New Arrivals
Tender Exploration
“Tender Exploration” reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”, it’s an enormous metallic machine on spindly legs, walking like a toddler, but also steaming, mumbling, panting, a creature full of energy, and inhabited by a fire demon. “Drake”, the first track”, starts seeking for a structure almost clumsily, the band members seem to have to find each other. But soon they have a good chemistry and Bauer, who dominates this piece in spite of its name, adds his huge repertoire of tech…
Body/Head
Bill Nace (Guitar) and Kim Gordon (Guitar, voice). "So much more than a 'likely pairing,' this is a group which manages to illuminate the best of both players while simultaneously pushing them into fresh territory. Live shows have been accompanied by slowed films, and the pair's obsession with cinema comes across in the music itself. The pieces exist as vignettes in and of themselves, all the while presenting a full-bodied emotional narrative over the course of the record's 20 minutes. It…
Music For Fireworks
In 1978, Philippe Genion bought a guitar for 1000 belgian francs (25€). He connected it to his hifi amp, quickly learned how to play "smoke on the water" and a few punk songs with two fingers and within two weeks, pushing the amp more and more to the limit, blew his 200W speakers out. Later, around 1980, he bought an old ARP synthesizer from walloon band "Jo Lemaire plus Flouze" and started playing with these instruments and a few old flanger and distorsion pedals, and started recording so…
Footnote(s)
Originally published as a cdr in 2005, limited to hardly any copies on Feater one's Nest, in the period Joshua Burkett visited Europe for the first time, it was about time these beautiful recordings saw some day light again on wax! I've met various people on other planets that i could compare to friends closer to home, Bill Nace calls himself a "fat Vaast Colson", Vladimier looks like Phillip Quehenberger, Tarp's Conrad Capistran's laughter sounds simular to W Ravenveers grinning and so on…
Split LP
When does modern composition become drone?  When the original elements are sunk into a sea of strings, brass and electronics, as they are on this evocative split release.  Each of the artists composes, but in a modern fashion, either by manipulating source elements or by rearranging them to make a different sort of sense.  Both pieces are based on recordings of the Antonio Lomatto choir, conducted by Davide Mainetti.  The phantoms of these recordings remain, spectral yet in…
HaLF-UNReLeaSeD MaDNeSS
Very cool compilation of unreleased BeNe GeSSeRiT tracks. The husband & wife duo of Alain Neffe & Nadine Bal counted as one of the most frivolous & quite impressive live acts around during the eighties. On top of a catchy but minimal synth basis created by B GHoLa (Alain Neffe) runs the strange, & playfull voice by BeNeDiCT G (Nadine Ball). This is minimal synth pop for the crazy ones among us, but aren't we all a bit mad? Limited edition of 400 copies. Cover sleeve & insert by B GHoLa
Demiurge
Multiverse - the constellation of forward-thinking Bristol labels that also includes Tectonic, Kapsize and Caravan - reactivates its seminal Subtext imprint for a daring new LP from Emptyset. A collaboration between Mutiverse boss James 'Ginz' Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, Demiurge is the second album by Emptyset, and finds them reducing their production process down to a singular signal chain channelled into a modulated analogue hardware line (or so we're told). The results are somewhere between dr…
Live
Astounding LP documenting a high-quality live recording of a performance in Vittorio Veneto (Italy) in July 2012 by Virginia Genta (Jooklo etc), David Vanzan (Jooklo etc) and Chris Corsano. With Genta on tenor & soprano saxophones and clarinet, Vanzan on electric guitar and home-made semi-modular synthesiser, and Corsano on percussion, the trio combine their "informal creative sounds into a set of abstract cosmic-punk improvisations". Pressed on clear, marbled-yellow 180g vinyl and housed in han…
Keeping a record of it
Keeping a record of It is the follow-up to Lonnie Holley's debut album, Just Before Music. It features recordings made in 2006, 2010 and 2011. Guest performers include Cole Alexander from the Black Lips, Bradford Cox from Deerhunter, and visual artist Lillian Blades.
'Last year, at 62, after decades of singing while he worked, Holley released his jarring debut album, Just Before Music, a marriage of improvised keys and the rambling, hollow bellow of his voice, as well as the first original rec…
Sounding the Body Electric
The connections between the visual arts and experimental music were closer in the 1960s and 1970s than perhaps any time before or since. Sound and image combined in artists films, \'happenings\' and sounding installations. Experimental Forms of notation were also created to stimulate uninhibited musical expression. Eastern European artists and composers were at the forefront of these new experiments with sound and yet their achievements have never been recorded until now. Sounding the Body…
The Soft Room Recordings 1980-84
Paul Nagle is an electronic artist and synthesist from UK who started to produce wonderful fascinating electronic sounds since the late 70's when his parents moved to a remote farmhouse, triggering creative outbursts in many fields - music, painting and writing to name but three. His music which combines elements of electronica, ambient, trance, minimalsynth and new age would have perfectly fit to a label like Martin Reed's Mirage who also released early works of Colin Potter, Ian Boddy, Mark S…
Eselsbrucke
Cristian Vogel is a composer, music producer and music theorist. His work is known worldwide through state-of-the-art DJ and Live performances to compositions for choreography and many studio productions. Born in Chile 1972 and raised in the UK, he is now based in Berlin. Cristian Vogel has been a long-term innovator in the composition, mixing and performance of electronic sounds. Over a 20 year career at the vanguard of European electronic music, his work has been highly acclaimed for its quali…
Novaya Zemlya
Novaya Zemlya (lit. "New Land"), also known in Dutch as "Nova Zembla" and in Norwegian as "Gåselandet" (lit. the "Goose Land"), is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe, the easternmost point of Europe, lying at Cape Flissingsky on the northern island. The artwork, by Jon Wozencroft, includes an essay by Thierry Charollais, "Thomas Köner's Novaya Zemlya: towards a metaphysical geography"... Of course we find the unique Köneresque glow…
Litio Folk
Rob Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Om, 90 Day Men) swiftly proceeds his stunning 'Timon Irnok Manta' side for Type with a humbling, stripped down suite crafted almost entirely from his own vocals, subtly layered with some synth work. 'Lítió Fólk' feels at once vast and intimate: Lowe's vocals resonate deeply, instinctively - quavering notes and curling overtones centre the sound within the body - while the layered and sustained drone structure seems to draw the spirit ever outwards, drawing enchanting melodi…
Love Song
"The singularly strange storytelling power of Jun Konagayas unit GRIM had been largely overlooked until haang niap records "Folk Songs For An Obscure Race" compilation of the groups early 80s material. Konagaya restarted the group in 2009 and these are their first new recordings - and a full album to boot. Split release between Art Into Life and Eskimo Records! A story in 8 volumes, ripe with deviant madness and gathered salvic capacity. Handmade clock artwork by Konagaya - each one is di…
The New Dark Age of Love
The past two years have found Austin’s Lone State dark lord Xander Harris (aka Justin Sweatt) on a heavy transfigurative trip, overhauling his live rig, detouring through an expansive soundtrack project celebrating the 20th anniversary of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, touring outside Texas (from New Orleans to the Netherlands), plus a host of other inner life turmoils and metamorphoses. All of which seems to have seeped into the synthesizer soil of his stunning second full-length, The New Dark A…
Stridulum EP
Zola Jesus didn't need to clean up to stand apart from the lo-fi horde-- they already had Nika Danilova's voice, which tends to cut through a track and leave an indelible impression no matter how it's recorded. Whether it's wordless yowling, an extended cover of "Somebody to Love", or something as disarming as The Spoils' "Clay Bodies", her singing has a way of sticking in your memory. Even so, the Stridulum EP represents a large stride forward, not just in production quality, but in the …
Amaranthine
Every new Richard Youngs LP is in some way an event – his modus is so restless and yet his muse remains so distinctively personal that it’s always a thrill to see where he’s gonna dive in next. Amaranthine puts his vocals way up front for a series of four ecstatic bardic/future folk classics that ride in on wave after staggering wave of free form percussion, clanging household objects, shakuhachi and fuzz guitar. The vocals fall into the classic post-Summer Wanderer style of endlessly rep…
Liquified Sky
Line is pleased to announce its latest edition featuring astoundingly detailed audio visual works by six internationally recognized artists: Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand, COH, Paul Prudence, Francisco López, and Asmus Tietchens. The fluidity and even the granularity of light can be unfolded by the senses through active attunement coupled with meticulously orchestrated conditions. Though formerly considered impossible to imagine, let alone perceive, recently, a variety of quantum behavior h…
No Answer : Lower Floors
LP version. "No Answer : Lower Floors is the record of 2013 you need to be most worried about. No Answer : Lower Floors is further flesh to the shadowy silhouette cast by this Michigan art abstraction unit, perenially poised on the cusp of a precipice. Wolf Eyes will carry on forever but always remain mysteriously unfinished. The No Answer : Lower Floors material covers all bases: tough to toughest to tangled, all done in the Wolves' least convoluted smooth style. The vocals, delays, primit…