New Arrivals
Don\'t Tell Me Stories
Compilation of the early german dark-wave-legends with their Monogam-Hits such as „Casualties, „Radio War", „Don't tell me stories" and so far unreleased material. Very rare
Recur
After successful EP Collapsed, the Bristol-based project Emptyset strikes back with a full-length album on Raster-Noton. Once more James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas challenge the perceptual boundaries between noise and music and the potential for both technology and architecture to embed and codify themselves within sound. Recur is presented as Emptyset's third studio album -- continuing on from their work with Demiurge, the material examines the central themes of time, structure and recursion, thr…
Frog 2
The music developped by Frog is a work on percussions of all sorts : electronic, metallic, or else.. bathing in atmospheres made of « humid » tessituras. The music is simple, and unlike Brume, accessible ! Except for the arrangement of rhythms, 75% of work is concentrated on textures, mainly electronic : analog and digital.Electroacoustic is rarer here, most of the sounds being filtered by « vintage » analog synths using the whole usual range : VCO, VCF, VCA, envelope modulators etc.…
Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989 - For Warne Marsh
"I would like to make a few notes and hopefully clear up a potential misunderstanding or two. Most importantly, no matter what you think about the original Tristano performances, this music is not "cool" – with feverish intensity, volcanic dynamics, explosive technique, aggressive attitudes ... there is an enormous amount of drama here, and none of it is sedate, reticent, or bloodless. Note the treacherously difficult heads on tunes like "Two Not One," "Dreams," "Lennie's Pennies," and "A…
Joke in the hole
Black Dice bod returns to DFA with a playful solo LP of sample-splitting psychotomimetic grooves. Like an unhinged, PCP-huffing cousin of Smith 'N Hack, Copeland deranges plunderphonic globs into stomping, jerry-rigged and unstable structures, equal parts garage rock, wayward blues, disco, techno and avant-garde noise collage. Yet far from being a total mess, 'Joke In The Hole' is possibly his most "musical" effort to date, enriched with fragments of melodic hooks that give something to hold ont…
Grain
CD edition "The new Zs lineup (Sam Hillmer, Greg Fox and Patrick Higgins) sounds very much like a new band, at least as evidenced by the Grain EP. The two side-length tracks (coming in at a total of 42-minutes) bear the marks of Zs' sound - repeated phrases, looped or played in situ; buried drones and harsh electronic tones - but it does sound very much like a new band.
There's an extended ambience to the album that trick perceptions of time. Glitches and waves that last only a minute or th…
Two characters
Through more than 25 years of existence, the french composer Christian Renou, aka Brume, has developed a unique 'handwriting' style within the experimental underground, something one may call 'atmospheric musique concrète'. It is the marriage of many concrete sounds, hand-played acoustic instruments and electronic drones noises that are arranged in a manner somewhat akin to a 'narrative' - highly emotive and often evolving in a dramatic way. We are delighted to have received two tracks for the S…
Sorrow Come Pass Me Around
A collection of spiritual and gospel songs performed in informal non-church settings between 1965 and 1973. Most are guitar-accompanied and performed by active or former blues artists. "Most records of black religious music contain some form of gospel singing or congregational singing recorded at a church service. This album, though, tries to present a broader range of performance styles and contexts with the hope of showing the important role that religious music plays in the Southern bl…
The Alan Lomax Recordings
This has gotta be a piece of history right here. These 12 songs comprise Alan Lomax's first recordings of the legendary Fred McDowell in an incredible, on-the-spot document of his soul-stomping, spirit-wrenching blues. Fred is joined by Miles Pratcher on second guitar for a number of songs, and accompanied by Annie Mae McDowell's vocals and Fanny Davis on hair comb, running through a repetoire of spirituals and original songs. We're by no means Blues experts, but you don't need to know jack sh*t…
Trees Have Cancer Too
Duo of Pedro Sousa and Pedro Lopes, two portuguese young musicians, and some of the most exciting in the plastic, tonal and energic exploration of sound in a long time. Using sax (Sousa), turntables (Lopes) and a communal use of electronics, their music is admittedly nervous, obsessively bent over the following moment. Unlike other past forms of improvisation more concerned with listening and a certain purity of sound, this search is as focused as much as frantic in the pursuit of a new d…
Ovenschotels
Both DT and JC have been sending eachother garbage and leftovers since a few years, sometimes almost nothing, probably out of pity, often to make eachother smile or as an act of friendship.Sharing the last spoon of cold soup on a cold winter night, when the heater does not want to be touched. these 36 pages are filth, with found imagery or buggles that the cleaning lady forgot to sniff out, images that have been dominating our seperate rooms for years and that remain unnoticed because of the dai…
Making real
Making Real, an exercise in creating reality. Created by Gerritt Wittmer in 2012-2013. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Featuring the artwork of painter Nicola Samori. Gerritt Wittmer is a sound and performance artist based in Oakland, California. His work often articulates abstract narratives through vocal expression, body performance, and intense theatrical lighting. He has performed and recorded as Gerritt, Ginnungagap (with Stephen O'Malley and Tim Wyskida), Deathroes (with Sixes), and has perfo…
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…
Fever Logic
Ensemble Economique has emerged as an unusually globe-trotting creative valve for Arcata, CA, beachcomber Brian Pyle. The last year alone has seen him backpacking through Scandinavia, Europe and Russia—twice. Maybe his spirit’s too absorbent, ’cause he’s brought back some deeply heavier moods and ancient world weariness since his last outing on Not Not Fun, 2010’s demonic tribal monsoon Psychical. Recent splits with similarly instinctual psychedelic unclassifiables like Lee Noble and Her…
Unfinished Studies
This LP is the first release from young Melbourne-based composer Robert McDougall, presenting four electroacoustic studies, the fruits of many hours of private sonic research and improvisation. Simple electronics, acoustic instruments, field recordings and textural manipulations are subtly processed, fragmented and iterated into patiently evolving forms. Eschewing the jump-cut dynamics of academic electroacoustics while making use of a large variety of source material, McDougall allows the eleme…
Souvenir Of Italy
A lost gem from the mid 80s in the best italian tradition, BlowUp reissue of the month: to describe GustoForte’s Picture disc “Souvenir of Italy - La merda che fuma”, to give some dialect shape to the electro-magnetic throbbings that come out from the record , to try drawing, with grammatic help also that more basic, a logic or a descriptive way, it’s complex.And not because exists a multi-shape objective difficulty but rather the concreteness it’s impossible to approach to GustoForte: sandpaper…
Works for String Quartet and Percussion
"The evolution of the string quartet repertory has accelerated during the last half of the twentieth-century and beyond as composers from both the mainstream and the avant-garde have mined its seemingly inexhaustible creative resources. This CD features the virtually unprecedented combination of string quartet and percussion. It contains three works by prominent American experimentalist composers from several generations exploring the ensemble's unique sonic resources in diverse stylistic settin…
Music Of Group Ongaku
"Group ONGAKU, founded mainly by students at Tokyo National University of Fine Art & Music, was the 1st collective musical improvisation group. The group began their activities in 1958, & from the naming of the group in 1960 onward continued until somewhere around 1962. They attempted to create acoustics corresponding to actual time & space by means of collective improvisation. Although methodically different, the music that they pursued incidentally shared common directions with contemporaries …
Goose vibrations
GOL (Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Shardja, and Samon Takahashi). GOL was formed in 1988 in Paris by Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Sharda and Samon Takahashi. The quartet embodies, within a post-dada spirit, a lost rural tradition. GOL plays flute, horns, guitar, violin, toys, selfmanufactured instruments, tapes, turntables, voices, various percussion instruments and electronics, an appropriateness of both traditional string instrument and handmade low fi equipment. G…
Asphalt And Delay
Awesome brand new LP that marks the band’s first full length album foray in to the exploration of duo improvisation. Recorded over an extended period of time, in a secret midtown Manhattan location high above the city streets, this is their first record devoted entirely to duo improvisations. The LP also features striking silkscreen cover art by Yoko Tack.Since their late-1990s inception, White Out - as comprised by multi-instrumentalist Lin Culbertson and drummer Tom Surgal - have been one of t…