New Arrivals
Identity Picks
"Over the last decade, Burlington, Vermont songwriter/producer Ryan Power has tirelessly embarked on the quest to write the definitive song based music, full of accuracy, refinement, deliberation, and perfectly-placed shifting harmonic puzzles. Ryan's latest Identity Picks for NNA Tapes is an eight track song cycle that dances through lush jazz pads, aquatic smooth jazz funk styles, and the sensitive side of progressive rock. These songs are long, shifting compositions, slowly unfolding an…
Assimilating The Shadow
In the time since Ricardo Donoso delivered his debut album Progress Chance, he's been pursuing his take on morning music even further. Informed by deep house, slowed-down trance and club influences, this new album unfolds to reveal elaborate sonic labyrinths that emerge out of the burning embers of dance music. Assimilating the Shadow has been designed to be consumed at sunrise, at the party's end. It assembles dark, carefully-considered sequences layered in a way that seems on first list…
Jealous Heart
Mark Templeton presents Jealous Heart, an album which re-imagines the story of his sound in an approach that is both staid and deeply emotional, reorienting what is offered and what is held back through a myriad of smeared stringed instruments, fragmented horn phrases, tape loops, and found-sound-driven explorations. Templeton's music is always difficult to truly classify, which is part of its charm. It is way too dense and detailed to qualify as ambient in a traditional sense -- instead …
Tape-Recordings 1981-82
Olaf Schirm alias Symboter is a berlin-born electronic artist and musician. In the late 70s he lived in Munich. At that time he got Inspired by early Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk and other international computer music avantgarde artists. He used commercial synthesizers imported from Japan and his gigantic custom-built Symboter Modular System.
As technician of Gershon Kingsley ("Popcorn", "I feel love" sequence) he was able to use his Moog Modular System in many of his own songs andf…
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…
The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group
The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group is a spice-hunting collective formed in Rotterdam in the summer of 2012, when multi-media cultural center The Worm graciously opened their world-class synthesizer studio to the current incarnation of Sun Araw Band. Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw, Magic Lantern), M. Geddes Gengras , Tony Lowe (CEO Raw Tings), and Butchy Fuego (San Gabriel, Boredoms) spent a week amidst Syrinx, Serge, and Surinamese victuals, tracking the self-titled double album live to two-trac…
Temple
'Temple' is the final installment in Jan Jelinek's series of four vinyl compilations that bring together the wide variety of his music: commissioned works, live recordings, collaborations with other musicians as well as unreleased material from the last five years. Temple stems from a collaboration with French-Canadian choreographer Sylvain Émard. Temple is a re-worked excerpt of the music for the dance piece Fragments – Volume I and is a 10 minute drone work that builds from nothing more than a…
In St Cuthbert's Time
The Sounds of Lindisfarne and the Gospels. To celebrate the exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels at Durham Cathedral from July to September 2013, awardÐwinning wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson has researched the sonic environment of the Holy Island as it might have been experienced by St Cuthbert in 700 A.D. 'A 7th Century Soundscape of Lindisfarne. Throughout human history artists have been influenced by their surroundings and the sounds of the landscape they inhabit. When Eadfrith, the B…
Live from Festival au Desert, Timbuktu
Two days before the 2012 rebellion in northern Mali. Soldiers are everywhere. Guns mounted on pickups; low-flying surveillance planes. Several thousand people have gathered outside Timbuktu to celebrate the music and culture of the Sahara at the 12th edition of the Festival au Desert. Three months later, Sharia descends on northern Mali. A millennial history is suppressed. Shrines destroyed. Secular music banned. Before, the streets were alive with music. Weddings, baptisms, celebrations …
Kenzo Deluxe
Guitarist Chris Forsyth is a unique voice in the realm of American music, having emerged from the challenging free form expressionism of his old group Peeesseye with a lyrical command rare in any genre. His newest work brings his trademark lyricism to new heights in his most straightforward setting yet. Gone are the fleshed out rock band arrangements of last year’s Paranoid Cat LP, replaced on Kenzo Deluxe, by Forsyth shunning overdubs and playing his transcendent songs alone in a room on his el…
In Sirenis
A deluxe edition LP, documenting and salvaging the sonic particularities of the Ravenna harbour."By “noise” we mean all the sounds that surround us every day, but the idea of an uncontaminated natural landscape, or of a singular sound event isolated from the context is impossible to realize and undeniably limiting. The artificial is now an integral part of contemporary sound and image landscape, sometimes almost a synonym thereof.In Ravenna harbour area, largely industrialized spaces intermingle…
Tbriz
Reinhold Friedl, inside-piano, prepared piano, piano. Hannes Strobl, electric bass guitar, electric upright bass, electronics. Hayden Chisholm, alto saxophone. Composed and produced by Hannes Strobl and Reinhold Friedl, Berlin 2008 - 2013. P.O.P. (Psychology of Perception) Which sounds are similar to each other, which different, which repeated, which varied, which altered? Instrumentally played repetitions, digital repetitions in the effect path of the electric bass, repetitions in another posit…
Don't tell the driver
Finally, after 15 years, Big Mick Turner has turned in the big rock record we always knew he had in him. Yeah, Don't Tell the Driver is a different kind of record from all the Mick Turner records -- not just his own, but the ones he's done with Dirty Three, Bonny Billy, Cat Power, Fungus Brains, and Venom P. Stinger put together. So, what's so different about Don't Tell the Driver anyway? Well, Mick grew a mustache for this one. That must mean it's his Sgt. Pepper; a consolidation and developmen…
Graft
Graft is an album by Japanese noise master Masami Akita aka Merzbow. This LP album is pressed on lime-green vinyl in a "bootleg"-style sleeve and sealed with a sticker. Limited to 300 regular copies. According to the Merzbow blog, the design was inspired by a '70s Jethro Tull bootleg called My God, and the recording was inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. Recorded in November 2009 at Munemi House, Tokyo.
2nd Wave
In a fair and reasonable world, Roland Haynes would have compelled more attention than he did when his jazz-funk record 2nd Wave appeared on Black Jazz in the mid-1970s. Not to say the keyboardist was totally neglected back then, but he and other plugged-in pianists of his stylistic inclination (such as label-mate Doug Carn, Hampton Hawes, Don Grolnick, Larry Willis, and Gordon Beck) existed in the deep shadow cast by jazzman-turned-jazz-funk powerhouse Herbie Hancock, whose records with the H…
94diskont
The extremely influential 1995 classic album from Oval is finally re-issued on vinyl. Freshly cut to vinyl by Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering the two LPs are pressed on orange vinyl and packaged in a jacket replicating the original. LP1 is the album, LP2 is a 12" featuring remixes from Jim O'Rourke, Scanner, Mouse on Mars, and Christian Vogel. Included for the first time is a free download coupon. Limited to 1,500 units worldwide."
Scales
*Orange Vinyl* Like a would-be soundtrack to some forgotten Wagnerian saga, Mythical Beast's debut full-length unleashes sonic elements akin to trudging minions in an epic struggle for tonal supremacy. This bloodless battle is for hearts and minds though, and is shot through with majesty and pathos. It's no wonder that a trio commanding this type of simple yet nuanced compositional energy would risk life and limb crossing the New Orleans "security" perimeter one month post-Katrina to rescue thei…
Solitaire
Beautifully presented reissue of classic archival electroacoustic works, within "Warszawa-Oslo" project, a recollection, phonographic documentation and reactivation of bonds between Polish and Norwegian electro-acoustic music, presentation of their individual character and unquestionable significance on the international scale. This beautifully designed set (with extensive booklet of note) collects some of the most exciting, shimmering and crystalline electronic sounds to be unearthed in quite a…
A big circle drawn with little hands
A big circle drawn with little hands was created from a box of things sent to Steve Roden by label owner Sylvian, who runs the ini itu label. the box contained everything from newspapers, coins, wooden toys, pamphlets, plastic objects, plastic bags, broken airline headphones, notes, a bottle opener, a noise maker of wood, a small electronic toy shaped like a butterfly that offered tones and animal noises, cardboard, a fan, and other things. i also used a banjo in the first track, and my voice in…
Abisso
Close your eyes. You may think Satan is singing. Open them: you’ll see a small masked woman, with dreadlocks down the her ankles, and without vocal effects. Close your eyes again: you’ll think of a heavy metal double kick drum set. Open them again: a gigantic, wrestling masked man is torturino a floor tom, a snare and a cymbal, standing up, no kick. Two people, half gear, enough to bring Hell.This is OvO. What they do is not easy to file. Not noise, not metal, not doom, not punk, not rock and ro…