New Arrivals
Molam: Thai Country Groove from Isan Vol. 2
Molam is a multi-faceted folk country music native to Laos and the collection of rural Northeastern Thai provinces called Isan. Molam is an umbrella term used for numerous Lam styles. It literally translates into "expert singer" or "expert song." Featured here on volume two of this series are Lam Phun, Lam Thuy, Lam Plern, Lam Dern, and Lam Sing styles of Molam recordings from the 1970s and 1980s. All of these forms are built from a tradition that is centuries-old. A few examples of Molam…
Ensemble Pearl
Cosmic, heavy amplified rock drops and ripples, auras radiate and expand into cloud forms, through which lightning bolts. Tides rise, the moons wax upon a place somewhere between Link Wray, Hex-era Earth and early Tangerine Dream. The echoes return, leaving a trail that blows and drifts, creating a separate piece. Ensemble Pearl are Atsuo, William Herzog, Michio Kurihara and Stephen O'Malley. Their debut album also features the elemental forces of Eyvind Kang and Timba Harris. These playe…
Message Bag
We come burdened with the glorious purpose of having readied the latest recordings by Messages, a double LP set called Message Bag. It's a set of pieces that imparts a vibe rife with history, and yet clearly focused on the future. You buy these 2 LPs, poster and insert in a bag, but in all of its formats and strategies Message Bag operates as a return to an unresolved system, as an alternative to the rest of yr choices, and bestows something that can't be bought. We call it Wisdom.
Along the way
Former Emeralds member Mark McGuire has planned a new album following his 2011 albumGet Lost. Along the Waythrough Dead Oceans. On Along The Way, McGuire writes in the liner notes: "€œThis story is an odyssey through the vast, unknown regions of the mind€¦the endless unfolding of psychological landscapes, leading to perpetual discoveries and expansions, in a genuinely emergent and infinite world of worlds. Further he writes “[the new album] is not a critique, it is not inst…
KK Null + The Noiser
KK Null (computer, kaospad, voice, member of Zeni Geva). The Noiser (machines, kaospad, voice, member of Formanex). For few years now KK Null and The Noiser had been playing together through Europe giving their best version of a new noise and contemporary music mixing critical beats, electroacoustic composition combined with improvised sound poetry and extreme post-punk. This first album of their collaboration, released by Monotype Records, is a glimpse of their relation to live acts and studio …
Hemp Is Here
Leven Signs' Hemp Is Here came and went in 1985, as both a cassette release (Unlikely Records) and vinyl release (Cordelia) in the blink of an eye. The duo of Peter Karkut and Maggie Turner managed to craft one of the strangest, most affecting albums of new wave experimentalism of the era, but due to the album's impossible-to-find status, it's been largely forgotten and continuously overlooked ever since. A chance encounter with the cassette version of Hemp Is Here led Brad Rose of Digitali…
Ill Fares The Land
**Digitalis debut from Koenraad Ecker, one half of Opal Tapes' Lumisokea, highly recommended if you're into Vainio, Joachim Nordwall, The Haxan Cloak. Initial copies on transparent red wax** Belgium's Koenraad Ecker swiftly follows his 'Apophenia' LP as part of the Lumisokea duo for Opal Tapes with a personalised invitation to his shadowy solo zones for Digitalis. Inhabiting space between slow techno and electro-acoustic dimensions, 'Ill Fares The Land' surveys similar soundscapes to Mika…
Untitled
This album is a return to brutality for Drumm and a continuation of the intense lo-end evil of Wiese. Needless to say it is amazing and an essential purchase for noise fans, Mania-inducing heavy waves of suffocating bass frequencies with ripping and tearing, hissing and speaker-destroying hell-storm; at times these guys indulge in noise in the service of the metal that has influenced them via hi-end frequencies, but for the most part this is an expansive record that will immensely satisfy fans o…
We Will Always Be
There's a disarming honesty to the way Michigan-based husband and wife duo Windy & Carl communicate with one another. A blog post from Windy, published in late 2011, describes the making of We Will Always Be, framing it in the context of their relationship. "Yeah, we have had bumps in the road, and on occasion it seems as if we may never recover from these bumps, but we do," she wrote. That type of candor doesn't stop at the written word; it also bleeds through into the duo's music. Often their …
333 Loops (Volume 1)
333 Loops (Volume 1) is the first chapter of a CD/DL live series, which documents the sound events generated by the homonymous modular system, designed in 2011 by the Italian musician Emiliano Romanelli.
The system is composed by an archive of 333 pre-recorded sound loops, produced between 2008 and 2011 by a sound synthesis software played in different acoustic environments, and documented mainly with internal microphones of several digital and analog portable recorders. Subsequently, by a custo…
Spectral arrows : Rotterdam
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and preparations to lend an aura to the per…
El Tren Fantasma - The Signal Man's Mix
A 12' Vinyl with two remixed tracks from the CD "We know Chris Watson mostly from his works dealing with sounds from nature, animal wild life and stormy weather. A decade ago he worked as a sound recordist for the BBC who were doing a documentary on the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico, a train company with a trail from Los Mochis to Veracruz, coast to coast, through cities and wild life. All of that sound material is now used in 'El tren Fantasma', the ghost train (since it no longer ex…
Proceed with Caution!
Whereas the earlier black jazz album Shawn-Neeq had its share of riff-based funk, Calvin Keys' second outing Proceed with Caution! (1974) sticks close to straight-ahead jazz verities with the 30-something guitarist in the studio with seven similarly young, on-the-rise musicians including Charles Owens (saxophones, flute), Oscar Brashear (trumpet), Al Hall Jr. (trombone), Kirk Lightsey (electric piano), Henry Franklin (bass), and Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums). Keys can really play the guitar, e…
Amulet
Oren Ambarchi live recordings assembled on Cheryl Cole's iPhone at her house in Winnipeg. Not really, but it's that's how I first misread the description. Amulet actually presents two iPhone recordings assembled at Chez Cole, Winnipeg, July 2013 by the inestimable Oren Ambarchi. We've no further info but from what we can hear these are rudimentary iPhone recordings excerpted and crudely edited from a live performance (a shard of applause possibly gives the game away) between rippling, dynamicall…
Mutations et Protheses
LP version (initalia copies are coloured). Rare recordings by pioneers of industrial noise music, 1979-1983, never released before on CD or LP. Etat Brut was an industrial/noise band from Brussels that operated from 1979 until 1983. The duo (Phillippe x and Philippe X, today academic scientists) released dozens of cassettes, various flyers and Xeroxed booklets. Some collective concerts were organized at that time with Club Moral and Pseudocode. Cassettes like Emissions 1 (1981) or Géomé…
Hello
Takahiro Kawaguchi began making field recordings and performing improvised music in 2000, and in recent years has attracted a great deal of attention as a sound artist. In January 2009 he released, on Taku Unami's label Hibari Music, the solo album n, on which he uses several remodeled counters. Shinjiro Yamaguchi, born in 1983, is an electronic music player. in October 2008 he released the minimal ambient solo album Kogai on the Japanese label Cherry Music.This is the debut album of Kawaguchi a…
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 …
Moved by magnets
Stunning release from Cristian Vogel and SØS Gunver Ryberg as SGR^CAV for The Tapeworm. The label informs us that "Their compositions encourage the listener to observe and explore the resonances of a powerful musical awareness" and 'Moved By Magnets' exhibits a keen sense of spatial perception, tone and presence which entirely justifies that claim. Over four pieces they explore diffuse, free-formed spaces charged with a slow-moving, chaotic sort of energy ranging from the shuddering metallic res…
Animalia Corolla
Most of us are living in an urban world, dominated by constant noise and contagious stress. Our ears are conditioned by this aggressive environment and have often lost the ability to perceive another discreet world surrounding us. It might be hidden but also swarming, vivid and incredibly musical. We are all able to prick up our ears to some birds chattering together, the wind shaking leaves, toads singing serenades or old spirits telling us their immemorial adventures…Since its creation in 2006…
Dream Seeds
Extra Life’s first record for Northern Spy, Dream Seeds marks a dramatically new creative direction in the band’s still-young but prolific career. It is perhaps Extra Life’s most clearly-defined concept album : seven songs dealing entirely with the twin themes of dreams and children. In a lyrical left turn away from the morbid sexuality and black humor of Made Flesh, these songs look to the subconscious in search of innocence, morality and meaning. According to principal songwriter and e…