New Arrivals
Arf Arf
The Australian sound poetry / film-maker / artist group ARF ARF consists of Marisa Stirpe, Frank Lovece, Michael Buckley and Marcus Bergner. Between 1985 and 2000 they produced and mounted hundreds of live performances in Australia and Europe. Their film 'Thread of Voice' (featuring Bob Cobbing / Konkrete Canticle) has been shown widely including at The Serpentine Gallery (London), The Pompidou Centre (Paris), Arsenal Kino (Berlin), Millennium (New York) and at the Museum of Modern Art in…
Brokeback And The Black Rock
In the fall of 2010, when Douglas McCombs convened a new version of the band, Brokeback hadn't played a live show for more than two years and had not recorded any new music for eight. The band, a long-running side project for Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day's Douglas McCombs, had stiffened up, sometimes getting lost in a welter of meticulously constructed electronics. McCombs's idea was not to start over, exactly, but to start fresh, approaching similar harmonic content from a different directio…
The New Dark Age of Love
The past two years have found Austin’s Lone State dark lord Xander Harris (aka Justin Sweatt) on a heavy transfigurative trip, overhauling his live rig, detouring through an expansive soundtrack project celebrating the 20th anniversary of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, touring outside Texas (from New Orleans to the Netherlands), plus a host of other inner life turmoils and metamorphoses. All of which seems to have seeped into the synthesizer soil of his stunning second full-length, The New Dark A…
Palimpsest
It’s no secret how much we’ve loved Stephan Mathieu’s sublime drones and Sylvain Chauveau’s delicate compositions in the past, so to see these two pillars of experimental music collaborating has got us hot under the collar. But that’s not the half of it – not only did the two decide to work together, they had a very specific concept - ‘Palimpsest’ finds the duo reframing the timeless songs of Bill Callahan (aka Smog). Those familiar with Callahan’s writing might struggle to work out just how two…
Mauricio Kagel Ludwig van
Mauricio Kagel’s 1970s film Ludwig Van, a rather critical piece of avant-garde cinema, asked pointed questions about the ways in which later audiences appropriate and interprete Beethoven’s music. Pianist F. Blondy and turntablist DJ LENAR reclaim and reinterpret the soundtrack in this post-modern mashup that includes source material such as Herzog soundtracks, a lecture by Alfred Cortot, samples of string playing and percussion from contemporary improvisation records, and numerous other …
Protoplasm
Hand-stamped edition of 500 copies** Blackest Ever Black present recordings of Black Rain's riveting performance at Corsica Studios in October 2012. It's the first release by Stuart Argabright (Ike Yard/Death Comet Crew) since BEB compiled and reissued their seminal cyberpunk missive 'Now I'm Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95' on LP, and offers a murky glimpse of what to expect from the Black Rain album due in early 2014. There are few others who do this sound with such authenticity and …
Afro Noise I (Volume 4)
Dirter Promotions presents another volume of Cut Hands material, containing reworked and remastered versions of some tracks from his Afro-noise project. Comes in a beautiful special edition on 180 gram vinyl mastered by Noel Summerville and featuring the magical vévé artwork of Mimsy DeBlois, in a one-off pressing of 750 copies. The entire 750-limited pressings of Volume 1 and Volume 2 sold out on release day, so don't miss these! A reclamation of the conscious through 16 pieces (split betwe…
Kitchen
Kevin Drumm is a musician not only known as a one-man-orchestra exploring the boundaries of music, but also a star under the banner of inestimable Bocian Records label. This time we were granted with access to his kitchen. The LP is limited to 34 minutes, consisting of 2 pieces, originally recorded in 1996 yet fully remastered in 2012. Side one piece slowly opens a kitchen door. Smooth, equilibrious and loopy sound fractions that surpass those requirements ambient music is bound to meet. F…
Sung In Broken Symmetry
Describing the music of Aquarelle's Ryan Potts is a difficult task indeed. It's related to the hazy, heavily treated output of musicians such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, but one would be remiss to locate it solely within the realm of electronic ambient or drone, as there are often strong organic, rhythmic and composerly elements to Potts' work. In fact, the title of his last record, Slow Circles, might offer the best point of access into the Aquarelle aesthetic, in which compositional trop…
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
The Further The Flame, The Worse It Burns Me Greek Folk Music
Early 20th century recordings from the great Greek singer Marika Papagika – recordings made for Columbia Records in NYC between 1919 and 1929! Beautiful material that quite easily could have gone lost to the world over the long, long years – very few photos of Marika are even known to exist! The sound is still wonderful, and it's put together in a great vinyl release by Mississippi! It comes with a lovely folder of notes, a bit of a nod to classic Folkways releases. Titles include "H…
A Crack-Up at the Race Riots
"'It's about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice. I wanted to write the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel.' -- Harmony Korine, addressing a national television audience, 10/17/97. Back in print from Harmony Korine, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots was originally published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998. Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in …
Berlin
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Chris Heenan, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet. Alexander Frangenheim, double bass. Ofer Bymel, percussion. Recorded 2010 in Berlin.
El Acero del Partido/Heroe del Trabajo
Limited vinyl reissue of the first LP from Spanish industrial band Esplendor Geométrico. An industrial classic originally released in 1982 on the Tic Tac label, Esplendor Geométrico's sound was already devoid of aggressive lyrics and even titles for their tracks (the A-side, El Acero del Partidio, is spread across five tracks while the B-side, Héroe Del Trabajo, has three tracks). Their sound had already begun to acquire a personality of its own, not fully mature but with an astounding aus…
How To Get Out Of The Cage
From 1982 to 1992 Frank Scheffer worked with John Cage on many different occasions, which resulted in a unique archive of historical audio-visual material. Based on this unique archive, including interviews, musical performances and images of different locations related to his life and work—filmed on 16mm—the filmmaker Scheffer created How to Get Out of the Cage—A Year with John Cage. Frank Scheffer wrote: "The famous artist Marina Abramovic introduced me to John Cage. She thought it woul…
Broken iteration
The Japanese percussion player who lives in Europe has three fields of interest: 1, non-idiomatic improvisation (that includes idiomatic researches about it, or workshops on it). 2, electro acoustic composition. 3, plural disciplinary collaboration (with words, images, body movements etc) and it would seem to me that these four pieces here are a combination of 1 and 2. [] Murayama's playing is very minimal and we do recognize indeed the element of percussion instruments, and Murayama explores hi…
Broselmaschine II
"Second chapter on the Bröselmaschine saga after a four-year hiatus. The band's second incarnation came to life in 1975, when Peter Bursch reformed the group together with old member Willi Kissmer and new recruit, Klaus Dapper (flute, sax, tuba). Helped by such honorable guests as Mani Neumeier and Roland Schaeffer (from Guru Guru) or Jan Fride from Kraan, their 1976 album was a solid session of progressive folk, very different than its predecessor but also with an atypically hypnotic and…
Delicate Tension
Personal Injury is pleased to present R. Stevie Moore’s classic 2nd album Delicate Tension, originally released by Stevie’s uncle on HP Music in 1978. Delicate Tension is regarded as an absolute highlight of RSM’s massive discography and was featured as one of his six most “essential” albums in The WIRE’s recent cover article. Reissued for the first time on vinyl in an exact-repro sleeve and mastered from a digital transfer off the original analog reels. - His first LP made in New York. Along wi…
Lava
"Lava is a wonderfully apt title for this duet between Liudas Mockunas on soprano, tenor and bass saxophones and Barry Guy on bass. The music was recorded live at Kaunas Artists House Concert Hall in Lithuania on the 2nd of April, 2011, and released in a limited edition run of 300 vinyl LP's. Lava is the appropriate name for this music as it flows slowly and inexorably forward. Guy is a rock solid bassist who is a stalwart on the avant jazz and classical scene in Europe, and his skills ar…
ACE 26,250'/11 DEGREES 22.4'N 142 DEGREES 35.5'E
The audio on this LP was inspired by early efforts to explore extreme locations on earth, and the clash between the will of humans, the limits of their bodies, and the immutable laws of the natural world - the latter which can easily destroy both of the first two. The 11° 22.4'N 142° 35.5'E side is based on the 1960 dive by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in the bathyscaphe Trieste to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on earth. This side aims to mirror the …