEX CA 91352' has brighter and more mellifluous melodies rising up through the mix.…
Triple Pocket Napkin Fold
“From the opacities of poetry and withheld language emerges this collection of folded, layered, improvised, imperfect, and unexpected forms of address: mud dancing, whispers, shouts, laughter, screams and vocal sound making that resist the order of speech.”
Syne Vuyle Hoeck
*300 copies limited edition* The Ghentian skyline has low peaks and hides its horrors in full view ~ walk streamside and you’ll quickly be confronted with façades that leer with their tales and secrets, the angels and demons that built this city holding up its mortar and stone in an inextricable embrace. It is within this incongruous backdrop that Benoît Monsieurs has fostered the Venediktos Tempelboom persona. Using the 12-string guitar as his main instrument, the self-taught musician creates p…
A Shaw Deal
Some things take a long time. And some things are meant to last. But how you know that, or learn how to find out, that’s a more intangible thing. That’s A Shaw Deal – intangible. A communal meeting place for two old friends and their different musics. A Shaw Deal is the first album by Geologist and DS. They go back a long ways – back before Highlife, before Shaw joined White Magic – back to the early childhood of Animal Collective. Basically, Doug Shaw touched down in NYC around 2003, and he and…
Ku
*2024 stock* The act of conjuring remarkable sound from found objects is at the very heart of this recording from American musicians Greg Davis and Jeph Jerman. Having met in Arizona some years back, Davis and Jerman commenced working together on a series of recording projects.
Improvising with a range of implements and devices ranging from sticks, stones and low-fi electronics to prepared instruments, gongs and broken percussion, the pair sought to develop a personal language that reflected th…
A Picturesque View, Ignored
*2024 stock* Echoes of disconnected sound reverberate meshing together into a cascading river of intersecting sound elements – occasionally confrontational, ultimately unforgettable.
s/t
Strzał w kolano (eng: Shot in the knee) is a solo project of Jakub Majchrzak (ex Kurws) that began with a concert in Lisbon back in 2017 and has recently been revived. The foundation of this project is a classical guitar (tuned quarter-tone) connected via a piezo microphone to separate guitar amplifiers. The signals emanating from the amplifiers are given distinct identities through horizontal and vertical processing or static manipulation within the texture of the sounds themselves.
Conceptuall…
Four Guitar Solos For Bemma Bar
Hubert Kostkiewicz - guitar and a modest kit consisting of two effects and a looper.
Live in Porto, 24 November 1989
A historical live recording by Blaine L. Reininger and Steven Brown, founders of legendary post-punk band Tuxedomoon, here in their parallel guise as a classical piano and violin duo, one they have maintained throughout the decades.
This is the "other" 1989 Blaine and Steven concert in Portugal, performed two days after the Lisbon gig immortalised many moons ago on "One Hundred Years of Music". "Live in Porto 1989" is undoubtedly the better of the two gigs (just listen to "Iberia"!…), but the oc…
Skylla
Skylla is the debut solo recording of Italian-born and London-based composer, bassist, and vocalist Ruth Goller. This album of otherworldly detuned bass harmonics and dense vocal arrangements was initially released in 2021 by longtime collaborator Bex Burch’s Vula Viel Records, and quickly went out of print. Since then Goller’s notoriety has only grown, and her follow-up record, Skyllumina, was released by International Anthem in early 2024 and met with high praise.
Skylla is the genesis of her …
"The Cave" Down To Earth
Second album from the japanese psych-prog band that started out as Far Out in 1973. The record is basically a concept: "The Cave" is arriving onto our planet, and the group is generally celebrating the beauties of nature. Heavily influenced by Floyd (Atom Heart Mother era), the group lays down some very credible ambiances that even Waters & Co. could've pulled off. This album will draw Klaus Schulze's attention and he will collaborate with FEFB on their next one.
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In these early Pragma works, sound artist TeZ channels a primal industrial and electronic spirit, blending cosmic and concrete sonic elements to guide the listener through alien, pagan landscapes marked by entropic rhythms and magical atmospheres. For the third edition of this lathe-cut release, TeZ invited Sumus (formerly Psychick Warriors of Gaia) to contribute their masterfully fragmented collages of acoustic wonders, adding a unique dimension to the work.