New Arrivals
Hold
Like watching a massive twisting fire slowly fading into the open skies, accompanied by a drum section so repetitive yet mind-bending that you're unsure if it's ever going to stop. This is how Hold starts off, leaving you catching for your breath before the album has even reached the second track. James Welburn steps into the ashes covered in drones and noise together with drumming partner Tony Buck (The Necks), producing a crushingly epic debut album. Hailing from the UK, but located in both Be…
Procession Acts
Ross Gentry returns to Bathetic under his Villages moniker to present his sophomore LP, Procession Acts. Procession Acts carries on Villages’ debut LP’s grand expanse of ambient glory, while carrying the sound to a heightened level. Procession Acts comes across as much more cinematic. It is a denser record, more precise in its attack and its immersion. Procession Acts moves along at a steady pace, while streaking the room with beauty. It’s a rhythmic, pulsing, thumping, ticking record, that move…
The South Shore
XI Records is pleased to announce the debut full-length release from Michael Vincent Waller, The South Shore, featuring chamber works from 2011 through 2014, with album art photography by Phill Niblock. Waller has collaborated with numerous musicians and ensembles to bring this album to life. This kind of listening is for the brain to relax and enjoy, for the soul and emotions together as art for the universal. Reveling in subtext and subtlety, a symbiotic exploration of the history and future o…
Fridge Trax Plus
20th year anniversary reissue of the two milestone releases that kickstarted the entire Mego / Editions Mego imprint and initial aesthetic. This deluxe reissue brings together the first MEGO release, 'Fridge Trax' and the full length album that followed 'Live and final Fridge', originally released on Source in 1995. Made by the founders of the initial Mego label, Peter Rehberg (Pita), alongside Andreas Pieper and Ramon Bauer (General Magic) these recordings are legendary in their execution. It w…
New Wave Copy Center / How is your Popo?
The photocopier is a joy to work with — though not in your tiny apartment, and it can be expensive to maintain. That's precisely why copy centers are a great help! In Antwerp, Belgium, where Speedqueen is based, the cheapest copy centre was more akin to a darkroom than a help desk. Its two employees were depressed, almost identical goth sisters — they both had thick, red and black oil painted hair, white skin and dodgy piercings, tightly wrapped in black clothing. The smile had yet to be invente…
Menjadi
Indonesian hardcore band Senyawa board the Morphine Records mothership in early 2015, with a stunning upcoming album "Menjadi" (doser025LP). A preview appears here in the shape of a an extraordinary album track replayed by Charles Cohen's on his Buchla Music Easel. While enjoying a few months residence in Germany, Mr Cohen conducted a ritual-esq and tonal re-adaptation - flushing the song through layers of spaced out orchestrated grooves. Meanwhile in the US, explorer of the deepest depth…
Celestial Ascent
If his 1969 debut album, Dawn, offered a magical ethnic sound from an 80-string guitar-zither, American multi-instrumentalist Don Robertson's 1980 follow-up, Celestial Ascent, uses the Austro-Germanic instrument as a viaticum for a timeless journey into the depths of the soul and psyche. The album was originally released as a cassette, and this is its first reissue since then. Traditionally designed to accompany the singing of psalms in religious communities, here the zither is the perfect …
Let No One Judge You: Early Recordings From Iran, 1906-1933
Gorgeous 4LP box set presented in two gatefold sleeves inside a heavy card slipcase, with a 12” square, 20 page, saddle stitched booklet on art paper. The set is a 34-song anthology of Early Recordings From Iran painstakingly restored from 78s at Abbey Road studio in London "Ravishingly beautiful, achingly precious songs and instrumentals, ranging from two performances by the Royal Court Orchestra in 1906 — with futuristic, overlapping trumpets and exquisite clarinet improvisation — through to a…
Live at MAXXI
After their respective releases on Spectrum Spools, Italian techno masterminds Donato Dozzy (Sintetizzatrice (SP 038CD/LP, 2015)) and Neel (Phobos (SP 037CD, 2014)) return as the duo Voices from the Lake with Live at MAXXI on the motherlabel Editions Mego. A marvelous, organic live set of hypnotic, ambient techno that proves the outstanding and elegant craftsmanship of the pair's renowned sonic sculpture work. As expected, they stay true to their polyphonic topography of liquid scapes, with …
What You Hear (Is What You Hear)
Thomas Brinkmann is renowned for audio works that hover among forms such as techno, minimalism, and ambient. Alongside such pioneering works as Klick (2000), Studio 1 - Variationen (1997), and 2012's duo with Oren Ambarchi, The Mortimer Trap (BT 006CD), with What You Hear (Is What You Hear) Brinkmann moves further to separate his art, not only from descriptive musical terms that oppress creative output, but also from the notion of an author in the act of creation. The 11 tracks on display form…
Represencing
Eremite presents the first CD edition of Joshua Abrams' acclaimed 2012 LP Represencing, now out of print on vinyl. Represencing is the second installment of the Joshua Abrams sound-world, first introduced in 2010 on Natural Information (MTE 061CD). Abrams again organizes small group statements around the resonant grooves of the guimbri, a North African three-stringed, animal hide bass, with a unique and broadly assimilative compositional voice. Blending sources that range from traditional mus…
Natural Information
Eremite presents the first CD edition of Joshua Abrams's acclaimed 2010 LP Natural Information, now out of print on vinyl. Abrams's first record for Eremite is another fascinating entry in his discography of recordings that gather aesthetic input from all over the map into vivid personal statements. At the heart of Natural Information is the guimbri, a three-stringed animal hide bass traditionally used by the Gnawa people of North Africa in healing ceremonies. Combining solo, trio, and qua…
The Growth of Artefacts
Presenting a brand new composition from Taiwan based sound artist, YannickDauby, The Growth of Artefacts is a rich atmospheric soundscape based on british anthropologist Tim Engold's 'On Weaving a Basket'.'The world of our experience is, indeed, continually and endlessly coming into being around us as we weave. If it has a surface, it is like the surface of the basket: it has no 'inside' or 'outside'. Mind is not above, nor nature below; rather, if we ask where mind is, it is in the weave of the…
Drugstore
Tony Iglio, born in 1932, has been one of the most popular orchestral arrangers of RAI (Italian National Television) and has composed over 1500 songs. Son of art, over the years he has played with and for the most important figures of the last century in Italy. "Drugstore" was recorded in 1971 in a small theatre in Napoli by a combo of professional musicians and is rated the weirdest and most insane Italian library of the early 70’s mixing jazz, psychedelia, effects and purcussions. The f…
Ossification
Officer! is either Mick Hobbs (The Work, Family Fodder,Half Japanese) alone or Mick Hobbs with friends. Ossificationis like an amazing party held at This Heat's Cold Storage Studio, with friends like Felix Fiedorowicz, Tom Cora, Tim Hodgkinson, Bill Gilonis, Zeena Parkins, Patrick Q, andCatherine Jauniaux. The output of this party is one of the most unusual, pleasurable, and character-filled "pop" records anyone has heard. Fourteen songs that contain the spirit of pop, rock, classical, medieval,…
Doing The Splash
The Megaphone & Knock 'em Dead labels present the fifth release from improvising trio Konk Pack. Konk Pack are a two-thirds British and one-third Austrian "organic" improvisational group. Their music can be very delicate and light but when they get hot and bothered, it's like being inside of a hurricane, an earthquake and an electrical storm, all at the same time. All three members of Konk Pack have been improvising for decades with musicians like Lol Coxhill,Cecil Taylor, Tom Cora, Alan Silva, …
Batu Malablab: Suite for Prepared Piano, Flute and Electronics
Based in Baltimore, M.C. Schmidt is one half of the acclaimed electronic duo Matmos. As half of Matmos, Schmidt has worked with Terry Riley, Björk, Kronos Quartet, Peter Rehberg, INA-GRM, Rrose, Marshall Allen, Horse Lords, People Like Us, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Antony Hegarty, William Basinski, and many more. Batu Malablab, his first solo album, works a dislocating magic, indulging in a tradition of western fantasy of non-western music. Recalling gamelan-inspired experimental classics such…
Note D'Autore - A tu per tu con i compositori d'oggi
Per sette anni Ricciarda Belgiojoso, dalle antenne di Radio Classica,intratteneva gli spettatori con le sue interviste ai compositori più rappresentativi della scena attuale con l'intenzione di dimostrare che "La grande musica non finisce con il '900". La musica contemporaneain effetti è generalmente considerata ostica: "Mi ero proposta per quel ruolo proprio perché, curiosa di conoscere la musica del mio tempo, avevo grande difficoltà a trovarne tracce: rarissime comparse nelle trasmissioni rad…
Program
"A collaboration between Kouhei Matsunaga (who has worked with everyone from Sensational to Autechre and Asmus Tietchens) and the less prolific Toshio Munehiro, NHK’s ultra minimalist approach to techno may conjure memories of the late 90s/early 2000s glitch and microsound scenes, but their combination of erratic beats and digital expanses feels anything but dated, sounding entirely unique and fresh in 2015. I have always had a soft spot for that short lived era that was often full of derided la…
Sleepwalkers In A Cold Circus
On Sleepwalkers in a Cold Circus Belgian sound artist Koenraad Ecker creates a biotope of musical characters that is sober, delicate, complex and vivid, with a restrained intensity, a “cold fire.” The characters discuss, hesitate, fight, pull closer, push back. Through the use of microtonality and recordings of acoustic instruments it is the elusive sound of a somnambulistic travelogue. “I’m searching for ways to create an intricate narrative, switching perspectives and voices within one form, t…