New Arrivals
Rec Blast Motorbike
"The mighty 'classic' lineup of the Vibracathedral Orchestra returns with their first new music in many years. Here the quintet of Michael Flower, Neil Campbell, Bridget Hayden, Adam Davenport and Julian Bradley (joined by raconteur John Godbert) feature in a set of upbeat tracks that put the group's radical instrumental strategies into a package of full-on rock action. Recorded live using a binaural head system, the sound is nicely ragged in a you-are-there way, with scouring guitars and …
A Castle Popping
“Music For Private Ensemble” is Sean McCann’s first new solo album since 2011′s “The Capital”. Demonstrating a more serious study of orchestration and timbre than his previous work; it is a big step forward. The four arrangements presented here shy away from the use of synthesizers and effects processing – instead relying on voicing and movement to actuate the album’s sentiments. Inspired by the grandiosity of John Adams, the concerned somberness of Gavin Bryars, and the guttural tape work of Fl…
Excavated Shellac: Strings
Mesmerizing performances from the four corners of the world played on stringed instruments and recorded and released 78-RPM records circa 1920-1950. Featuring fiddles, shamisen, charango, Paraguyan harp, Indian vina, Lebanese oud, Persian violin, Vietnamese moon guitar, and more. All previously unreleased on CD, with three bonus tracks not available on the now-out-of-print 2010 LP. All records have been carefully transferred and mastered and are presented in a digipak with a 20-page booklet feat…
The Birth Of Rock And Roll
"Collector and Americana yay-sayer Jim Linderman is an archivist of the obscure. His collections tell vast stories in sotto voce, allowing curios and objects shadowed by mainstream culture and ideology to converse and be heard. What we hear is an enormous American sub-culture speaking in forbidden, marginalized languages: stuff discovered boxed in the attic out of embarrassment or zealotry, smutty ash trays crowing next to religious pamphlets, each claiming a part of the complex, sometimes contr…
Ambient 3
Nr. 3 from the most famous ambient series, now reissued. Laraaji’s glistening album “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance” has from the beginning been considered an outlier. Though widely celebrated at the time of its release in 1980 -- as the third installment of Brian Eno’s emerging ambient music series (Ambient 1-4) -- the album also brought with it an aura of mystification. Where did it fit in? An uncharted synthesis of resonating zither textures, interlocking, hammered rhythms and 3-D sound tre…
Threshold Archives - Remastered Reissues CD Bundle
*shipping on Tuesday* At long last, the posthumous reissues of Coil's near-sacrosanct catalogue gets underway with the first batch of eight CDs including some seriously remarkable finds. On each disc original releases are featured in their entirety alongside stacks of formerly unreleased material - remixes, demos, edits and instrumentals - amounting to one of the most gobsmacking archive retrievals of this decade. For the many who are understandably bewildered or even scared by Coil's sizeable…
Gloss
Lorenzo Senni's inspired Presto!? imprint presents one of 2015's most singular electronic albums with the solo debut proper from Theo Burt. Originally written circa 2009/2010, it's an album that was never really intended for public consumption but, thanks to Senni's efforts, is now presented here in all it's hugely individual glory. Perhaps best thought of as avant electro-pop or even some sort of Compute/R&Baroque composition, the Casio phase synth-sculpted arrangements of 'Gloss' elicit…
Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Li
FOla Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line is the first in-depth look at the life of Ola Belle Reed, a groundbreaking artist and one of the all-time greatest performers of authentic, old-time music. Born to a musical family in the mountains of Ashe County, North Carolina, in 1913, Reed became a prolific songwriter and performer, known for her unique style of banjo playing and singing. Reed inspired many musicians throughout her life, eventually becoming one of the …
Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Mi
Folksongs of Another America is a compilation of field recordings made in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin between 1937 and 1946. Armed with bulky microphones, blank disks, spare needles, and cumbersome disc-cutting machines, several folklorists had the foresight to document and preserve a significant but overlooked part of the nation's musical heritage, made by immigrant, Native American, rural, and working-class performers. Almost all of these restored dance tunes, ballads, lyric song…
Trinity
"Trinity represents the second installation in The Unheard Music Series efforts to resurrect Joe McPhee's early '70's work on the CjR label, soon to be completed withUnderground Railroad and Pieces Of Light. This brilliant trio recording of blues inflected out-soul from '73 follows up on hugely successful Nation Time, recorded a year later. Originally issued in '73 in an edition of 1000, Trinity has not available since. John Corbett has remastered Trinity from original tapes; the LP had to be se…
Insistency!
Third - and sadly last - chapter of the archival recordings fixed on tape by Hartmut Geerken during his stay in Kabul in the 70s. Insistency! was recorded at the Goethe Institut of Kabul on same day of the duo session of Hyndukush Serenade - May 22, 1977 - but sees also Maqsud Schukurwali and Ghafur Rasul - members of the Free Jazz Group Kabul - joining Geerken and John Tchicai and playing an insistent anthem, featuring also an eight year old Olaf Geerken at congas. On side B, the music g…
Closing Ice
after two years of abstinence, Senking takes us again into the depths of his musical creativity with his new record »closing ice«. The nine tracks of the album are intently dedicated to his distinctively bass-heavy and atmospheric compositions and the trips into the dark recesses of the human psyche.the mid-tempo grooves leave plenty of room for his sawing, war-declaring sounds that are unfolding expressive and gloomy but nevertheless warm soundscapes. every now and then, like a distant e…
Different Forces
“Different Forces” is the second album by Hamburg-based duo Phantom Horse, following their self-titled album debut on Dekorder. These polyrhythmic vehicles are driven under the influence of Cluster and Harmonia, that venerable school of out-there German explorers; the tuneful ghost of Moondog can also be seen on the rear-view mirror, while the landscape rushes by with the hypnotic pulse of 1960’s Minimalism. Packed in their distinct homelike, warm sound, Phantom Horse effortlessly follo…
Show Us The Fire
"Zelienople exist as a unique entry in the pantheon of Chicago musicians pushing the boundaries of genre. The quartet takes basic song-structures and textural palates of folk and rock and infuses them with the spontaneous fluidity of jazz and the shimmering haze of ambient music, emphasizing subtle facets of each genre to create their own individual style. Show Us The Fire is Zelienople's first album for Chicago's Immune Recordings and shows the band taking a more simplified approach to r…
Machine to Machine
Following on from early 2015’s exercise in dissonant formalism “Sarava Exu”, “Machine to Machine”, Donoso’s newest full length work sees a return to a more melodic sound. “Machine to Machine”, continues to bridge the gap between Ricardo Donoso’s more rhythmic and melodic work alongside his more experimental, loose and dissonant side yet still maintaining his unique signature feel; “WTF”-polymertric rhythms, elegant cinematics and spine chilling tension. Recorded over the last two years …
Mnemosyne
Berlin-based Italian/Belgian duo Lumisokea present Mnemosyne, shedding the bass-heavy rollers found on 2014's Apophenia (Opal), and welcoming space and tension into the fold. Most of the groundwork for the record was made during a week-long residency the duo (comprised of Andrea Taeggi and Koenraad Ecker) rimprovised with a collection of synthesizers from the '60s and '70s at the Worm studio in Rotterdam; edited and combined the resultant sound with heavily-processed recordings of gamelan bell…
James Moore Plays The Book Of Heads
Composed 1976–8 and now studied by guitarists the world over, The Book of Heads is one of John Zorn’s most popular and oft-performed compositions. Utilizing an hermetic language of meticulously notated sounds inspired by contemporary classical extended techniques, the idiosyncratic guitar languages of free improvisation, cartoons, film noir, world music, philosophy and more, they receive a virtuosic reading by James Moore, founding member of the Dither guitar quartet. This special edition …
Passio
The recording of this formidable piece of religious music dates back to 1988, though Passio had its Munich premiere back in 1982. The piece is an interpretation of the Passion as given account by St. John's gospel, which is here performed by The Hilliard Ensemble. At the core of the piece is the dialogue between Pilate and Jesus, as played out between tenor and bass vocalists, respectively. One of the key elements to the emotive success of Passio is the punctuation of the piece, with the …
Hyperrealist Music
This collection, featuring seven pieces from 2011 to 2015, celebrates Noah Creshevsky's 70th year with a fittingly life-affirming and masterful verve. An award-winning composer who has studied with Nadia Boulanger and Luciano Berio, he began composing electronic music in 1971, using the power of circuitry, tape and then digital technology to create a "hyperreal" musical world in which recordings of human performers, both vocalists and instrumentalists, are juxtaposed and recombined in compositio…
A Gathering Together
LP version. A Gathering Together is Ron Morelli's second full-length for Hospital Productions, a "techno" cacophony brought to its granular detail and reduced to its most elemental tonal depths. A cohesive fusion of surreal and feverish déjà-vu loops, brittle noise, fucked rhythms, scrap-metal percussions, pro-one metal synths, and an injection of near-buried DrÄÂno vocal samples, it's a fearsome celebration of brokenness and of amplified surroundings, with stereo-shifting drones and dr…