New Arrivals
Appalachian excitation
The meeting of composer Arnold Dreyblatt and psych-folk trio Megafaun shouldn’t be seen as unlikely just because it’s cross-generational, or even (arguably) cross-genre. Such categorizations have to be set aside before taking in their Appalachian Excitation. Born in New York in 1953, Dreyblatt came up under such lauded experimental groundbreakers as Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young, obtaining a Master’s degree in composition from Wesleyan University. Now based in Berlin, where h…
Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow
35 years have passed since Bill’s last new slab of vinyl was released. We bring you this set of gems from ‘78–’81. It’s bursting with a couple new tracks (with a few traded out from the ‘05 CD), a new sequence, new art, and expanded liner notes by the man himself.
Rehearsal tapes and alt. Takes NYC 1976-1978
"Connie Burg and I met Sumner Crane and Nancy Arlen in late 1975 and quickly decided to start a band. Sumner had been playing piano since he was a kid and I trumpet, guitar and more recently bass, but we were for the most part self taught. Connie decided to pick up a guitar and we started jamming in Nancy’s loft on Broadway and Duane St. where Sumner lived downstairs. For the first few months it was just piano, bass and acoustic guitar, with some paper bag percussion from Nancy. Our biggest rock…
The Dusted Sessions
"Date Palms revolve around the core duo of Gregg Kowalsky (keyboards, electronics) and Marielle Jakobsons (violin, flute, electronics). They employ traditional rock instrumentation to create music informed by Indian classical music, country, minimalism, and spiritual jazz, arriving at a style that is wholly their own. On their third album, The Dusted Sessions, the duo expanded the line-up to include Ben Bracken on electric bass, Michael Elrod on tanpura, and Noah Philips on electric guitar…
The Magic Bridge
Gatefold double LP version. Includes a CD with three bonus tracks, plus lyric sheet inserts. Richard Dawson has been a much-loved musical spectacle in his native Newcastle for many years now, a skewed troubadour who sings and plays guitar with a rare intensity and a very singular style. Beguiled northern audiences have long awaited the arrival of recordings that capture Dawson's genius, and it has finally arrived with his album The Magic Bridge, a 10-song collection out on CD (Pink Triangle…
Ornate shroud
Hopefully MRTYU requires little introduction, because the project evades easy description. An odd compound of vedic imagery, metal misanthropy, and violin agony, this music moves away from any particular fan base in pursuit of its distant, darkened idols. Ornate shroud is MRTYU's most potent spawn to date. Hewing closer to song form than previous releases, the album conceals Antony Milton's violent guitar and violin work behind MRTYU's characteristic murk. Its pieces transition from jagged riffs…
Split
New split 12′ between two modular experimentalists stretching the world map for this split release. While Keith Fullerton Whitman comes with one of his more accessible / danceable piece to date, Floris Vanhoof had full reign to record a dark and hazy drone piece for the flipside. Using purely analog synths, both build very unique although complementary compositions. Keith Fullerton Whitman – you already know him – is an American electronic musician who has recorded albums influenced by many genr…
Cold Soup
First release from this duo of Tokyo-based guitarist, Tetuzi Akiyama, and New York's Che Chen. Akiyama is in rare "Don't Forget to Boogie" form here; his heavily distorted, locomotive guitar lines chugging away as Chen's electrified fiddle drones, screeches and scrapes. Sine wave generators and a modified tape delay round out the mix. Sidelong live track on one side, studio jams on the flip. Released on Jozef Van Wissem's Incunabulum Records.
The jungle he told me
Joachim Badenhorst (1981) is a Belgian reed player who divides his time between NYC and Belgium. Over the last 5 years Joachim has released a number of albums with different projects, such as Baloni, Han Bennink Trio, Rawfishboys, Taro, Tony Malaby’s Novela, Thomas Heberer’s Clarino, Mogil, Polylemma, Os Meus Shorts, International Trio, Red Rocket and Equillibrium.The Jungle He Told Me is Joachim's first solo album. It consists out of nine pieces on clarinet, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone. B…
A Birthday Tribute - 75 Years
Five recordings, 2 from 1977 at Tempo Natural and 3 from 1993, where Tony Oxley leads various permutations of improvisers Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford, Pat Thomas, Matt Wand, Phillip Wachsmann, Ian Brighton. The first track from 1993 brings all musicians together for a 29 minute work of great dynamic and dialog. The following track present a quartet with Oxley, Bailey, Thomas and Wand from the same session, and the final 1993 track is the duo of Oxley and Rutherford. The first '77 tra…
Introjection
The collaboration between Israeli electronic musician Shay Nassi and German media artist Nicolas Wiese began in 2008, with the exchange of some raw recordings of feedbacks and everyday objects, via internet. During the following years, several compositional sketches have been sent back and forth and so have been refined step by step, in multiple sonic layering and construction processes. The result is a 45-minute-long collection of dense, dynamic, ambiguos and twisted atmospheric pieces which ca…
Let's Build A Pussy
Editions Mego is happy to announce a vinyl reissue of the long out-of-print and impossibly rare final Harry Pussy album, the monumental Let's Build a Pussy. Originally released in 1998 after the band broke up, this has always been an elusive release. "You cannot buy this anywhere and you will never find one!!!" was what one writer exclaimed. Consisting of an hour-long piece of Bill Orcutt time-stretching a second of Adris Hoyos' voice into a slow, shifting drone. A piece of music you will lo…
Cafe Cicago
RESTOCKED things were different in thailand a few years back, since it's inhabited by the sleazy christophersons or lou de preycks of our time, you can not just enter cocktail bars anymore without showing your ID! the idea is simple and plain though: watching the sunset with purple sunglasses and a fresh strawberry diahreah with ice in your hands while listening to classic german kraut or early kraftmenship from the same country! sliding over the autobahn while dreaming away on the analog…
s/t
"Marissa Nadler's Kickstarter funded self-titled self-release. Brian McTear produced the album, which Nadler says is the 'most honest, natural record' of her career." "You'll want this music to never end...best severe and complex emotions that we've possibly never recognized in this or previous lives." -- LA Weekly
Dream Seeds
Extra Life’s first record for Northern Spy, Dream Seeds marks a dramatically new creative direction in the band’s still-young but prolific career. It is perhaps Extra Life’s most clearly-defined concept album : seven songs dealing entirely with the twin themes of dreams and children. In a lyrical left turn away from the morbid sexuality and black humor of Made Flesh, these songs look to the subconscious in search of innocence, morality and meaning. According to principal songwriter and e…
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
The Men Parted The Sea To Devour The Water
Numbered edition of 700 housed in die-cut, origami fold and foil-blocked jacket** 'The Men Parted The Sea To Devour The Water' is The Haxan Cloak's long awaited Latitudes edition. It's his first release since that jaw-dropping eponymous album (an end of year favourite across the board) and means that we're possibly one step closer to two things: a vinyl edition of said LP, and his hugely anticipated album debut for Tri Angle. But let's not get ahead of ourselves....here we find Bobby Kr…
Living Theory Without Anecdotes
The album Living Theory Without Anecdotes confates Nicolas Wiese's acousmatic compositions from the years 2009-2011. There is a common thread: all four compositions are constructed out of samples from acoustic instrument and object recordings, and mostly have rather foating structures with slow crescendos and little disruptions. A significant element in Wiese's soundworks is the spatial layering - there is an architecture of foregrounds, backgrounds and diferent midgrounds that integrate …
Coin coin chapter two: Mississippi Moonchile
2013 release. Mississippi Moonchile is the much-anticipated new installment of Matana Roberts' unique and forward-looking project and it finds Roberts conjuring some of the most nuanced, thoughtful and substantial American liberation music of the 21st century. Mississippi Moonchile was developed for an intimately woven New York jazz sextet and represents the next leap forward in Roberts' iconoclastic and complex project of memory and recuperation, where historical and contemporary musical tropes…
Seitz versus Gendreau
Seitz Versus Gendreau is a collaborative experiment in using concrete music compositional strategies. These pieces were composed with created and found sound captured in San Francisco. 'Chorus After Rains': A strategy where we each use the same raw sound clips with different results. The two pieces are then melded to create one piece of music, the different modules becoming inseparable from each other. 'Things Lost That Will Never Be Found': A composition with live instruments, moving fro…