New Arrivals
Music For How Mata Hari Lost Her Head And Found Her Body
Julian Lynch and filmmaker Amy Ruhl first collaborated on Lynch's Seed video from his proper debut album (Orange You Glad) on Olde English Spelling Bee. Around this time, Ruhl was beginning work on her first film, an animated, allegorical biography of the courtesan, dancer & spy, Mata Hari. Spurred from talks about a using gamelan to score the film, Ruhl asked Lynch to contribute songs to the film & he delivered five new instrumentals. Drawing on both Indonesian music and his own bedro…
Repaired/Replaced
Touch presents a 7" from Mike Harding as part of the Touch Sevens series. Recorded in West Wittering in Balham using DPA 4060s onto a Nagra Ares P-ll digital recorder. Cut by Jason at Transition. Artwork & photography by Jon Wozencroft.
With the Antithetical Self
"with the antithetical self" consists of improvisational pieces completed between winter 2008 and spring 2009. i would sit quietly in an empty room daily and calibrate myself to all noises surrounding. from there a single tone would be introduced, which i would listen to for fifteen or twenty minutes before joining in. on some days, listening was enough. at other times, i would hear a song within the tone and mimic it, bringing it out into existence and layer it from there with additional instr…
III
III is as immediate as a truck with failed brakes crashing through your living room wall. The third and final installment of a trilogy entitled Ceremony, its opening moments rage and wail, with distorted guitars pulling out in front of the drums like hellhounds that have slipped their master's leash. But this isn't a mono-dimensional freak-out. Smith paces himself, pulling back into brooding drones and pensive picking before lashing out once more. As befits a journey that's taken three di…
Volume 1
Awesome electronic music by Thomas Gorbach. The composer uses algorithms to compose, but the result is so musical that it sounds intuitive and dramatic. He synthesizes sounds that mix poetic, elusive textures with powerful rhythms that come and go like images in a fog. He describes these sound sources as "various murmur and instrumental pickles" The compositions include 'Trilogy: not to yield an inch, hermitage, oysters'; and 'Miasma'.
Dropsonde
2012 repress; originally released 2006. Biosphere is Norwegian composer and performer Geir Jenssen, and this is his fifth release for Touch. In the early 1990s he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic and enduring. Dropsonde isn't a soundtrack like the interwoven Substrata nor an episodic journey in the way that Autour de la Lune is. Here Geir Jenssen is pushing new directions towards the jazz colors of Miles Davis a…
OvalDNA
In many ways, O, released on Thrill Jockey after a nine-year break, was a second debut album for Markus Popp aka Oval. A radical break with old concepts and methods, a new beginning. While Popp's artistic approach in the 1990s and early 2000s was more of a structural, theoretical nature, O was just about the music itself. Themes such as the means of production, limitations, dogma and concept took a back seat to a musical sensibility. Instead of writing new software to synthesize and proces…
Hermetic Organ
Breathtaking solo organ improvisations recording!! This is the first volume documenting Zorn's breathtaking solo organ improvisations. Although organ was Zorn's first instrument (he often credits Lon Chaney in the silent classic Phantom of the Opera as a primal influence), in 2011 Zorn surprised even his hardcore fans by initiating a new series of solo organ concerts in churches around the world. Premiering at the historic Christ Church in Philadelphia, the word on these concerts spread li…
Dort Ist Der Weg
Latest from these blackened doomdrone soundscapers, once again demonstrating that these guys definitely don't let any sort of genre classification define what they do, cuz what they do here is let their krautrock freak flag fly, whipping up a gorgeous chunk of hazy, rhythmic psychedelia, a reinterpretation of a classic Popol Vuh jam (from 1976), which does indeed channel the same sort of brooding, blissy mesmer, a dreamy, dark dirge, hypnotic and hazy, spidery guitar melodies over simple …
Tretetam
A state of mind between sleep and consciousness, where the past gently glides over the future, weaving it's self into the unknown. An unfamiliar place, surrounded by things you recognized and things you do not. Birds in flight, sprinklers, quiet humming of machines, echoing voices blended with strains of haunted melodies that remind you there is a vast world outside your door in a state of constant change.
Heavy metal drones
Hand-numbered edition of 300 copies art edition set that features a 10” on clear vinyl, a CD and an accompanying art book/manifesto from this obscure Japanese/South African avant garde performance troupe. Reputedly starting off in 1976 through tape experiments at home, much of Ellende’s work is based on the writings of founder member Wim Bontjes, who passed away in 1995 and if the contents of the booklet are anything to go by they share a healthy obsession with sex, ritual and radical per…
Suhina
Brilliant new recordings by the prolific cosmopolitan (currently residing in Berlin) Michael Northam. Suhina is a notion for the sound of the wind moving through the trees. Instead of doing field recordings of wind Michael Northam tried to capture this feeling & the essence of this process through instrumental recordings from Indonesian flute & keyboard. Nature phenomena seen as the true manifestation of the Unknown. Stunning full colour artwork by Indian artist Rohini Devasher. White vinyl, edi…
Bliss
Versatility has always been what sets Luca Sigurtà apart. His new solo album ‘Bliss’ out on Fratto9. Recor- ded in 2011 and Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, this new offering exhibits his most dreamy side. There are five tracks which sit between cinematic drone music and that of Angelo Badalmenti.
It a soundscape through a sunny afternoon in the North of Europe, filled with white light that illuminates the port and with the presence of distant noise.
Shared between the passion for silence and …
Dance Pop
Chart smashing 7" from the Olde English Spelling Bee camp, dropping the debut from Brooklyn's hugely tipped Greatest Hits. Aside from having one of the best names ever, this band also make some of the most f**ked up pop music we've heard all year. Think Autre Ne Veut doing a guest spot on The Hitman And Her presented by Pete Waterman and James V/VM in a Michaela Strachan mask, and you're almost there. The PWL-production line groove of 'Danse Pop' is our favourite, while 'Make You Mine' s…
C93-Box Sets in Fine linen Folder
Finally arrived, very few copies available left, both wooden Boxes (VOD74 and VOD75) delivered in deluxe silk-screened and embossed fine-linen folder to complete and protect the 2 wooden boxe. Already sold out at source, an extraordinarily beautiful and monumental release from Vinyl on Demand
Saison 1979-82
Amazing box containg the entire Polyphonic Size discography, with all singles, maxi singles, 1st lp produced by JJ Burnel (live for each moment), b-sides and rare tracks, plus superb unreleased material (in excellent sound quality), carefully selected and remastered from roger-marc vande voorde's archives. including unreleased songs (Me Or You, Citizen Of Science, Asakusa Dub, Her Toys Dub), unreleased electronic instrumental tracks (Electronic 14-7, Electronic 65-4, Electronic 69-7, Electronic …
Mysterier
7" vinyl was the quintessential format for popular music. Today, it is an undervalued and mostly promotional medium, used as a fetishistic signpost for a time of musical authenticity and a "healthy" popular culture. Two tracks from Biosphere originally recorded for Hågogaland Teater, Tromsø, Norway in 2006 and remastered in 2011. Part of the Touch Sevens series, cut by Jason at Transition. Artwork & photography by Jon Wozencroft.
Surviving The Garden Of Hate
"Copper Glove, the new project from Baltimore's Door (formerly Earth Crown; who shared splits with Secret Abuse and Kites on past Arbor releases), shows a further progression of his one man industrial-noise synth unit. In opposition to his former work, Copper Glove is more mindful of composition; utilizing tone generators and processed synthesis and vocals, to present a dense cut up analog form of industrial concréte. Door's nihilistic optimism carries itself with a sense of effortlessne…
VII
The seventh album from Montreal's harbinger of blackmetaldoompsychedelia appears on Important. Of the two sides of Aun's bi-polar output this falls into the cataclysmic doom zone, full of downtuned scorched-earth riffage and ominous ambience. The inclusion of drummer Away from Voivod lends a thunderous motorik propulsion to 'Falcon' and punctures 'Broken Bill' with neck snapping weight. For fans of Earth, Sunn 0))), Pelican, Gnod - Recommended.
In Dust
In recent years, there has been a surge of electronic artists, for the most part new comers, who have rejected the digital approach which had dominated since the nineties in favour of the more organic analogue textures pioneered during the late sixties and well into the seventies by German experimental musicians, from the most exploratory, with the likes of Emeralds or Oneohtrix Point Never, to the bulk of the Scandinavian disco scene, spearheaded by Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and DiskJokke.…