New Arrivals
Alan Lomax In Haiti
Harte Recordings, together with the estate of Alan Lomax, and in collaboration with The Library Of Congress and the The Association for Cultural Equity, present Alan Lomax In Haiti -- a chronicle of Lomax's 1936 Haitian recording expedition for the Library. This 10-CD box-set, in the modern tradition of those lovingly created by Revenant and Dust-To-Digital, is curated from over 50 hours of field recordings by the pre-eminent Haitian scholar, Gage Averill. Besides the CDs, the set contain…
Luck In The Valley
Like all pre-war recordings and all of Rose's releases, this album was recorded live. It was not created using overdubs but rather by recording a few 'takes' and selecting the best performance out of those. Rose stated, 'I wanted the songs to have an immediacy and spontaneity as they were being recorded. All the musicians chosen for the record know how to play the songs without overworking the material, but at the same time creating memorable accompaniments on the spot.' Several of the so…
Redlight
"Portland, Oregon's Grails are another new band that fall into the developed post-everything niche sparked off by the likes of Godspeed at the end of the last millenium. Made up with members of Jacki-o-Motherf*cker and Holy Sons, their sound takes in the quiet/loud formula but peppers it with dense layers of Violin, Piano and twilight instrumentation. The band have already sparked off the interest of the Swans' Michael Gira and Neurosis guitarist/vocalist and label co-owner Steve Von Till - thou…
Alienacustica
'Alienacustica' is a superb collection of works by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien) as you have never heard before. Forget all MCIAA's noise records... this is a totally different affair: starting from January 2006 they have released 3 unusual, completely acoustic works, all in limited and sold-out editions: a soloist split lp, a private art edition cd-r, and an out-of-print cd. The different approach to these works shows another side of the Opalio brothers' musical universe: all…
Open Strings: Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East, An
Spectacoular 4LP box on Honest Jon's called Open Strings which features 2 LP's of 78's from the MIddle East circa the 20's (we're talking Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey) and 2 LP's of more contemporary folks who are clearly inspired by such greatness. Thems being the likes of Richard Bishop (no longer calling him a sir as I don't believe the queen has chinned him with her sword), MV/EE, Ricky Tomlinson, Steffen Basho Junghans, Six Organs of Admitance, Micah Blue Smaldone, Michael Flower, Charlie Parr…
The Glass Bead Game
James Blackshaw once made Michael Gira cry. Not by sucker-punching the poor guy. It was something much simpler: Blackshaw reduced the former Swan frontman — a menacing presence even as he eclipses AARP eligibility — to tears through nothing but a finger-picked acoustic and minimal, melancholic chords. It's easy to understand why. As Gira wrote in a press release celebrating Blackshaw's signing to his Young God imprint, the widely-acclaimed 12-string maestro writes "absolutely beautiful and spell…
The Freak Of Araby
Listen through Sir Richard Bishop’s six readily available solo albums, and you get the picture that the worldview of the former Sun City Girls’ guitarist is not only complex, but also more than a little ambiguous. What exactly is Richard Bishop? A dealer in the exotic? A dabbler in esoteric mysticism? A “traveling salesman”? The Freak of Araby doesn’t make Bishop’s worldview any simpler for us, but it does clarify it some. He is, first and foremost, a traveler, picking up inspiration as he roams…
Have One On Me
Destined to be one of the top album of the year, finally Joanna Newsom releases her first album since late 2006's Ys, making up for lost time with a disc for 2008, one for 2009 and one for today. Featuring Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan from Joanna's Ys Street Band, Have One On Me is an extravagantly packaged (and extravagantly nicely-priced) collection of fantastic new Joanna Newsom songs -- her most colorful record to date.
Alone Together #1 – Obelisk / Tholos
A new 7" by Christina Carter which serves as the opening ceremony for our new 7" series of solo performances 'Alone Together'. A loan voice, the tangled bells, the caw of a crow, a plane passing overhead… A fortuitous overlapping of sound moments, trapped in amber by Christina for us to bear witness. Much like her early CDRs 'Hand & Mind' or 'Human As Guitar', 'Obelisk/Tholos' is an act of white witchcraft, a healing spell that defines time with the merest of tools: bells, voice, a microp…
Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African American Tr
Based on four years of fieldwork throughout the state, the Florida Folklife Program released the two-album, 27-track LP Drop on Down in Florida: Recent Field Recordings of Afro-American Traditional Music in 1981. The album was intended to highlight African American music traditions for a statewide public audience, particularly blues and sacred traditions. When the Folklife Program sought the opportunity to produce an expanded reissue of the album that would include previously unissued field…
Chance Meeting (Reissue / Special Edition)
United Jnana is pleased to reissue the debut album from Nurse With Wound, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, originally released on United Dairies in 1979. This special edition CD features a digipack with the original artwork restored and an expanded booklet with archival material chosen by Steven Stapleton. The disc has been remastered from the original analog tapes and features bonus material. Chance Meeting enjoys a reputation as one of the most singular…
10 Tears Of Sound
DVD all regions. Celebrating the first 10 years of the festival, this set contains over 11 hours OF audio, a beautiful booklet and a feature length documentary! 20 incredible performances were painstakingly selected by committee from the rich festival history to be shared on one DVD as .wav files (the best way to fit so much high quality audio). The artists featured on this disc are: David Grubbs, Lee Ranaldo + Dean Roberts, Martin Tétreault, Oval, CiNdy (Sam Shalabi + Alexandre St-Onge), Tomas …
Induced Musical Spasticity: B.C. Free Music Society (1984-2009)
Major archival unearthing that makes available for the first time the bulk of the 'official' releases - plus a ton of unreleased material - from the mythic Butte County Free Music Society, a collective of musical oddballs, 'noise' musicians, art pranksters, record collectors and rock/roll fans who modeled themselves on the Los Angeles Free Music Society in order to create an umbrella organization that would shelter 'out' musicians during times of musical drought, this one taking place in the ear…
Raw and the cooked
Collaborative compositions by Jean Claude Jones (electro acoustic bass and live electronics), Loic Kessous (computer and live electronics), Stephen Horenstein (baritone saxophone). Recorded and mixed at Kadima Studio, Jerusalem, May-June, 2006
Enlightenment / Phrenesia
Holy Strays follows up his scuzzy debut tape for NNF with two surprisingly lush and undeniably ace electronic trips. The meld of sparse, reverberating drums and plangent psych licks on 'Enlightenment' calls to mind Forest Swords jamming with a lo-fi Raime, on some sweet Hoffman's in a cabin in the Alps, after listening to loads of Amon Duul. Flipsude 'Phrenesia' is a moodier counterpoint, sucking us in with wormholing synthline while blunted programmed beats and a lone rave mistress vocal…
Hamilton Road
3-song teaser for the upcoming Ducktails full-length Ducktails 3: Arcade Dynamics. Features home recorded demo versions of 3 tracks - includes 'Sitting' (aka 'Hamilton Road') & 'Art Vandelay' which is a track that he has been regularly performing live with his side project Real Estate. Cover art by Petra Cortright."
24-24 Music
Though classically trained Arthur Russell's major contributions to the music world is in the dance genre. Despite the fact that his pioneering work in the late '70s and on through the '80s was only quietly acknowledged at the time, his long term impact is best described as formidable. Russell's innovative; left field dance records flew way ahead of what people were used to hearing at the time, due in part, to his involvement in New York's downtown avant-garde music scene. He scored severa…
Mask Rewind
LISFRANK was an obscure one-man project from Savona area, Italy, active from 1980 onwards but not releasing much music ever since apart from a few tracks via the own Mask Productions label in 1982 and 1983. The first and only LISFRANK stand-alone release was the 12”EP “Man Mask” (Mask Productions, MKX 01, 1982), definitely one of the best and rarest early 80’s minimal electro 12”s ever and on top of most want lists ever since, including the super hit “It’s Life”, as well as “Violence in m…
Para Pacem Para Bellum
Para Pacem Para Bellum” is the first CD release with the great music of Svyatoslav Lunyov's. That serious, highly emotional and spiritual work is the result of two general methods of creating music: academic tradition (scores, acoustic instruments and playing of the real musicians) and the contemporary/experimental way (generating, synthesis, editing with computer tools). Needs to say that this electro-acoustic work combines the well-known traditional elements of the Requiem, Passions and the Ma…
The Atrocity Exhibition
Amazing experimental film with music by Jim Thirwell (Foetus). J.G. Ballard once said that the Atrocity Exhibition had been considered his only ‘unfilmable’ novel. Until Jonathan Weiss' feature adaptation of this infamous work of experimental fiction, a film which Ballard calls, ‘a poetic masterpiece’. Of all the films made of Ballard's fiction, only The Atrocity Exhibition contains a full length DVD commentary by the author himself. Less a commentary than a philosophical discourse on the nature…