New Arrivals
Die letzte Rache
Der Plan (Moritz R, Frank Fenstermacher, Pyrolator) were instrumental in ushering in the German New Wave (NDW) and are considered free spirits of synthesizer pop: electronic music created with minimal means, sometimes experimental, playful or even bordering on dilettantism, but always with a sense of humour.
Retrospectively, it makes perfect sense that Der Plan created a soundtrack. For one thing, visuals were almost as important to Der Plan as their music. And if every self-respecting pop b…
Elegy For Rusted Souls
After their last release from 1982, the seminal "California Babylon", San Francisco industrial pioneers Factrix are back with a new studio album, recorded together with Italian duo Control Unit (whose critically acclaimed debut "The Fugitives" was released on Backwards last year). The quartet formed by Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, Silvia Kastel and Ninni Morgia moulds a new language of industrial music with guitars, bass and electronics, resulting in a fusion of acoustic and electric elements, pri…
The Background Noise
Under The Snow is a project by Stefano Gentile (guitar, objects, field-recordings) and Gianluca Favaron (microphones, field-recordings, processing). Stefano Gentile is well known for his work as owner of the Silentes and Amplexus labels; he is part of Maribor (along with Maurizio Bianchi, Nimh, Andrea Marutti and Gianluca Favaron) and in the past he has collaborated with Aube and Amir Baghiri. Beyond releasing under his own name, Gianluca Favaron collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen proje…
Concredrones
M.B., also known as Maurizio Bianchi doesn’t need much introduction. In the early 80s he was responsible for a string of compelling electronic music albums in the first wave of ‘industrial music’. After a hiatus of many years he returned in the late 90s and since then has been very active with many new solo releases, but also on the side with collaborations. Here he works with Mario Costa, also known as Sostrah Tinnitus, from Italy, who has had a number of releases on labels as Umbra, Beyond, My…
A finger in the fishes mouth - Poetry book
A facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s only poetry collection, A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, originally published by Bettiscombe Press, Bridport, Dorset in 1972, is due to be published by Test Centre, with a new Foreword by Sophie Mayer and Afterwords by Keith Collins, Jarman’s partner, and Tony Peake, his biographer.Postcards from Jarman’s own collection, here gorgeously reproduced in an evocative green, preface each of the 32 numbered poems, written when he was in his early twenties. The impact…
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Cute doesn’t cut it, at least not all the time. But take cute, add drum machines, and put him (yes, for our purposes, “cute” is a dude) in short-shorts, smear him with trashy makeup, wrap him in cellophane and bind him in handcuffs—as Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes has been doing onstage lately—and suddenly this thing called “cute” undergoes a transfiguration. It’s a whole new beast.Once the most overtly precious of the Elephant 6 menagerie, Barnes has since jettisoned the everybody-and-his-roommate…
El Pianista del Antifaz
LP version with CD. French-Catalan musician Pascal Comelade's world is atypical and his inspirations come from many different sources -- from contemporary music to The Cramps -- making him one of the most creative and original artists of our times. At the crossroads of many different arts, never where he's expected, he never ceases to surprise his audience, taking the listener on poetic paths of primitive perception. El Pianista del Antifaz is the latest album in Comelade's galaxy. The artwor…
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980
Blackest Ever Black presents the first vinyl edition of Dickon Hinchliffe's original score for 1980 -- the second part of Channel 4 and Revolution Films' Red Riding trilogy, adapted by Tony Grisoni from David Peace's quartet of novels and first screened in 2009. Each film in the Red Riding trilogy, a landmark achievement in British television history, was helmed by a different director and had its own distinctive look, sound and feel. While Julian Jarrold's 1974 and Anand Tucker's 1983 were bo…
The Stargate Tapes
"Sharing social circles and spiritual ideologies with artists such as Iasos, Connie Demby and Deuter, whilst splitting label release schedules with Laraaji, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos, the unique Florida raised soul mate duo known as Emerald Web released their privately pressed debut LP at an axis where post-prog rock met proto-new age and ambient electronic music. At the turn of the 1980s Bob Stohl and Kat Epple embarked on a ten-year spiritual journey playing at planetariums and laser sho…
Revelation
An undisputed 70s spiritual jazz classic – and arguably the best album that Doug Carn ever cut for the Black Jazz label! The set is a masterpiece of spiritual jazz – with Carn on keyboards setting up the groove, and wife Jean singing some incredible vocals. Doug Carn's third album for Black Jazz, Revelation (1973), is as compulsively listenable as his previous outings. The keyboardist-composer-arranger-bandleader is on top of his game -- Jean Carn returns to handle the vocal parts, the hir…
GAU
In March of 2012, nearing the end of a tour together through the Netherlands and Belgium, Celer, Machinefabriek, and Jan and Romke Kleefstra gathered in a country studio, spending an afternoon improvising to record Gau. Recorded by the old hardcorerocker Jan Switters at the Landscape studios in Gauw, situated in the countryside in the midst of Friesland, the place was surrounded by green fields with idle tractors, few trees, buzzards and only massive farmhouses dotting the horizon. From the almo…
Nekropolis 81 Vol.1-4
Peter Frohmader alias Nekropolis is a german artist known for his distinct and very dark athmospheric electronic compositions as well as his extreme visual art-projects leading to many exhibitions, films, multi.media-events and collaborations in the field of art and music (incl. H.R. Giger, Chris Karrer...). In 1981 at age of 23 Peter released his first Lp “Musik aus dem Schattenreich“. At same time he produced a series of 4 Tapes called Nekropolis 81 Vol.1-4 which can be found on his comprehens…
Blank Generation
2013 repress. Exact repro vinyl version of the debut Richard Hell album, originally issued by Sire in 1977; 180 gram vinyl . "Hell formed the Voidoids, whose unwavering individualism kept the group out of the big time while producing a demanding and impressive corpus of work. 'I was saying let me out of here before I was even born.' That lyric sums up Hell's attitude, which he expanded and perfected on Blank Generation with a new version of the title track and such powerful statements as 'Love C…
Balf Quarry
LP version; printed innersleeve with lyrics. Before Balf Quarry landed on my desk, I figured the dirtiest thing in Connecticut was Chris Dodd's browser history. Not so. Among other things — like guitar tones that buzz around like contact-high June bugs, Elisa Ambrogio's slack vocals wavering between coy calls and willfully distant snarls, and a production value so low and dense you feel you're listening to them from the dining room above their rehearsal space — Hartford natives the Magik Markers…
Berlin
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Chris Heenan, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet. Alexander Frangenheim, double bass. Ofer Bymel, percussion. Recorded 2010 in Berlin.
Interior field
Limited edition of 500. Interior Field is a new stereo variation of a multi-channel sound work created from field recordings of a variety of small and large spaces from around the world. This work was originally presented at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC in 2012. Through his compositional practice, Chartier utilizes the unique physicality of these environments to create a newly defined acoustic space. Interior Field is a transposition of location, focus, and experience itself. A signif…
Crossarc chute
Crossarc Chute was inspired by my interest in the compositional strategies adopted for the early analogue electronics of the 1950s and ’60s, yet using digital processes and my own adaptations. Starting with pulse sounds, predefined filtering techniques and rules became the springboard from which I was able to generate many new sounds. These parameters formed a kind of system from which I could at times deviate.For one piece, Detail II, I separated the frequencybands of a group of sounds and then…
Sunrise
The music of My Education, a five-piece group from Austin, Texas, tends towards the classical side of the spectrum. If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel” and collaborated with the hip-hop group däle…
Winds & Skins
Winds & Skins transpired to be the very last set of recordings made by Afro-Cuban percussionist Sabu Martinez, who sadly passed away precisely one month after this December 1978 session was committed to tape. The album draws a line under a career that saw the illustrious musician performing alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey as well as releasing a string of out-and-out classic Latin jazz records. Here the noted conguero teams up with the lauded saxophonist/flautist Sahib Shihab, who himsel…
The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World
Peter Jefferies's extraordinary debut solo album, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World, first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs -- for both the album and a striking 7-inch, 'The Fate of the Human Carbine,' released around the same time -- it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a couple of years it slipped…