Fantastic new limited edition cassette album from James Ferraro that works as both a departure from and a consolidation of the most recent arc of his work, with a series of meditations on American concepts of heroism and freedom as refracted via MTV, Hollywood and various black magic marketing strategies. The first side starts off with an unexpected slow avant blues guitar piece that picks up organ and synth to sound uncannily like early Charalambides before breaking into an electric boogie that serves to conflate notions of authentic outlaw forms and clichéd rebel shorthand while sounding totally fucked up. The flip is even better, with the first long track coming across like an Afrodelic take on Scottish folk drones, with what sounds like orchestras of haunting bagpipe melody repeated to the point of satori. Throw in a ton of incidental CSI-styled bliss/synth moves and you got another classic, one-off shot from Ferraro. Comes in full colour pro-printed sleeves. Highly recommended.

Fantastic limited edition vinyl pressing of what was originally a limited self-released CD-R from this new sci-fi synth project of James Ferraro of The Skaters et al, with 1980s minimal wave moves bisected by the kinda keyboard patterns you might've found on an Edgar Froese solo album or post-Body Love Klaus Schulze and exploded with barbarous invocations, syruped-vocals and some black drone atmospherics. Or, as the cover art suggests, urban landscapes as visioned by showroom dummies illuminated under 3 am neon. This is a fantastic LP with a look and feel of the most cracked weirdo private press release. Completely re-mastered and with a bonus unreleased track. Super desirable, edition of 425 copies and already completely sold out at source. Highly recommended.

New limited edition album from James Ferraro’s magick partner Labanna Bly aka P.A.R.A., on Ferraro’s own New Age Discs. Whereas James’s power-visions are drawn from irradiated post-Terminator arcade game imagery and trashy 1980s mainstream culture given powerful alchemical treatments, P.A.R.A.s work is sourced more in established occult practice, with polymorphic goddess identities channeled via intense vocal excitations and primitive mantras. This one has a more zone ESP-Disk feel, with overdubbed vocal chants, bell tones, keyboard drones and a heavy Bobby Beausoleil/Angus MacLise/Joyous Lake-style atmosphere all siphoned through the patented New Age label aesthetic. Uniquely transporting and highly recommended.

New limited edition album from James Ferraro’s magick partner Labanna Bly aka P.A.R.A., on Ferraro’s own New Age Discs. Whereas James’s power-visions are drawn from irradiated post-Terminator arcade game imagery and trashy 1980s mainstream culture given powerful alchemical treatments, P.A.R.A.s work is sourced more in established occult practice, with polymorphic goddess identities channeled via intense vocal excitations and primitive mantras. This is the most overtly ritualistic of her new releases, starting with an evocation of elemental female power via the chanting of Goddess names before dissolving into bell tones, haunting vocal cries and wiped-out tape drone. Highly recommended.

New limited edition album from James Ferraro’s magick partner Labanna Bly aka P.A.R.A., on Ferraro’s own New Age Discs. Whereas James’s power-visions are drawn from irradiated post-Terminator arcade game imagery and trashy 1980s mainstream culture given powerful alchemical treatments, P.A.R.A.s work is sourced more in established occult practice, with polymorphic goddess identities channeled via intense vocal excitations and primitive mantras. The murky, lo-fi feel of the recordings seems to function as a scrying mirror that facilitates the unlocking of repressed personas with the result that at points it sounds like Labanna is duetting with multiple incarnations of herself, as loop after loop of fourth world chant, tape junk and drums work to disorientate you completely. There are aspects of Meredith Monk, Cameron, Fursaxa, the hysterical cinema of Kenneth Anger and Ira Cohen… all filtered through the uniquely brain-erasing, Angus MacLise-to-the-nth-degree New Age label aesthetic. Fantastic and highly recommended.

Vinyl upgrade for what was originally a self-released Europe-only CD-R from James Ferraro of The Skaters/Lamborghini Crystal et al. Discovery is packaged as a companion volume to Clear and feels like an extension of the modes first extrapolated there, with hypnotic rhythms driving crystal-complex keyboard patterns through endlessly reflective hall-of-mirrors style sonic environs. The album becomes progressively denser as we approach the second half, with what could almost be a backwards re-staging of Faust’s “Krautrock” fed slowly into the nearest wormhole. Another monster. Comes with a free MP3 download. Highly recommended.

First of two new limited self-released CD-Rs in hand-sewn full-colour paper packages from Labanna Bly, James Ferraro’s partner in magick, released on Ferraro’s own New Age imprint. Sounding like a more infernal Fursaxa, Bly uses crude, foggy loops and barbarous mantras to generate a thick, transformative atmosphere where shadows of drones seem populated by all sorts of nocturnal wildlife. The atmosphere is heavily ritualistsic, with the feel of the best of the Kenneth Anger soundtracks and MacLise’s Thunderbolt Pagoda jam given a massive injection of heavy feminine energy.

Great looking, fully re-mastered vinyl edition of what was originally a Europe-only cassette released in an edition of 80 copies from the solo project of Spencer Clark of The Skaters/Vodka Soap/Monopoly Child et al. Spencer describes Black Joker as being more drone-focused and with faster percussion than the recent Monopoly Child sets. Indeed, the percussion is thrifty and up-front, with arcs of criss-crossing time signatures generating maximum space/time confusion.  The combination of trance-informed momentum and bubbling electronic sci-fi tones sounds closest to one of the Sun Ra Arkestra’s most future-visioned takes on “Ancient Aethiopia” while expanding on the classic post-Angus MacLise feel of all of the best Skaters material. Comes with pro-printed 80s style 12” maxi-sleeves with liner notes by Fortean authority, itinerant visionary and Skaters road mangler in-absentia Charles Berlitz. ”…the drifting of desert sand sculptures appearing within crystaline miraged mountains during a cycle in which the gleaming of sand star sparkled night is blown, floating towards dawn, as the racing of the camels amongst the sunbound mirages expend dimensions of presentation for these sculptures, which, as wind diminishes and returns, a sand is cast to represent the variety of dimensions interacted : as symbold vision, where the atmosphered wind senses the stars amongst the sand, the camel within the mirage, and the mediation of an experiences whole motion of interaction...” Recommended.

New edition of 400 double LP from James Ferraro that presents one of his most ambitious Dystopian TV futures by assembling a suite of movie soundtrack themes, electro keyboard rites and surveillance fantasies, complete with artwork that conflates 1980s breakout blockbusters with contemporary military technology and the spectacularisation of war as an arcade game. Citrac bundles a new album of recordings with the previously released Postremo Mundus Techno-Symposium and excerpts and alternative edits from another self-released CD-R, Liquid Metal’s Alternative Soundtrack To Digital Overdrive. The track titles take the whole sick city/dystopian cheeseburger USA vibe to a whole other level – “Computer Chipped Police”, “Surveillance ”, “Public Execution Of A No Mark”, “Gates Surrounding Control Tower” – while the sonics combine bass guitar, thunder cracks, Nazi-fied marching songs, triumphant horns, video game asteroid explosions, tape-warped muscleman grunts and meathead vocal chants. The effect is as horrifying and confusing as the post-microwave culture that James both worships and abhors and this is some of the most startling black nightmare psychedelia of his career. Comes with two full colour inner sleeves with new art by James. Highly recommended.

Third installment in a new series of releases from Ferraro, part of his Summer Headrush 2009 Series vision. Inspired by “Visualisations that came to mind while receiving self-induced hypocapnia or as it’s commonly called ‘free fall’, the albums being representative of the free fall head space.” Body Fusion 1 presents a themed suite with track titles like "Shemale", "Pregnant Air", "Angel Alien" and "Species Within" that takes off in Multitopia's transformative worlds-within-worlds style. Cut-up throughout with pitch-shift sonic reassignments of she-males and transvestite phone sex lines that promise "fantasy fulfilment 24/7" the music feels like an attempt to mint a form of holy/devotional reverie directed towards the celebration of the gatekeepers of the most primal, transformational sexual urges, with lap-dancing clubs, peep shows, strip bars and chatlines re-imagined as temples to the lifeforce. Featuring some of James's darkest transits, the music is built around huge organ drones that build to the kind of otherwordly ascensions of Popol Vuh's "Vuh" over which he drops in huge crashes of percussion and eerie music box melodies. Full colour covers too. Highly recommended.

Fourth installment in a new series of releases from Ferraro, part of his Summer Headrush 2009 Series vision. Inspired by “Visualisations that came to mind while receiving self-induced hypocapnia or as it’s commonly called ‘free fall’, the albums being representative of the free fall head space.” This second volume of Body Fusion continues the first's theme of body transformation, she-males and temples to the sex urge by combining massed keyboard drones, modal takes on 80s soundtrack melodies and disturbing, modulated phone sex voices where 1-800-Shemale callers are offered dial-in fantasises over ascensions of percussion, cartoon voices and fleets of orchestrated dogs (!?). Ferraro makes particularly profound use of samples of wordless vocals played on a keyboard, creating a form of sci-fi chorale that paralelles the themes of surgical transformation, hypnagogic implants and the desire to exceed and confuse the limits of the body in a form of human/alien communion. It genuinely sounds like nothing else. Titles include "Genitalia Eclipse", "Data Implant", "De Ja Vu Axis" and "Clown Fish Prayer". Full colour covers. Highly recommended.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. iAsia as in iPhone, iAsia presents a future-primitive vision of cyber Asia as broadcast via 107.7 XM Radio Mars, a Sublime Frequencies-style covert vision of a continent plugged into the grid and mutating via endlessly refracted and digitally morphed images of itself. Or if you’re a dumbo it’s a series of keyboard, loops and sample jams that sez future Bollywood = Multitopia. Melodies are devoured and reconfigured from around the world, further confusing the geographical focus as a digitized one world. There are hints of Ferraro’s Polynesian obsession on the second track, “Happy HD Bengal/Casino Neptune”, with tumbling percussive melodies and swells of synth while distant clouds of heavenly vocals bob on the horizon. The rest of the music is threaded with 80s-inflected modal melodies that might have soundtracked a Bollywood space cops drama that visioned 2012 as 1982 with more neon and a power synth backing. Some of Ferraro’s more dramatic Hypnagogic pop inventions.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Wild World is Edward Flex visits Multitopia, one of the bleakest and darkest of Ferraro’s recordings thus far, as he ties up fantasies of body modification and Hollywood stardom with terrible eschatological visions and cut-ups of recorded testimonies of members of the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicide cult on their hopes for a transport to heaven. His use of minimal musical fragments looped to infinity is at its most twisted and wrong, with obsessive vocal figures played out over leery keyboard parts and snippets of vocal that conflate plastic surgery with pre-lapsarian and post-UFO powers of transformation. There’s often a lurid, cartoon aspect to Ferraro’s amplification of the various desires that contemporary popular culture works as a cipher for but this one feels less technicolour and more desperate, charting the apocalyptic fantasies (via Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson) that find their apotheosis in California’s end-of-land culture through a series of black magical workings. Also features some of Ferraro’s most shredding 80s/90s metal guitar. An extremely heavy installment.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. One of the most minimal, spaced-out and transcendentally beautiful of Ferraro’s recent releases, Son Of Dracula is the sound of waves lapping at the furthest edges of space while someone on a distant planet plays a ghostly Hawaiian guitar and the stars twinkle in high-frequency song. Aspects of Scorces at their most translucent give way to a weird Sun Ra plays the incidental music to a Hall Of Mirrors scene from Scooby Doo feel and an incredible cover version of Elvis’s most spooked recording “Blue Moon” into a haunted, pitch-shift Elvis medley. The pink Cadillac on the front pretty much gives the game away. Totally bewitching.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Warning: Hacker Track™ is an eXtremely addictive cyber drug downloadable online into your brain. Hacker Track is a deprogramming/reprogramming tool created by Ferraro that uses auto-suggestion, hypnotism and sonic download technology in order to re-boot your mind. Hacker Track features some of Ferraro’s most obsessive loop constructs set within haunted laminal structures. The first piece is a murky fog of wave tones and modulated barbarous vocals that aims to by-pass the brain’s rational/language centers and effect complete organic/cyber communion. As the repeat-phrases become more alien and insistent the piece moves into a zone of ‘meaningless’ sound that works as an unsettling transport. The second piece deals in euphoric sonic boom stylings that somehow combine the wartime machinery of the David Jackman field recordings with triumphal organ tones and the expressway sounds of kundalini take-off.  A beautiful brain eraser.

Massive new limited edition LP on NNCK’s new imprint documenting a series of recordings from this ambitious American/European big band that unites Dave Nuss of The No-Neck Blues Band with Spencer Clark and James Ferraro of The Skaters alongside Jan Anderzen of Kemialliset Ystavat, Jonna from Kuupuu, Stellar Om Source, Mik Quantius from Embryo and Tiitus Petajaniemi and Jari Koho of Uton/Keijo. The whole entourage toured through Europe in the spring of 2007 and this LP collects the best of the jams. Three long tracks and one fragment, including two pieces recorded at VPRO Radio. The sound takes off from the kind of free goof blueprint of The Godz, with a lots of percussion and odd rhythmic dunting while The Skaters work lush keyboard parts and a wall of ululating vocal drone deep into the backdrop. Quantius supplies vocals that are somewhere between Don Van Vliet and Alan Bishop and the whole thing proceeds into this kind of weird ethno-zone where fragmented world rhythms and sounds are twisted to dark, psychotropic ends. But the real gravy is the side long fourth track, the most convincing update of the monochord bass/drum confusion of Skip Spence’s “Grey/Afro” ever improvised in real time, combining sublime vocal highs with a hypnotic bottom end. Highly recommended.

Limited vinyl reissue of one of James Ferraro’s greatest sides, Lamborghini Crystal’s 1992 Cool Runnings, now remastered and rebirthed as Grippers Nother Onesers’ At Slimer Beach. The LP is built around amazing disco/psych/drone/glam songs with high, high vox, gospelised choirs, repeat rhythms, jamming wah guitars and that beautiful, refracted-through-a-sea-of-fug sound that characterises all of his best work. Joyous, profoundly affecting and seemingly broadcast from a bedroom in the 1970s that still harbours the slowly decaying ghost of progressive disco/funk/glam dreams, the set runs from primitive NY Dolls-styled trash through full ensemble Aquarian musicals. Another singular release from this always confounding artist. Features Ghostbusters-tribute artwork and some naked snaps of our hero. Dedicated to Richard Ramirez..“It was formed by James Ferraro and it is the first release under this name (it is inspired by childhood memories of seeing holograms for the first time and hearing disco/rock music coming from other rooms around the house and from behind walls, I remember realizing the different shades/ and it felt mystical, and the images and sounds had employed psychic senses I had never used before, total ' disco breeze/sun reflecting on iridescent oil sunglasses,)” – James Ferraro. Edition of 450 copies.  Highly recommended. 

Edition of 450 copies vinyl reissue of a great cassette album from James Ferraro, originally released on Dreamtime Taped Sounds, a series of meditations on American concepts of heroism and freedom as refracted via MTV, Hollywood and various black magic marketing strategies. Starts off with an unexpected slow avant blues guitar piece that picks up organ and synth to sound uncannily like early Charalambides before breaking into an electric boogie that serves to conflate notions of authentic outlaw forms and clichéd rebel shorthand while sounding totally fucked up. Comes with an MP3 download coupon: “"THE ENERGY ENHANCED GLADIATOR WISHES TO MERGE AS ONE WITH HIS GIRL. HIS TONGUE RING GLOWS UNDERNEATH THE RENO MOON. HER SILVER SILENCE BEGS FOR HIS PLEASURE. HE CAN HEAR HER CALL DEEP WITHIN HIS BEING, AS THE DESERT CLOUDS ROLL ON OVER HIS METAL SLAVE. SHE SUBMITS TO BE PARKED AND THE SHADOW OF LOVE IS AMOUNG THEM. A BLACKTOP TUMBLE WEED ROLLS AROUND THE DRIED TAR ONLY A DREAM OF IT’S MASTER BLOWING IN THE WIND. FROM THE HAND OF THE GLADIATOR WHO NOW HUNTS FOR A DREAM, A FLAT SCREEN DREAM. A GROUP OF HUMANS PRESUMED LOST FOR THE LAST DECADE AND A HALF WERE FOUND ALIVE CAMPING OUT IN THE BACK RECESSES OF A COSTCO SUPER MARKET. AFTER BEING LOST DEEP INSIDE OF THE COSTCO BUILDING FOR WEEKS WITHOUT ANY OUTSIDE CONTACT, THEY FINALLY STARTED THE SETTLEMENT OF "NO FEAR". The front cover (JUDGE JUDYITE IN SODOM AND GOMORRAH) represents the programmed citizen and the process of it’s logical sequence as visible from the working creative inner ego of the program (the living human host’s perspective) in a snapshot form in the empty world created by the MODERN Gomorrah temple BEST BUY™ plaza center. The back cover represents the same idea but this one exhibits the inner head perspective of the "LIQUID ENERGY ENHANCED GLADIATOR IN THE DIGITAL COLOSSEUM A.G.* *After Google " – James Ferraro. Highly recommended.