New Arrivals
Asleep On The Floodplain
Ben Chasny has spent many years at this point perfecting his very personal vision of the American landscape. With his early LPs he managed to grab a groundswell of support for his distinctly lo-fi recordings, and since hitting the Drag City label with the breathtaking 'School of Flower' he has managed to extend his vision to countless others. 'Asleep on the Floodplain' continues his exploration, and while it doesn't change up the formula too much (apart from the odd analogue synth blurt here and…
Lifetime Of Romance
LP version. "Heartland synthesist Dylan Ettinger follows up 2010's widely lauded New Age Outlaws imaginary cyber-soundtrack with a stark, dark, and intensely different collection of misshapen new wave weirdnesses, Lifetime Of Romance. Recorded at a proper studio, and written over the course of a year, the seven songs of Romance reflect a heavy influence from the fringier strains of bummed out quasi-industrial synth-pop in the vein of Fad Gadget, certain Cabaret Voltaire, early Human League,…
The Hour Is Now
An excellent compilation of beautiful early 70s folk tunes from three LPs that that legendary acid-folk hippy-goddess Collie Ryan recorded in 1973, pretty much in Fahey/Basho vein
Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow was written and recorded as a follow-up to the Bill Fay Group's Time Of The Last Persecution. Although recorded between 1978 and 1981 this album never saw a release at the time, and it fell to the Durtro/Jnana label to unearth these lost 20 songs. Fay comes across as one of those artists who fell victim to the machinations of the music industry, with his first two albums going largely overlooked until an eventual resurgence in interest as the years passed. …
The Live in Lisbon
What happens when two stars collide? An interstellar collaboration out of this galaxy! Here in this new fantastic LP from Virginia Genta (of Jooklo fame) and Chris Corsano (arguably considered 'the last drummer on earth'), both musicians put blood, sweat, and lots of muscle into three new wildly charged cuts!!!! The album begins at sunset on a terrace in Lisbon (Summer 2008) with ferocious sax and drums escalating as the sun sets with Chris' incredible drum solo leaving everyone in a trance, whi…
Soulnessless EP 2 (DJ Sprinkles Remix)
The 2nd of two keenly awaited vinyl EPs supporting the ambitious 32 hour, 16GB microSD card release of Terre Thaemlitz's 'Soulnessless' - this time featuring a killer reworking from Terre's DJ Sprinkles Alias, plus a sublime 18 minute Piano excerpt of the original. With 'Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album (Sprinkles' Unpaid Overtime)' on the A-side Terre returns to the deeply arresting New York/New Jersey minimalist House approach which made his 2009 LP - 'Midtown 120 Blue…
New Sky Dragon
Top flight three man cosmic research team further investigations on galactic flux and refraction with two transmissions of synesthetic mind-fold. Lift off with skyward string stasis cutting through buffeted drum-clouds and synthesiser atmosphere, cosmic forever vision peaks at warp-speed rocket drone, anti-gravity percussion accents and star scraping rainbow universes. Saturating feedback zones spread webs of dimension amidst asteroid belt orbits, where two-way trips initiate zero g shimm…
Blue eyes are my reward
Jawdropping new collection of crop circles etched in sonic candy-floss by New Zealand’s beardsmith / noise-farmer Campbell Kneale. Rated by the horses mouth as the best thing he ever made, EVER, ‘Blue Eyes Are My Reward’ shimmers like an icicle-clad forest resplendent in its own crystalline magnificence. Snakecharming groove, dublike boomph, and bleary eyed strum blast the path out of a decidedly greying world of so-so metalized myspace drone, into a miniaturized drone-prairie of superpow…
Dispossession
Dispossession is the second full length from Brooklyn’s Mike Wexler, and his debut for Mexican Summer. An artist who defies easy categorization—a songwriter/guitarist without a traditionalist bone in his body, with an ear for far flung sound-worlds and sonic atmospheres both high & low, Wexler brings all of his manifold interests to bear in carving out a space for a singular vision uniquely attuned to the present moment. Dispossession is the product of over two years of intermittent recor…
The Ann Steel Album
Repressed! "Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian electronic composer who's made albums using every possible permutation of the same six notes, right up to modern classical, with The Ann Steel Album as the weird anomaly. Made with an American model who moved to Italy to make it big in fashion, Roberto took her languid, Laurie Anderson-esque voice and created a detached futurist popstar. The odd sound of these European futurist pop songs make it sound like the machines are breathing, creatin…
Didascalies 2
Vinyl-only release. Performers: Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven (piano); Claude Berset (piano); Vincent Royer (viola). Sub Rosa presents the first release after their Luc Ferrari trilogy. Didascalies 2 is not to be confused with 2007's Didascalies (SR 261CD) -- this is another composition entirely, never published before. "The other day I found a file from 1993, a score for two pianos entitled 'Revenir à la Note de Départ' (trans. 'Getting Back To The Initial Note'). So I decided to turn it i…
Holiday For Soul Dance
One of the key but underappreciated episodes in avant-garde jazz, Sun Ra's Atlantis sounds far out even today. Rather than a full-on assault on the senses, Atlantis is an exercise in build-up, with long, almost forlorn passages of Ra on electric keyboards setting a vast echo chamber for his Arkestra to spring forth within. Captured during one of the most adventurous periods for Sun Ra, *Atlantis* features the orchestral perfection of the best big bands of the century-and then proceeds towards mu…
At WKCR Studios NY 12-8-74
Massively unlikely unearthing of a previously unreleased live radio broadcast from legendary free jazz saxophonist Charles Tyler in a hand-numbered edition of only 99 copies: Tyler is a comparatively unsung player compared to the better known free music titans but his was a fascinating career, playing alongside Albert Ayler on Bells and Spirits Rejoice, cutting a hands-down classic run of private LPs – Eastern Man Alone on ESP Disk, Voyage From Jericho and Live In Europe, 1978’s Saga Of Th…
Lip Syncing to Verme
As a slow motion Stan Brakhage on K, this last and definitive new album from Aaron Dilloway is fluid and cinematic. After the monumental Chain Shot Lp and a furious live activity, the Mid West's mad tape-scientist is back to take your hand and dive you in a buzzy ocean of muddy water loops. Welcome to this creepy journey to the south of heaven, here you can just crawl like a worm.
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…
Absent Coast
Another sublime drone album from the unshakably good Root Strata camp, En's The Absent Coast is a real upper tier ambient release. Distinguished by its depth and effortless musicality, this album is one for genre fans to really savour. After the sandblasting noise/tonal onslaught of 'A Dying Sun/Return To Holyoke', the album calibrates itself to a stately simmer that comes to life during the quite sublime 'Honeysuckle Heart', which combines glassy sustains with crackl…
Clear
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…
MP3 Deviations #8
The MP3 Deviation album contains pieces that are results of the collaborative research by a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) and myself, led by Tony Myatt at Music Research Center at the University of York in UK in 2009. My idea was to develop new software based on the disruption of the MP3. Primarily I thought the MP3 as reproducing device could have created very new sound by intervention between its main elements, the compression encoder and decoder. It turned out th…
The Lost Jockeys
The Lost Jockey was a large aggregate of British new music performers who came together on this LP to play compositions by three of its members: Andrew Poppy, John Barker and Orlando Gough. Poppy is the best known of the three-he worked with Psychic TV on their first two albums and made two rather dated EPs for ZTT in the mid-80s-and his pieces here are better than the later works but still forgettable. It’s Gough’s side-long “Hoovering the Beach I & II” that’s worth the price of admission-with …
Shot
ultralimited lavishly packaged LP (100 handnumbered copies only!), this ground-breaking electro-acoustic trio made my day. The album is largely improvised, with extracts of Charles Bukowski’s poetic works overlapping on the interweavings and multiple stratiï¬Âed references in the trio’s music. It features a faceted palette of acoustic, analogue and digital colours: drums, metallic objects, ethnical instruments, samples, sequences, filtered voice, pedal effects, vinyls, digital electronic…