New Arrivals
Pre-Existence
*2023 stock* Limted 2022 restock, last copies. Originally released in 2006. Tetuzi Akiyama has been a major player on the free music/improv scene in Tokyo for over 20 years. Pre-Existence first came out on CD as a part of the great Wooden Guitar series from Locust. Akiyama's playing here is one of a minimalist approach, discovering and investigating the empty spaces between each note. He does not follow the Takoma guitar school style of finger-picking, but instead invokes a far more warped primi…
Many Glorious Petals
*360 copies limited edition* "After a handful of whacked-out cassettes & CDRs, for labels as discerning as Chocolate Monk and Beartown, this Nottingham trio has final made their debut LP, and it is a beautiful, swirling cone of sounds.
Unlike some of their more savage kith, Food People‘s basic template is based less on explosive dynamics than it is on twisted invention. Their music is rarely overtly aggressive or ornery. Its power is drawn from quietly disorienting musical details that are assem…
Old World Die Must
*300 copies limited edition* This is the 14th album released by this Georgia-based improv trio, but the first to come out on LP. The Electric Nature has gone through a variety of phases during its decade-plus history, but its recent work has been fairly abstract, and so it continues here. The basic threesome — Michael Potter, Michael Pierce and Thom Strickland — are not credited with individual instruments here. It is merely noted that between them they play guitars, synthesizers, drums, percuss…
Synth Soundtrack (A Sick Soundtrack Re-Work)
Tip! Synth Soundtrack is a re-work of Sick Soundtrack, the first album by Gaznevada, the legendary new wave no wave rock dance punk band of the 70s-80s. The Sick Soundtrack multitrack no longer exists, it was lost many years ago: no multitrack no remixes.
And, in fact, Synth Soundtrack is NOT a remix. No possibility of removing or correcting sounds, synthesizers, rhythms, it was only possible to add. Basically today’s Gaznevada played together with original Gaznevada. A time machine jam …
The Flow Across Borders
*2023 stock* Ali O’May and Frazer Brown met in early 2018 while performing with their respective bands at an Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) gig in Edinburgh. With obvious common interests, further discussions lead a few months later to Ali passing Frazer a USB drive filled with stems recorded directly from Ali’s vast modular system. Across August and September 2019, Frazer used about a dozen of those stems as the foundation for a set of tracks, building them into fully realised pieces across a…
.... And Take The Black Worm With Me
*2023 strock* As a founding member of Dublin experimental folk group Lankum, Ian Lynch explores submerged leylines of music and song. Forging a musical path that is all at once dark, mysterious and foreboding, but ultimately transcendental. His new solo project One Leg One Eye sees him taking a fresh approach to musical arrangement culminating in a sound that is more rooted in the raw aesthetics of second wave black metal than contemporary folk. The project was born across 2021, a period in whic…
When The Frog From The Well Sees The Ocean (Reports From English UFOlklore)
200 copies limited edition "This latest collection from Folklore Tapes borrows its title from a Japanese proverb about knowing one's limitations ("the frog in the well knows nothing of the sea"), which was itself borrowed from a Chinese fable. In the context of an album devoted to UFO lore, of course, humans are the frogs, the infinite universe is the ocean, and the usual eclectic Folklore Tapes cast of characters gleefully devote themselves to celebrating the colorful hoaxes and stories of thei…
Too Small To Be A Plain
*200 copies limited edition* “I decided to treat my process like gathering tiny beach rocks -- nothing stands on its own initially but after a few months you find yourself with a collection,” says Chicago cellist, composer, and improviser Lia Kohl. She’s talking about beginning work on her album Too Small To Be A Plain, which began as experiments in creating small bits of music every day. For years, Kohl has worked in collaboration with artists, ensembles, and bands, either in projects of her ow…
The Wild Wild Berry
*2023 stock* A collection of traditional English songs and tunes selected from the library of field recordings at Cecil Sharp House.
Connection
On their 5th studio album, Connection, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog have pushed their long-brewing tension between traditional pop songcraft and avantgarde improvisational music to the breaking point, bridging their customary genre-agnostic approach with elements of glam boogie, minimalist disco, psychedelic boogaloo, garage-punk-against-the-machine agitprop, and so much more. Recorded at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, NY and mixed by Ben Greenberg (Danny Elfman, Depeche Mode, Lamb of God) the albu…
Astralturfing
"Fantastic debut LP by this severely talented instrumental duo, currently based around Hampshire College unless I am much mistaken. Living Window is comprised of drummer Cameron Mitchell and guitarist Mila Dorji, who have create an album of pile-driving avant garde hunch reminiscent of pre-Mahavishnu McLaughlin’s slow-hand recordings with Tony Williams or Billy Cox.
Mitchell drumming mixes rock and jazz attacks in equal measure, either drawing out rhythms or pounding them straight into pumice. A…
Flowers In Space
"This is the first LP (following a cassette) released under Drew Gardner’s name and it’s a doozy. Drew is a guitarist, probably best known as a founding member of Elkhorn (although his musical partnerships with Jesse Shepard go back way further than that), and his recent work with Jeffrey Alexander’s Heavy Lidders has also been noteworthy as hell. The band here is a trio with Andy Cush (Garcia Peoples) on bass, and the extremely well documented Ryan Jewell on drums. Drew’s guitar playing is jazz…
Think - Tank - Funk
Not funk music but a demanding, innovative piece of chamber music and psychedelic avant-garde jazz, Think-Tank-Funk is an unusually daring album to appear in 1973 in Finland. Half-impossible to find on vinyl, the Svart reissue comes added with a fresh interview with Helasvuo.
Esa Helasvuo, known for his long musical career encompassing choral music, orchestral works, soundtracks and children's music, had years of composing experience under his belt already (he had, for example, written the Vesa-…
Skryvania
*Limited edition of 300* A true diamond in the pantheon of French progressive rock, Skryvania’s sole album that was released in 1978 is currently the scene’s most expensive artefact, with copies selling for over 3000 euros (if found). The album’s musical merit is hardly contestable. Although largely composed in the typically French symphonic prog vein, it is no stranger to hard prog and psychedelia, with fuzzed out guitar solos in constant dialogue with escalating moog assaults. This largely ins…
necesse est numquam revelare stercorem tuum
Michael Speers and Luciano Maggiore make music contemplating the kernel of black metal.
Hand Signals
*2023 stock* Since reactivating in the wake of the essential 2009 archival BUFMS box set, 'Induced Musical Spasticity', Bren't Lewiis Ensemble have released more than 40 titles of the finest avant ear wonk around. Much of this activity has proceeded with relatively little fanfare. Perhaps the number of releases is intimidating to some, or maybe well-adjusted society simply has little need for (in their own words) "screeches, recitations, injured vocalizations, inexplicable flurries of bleeps, bl…
Can Yr Ysgol
*100 copies limited edition* LDSN is Todmorden-based writer and artist Lauren de Sá Naylor. Over the past number of years, she has released a string of highly hypnotic and intimate recordings on labels such as Chocolate Monk, Invisible Animals, Cardboard Club, and Fort Evil Fruit. Yakkida is Leeds-based artist Hilary Knott, who also performs as Basic Switches and is a member of indie-rock trio, Cowtown. Together, LDSN and Yakkida make rhythmic, dissonant and harmonious sounds using voices, loops…
Bonn Ist Supreme
2023 restock. Subtitled: Live at the Kulturforum, Bonn, Germany, November 24, 1980. Another in the Wooden Weavil series, this time an unreleased live Robbie Basho recording from Germany in 1980. Robbie Basho was one of the great pioneers of the acoustic steel string guitar in the U.S., along with Leo Kottke and John Fahey in the 1960s. This program appears to have been recorded in one go. Robbie scatters his Americana numbers throughout, beginning with "Redwood Ramble," and ending with "Californ…
An Evening With The Devil
2023 repress. "The Tribe co-founder's debut, remixed from the original mutli-track master tapes under the direction of its creator and lacquered by Bernie Grundman. Now-Again presents the defi¬nitive Tribe Records reissues. Deep, spiritual jazz of the highest order. The Tribe label, one of the brightest lights of America's 1970s jazz underground, receives the Now-Again reissue treatment. This is your chance to indulge in the music and story of one of the most meaningful, local movements of the 2…
Scry
*2023 stock* Cole Pulice is a composer, saxophonist and electroacoustic musician from Oakland-via-Minneapolis. Following their debut album "Gloam" and two duo collaborations with Lynn Avery and Nat Harvie, Cole Pulice returns with their sophomore album "Scry". The sound is deeply contemporary, incorporating saxophone/wind synth with live signal processing and modern electronics/software. It drifts between electroacoustic experimentalism and more traditional forms of song-like beauty, casting a w…