New Arrivals
Heron
Long awaited reissue of the classic first album by legendary prog-folkies Heron, from Berkshire, UK. Issued in 1970 on the ultra collectable Dawn label, their beautiful songs were recorded in a field, surrounded by trees, birds and sun.
This debut album is an Acid Folk masterpiece. Delicate songs, brilliant interpretations and a magic sound provided for their "outdoors recording style". This sessions keep the attention of Roger Daltrey (The Who) who visited the band those days and John Peel, wh…
Homage To The Sine Wave
Already out of print, Eleh resurfaces from the depths with a new full-length release on TAIGA records. Homage to the Sine Wave is the second release in the sound wave series following 2008's sold-out LP, Homage to the Square Wave. In a fashion similar to Square Wave, the elemental approach to construction of the pieces on Sine Wave is influenced by Josef Albers, the visual artist best known for his color studies embodied in paintings of geometric abstraction. Both faces feature sidelong composi…
Shadow of events
'Shadow Of Events is the third album by Oslo, Norway sound artist, producer and musician Alexander Rishaug, following his Asphodel CD Possible Landscape (2004) and 2001's Panorama on the Smalltown Supersound label. The album was recorded over a five year period and mixed in Berlin last year. Not unlike his previous albums but apparently more refined Shadow Of Events combines a warm and organic haunting quality blended with both abstract and concrete tones and subtle digital noises. 'Most …
Cover Versions
Andrew Pekler selected 300 different covers from second-hand records and, using colorful geometric elements to cover over all titles, performer’s names, and label logos, removed traces of the covers’ original contexts. The sunsets, couples in silhouette, alpine panoramas, roses on pianos, female faces in close-up, and seascapes no longer serve as the packaging for easy listening and exotica. Instead, the romantic, bizarre and intriguingly bland images of the original covers are free to lend thei…
The Godward Way
Daniel Higgs has always been held in the highest esteem by us here at Southern, becoming an almost totemic figure in the process. Certainly an appreciation for his work, and the canon of the band Lungfish, has been a job requirement for all the staff who've worked with us over the years. He has graced us with visits from time to time, and his London shows have always been must attend events for Southern alumni. Naturally, a Latitudes recording would be the jewel in the crown for our catal…
Disappearance
Pioneering electronic minimalist Taylor Deupree and revered Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto collaborate properly for the first time with the willowy ambient beauty of 'Disappearance'. They previously crossed paths when Deupree remixed a song from Sakamoto's 'Chasm' album in 2006, and since then they've reached a mutual appreciation for the themes of 'Isolation, solitude, contemplation' which perfuse the delicate structures of 'Disappearance'. Its initial ideas were sketched out during rehears…
End Line
Ottaven new LP issued in a tiny run of 100 copies only, a strong and puzzling mixture of tapes, electronics, varispeeding, and multiple exposures, carefully executed, with much precision and clarity. Flipping between noisily bristling electronic frequencies and blustery washes of oscillating tones, Ottaven sounds carefully programmed even in its most frentic moments, and offers several blasts abrasive enough to unclog the dirtiest pore.
A history of every one
'A History of Every One' by Bill Orcutt is an album of songs: minstrel songs, holiday songs, hymns, marches, cowboy songs, Disney songs, work songs, delta blues. The original tunes themselves are nothing special, well known, but not particularly well-regarded. Most would be filler on a mid-60's Doris Day or Burl Ives LP. What Orcutt does with them however is remarkable: expanding upon techniques developed on 2011's 'How the Thing Sings' and incorporating ideasforged since his recording of 'The S…
Relief
Our man Millis is a Climax Golden Twin and a noted curator of globe trotting / time traveling esoterica, amongst other accolades.ÊIn the former category, Millis and Jeffery Taylor steadily release some of the most headscratching amalgamations of avant-rock, decontextualized temple music, heightened-state minimalism, and collaged field recordings this side of the Sun City Girls (including the soundtrack to the cult film Session Nine); and in the latter, Millis has published a number of acclaimed …
Kogetsudai
Kogetsudai is Sylvain Chauveau's 10th album, the second in a trilogy initiated by Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) (2010), where the song structure is dismantled and reconstructed on the fringe of silence. Whereas Singular Forms found inspiration from Abstract Painting, Kogetsudai is influenced by Zen rock gardens found in Japan Ñ also the location where the album was conceived (for the most part) Ñ and from which the album borrows its title. Layers of minimal electronic sounds and filtered f…
Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989 - For Warne Marsh
"I would like to make a few notes and hopefully clear up a potential misunderstanding or two. Most importantly, no matter what you think about the original Tristano performances, this music is not "cool" – with feverish intensity, volcanic dynamics, explosive technique, aggressive attitudes ... there is an enormous amount of drama here, and none of it is sedate, reticent, or bloodless. Note the treacherously difficult heads on tunes like "Two Not One," "Dreams," "Lennie's Pennies," and "A…
Gongs of Cambodia and Laos
A compilation of gongs of ethnic minorities in Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri provinces of Cambodia and in Champasak and Attapeu provinces of Laos, recorded between 2003 and 2007, released for the first time on a double vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker at dubplates Berlin. Georges Condominas had released end of the 50s on the french label Ocora a vinyl containing recordings of gong ceremonies 'musiques Mnong gar du Vietnam', in between so much has happened and more than 50 years later it's tim…
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment
...of What My Love Could Be" EXCLUSIVE!! 2LP vinyl. This is ground zero for one of the 90s last true cult bands; now legendary for churning ghostly wailings, unearthly bellows, & gentle whispers together into one soaring, crawling, ugly & beautiful blend of brilliance. An essential listening for all fans of hard & heavy post-rock. Comes w/ 12x12 insert. Don't sleep on this!
Ablation
Welcome return for Robert Hampson with the first Main album in seven years, new on eMego. Hampson founded Main with Scott Dawson upon disbanding Loop in '94, and while their initial releases still bore traces of their space-rock origins, the goal was always total ecstatic abstraction, and by the time of the Hz series, completed in '96, they'd pretty much achieved it. Main's music has been called many things: industrial, noise, isolationist electronica, dub, drone; the truth it, it's all a…
Lifespans
Lifespans is a mesmerizing and hallucinating piece of electronic music. Listen to it at a fairly loud volume, or with headphones, and you will hear myriads of voices and melodies, never repeating themselves
These Are The Good Times
The Vittelli label announces itself with this fine release of London’s highlife, lowlife, wildlife and everday life plucked from Ian Rawes’ vast London Sound Survey. At his day job at the British Library sound archive Rawes cut his teeth in archiving and explored its depths. Field recordings and studies by acoustic ecologists came to his attention around the same time that he was looking to create his own capital-based project. At this time the internet promised to be the great equaliser a…
Inoculate ?
Instability between sound and silence, between stagnation and air pressure; or else digital phantoms, remanences of what has not occurred - and the live electronics that sculpt this matter. Instruments increased to excess or, to the contrary, reduced to the flimsiest breath, distorted and exploited by themselves as much as by the teeming immobility of the dancer, body to hear. A slowness always in imbalance with abrupt accelerations, a stasis filled with electricity, a wall of sound.
Penpals Forever And Ever
Expanding Erik Skodvin's extremely limited 2008 cassette edition Penpals Forever, this vinyl release remasters the original content and adds a whole extra side's worth of new material, all of which is exclusive to the LP. You wouldn't necessarily discern this straight away from the Deaf Center member's elusive and teasingly enigmatic music, but apparently 'Penpals Forever And Ever' is an "imaginary tale of a long dead baroque painter and his telekinetic correspondence with a flightless b…
Era
"Era is the fourth annual report from Chicago powerhouse quartet Disappears. It was formed during the gloom of the Chicago winter at Electrical Audio by now regular foil John Congleton. Insular and dark, the album sees the band further refining their love of dub, minimalism and repetition into their most original and stark set yet. It harks back to the early 80's post punk period, when almost anything seemed possible with the classic two guitar, bass and drums lineup, and exploration and…
Bitter Suites
Deluxe repress edition of this incredible masterpiece made out of two live performances of the U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble recorded in 1979 at The Showing Room in NYC and at Helen Shlien Gallery in Boston. The Ensemble performs playing large sheets of metal and producing amazingly droning sounds. These live recordings are the result of an evolutionary refinement of instrumental design and playing techniques which Robert Rutman explored and develped after a ten year period of practice. He inv…