New Arrivals
Dums Will Survive
RFTO Bandwagon have just released their first full-length LP entitled Dums Will Survive on Dull Knife Records this month. Coming latently on the heels of their excellent New Jack 7" on the same imprint from last spring, RFTO Bandwagon continue with their mark of gritty folk-pop, and often sway into the weirdo territory of the genre with songs the grip the edges of so many sounds, and yet stay held together with beautifully frayed strands of brilliant songwriting. The title track on the a-side (t…
Ancestral star
Finally reprinted...Returning with a brand new album of arid, dustbowl blues and slow-motion desert-scapes, Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras resume duties as Barn Owl for a third album. Previously this band has tended to court associations with the sound developed by Earth for their Hex album; the overall effect is resolutely bleak and doom-laden, yet not entirely without some grounding in the language of grassroots Americana. Ancestral Star takes the Barn Owl sound to a new level of refinement, spe…
BloodLinks + SacredPlaces
Poet Laureate of East St. Louis+founder/editor of internationally acclaimed journal "Drum Voices Revue". Principal architect of black cultural arts movement of the 60s, teacher & acclaimed writer of countless volumes of poetry, Redmond has been called "the preacher of poetic rhythm" by Maya Angelou, "a carver of high song magic" by Quincy Troupe & "a worker & healer" by Ishmael Reed. On this spirited, funky, streetwise collection of 12 vintage cuts recorded live in the studio in Sacramento in 19…
Heaps of nothing
The second album from Australian band Naked On The Vague, who have doubled in size for this batch of new material. The tone is characterised by dark and fearsomely heavy garage-punk, with a wafer-thin coating of distortion lending a little extra bite to the band's already vicious dynamics. "Bleak, unrepentant, withering and droll, Heaps of Nothing is a 21st century codification of the gallows wit and mesmerizing otherworldliness of (Dub Housing-era) Pere Ubu, Primitive Calculators and L…
The outer darkness
"Our third volume of Sun Ra spoken word opens with a rare space story that I discovered on an unmarked five inch reel of tape. When I played the recording, I discovered an incredible story recited by an unknown artist, with Sun Ra going beyond the call of duty on keyboard. Included are two complete lengthy performances from this 1967 session.... The group recitation, 'The Outer Darkness,' is a reworking of the poem 'I Seek A Better World' originally recited by Ray Stubbs on the first volume.... …
Black Summit
Strictly limited to 400 copies only, already sold out at source* Garden Söund is the rewarding collaboration of two hugely respected outfits: Barn Owl and Eternal Tapestry. Word of the album has spread like wildfire on a vast midwest plain, hence all 400 copies are sold out at source. 'Black Summit' finds the commonalities in Barn Owl's epic desert scapes and the crushingly potent psychedelia of Jed Bindeman's Eternal Tapestry with immeasurable success. The two characters stalk moonlit ca…
Double Demon
What mischief can be made with just cornet, vibraphone and drums. Rob Mazurek has scaled back considerably since Stars Have Shapes, the 2010 record from his Exploding Star Orchestra. His new project, the curiously named Starlicker, is a mere trio, with Chicago vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and Tortoise drummer John Herndon. But this group emits more sound and energy than do some sextets. Double Demon is Out to Lunch! for a new generation. Powered by Herndon’s hyperkinet…
Traba
"Following the blurry shoegaze ambience of his revelatory 'Navigare' LP for Miasmah, former Slowdive drummer Simon Scott applies his melancholy treatments to four tracks of widescreen, textured ambience for Chicago's Immune label. 'Traba' is distinguished from his debut by a swirling aquatic theme embedded in the titles and the nautical nature of the recordings. The mass of 'She Came From The Sea' is flooded with slow moving currents of darkness while at the surface we can hear lighter, m…
Decaying ships
The road is long, sweaty and tense when your shoes are made of metal and you have to walk through a labyrinth with a magnetic floor to reach a brown sea full of hungry lobsters. The ship is waiting though, and the tension is building up heavily with every spin of this record, heavy meditative aircraft static blurr slowing down your usual codeine rhythm! modular synth carpets at its nastiest! you'll be purring when you're on the actual boat.. thick like your mommy's wallet, yet sparse droning tha…
Man Leaving Harbour On a Ship (In a Room)
** Private edition, only a handful available. ** Man Leaving Harbour On a Ship (In a Room) is the title of a sound installation (for record player, vinyl record, speakers, found photograph, steel wires) by Vittorio Santoro to be presented in June 2010 at La BF15 Contemporary Art Space in Lyon. For the art installation of this sound piece, side A of the LP record (titled 'Commencement') is played over and over for a whole day. The organizers will take care that the side B (titled 'Conclusion') is…
Home
Home is a collection of folk songs recorded at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008. Recorded in various places in various parts of the world, it is an album about finding a home. Written, performed, recorded, and produced by Peter himself and mixed with his good friend and sound wizard from Efterklang, Mads Brauer.
Third Mouth
British avant pop artist Alexander Tucker releases his much anticipated new album, Third Mouth, on Thrill Jockey in 2012. This album builds on the strengths revealed by his landmark debut for the label, Dorwytch released in April 2011, culminating in his finest work to date. Using songs written over a 12 month period he achieves his own inimitable blend of psych rock and ambient pop using a variety of studio crafted effects, rudimentary beats, guitar and bass, as well as synth and cello drone…
Built For Nothing
"Suburban Michigan is a breeding ground where every weirdo has a label, a band, and a handful of secret/under the radar collaborative projects. Here Graveyard's Ben Hall and Lambsbread's Zac Davis create a monolithic one-sider influenced by too many private press jazz records and abstract instrumentalism. Davis turns in his effect pedals for nothing; pure clean tones plucked up and down scales and bridges so uniquely that it is easy to confuse the guitar for a sax. Ben Hall drums like a man with…
Vadelma/Hawaii
Surprisingly good free jazz from this Finnish combo. Very organic sound, there's something unique about them. "One of the hottest shows of recent memory was seeing this burning-free ecstatic force in TAMPERE back in 2008. One of those nights where you just feel that you are beyond this planet's laws of nature and in a world you did not know existed. Now the other foot has dropped, and what seemed impossible now can be held on this beautiful LP. Side Vadelma recorded January 26 in Helsinki. Side…
(Fake) The Facts
After the runaway success of the Akita/Gustafsson/O'Rourke LP One Bird Two Bird (DEMEGO 016LP), Swedish sax legend Mats Gustafsson returns to Editions Mego with another storming collaboration. Now a resident of Vienna, he teamed up with experimental artists dieb13 and Martin Siewert for a live and studio session. (Fake) The Facts is the result. A dense fog of sound comes from all directions, but whereas the general impetus is a full-on attack, the trio finds enough restraint to create a deepe…
The sacrifice for the music became our lifestyle
Chris Abrahams, upright piano. Kai Fagaschinski, b-flat clarinet. Cover painting & sleeve design by Zev Langer. How do you run a duo when both of its protagonists are living at two opposite ends of the planet ? Well, it's not that dramatic. For many years Chris has used his European tours as a springboard for extended stays in Kai's hometown of choice, Berlin. After appreciating each other's work for quite a while they began collaborating at a friend's piano-armed kitchen in 2007. While C…
Whisper Not / The Wrong Holiday
This latest release on the excellent Forced Nostalgia imprint is by some distance its most illuminating release to date - a split LP that features an astonishing rediscovery from the early 1980's synth-pop era. That album is 'Whisper Not' by Vazz - a duo consisting of Anna Howson & Hugh Small, and is redolent of so much classic, deeply cherished music from around the same period (think Crépuscules, Antena, early Cocteau Twins on the one hand, and The Cure's 'Seventeen Seconds' on the othe…
When California Falls Into the Sea
The product of more than a year's work, finds Caminiti shifting away from the evocation of the land elements and towards the urban- the coarseness of blood on the streets and people living in squalor juxtaposed with beautiful, fleeting moments like sun reflecting off of glass buildings into dingy puddles- to produce a dialogue where guitars float through the air weightlessly, weaving around each other like butterflies and other moments that are more solitary, monolithic excursions into the night…
The Labyrinth Scored For Eleven Different Cats
The legendary American artist Terry Fox is known for his pioneering work in performance, sculpture, drawing and installation. Throughout his career, Fox (who died in Cologne in 2008), focused on sound as a fundamental artistic material. Many of his most important sound works were realized long before terms such as "sound art" or "audio art" became widely known.This recording, The Labyrinth Scored for 11 Cats (1977), is now recognized as an early classic of the audio art genre. It is one of Fox's…
Split LP
Delving into the realm of deep listening, transported by way of analog synthesizers, Family Battle Snake weaves an electronic web that cocoons the listener in warm cascading frequencies. Calls to mind classic electronic composers such as Charles Dodge, Charles Wourinen and even a hint of NWW. Family Battle Snake is Bill Kouligas, a London-based Greek who also performs and records with Sudden Infant. Astro is Hiroshi Hasegawa of the legendary and now defunct Japanese noise unit C.C.C.C. Sonic wav…