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.

Much-anticipated new album from Richard, with prior word describing it as an "ecstatic house" LP. It's Richard's first ever all-synth album and yeah, it does use beats and gurgles and sudden rushes of electro-melody but its relationship to contemporary electronic is, ultimately, still fairly bent. The technology itself does make it sound like it's at least in dialogue with a buncha recent dance music, but it feels just as informed by the early rhythmic electronic music of Harmonia, Cluster and Asmus Tietchens. And it still somehow sounds like Richard, those epic, soaring melodies, a strange, melancholy undercurrent, the sometimes bizarre combinations of sounds and textures... Richard's catalogue is so diverse, so restless to never repeat itself, but there's an essential something, a 'Richard-ness' - ha - that is always present and this is great example of his alchemical powers. Highly recommended.

First completely solo album from Japanese folk spirit, gambler, actor, pin-up, painter and decadent poet Kazuki Tomokawa in 16 years. Consisting of just vocals and acoustic guitar, A Bumpkin’s Empty Bravado was recorded after an illness where Tomokawa was advised to temporarily give up drinking and smoking in order to save his life. Tomokawa is one of the great contemporary vocal stylists and the force and conviction of his delivery is so powerful that it effortlessly transcends the language barrier. His song-writing here is inspired, with melodies that sound a little like classic Dylan made a bit more elastic and given tougher phrasing. The bulk of the material feels like timeless folk-simple melodies re-birthed as vehicles for dark, surrealist violence and to counter the force of his striking vocal delivery he delivers some particularly tender guitar picking alongside this classic driving ballad style. Comes with a fold-out poster sleeve featuring art from Tomokawa and sleevenotes and lyrics in both English and Japanese. Highly recommended.

Another staggering job by 5MA: this beautiful 10” lathe from Loren Connors features one-side of  solo elegiac guitar exegesis and a heavier live set from Issue Project Room in Brooklyn in 2007. The packaging is superb, with the lathe housed inside an oversize wooden box with screenprinted artist name on the lid and a white art paper obi strip. Inside is a clear 10” lathe with handwritten centre labels in a black sleeve with letterpressed text, three screenprinted portraits of Loren screened by Alan Sherry of SIWA, an individual photo and a black-on-black info card print. The box is lined with a black card base panel letterpressed with a picture of Loren. Edition of 100 copies.

Co-released with Woodsist, this is the debut full-length from this collaborative project between Blank Dogs and Dum Dum Girls. Six new tracks that combine a haze of beautiful girl-pop vocals with out-of-focus psychedelia, hallucinatory arrangements and an atmosphere somewhere between 1980s psychedelic DIY, weirdo 70s private press and the early Rough Trade singles.

Deluxe document of a legendary art-action by Joke Lanz (aka Sudden Infant) and Rudolf Eb.Er, two of the main players in the Schimpfluch Gruppe. An extremely limited pressing - only 200 copies – Akustische Aktion was initially put together to be sold at the Sudden Infant 20^th anniversary celebrations that took place in Berlin in April of this year. It comes pressed on 140g vinyl and packaged in a pro-pressed folded cover housed in a silkscreened PVC sleeve. Akustische Aktion is an audio documentation of a 1991 performance that saw Lanz and Eb.Er sit down to eat a meal with a microphone in front of each of them and the volume turned way up. I actually think this works even better as a recording than as a physical performance in that the sounds are so completely removed from their sources that you’re able to listen to it almost as some kind of instant composition. There are rhythms – chewing, cracking a can open, the clatter of cutlery on plates – and there’s the same obsession that runs through much of the Schimpfluch activities: making overt the previously hidden, bringing the inside to the outside, the interest in body sounds, organic rhythms, notions of composition and decomposition. Listened to without any context it sounds like a particularly abstract improvisation and the fact that it’s able to communicate on some many levels is testimony to the power of the group’s ideas and the rigor of their realization. An stunning art-action document, beautifully presented. Recommended.

Collaboration album between Helena Espvall of Espers et al and Masaki Batoh of Ghost. Recorded in Tokyo, Japan in December 2008, the bulk of Overloaded Ark feels like an instrumental Ghost album, with traditional folk melodies threaded by ethnic strings, wordless vocal tones and the occasional deep-space drone. It feels pretty varied in its approach, with soaring celtic hymns segueing into Popol Vuh-style devotionals and early music instrumentals that could almost be William Lawes. Guest appearances from various Ghost members.

New Six Organs studio album with a bigger sound and more of a group feel. Recorded by Randall Dunn (Sunn O)))/Earth), Luminous Night features violinist Eyvind Kang and flautist Hans Teuber who add to the overall cinematic feel of the sonics.

First in a series of DVD documents of the complete works of Japanese ‘noise’ guitarist Masayuki ‘Jojo’ Takayanagi. This one presents an up-close full colour film of two Action Direct solo performances, one from August 4^th 1990 and the other from December 17^th 1990. The first one is a two part take on “Inanimate Nature” with Takayanagi using violently bowed guitars, metal poles, various string modifications and an array of tapes containing music and environmental sound to create an overwhelming sonic environment. Fascinating to see the specifics of Takayanagi’s process up close like this. The second performance is a two-part improvisation for pre-recorded tapes, mixing board and tannoy system, a psychedelic construction built from ghostly currents of vocals, environmental noise and archaic broadcasting technology. Region free DVD. Highly recommended.

“Global navigation satellite sytsems have made the old surveying process of triangulation unnecessary. That is to say, when you want to make a map these days, you just take a big cosmic snapshot & draw it. Guess it beats working out your scale of reference from a few points on the ground with some string & pencils. However, these two polite, mannered gentlemen are old fashioned. And old fashioned is the kind of guys the world needs, because they're the kind you would let babysit your kids. So instead of downloading the Buddha app to a fucking iphone, the pair go Euclidean by laying down lines across each other's playing, quietly looking for fixed angles. Little bubbles & abrasions from Wooley's trumpet mouthpiece. Planes of wavering tone from Forsyth's guitar. Live at Zorn's club in NYC.” - Angela Sawyer.

“Think you like poetry, asshole? You've probably never even met the fellow. But this guy has. Even if he is a sloppy painter. And one from that capital of self-shitters, Brooklyn. Yes he has. Been there, that is. And like that poor Greek SOB who died bringing the news of the Athenian victory, the guy's run all the way back here to the land of the living from a zone of arrows and corpses. And he brings you back a session that's epic in the literary sense. Yelling, screaming, ranting, and even some shrieking. Not much else either, save a couple of stray electronic buzzes from the mike. Recorded at a Chinatown hipster bar in front of a few close friends, who were probably shitfaced. In fact, what was Clint Simonson doing there amidst the defeated Persians, bearded fools & fish sauce? Your call, but I say he was on his knees catching the flying spittle in a little cup.” - Angela Sawyer.

“Following CDRs and cassettes for Smokers Gifts and Kovorox Sound, and a track on an Idwal Fisher comp, Melanie Delaney gulps down some fermented plantain extract, squares her shoulders, embarks on another  temporary exile from Ashtray Navigations, and takes her rightful place atop the Chocolate Monk bully pulpit. The musical spastasms of her solo project Ocelocelot goink in tandem with Jovial Bowel Syndrome, that Midlands medical condish afflicting those with diets high in pig’s milk and sausage muke. Ring modulator abounds on the CD, attaching itself to every decibel like a Louisiana eyeworm, leaving pockmarks across landscapes defined by cornball menses tutorials and cloudy waters from the snout of the matriarch. Delaney charms plasmagnetics and electrosputum with the deftness of the Janitorial Custodians of Jajouka. As Ocelocelot splays her space nuptials across a skyline smeared with mushy peas, and junked Vespas limp across the tarmac at Dragonfly refueling stations, orphans gaze away from the mysterious metal chambers it is their duty to scrub with steel wool. Gawk, urchins.” - S.Glass

“More voltaic drip from the minefield of a mind of Stella. Two of the tracks here originally appeared on a super limited cassette on the Nazot label (hence the title here), but you probably missed that in your somnolence. Plus we get an extra 25 minute track,, thats over 77 minutes of zonked out sci-fi damage. A nausea inducing ride, seas on saturn style, using the same demented tape technique as on the /Foucault Zombie/ sessions.” – Dylan Nyoukis.

When guitarist Bill Orcutt dropped off the edge of the world after his band, Harry Pussy, imploded sometime in the late-90s, a buncha people were really fucking sorry. His guitar playing in that group, alongside Adris Hoyos’s phenomenal drums and vocals, pretty much established a whole new blueprint for post-hardcore avant rock destruction. The fact that there isn’t a Harry Pussy tribute band in every fucking suburban town the world over is only down to that fact that Orcutt and Hoyos’s playing was so far beyond technique that no one could hope to even ape em, so in their absence everyone went back to jamming drones, triggering loops and gargling random alphabets. And while Hoyos fell in with the whole Swill Radio cabal for a while, Orcutt’s lack of a profile led to a buncha rumours, the most popular one being something to do with how he had jacked in music cause the underground was strictly for jerks and he was now working on some experimental movie in the wilds of nowhere. So it was as shocking as a power electronics fan turning up with a girlfriend when a solo 7” from Orcutt came out of nowhere earlier this year before being hoovered up by lovers of the good stuff and locked away in secure record vaults the world over. Then came the news that he was only going to be jamming at Nyoukis’s Colour Out Of Space with the best free jazz drummer in the UK, Mr Paul Hession and then - now (!) -- comes this motherfucker, a full-length solo album privately issued by Orcutt himself with virtually nada in terms of inside info. On A New Way To Pay Old Debts Orcutt is playing a four-string acoustic guitar – and he is fucking *playing* it. Like the “High-Waisted” 7”, the material picks up where Sonny Sharrock left the instrument hanging on Black Woman’s “Blind Willie”, with an amphetamine-blues style that combines feral vocal grunts and squeals (almost in the style of early Mazzacane), the kind of aggressive raga form of Roger McGuinn’s furthest navigations of “Eight Miles High”, the formally staggering, postcard-from-another-world feel of Joseph Spence’s Folkways recordings and a spike of hardcore adrenaline. The music retains the incredible dynamism of Harry Pussy, from the dive-bombing bass strings that resound like sprung traps through the lightning flash of the treble. Like Derek Bailey, a player that Orcutt has a lot in common with, Orcutt’s technique comes from the inside, it’s not about F/X or loops or fuzz or any kind of extended technique, it’s one man wrestling with the idea of guitar as sonic reducer. His approach is so tactile, so monomaniacal in its blunt physicality, like when he obsesses over the same screaming single note again and again, shadowing it with the same vocal cry before dropping into zagging barbed-wire repeats, that it feels like the most exciting free/rock/jazz/blues of your lifetime. Indeed, this LP shows up alla the solo acoustic guitar artists of the past whenever as a buncha dull furniture polishers. The ultimate solo guitar record form the greatest rock guitarist of the ‘noise’ era. A no-brainer for album of the year. Comes with pro-printed sleeves, self-released on Orcutt’s own private press. Highest possible recommendation.

Edition of 500 LP, the debut vinyl release from this Scottish label. Obscured By Fuzz is one of Dan Melchior’s most cranking Anglo-garage sides, with the kind of crude post-Oi appeal of The Afflicted Man hi-jacked by classy Medway-style ballads and snotty urban-psych assaults that are literally caked in fuzz. There’s also an amphetamine Mod/pop art feel that would join the dots from Ray Davies and The Small Faces through O Level, The Times and The Television Personalities all the way to the whole Billy Childish/Hangman cultus. Massively addictive, not a duff track on it. Recommended.

Hand-numbered edition of 730 copies from this psych rock trio, with a caveman jam style that is a potent and prehistoric as anything beamed from the brains of Guru Guru. Two side-long tracks that work a couple of crunching chords and some wailing single strings into heavens of wah-wah. Next time see you at the Dalai Lama? Packaged in letterpressed sleeves with silver foil ink and pressed on 180g vinyl, Palace Of The Skies also comes with a bonus CD that replicates the vinyl material while throwing in an extra track.

Anyone who has ever spent any considerable time in the UK's godforsaken capital will immediately concur with the sentiment expressed in the title - some has gotta liberate that place from the clutches of style-mag/media-centred mediocrity and soon. Bo'Weavil, a label that has done a lot to upgrade a host of key folk sides to deluxe vinyl, is the first to strike a blow with this nicely presented double LP in a hand-numbered edition of 550 copies on heavyweight vinyl that gives a side each to four artists dedicated to expanding free/folk tongues. Rob Mullender plays acoustic guitar instrumentals that fit nicely into the whole post-60s Pentangle/Davey Graham school of sorcery. Wooden Spoon plays acoustic and electric guitar and banjo and his banjo playing is particularly strong, stubby percussive forms that sound like rusty ragas nailed to tiny wooden crosses. The Eidetic Band are a trio that work non-idiomatic allusion that vaguely touches on Volcano The Bear/People Band style notions of freedom while still referencing established UK modes of improvised dialogue via bass, cello, tone generator, zither, laptop, guitar, power tools, sax, keyboard et al. Ladyswoodsman are the duo of Luke Garwood and Paul May who play guitars, clarinets, percussion and un-nameables across a series of rhythmic, improvisatory modes.

“Astromero is the psychedelic synth / noise project of Japanese pioneer Hiroshi Hasegawa (Astro,CCCC), and LA's Damion Romero (Speculum Fight). Side A is a live show in San Francisco, a total scorcher with an immense level of energy where shifting walls of synthetic sound produced by Hasegawa are complemented by the signature rumbling low end frequencies coming from Damion's custom electronics. Side B is a new studio track, full of brain melting tones and showing the more compositional side of this sick ongoing collaboration. Limited to 350.” – NF.

Recorded 2003/2004 and held back in order to close out the Qbico label that originally launched back in the day with a run of solo sides from Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple, Under Your Moonshine is Kawabata’s last solo guitar LP, recorded live with no overdubs. A little grainier and more out of focus than his Inui drone experiments, this one features distant starfields of bowed overtones giving way to arcs of luminous melody and pin-prick harmonics that fizzle out into ghostly after-images, at points coming close to the lost in space/total eclipse feel of early Tangerine  Dream.

Edition of 500 copies solo album from Mark McGuire of Emeralds, the second volume of the Steve Lownethal (Swingset) curated VDSQ Solo Acoustic series. This one presents five solo acoustic dreamworks from McGuire that expand on previous works – “Burning Leaves” references the phased polyrhythmic loop work of Amethyst Waves, “At First Sight” rescores the electric/vocal version from Carefully Choosing Words – while pushing off into a bunch of luminous new directions. Some of McGuire’s playing here is so basement-psych focussed that it almost sounds like Wayne Rogers of Major Stars et al cutting a solo kosmische bomb. But the presiding influence would seem to be Daniel Fichelscher of Popol Vuh, that same lightness of touch and that same ability to intimate otherworldly ascensions using only clean, overlapping strings. McGuire is a master of the poignantly staggered loop and most of the material here unwinds in heavenly cogs of multi-part guitar constructs, with melodic statements exploded in slow wheels of harmonics and endless motorik rhythms generated from flashes of repeat chords. There’s a clarity to the album that gives a great insight into the mechanics of McGuire’s personal universe and an ornate purity to the sonics that is as striking and complex as any mid-period Popol Vuh LP. And when he sets up one of those endlessly pulsing bleeding-straight-into-the future acid jams that sound like walls of keyboards using nothing but a series of acoustic loops, well, it’s pretty staggering. A major release from Mark. Silkscreened sleeves. Highly recommended.

New album from Seattle resident Reita Piecuch who builds massive fuzz-saturated keyboard/radio/tape/piano assemblages that dissolve into wraiths of melancholic tone with all of the revenant force of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops or Matthew Bower’s Sunroof/Hototogisu. Dialing In have had a previous CD on Campbell Kneale’s Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and have collaborated with Herb Diamante (aka John Godbert of Vibracathedral Orchestra). Here she brings her ecstasy sound to overloaded loops of street noise, warped third world melodies, and twisted modal constructs assembled from nothing but lapping waves of fuzz, shortwave tones and murky F/X. The Islamic Bomb is constructed around field recordings made during a trip to Pakistan, cutting up calls to prayer and 78s of popular music with harmonium and piano.  Jade green vinyl, edition of 500 copies. 

Edition of 80 copies CD-R from Bridget Hayden of Vibracathedral Orchestra/Telescopes et al. Recorded while on tour with Marcia Bassett (Zaimph/Hototogisu et al) in November 2008, the set sounds very much influenced by Bassett, particularly her work in Zaika with Tom Carter (Charalambides). Hayden sings and plays overdriven electric guitar with a slide, combining hovering fuzz drones with travelling steel in a pugilistic Industrial-blues style. 

New album of automatic nursery rhyme constructs and sad vocal hymnals from Eva aka Inca Ore. Silver Sea Surfer School features some of her most otherworldly creations, from lonesome vocals with angelic reverb treatments hissing over moebius electronics through macabre pitch-shifted visions cut-up with psychedelic junkyard ritual straight out of The Skaters’ songbook. Certainly the most ambitious and sonically ‘out’ of Eva’s records to date, with tape jump-cuts spooling through a variety of underwater/outer space environments while the vocals skirt the very fringe legibility, from spoken word memorials through distorted alien tongue. Edition of 500 copies. Recommended. 

Hand-numbered edition of 300 copies 7” from this Baltimore boy/girl duo with a similar feel to early Charalambides and the basement styles of the 90s underground. The fuzz guitar approximates the infinite riffing euphoria of Luxurious Bags’ classic Frayed Knots side, with floating female vocals and handclaps that pilot it straight into the narcotic pop zone and a brokedown/avant garage style that is aesthetically spot-on. Excellent. 

New sax/guitar drone extremity from this San Francisco duo that collide a non-stop gush of metal feedback and wailing single notes headfirst into saxophone hallelujahs and slow-motion Borbetomagus vibes. 

Edition of 500 copies vinyl version of what was originally a CD-R on Sacred Bones. A fantastic collection of new work from Zola Jesus, compiling four tracks from her WNYU radio session alongside six unreleased tracks. The radio session is particularly informative, with a much more stripped-down, less F/X heavy sound that brings the quality of Nika’s songwriting to the fore. The group are great, featuring Dead Luke on synth, Matt Elliott on floor tom and ‘Lindsay’ on bass and the version of “Last Day” is outstanding. The unreleased tracks have a more psychotic late night America/Suicide/Meredith Monk feel. Buncha people I know rate this as their favourite Zola Jesus release and it’s hard to argue. Highly recommended.

Limited edition of 100 copies hand-cut lathe direct from Peter King’s workshop in NZ. More dark gothic synth work from the duo of Nate Young (Wolf Eyes) and Steve Kenney. Square cut lathe with artwork by Young. 

Limited edition of 100 copies hand-cut lathe direct from Peter King’s workshop in NZ. Hallucinatory slow-motion landscapes of minimal electronics from Greh Holger. Square cut lathe.

Hand-numbered edition of 1000 copies vinyl edition of this classic Japanese Kosmiche side, where devotional keyboard visionary Klaus Schulze led this communal acid-rock group through new vectors of heavenly synth drone and mind-phasing F/X. Far East Family band have a fairly patchy back catalogue but their alliance with Schulze made for two stunning LPs. 1975’s Nipponjin, released by Vertigo and rated at number 14 in Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler, is the perfect blend of psychedelic German volk and wiped-out Japanese acid rock, with endless tiers of choral synth supporting disembodied vocals and perfectly lucid acid guitar that wails as beautifully as anything on the Far Out LP. The by-line on the cover reads “Join Our Mental Phase Sound”. I think you get the picture. Highly recommended.

“Our very first one sided LP, which is a bizarre trip from Michael Curtis Hilde's Mountainhood project. This one follows on from the two LPs on Time Lag's Red Records label a few months back which vanished super fast, as well as other releases on Reverb Worships and Yod. Total outsider midnight missions into weirdness... strange strings twang and rattle into the darkness, a very strange experience spread across one side of black wax. Limited to 320 copies in pro-printed wrap around sleeve featuring art by Michael.” – BRR.

Two new vertical tone ascensions from Campbell Kneale’s post-Birchville Cat Motel project, with a particularly barbaric ecstatic noise/death edge. Edition of 500 copies.

“Sensacao Do Principio is the third release proper from Tropa Macaca and their first with an American label. Their previous efforts on Ruby Red and Qbico were magnificent (though hard to find) efforts of blotted, aural sci-fi codifications somewhere between Anar Band and Blues Control. The two-track full-length continues their foray into post-psychedelic instrumental morphine, where Moolah's LP and Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" function as templates for the greater good. In other words, you gotta hear if for yourself.” – Tom Lax.

A beautiful compliment to Mississippi’s recent issue of Hurley’s classic Armchair Boogie LP, Parsnip Snips reissues an album that was originally released in 1995 but was actually recorded between the years 1965 and 1972 and works as Armchair Boogie’s perfect partner. Hurley’s style is supremely laid back and possessed of an odd melancholy warmth that you could bask in for days. The performances on Parsnip Snips were all recorded at home on a mono Wollensak and the feel is extremely up-close and personal. When Hurley played at Brattleboro’s legendary Free Folk Fest he made connections across several generations of DIY folk art and it’s his early recordings in particular that set a flame beneath performers like Matthew Valentine and Joshua Burkett. Parsnip Snips is a perfectly-nuanced collection of Hurley at his best, singing to himself and with friends, making music simply for the sake of making music, all captured on this remarkable LP. Massively addictive and highly recommended. 

Another good one from this group whose LP on Captured Tracks spearheaded the whole post-Flying Nun garage pop renaissance. Both tracks have a pair of sneakers planted in a garage on the edge of the world, with snappy/moody 60s art/punk moves, primitive Mo Tucker drumming and zoned fuzz guitar. Love this group. 

More great smalltown/suburban folk punk bliss from Christmas Island, who combine the kinda breezy basement forms of K’s International Pop Underground series with infectious bubblegum punk stylings. The A side is the perfect paean to dead end teendom and summer passing and watching TV and how you just wanna escape it all and how it all just happens again no matter where you go and that maybe that’s the point. A very bittersweet single with an easy poignancy that’s pretty impressive. Recommended.

Two more tracks of DIY new wave cut up with soaring dreampop vocals from this Sacramento group with a previous release on Woodsist. 

Love the cover shot on this one, the muzzy out-of-focus shot of Matthew Valentine, Erika Elder and Willie Lane perfectly captures the Xeroxed in nowhere USA feel of the sonics, with a set from Hudson, NY in July 2008 that trades euphoric candyfloss highs with tough, beautifully free-floating takes on material from all over the canon. Erika’s vocal sounds particularly dislocated, like a voice through a cloud. Weird fidelity that perfectly matches the artwork. What a trip. 

Immaculate duo set from Matthew Valentine and Erika Elder, one of the best of their more stripped down/peeled out set-ups, recorded live at WFMU in New Jersey. Great versions of “The Hungry Stones” that flashes with shots of odd electricity, “Huna Cosm”, “Boo Woe (When It’s All Gone”) and a version of “Weatherhead Hollow” into “Drone Trailer” that does subtle violence to linear notions of time and space. Check the co-ordinates. 

Ghostly duo performance from Matthew Valentine and Erika Elder, recorded at Greenfield Energy Park in Greenfield, MA in August 2009. Delicately bombed readings of “The Hungry Stones” and “Huna Cosm” but the set is dominated by an amazing transport that seamlessly melts through “Drone Trailer” into “Environments” into “Cold Rain” into “Environments” and finally into “Get Right Church”. 

Beautiful new album from this New Jersey group with a suburban teen plays rural psychedelic rock feel that is extremely potent. Features Matthew Mondanile of Ducktails on guitar.

There is something so authentically goofball and so completely out to lunch about Starving Weirdos that allows them to pull off the kind of ridiculously OTT psych moves that in lesser hands would come over like mere pastiche. Right from the cover of this double LP set, one of  pair of LPs on Weird Forest, the dumb teen on acid vibe is telegraphed in full colour via the via the painting of a pair of specs staring at the words Self Hypnosis while the black and white record labels spin on the deck. The thing is, they’re serious. Throughout their career their individual combo of enthusiastic naivety – calling an album Harry Smith fer chrissakes – and inspired commitment to higher-minded drone narcosis has allowed them access to the kinda unselfconsciously daffy environs that a bunch of lesser heads could never hope to explore. Starving Weirdos make drone music with a limited historical road map and it’s all the more inspired for it. Self Hypnosis has that massive depth of field/recorded in a warehouse feel that defines the best of the Weirdos’ sides. The production sounds pretty sophisticated, at points recalling the gushing surrealist sound of Nurse With Wound circa Spiral Insana. Like its companion volume, it feels as if they have devoured every speck of counter-cultural information that has come their way, refracting it into jams that are so beautifully ambitious and so unhampered by any notion of artistic self-consciousness whatsoever that they surpass many of their peers working in a similar area, re-birthing drone music by factoring in huge orchestral arrangements, screwed and chopped slow mo electronics and the kind of authentic freak-out styles that only a genuine pair of misfits could ever fully tap into. Self Hypnosis is another heavy instalment from a band who are as daft, fun, serious, psychedelic and unique as any ‘outsider’ artists. 

Limited tour-only self-released CD-R from the duo of Chris Corsano on drums and melodica and Mick Flower (Vibracathedral Orchestra) on Japan banjo. This one beats both of their ‘official’ LPs in terms of dynamism and psychedelic excess, with the opening track the greatest recorded document of the group’s ferocious live form. Drawn from live recordings in Switzerland and Cambridge, the method of attack varies across the five tracks, running from slow single note chorales with Corsano stampeding underneath through glorious fire music-inspired ascensions that just keep on peaking. It’s hard to create any kind of dynamic when you’re working with an instrument that has a constant drone sound but here Flower and Corsano explode the limitations by playing with a single voice, to the point where any notion of interaction is exploded in favour of a profound simultaneity. Easily the best thing these two have recorded together, every time we spin this in the shop someone has to have it. Highly recommended.

New acoustic guitar/vocals studio album from Jandek, with some of his most wayward and emotionally-barbed guitar playing in a while, a style that immediately reconnects with his earlier recordings. The cover shot is one of the best yet, a young Sterling suited up and moody in the fall, while the lyrics seem to be based around an earlier visit to Scotland, Edinburgh specifically, as well as a few great self-portraits and statements of intent – “Jumping Off”, “Painstakingly Critical” – and a 14 minute track with the ambiguous title of “Will There Be No More Photos”. There is some beautiful harmonica playing, with Sterling illuminating the spare “Girls Wore Gowns” with funereal blowing, a track that also features a particularly broken vocal. A necessary instalment.

Edition of 300 copies debut LP from the duo of Drajan Bryngelsson and Dan Raberg of Brainbombs. No Balls play an even more reductive from of sociopathtic rock minimalism than Brainbombs, like the opening seconds of a track from Sabbath’s Masters Of Reality hammered into repeat-submission by The Scientists, with martial drumming, indecipherable vocals and monolithic power chords giving way to some ferocious Industrial psych. Won’t be around for long. Already sold out at source.

Nicely assembled comp of rare 78rpm recordings of obscure Greek folk and ethnic music, urban songs and instrumentals, running from the 1920s through the 1940s, all packaged in a box with a large explanatory booklet featuring pictures, lyrics and essays. The music falls broadly under the rembetica banner, using accordion, hammer dulcimer, violin, lyra, mandolin, bouzouki and guitar while the themes run from drug ballads through songs of heartbreak and remorse, laments from jail... the quality of reproduction is pretty staggering considering the age and rarity of some of the recordings and this is a great document of a music and culture lost in time, full of mystery and melancholy atmosphere.

Been a while since we heard from the duo of Luke Younger and Steve Warwick aka Birds Of Delay but this is a fine return, with subtle rainbow electronics, speaker phasing and minimal tonal fireworks generating a kind of nowhere zone between H-Pop, Kraut-inspired keyboard bliss and the ‘fluffier’ side of Matthew Bower’s Sunroof. A bunch of studio tracks bundled with a live trio assault recorded at the CCA in Glasgow where they’re joined by Taylor Richardson of Infinity Window. Edition of 240 copies.

New album from this fascinating, schizophrenic French outfit (the solo project of Laurent Gerard, a frequent collaborator with Ghedalia Tazartes) who seem to have inherited the surrealist tradition of Jacques Berrocal/Red Noise/Futura Records, the same current that so entranced Nurse With Wound’s Steve Stapleton. Capitaine Present 5 is a collage of spoken word, sound poetry, weird synth pop and Industrial cut-ups, all rendered with the sophisticated élan of an experimental Gallic chanteur. Singular. Edition of 160 copies.

First full-length LP from the duo of Heath Moerland (Sick Llama/Fag Tapes) and Chris Pottinger (Odd Clouds/Cotton Museum). Slither play primitive drug and F/X damaged free jazz, with reeds played through cotton wool while tape sounds, homemade electronics and surreal electro-acoustic sound environments give it an extra layer of DIY dub. Edition of 240 copies.

Edition of 190 copies LP from the duo of Jon Lorenz and John Rich on saxophone and clarinet. Rich and Lorenz play their reeds through a warp of overloaded F/X, generating a more spectral, tone-fogged take on the Industrial strength free jazz of Borbetomagus while detouring into almost Hawkwind-styled black nightmare settings.

Edition of 400 copies LP from Campbell Kneale’s earth-quaking Our Love Will Destroy The World. Violent Industrial rock that works in stormclouds of overtone and omni-directional propulsion and feels like the soundtrack to the birth pains of galaxies. Is that a xylophone in there? Comparable to Matthew Bower’s most gridlocked and monumentally powerful recordings. Three tracks of vertical ascension.

Steffen Basho-Junghans is an avant/folk guitarist from Germany who combines a lyrical approach to steel guitar with an experimental use of various technical ‘binds’. He adopted the name Basho as a talismanic tribute to two figures central to his thought; the haiku master Matsuo Basho and the devotional guitarist Robbie Basho. Is presents a series of live guitar performances recorded straight to DAT between 2000-2006, switching between 6 and 12-string acoustics as well as some slide. Is perfectly balances both of Basho-Junghans’ styles, bridging his more experimental work and his more traditionally sourced material, with spare instrumentals that echo Blind Willie Johnson while projecting that vision forward into more fractured and aggressively nuanced environs. But he’s just as capable of sweeping you away on tumbling arpeggios and lush, melodic inventions as he is at rerouting the post-Takoma stream, so if you’re looking for a significantly new take on contemporary guitar soli, this is the place to be. The closing track, “...and like Wind we go” is dedicated to the memory of Jack Rose. Edition of 500 copies on 200g vinyl with a free download coupon. 

Third in a great run of solo recordings, following on from Tenor and Soprano, from saxophonist Joe McPhee. It’s easy to forget that McPhee comes from the same generation as Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, an original fire musician, even if he didn’t fully come to prominence till the 1990s. Alto was recorded live on May 4^th 2009 in NYC and further emphasises McPhee’s connection to the source, with a series of solo alto saxophone and alto clarinet performances that are perfectly poised between post-tongue ecstasy and soft, bruising blues, from boppy Ornette-ish tone-poems through Alyerised heavy metal gospel. Hand-numbered edition of 524 copies on 180g vinyl with silkscreen print on rice paper covers. 

Limited LP +7”reissue of an ultra-obscure outsider LP recorded by Carl Simmons in Massachusetts in 1999 and released in a tiny run on cassette on his own Unconscious Piano Productions. Described, fairly accurately, by the label as sounding like “Peter Grudzien reading mother goose, The Cheshire Cat conducting the Langley School Music Project, or Bob Dylan singing unknown lullabies with a head full of helium”, Simmons has a high, almost cartoon vocal delivery and he sings over complex assemblages of tapes that combine children’s backing vocals and snippets of conversations, playing a broken acoustic guitar and layering his vocals so that they sound like the kind of gnome chorus that Syd Barrett would regularly duet with. To celebrate the 10^th anniversary of its release, Sacred Bones have reissued an edited and re-sequenced edition of the cassette on CD, complete with a bonus 7” featuring out-takes. Folkways style sleeve, edition of 400 copies. 

Majorly alien side from this great Euro cult birthed by Jani Hirvonen, with modulated vocals and pulsing synths announcing their touchdown in elsewhere. The weird War Of The Worlds vibe gives way to a tannoy system in space feel, with F/X damaged hieroglyphics slurping around their mouths while somewhere in another galaxy planets are eviscerated with single beams of tone. Easily the most ‘out’ side from Jani thus far. Edition of 500 copies. 

Great new EP of punk-primitive re-thinks of the teenager-in-space sound of The Ronettes, Nancy & Lee and Thee Headcoatees from this Italian garage punk group fronted by vocalist ‘Anna’. Five tracks that have a doomy black eyeliner and crumpled fag packet appeal that is as existentially suave as anything outta the hip pocket of Wally Tax. Includes a cover of Betty James’ “I’m A Little Mixed Up”. 

“A (now posthumous) collection of live Warmer Milks material from 2003-2006 (goes right up until when the band broke up for the first time) originally assembled by Robert Beatty and M.A. Turner at the Resonant Hole in 2007. It was commissioned by a to-remain-unnamed boutique indie rock sub-label that stopped returning phone calls after they heard it. Includes selections from the very first Warmer Milks show from Trevor Tremaine's living room in 2003. Featuring the core of Turner/Shelton/Backus and includes appearances by probably every person who played in the band during this period (Chris Cprek, Mike Laugherty, Dave Farris, Thad Watson, Trevor Tremaine, Ben Allen, but really- who's  keeping track at this point?). Runs the gamut of styles from solo acoustic living room love ballads to full on pack of wild dogs at the bottom of a bourbon barrel in Texas shitstorms to the formative seeds of what would become the core of the band's swansong "Soft Walks". Something for everyone/nothing for no one. R.I.P. Warmer Milks.” – Robert Beatty. 

Deluxe double LP reissue of a key transitional work from the back catalogue of Italian power electronics/electro acoustic inventor MB aka Maurizio Bianchi. Mectpyo Blut was the first release under the MB imprint after a run of releases as Sacher-Pelz and was originally issued on cassette in 1980. This edition restores the complete work across two red vinyl LPs and with a gatefold sleeve that reproduces alla the graphics. In many ways this is one of the most crudely-realised of MB’s creations, with tracks made up of blurry hypnotic loops and modulated tape in a way that feels extremely homemade but there’s a contrary epic quality to the piece as a whole, as smears of primitive tone blur into ascensions of what sounds like wordless choirs and the comparatively melodic synth statements work to align it with earlier Germanic visions of Industrial music. I guess what separates MB’s work from much of the dull ‘power electronics’ that came up in his wake is its sense of organic process and its transparency of construction (not to say its overall atmosphere of weltschmerz): it feels like music made by thinking/feeling humans, crafted with their own hands, as opposed to the obliterating/overwhelming approach of modern PE. As such, it connects to parallel experiments undertaken by groups associated with imprints like LAFMS and Chocolate Monk as much as the whole post-Whitehouse/Broken Flag crew. “The emergence of MB, from Milano, heralds in a new era of experimental electronics emerging from Italy. MB’s compositions are influenced by the power of industrial technology and its dehumanizing effect on society and the individual. MB’s electronic storms create images ranging from industrial power to chaos, confusion and violence.” Edition of 300 copies, recommended.

‘Real’ CD album from Family Underground in an edition of 200 copies. Now down to the duo of Nicolas and Sara, though it’s impossible to tell as this is some of their most dense and inventive work to date. The overall feel is kinda Sun Ra on Xpressway, with tangled chords and analog strings conjuring synthesized jungles of purple drone and phased amps booming deep into the darkness with alla the destructo force of The Dead C. The more minimal keyboard tracks are particularly hypnotic, with simple two-note melodies flashing in the distance. Comes in a gatefold sleeve.

Killer limited tour-only 7” from Gary War that channels the first Syd-era Pink Floyd album into a Texas flashback zone overwhelmed with technicolour F/X and that classic underwater production style. This one has more of a mainline to the classic garage band sound of their debut New Raytheonport LP, which makes it a necessary addition to your shelf. Recommended.

Two new tracks of post-Godz aural confusion and homemade psych from these Finnish nuts that sometimes feature Chris Corsano. On Jan Anderzen of Kemialliset Ystavat’s label. “Two tracks by the Puke Eaters, the A side was originally conceived as a theme for an album dealing with Deihoma, the man who wandered inside "the Worm that ate the world" in order to slay it. Strictly Steen & Rusty, as inept as ever. B side has Rusty involved in the act of synthesizer desecration with some nameless slave. Steen Guru vocals were added later via the method of overdubbing.” - Ralf Normaali

New studio album from the Ramleh duo of Gary Mundy and Anthony Di Franco, this time out in their power electronics mode. More hi-fi and deliberately nuanced than their early Xeroxed style, Mundy’s delivery is at its most hysterical while the noise is almost technicolour in comparison. Also some great sludge bass noise/rock stylings courtesy of Di Franco. Full colour gatefold sleeve with insert.

Hand-numbered edition of 350 copies self-released 7” from Willie Lane of The Bummer Road, Slurp Dogs et al. A-side is a wailing slab of electric Spectrasound while the flip presents an hallucinatory matrix of acoustic and electric strings that feels like the perfect candyfloss trip.

“Alga marghen presents the first edition ever issued of Dick Higgins’ music. Fluxus founding member, in 1958 Dick Higgins studied Composition and Experimental Music with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York together with, among others, La Monte Young, Richard Maxfield, Toshi Ichiyanaghi, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Jackson Mac Low. In the Spring of 1968 Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts told Dick Higgins of a project that was afoot at Douglass College, where both were teaching at the time, to organize a show around guns. At that time the USA police seemed to have nothing better to do than to chase down teenagers for possessing miniscule amounts of marijuana and throwing them in jail, thus ruining their lives. Dick Higgins decided it would be more worthy if one could set all the policemen in the USA to composing symphonies themselves. So he proposed that the beautiful music paper be machine gunned and that symphonies be derived from the result. Geoffrey Hendricks arranged for Captain Toby of the South Brunswick Police to do this, which duly happened with a 9mm MP40 Schmeisser submachine gun, filmed by Alison Knowles. A volunteer orchestra, conducted by Philip Corner and including Charlotte Moorman, performed nine of the resulting symphonies at Douglass College on December 9th. The Douglass concert was taped, but the only copy disappeared when the Ars Viva! Gallery in Berlin, Germany, went bankrupt in 1984. The whole situation was documented with photographs in Source Magazine in 1970. As Philip Corner, conductor of the recordings presented here, said: “Leave it to Dick Higgins to come up with the most spectacular way to generate a page of patternless notes. Once over this dramatic gesture with machine-gun bullets leaves a stack of paper full of holes. I had not thought of this before but there must have been a conscious connection to the social turmoil of the 60's - all too unfortunately, come back around to high relevance these days. First press limited to 500 copies with digipack sleeve, also including a 16 page booklet with full documentation presenting 2 texts by Dick Higgins from the 1960s as well as a Philip Corner testimony, original photos and original scores.” – AM.

CD issue of what’s regarded as the most perfectly realised of the collaborations between the post-Far Out Far East Family Band and visionary Kraut cosmonaut Klaus Schulze. Recorded in 1976 on the back of Schulze’s classic Black Dance LP, Parallel World is a beautiful trip on hand drums and percussion through wiggy keyboards that leave sagging after-images across the jet black backdrop, droning vocal chants, outta space grooves and the kind of gorgeous choral synth levitations of the greatest devotional Krautrock, all cut up with long passages of semi-silence, sunrise tones and hallucinatory folk melody. One of the holiest of Japanese Kosmische sides, this one sits comfortably next to Popol Vuh’s In Den Garten Pharaos and Sergius Golowin’s Krishna Von Goloka as a truly epic trip. Listen to this one on headphones and feel the silence. Numbered edition of 1000 copies. Highly recommended.

Numbered edition of 1000 copies CD reissue of this 1972 album from the legendary Speed, Glue & Shinki, Japan’s most dysfunctional power trio. Wrapped in a sleeve designed by Michihiro Kimura of Taj Mahal Travellers, this self-titled double album documents the group’s drug-addled implosion while expanding the thug-psych styles of their debut by bring in Moogs and aiming their third eyes towards the stars, with trippy electronics squelched under foot by mile high riffs and a rhythm section that is pure Frankenstein.

CD packaged in a 7” sleeve from Finnish folk spirit Keijo with a set featuring his idiosyncratic,  psychedelic take on traditional blues, Woody Guthrie ballads etc: “Keijo's songs draw from country-blues sources, as is often the case with his releases, there's a couple of Woody Guthrie interpretations included here. Harmonicas whine and woe, but also keep up the rhythm of keepin' on. In these songs, people get up early and travel in a land "that used to be your land." It's a place where luck comes and goes, just like the people that you meet. The girl knows how to hit you like rolling thunder, the workers are left unpaid (the boss ain't), the ones with no work are standing in the welfare line, your "true love" throws you a suitcase and shows you the door, there's working in the country and in the cities, an anonymous wanderer carries the blues wherever he goes - but it's bigger than just being down: you don't see me worrying, 'cos I've got nothing left to lose. That's why we all share the blues.” – Ikuisuus.

Limited edition of 50 copies solo CD-R from frequent Richard Youngs collaborator Andrew Paine. Functions Of Hedgerow is intended as the third installment in the trilogy that includes Five Perspectives and Weekend World. Here Paine uses spoken word and drone to conjure the kind of pastoral violence of early Flying Saucer Attack while modulating and distorting vocals to macabre effect.

Edition of 300 copies LP from Emeralds associate Sam Goldberg. The A side revisits his track from the split Emeralds/Sam Goldberg tour cassette that came out a while back while the flip is a new side-long piece that utilizes orchestral arcs of dreamtone guitar to generate the kind of hallucinatory vistas of Andrew Chalk, Klaus Schulze and even early Grouper. Frozen landscapes and achingly slo-mo drone, the perfect soundtrack for barren winter days.

Psychotically wasted new single from this great group, with some wailing string-wrassling that’s straight out of Crime’s San Quentin run and classic thug-punk vocals. Two out-takes from Sick To Death on the flip too. 

New single from this SF-based psych/pop group, two hazy tracks from their Bombs Wombs cassette, with an A-side that has a Syd-era Pink Floyd feel and a flip with a great Bobby Fuller Four vibe. Boss!

Deluxe 7” from these guys, the first release to feature former Monoshock member Doug Pearson. This is black, apocalyptic rock that extends their Roxy/Chrome obsession deep into the American night. Comes in a deluxe sleeve with gold embossed text and an inserted invite. 

Beautiful new limited CD from Glasgow’s Alistair Crosbie (Eye Shaking Kingdom/Space Weather et al). A bit of a departure for Crosbie, I’ve Never Had  A Face is a single minimal piece for keyboard and electronic treatments  that has an evocative early music feel and a very English atmosphere, recalling everything from the music of William Byrd through the Canterbury sound and the settings of Dolly Collins. An interesting parallel to the electric Albion stylings of Space Weather and one of Crosbie’s most transfixing compositions. 

Edition of 70 copies cassette from Zak Boerger’s bedroom psych project, here cutting up Renbourne/Jansch/Chasny styled acoustic jams with elegiac fuzz-punkers that reference UK punks like early Wickham-Smith/Youngs and Flying Saucer Attack. 

Epic hi-fi power trio moves from Rick Tomlinson’s new psych group who weld the kind of juggernaut power of the Silence-era titans to extended modal jams and bucolic folk. 

“Left coast karaoke machine enthusiast Cameron Stallones leaves no loop unturned in his endless questing for the ultimate kaleidoscopic island-psych cocktail, and relocating from the LBC to Glen Rock (half Glendale, half Eagle Rock) freed him up to construct his own hermetic jam cove – dubbed Sun Ark Studio – thereby ratcheting up his workaholic-ism several levels. And so this Sun Ark 33 RPM single serves as both a love letter to his new musical HQ and a curious vinyl document of Araw’s next next-wave. Dubby basslines and reverbed drum pad action still reign hard but the song construction is less western and more liberated than ever before (echoing his new all-solo live set up), with micro-cycles of flute, voice, FX, and organ cascading down like fuchsia sunset light across the plastic rhythm section. “Bump Up (High Step)” is a warped reggae club heartbreaker, flangy cheese guitar leads and jungle rattles, a constant chorus. “Live Mind” is the B side, and it’s descended from the Heavy Deeds lineage, lots of equatorial sweat, low end pulse, dry funk guitar, bucket percussion, etc. A cool new boat trip on an evolved vessel. Black vinyl 7 inches in glue-pocket jackets with art by Stallones. Edition of 500.” – NNF. Already sold out at source. 

Excellent new single from this doomy garage-pop duo with aspects of the moodiest of the Flying Nun roster filtered through a UK Shadow Ring/Postcard/Factory aesthetic and a fug of F/X. B-side features a cover of The Cramps “Human Fly” that sounds closer to the Scientists than Lux and co. Edition of 600 copies. 

New limited double disc set from Mark McGuire of Emeralds on his own imprint. The second instalment in his on-going Guitar Meditations series, this set was recorded in September and October 2009 in Belgium and features six tracks. This is some of McGuire’s most extended instrumental work and works to isolate his contribution to Emeralds in a way that’s really effective. The tracks sound less like guitar settings and more like smears of eerie synth and electronics fed through the most delicate eternal delay so that the pieces feel highly organic and seem to give birth to constant fractal restatements of themselves. When the sound of the strings does come to the fore they evoke the kind of clipped, motorik style of Neu ’75, travelling endless tonal freeways beneath a slow droning sunrise. Another great one from Mark. 

Edition of only 99 copies LP, part of Qbico’s limited art edition series, that features the final session from the late Big Brother & The Holding Company guitarist James Gurley, jamming with P-Funk drummer Muruga Booker, Ken Kozora on synth and Zen drum, Peter Ruth on harp, Doug Weaver and Richard Smith on electric bass, Owen B on electric violin and Shakti Booker on vocals. Very limited supply!

"After developing his calling card on Adult Life and the eternal releases Carlos Giffoni defines his signature with compositional electronic music. Melding the analog drone colliding tonality of the past expressions and introducing minimalist sequencer details a pure electronic landscape is cultivated that nurtures the formation a man makes in stepping from the mysteries of youth into adulthood." - HP.

Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies duo album from Youngs & Paine, this one based around improvised extrapolations on specific musical forms, hence the title. Still, their takes on these forms is radically deconstructive and very minimal, with tracks that consist of a single chord with Richard’s vocal rising and falling, bass lines accompanying buzzing, squelching electronics, epic 10 minute treks through a no man’s land of distant drone and single guitar notes....

Warehouse find of original copies of these cassette album privately released by new age musician Joanna Brouk in the 1980s. Brouk had a radio programme on KPFA and her music exists on the cusp of avant garde practice and meditative deep-listening ritual, using pianos, tapes, synths, moogs and percussion to generate the kind of blank-out zones of JD Emmanuel, Iasos et al. "Brouk’s last tape (for now) finds her revisiting old themes explored on earlier recordings with the addition of digital synths. The sounds are still cosmic and weird and way ahead of the curve. Great J card cover photo features Ms. Brouk blissing out in the woods." - Yoga.

New album from the solo project of Megan Remy. US Girls is the perfect name for Remy’s project, as there’s something iconoclastically USA about her feel for classic stripped-down song-forms and rock/roll specific minimalism. Aspects of Springsteen’s classic Nebraska, the first Suicide album, Meredith Monk and even Elvis Presley’s Sun Session (think of the late night-time sound of the original version of “Blue Moon”) are filtered through a diffuse fog of F/X and looped rhythms to generate a music that sounds like the after-image in space of primitive 20^th century pop/rock culture. “Red Ford Radio” is one of her best tracks yet, a simple obsessive vocal pattern over dunting rhythms that feels like the reverse reflection of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.” Highly recommended.

Limited CD that restores a really obscure real people/disobedient kid/nascent punk rocker cassette that was issued as part of a prodigious run of weirdo documents recorded by an out-of-control 10 year old in Elma, Washington in the mid to late 80s. This is the first full release of his best known cassette, Thunder Hips And Saddle Bags, the release that put him on the weirdo radar after it made it through to tastemakers like Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop. The Skab recordings are much more interesting than just some maniac kid goofing off. His lyrics are funny, sharp and often inspired and there’s a precocious confidence and energy to the tracks, with inventive non-musical settings and primitive interventions on various instruments and household appliances. This album features a buncha classic tracks, including “John Wayne Is Dead”, “Throwin’ Rocks At Windows”, “PLayin’ Guitar Best I Can” and “We Need To Destroy The Soviet Union”. The whole package comes with liners from a bunch of heads, including the Skab himself who contributes an extremely poignant version of the Human Skab story based around the track “Dead Baby Blues” – you won’t be able to listen to it again without cracking up. Think of a pre-Red Cross/Redd Kross goof-off by a teen OD-ing on hamburger culture and with a precocious grasp of the DIY ethos and energy jag of punk rock. CD edition comes with a bonus Human Skab radio special from 1987.

Limited LP that restores a really obscure real people/disobedient kid/nascent punk rocker cassette that was issued as part of a prodigious run of weirdo documents recorded by an out-of-control 10 year old in Elma, Washington in the mid to late 80s. This is the first full release of his best known cassette, Thunder Hips And Saddle Bags, the one that put him on the weirdo radar after it made it through to tastemakers like Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop. The Skab recordings are much more interesting than just some maniac kid goofing off. His lyrics are funny, sharp and often inspired and there’s a precocious confidence and irresistible energy to the tracks, with inventive non-musical settings and primitive interventions on various instruments and household appliances. This album features a buncha classic tracks, including “John Wayne Is Dead”, “Throwin’ Rocks At Windows”, “Playin’ Guitar Best I Can” and “We Need To Destroy The Soviet Union”. The whole package comes with liners from a bunch of heads, including the Skab himself who contributes an extremely poignant version of the Human Skab story based around the track “Dead Baby Blues” – you won’t be able to listen to it again without cracking up. Think of a pre-Red Cross/Redd Kross goof-off by a teen OD-ing on hamburger culture and with a precocious grasp of the DIY ethos and energy jag of punk rock.

New release in this great series, dedicated to charting "unheralded classics of electronic music: 1947 to 1983". Every release comes beautifully packaged in perfect shrunken replica sleeves with an embossed sticker with each title pressed in a limited edition of 100 copies. The series puts back in print a number of record collector fantasies alongside a ton of unlikely idiosyncratic one-offs, and taken together it makes for one of the most ambitious and consistently dazzling series-runs of the entire CD-R revolution. If you've finally worked your way through the legendary Nurse With Wound list, this makes for a whole new stratum of unknown tongue. “ah, yes ; here’s mr. p.c. c.p.’s treatment of the other known icelandic early electronic music lp (the first, while not really “icelandic” in the sense that it was composed @ ucsd :: thorkell sigurbjörnsson’s “la jolla good friday” - creel pone #52 - but then again these two pieces were composed in holland and sweden, respectively) ...despite that each side-length piece (composed, respectively, by lárus halldór grímsson & thorsteinn hauksson) was composed at the dawn of the 1980s, the music here more in common, timbrally and technique-wise, with the danish late-60s “scene” (bent lorentzen’s ‘heaven and hell’ epic “the botomless pit”, specifically, but also the work of else-marie pade and jørgen plaetner) ...
the first movement of grímsson’s “vetrarrómantik” is quite gestural / minimal compared to the shuddering rhythmics & blasted synthesized thunderclaps that dot the second & third (making full use of the instituut voor sonologie’s arsenal of analogue synthesis tools ; despite the year nary a “plonky” computer-attack in sight !!!) ... hauksson’s “sonata” progresses in a similar fashion (substitute the instituut’s hand-wired modules with ems stockholm’s sprawling ems synthi 100 & buchla systems ; the same heard on akos rozmann’s epic “images of the dream and death”) utilizing a wide array of barber-pole / shepard tone patterns at the piece’s crescendo before settling into a long section of wafting fm tonalities that wouldn’t at all seem out of place on an autechre lp ...this creel pone edition comes complete with a reprint of the 4-page booklet in both icelandic and english, containing an excellent overview of “icelandic electronic music” (from the early 60s to the mid-80s), composer bios and information regarding the specific construction of these two epics ...” – CP.

New limited solo album from Neil Campbell aka Astral Social Club in a hand-numbered edition of 100 copies. While still focussed on the rhythmic psychedelic instants that have defined his most recent form there’s something in the primitive construction and the aggressive sonorities that recalls late-90s solo work like the Never Ending Bowed Metal Song and Boomerang Is Love. Already sold out at source.

Massive public service reissue that rescues Bardo Pond’s classic 1995 debut LP from the void. Bardo have consistently set the high-or-die standard for contemporary drug-damaged guitar rock and their debut LP remains one of their most gloriously wasted transits of epic string velocities. Somewhere between Neil Young circa Arc/Weld, the early Kousokuya recordings and classic USA bedroom underground, Bufo Alvarius was recorded entirely on four-track, further bolstering the feel of personal psychedelic satori. This edition comes with a free CD that includes the epic 30-minute “Amen”, missing from the vinyl due to length/fidelity issues. A modern classic.

Full-length album from this great US duo (here featuring Glenn Donaldson on one track) who somehow translate UK new wave/goth moves into a primitive garage realm that would reference The Shadow Ring and Joy Division as much as The Cramps. Even though it sounds like a mix that shouldn’t work, Judged By 12...  is a great collection that combines spare instrumentation - bass, simple lead guitar, electro-percussion and vocals – and a dreamy/esoteric atmosphere that does for US underground what Coil did for UK Industrial, somehow queering it, making it uncanny. There has been a slew of recent archival new wave unearthings but none of them come close to Blessure Grave in terms of atmosphere and bizarre breadth of influence.

Great single from this American duo, with two sides of doomy balladeering that combine doofy horror motifs with DIY/new wave stylings and beautifully confused UK/US moves. Heavy Flying Nun influence on this one, with the implicit Joy Division-worship of that particular imprint pushed way to the front.

Apparently Simon Reynolds’ favourite Hypnagogic pop outfit, Dolphins Into The Future are the solo project of Belgium’s Lieven Martens. They take off where James Ferraro’s early investigations into dolphin consciousness and Atlantean ritual peaked circa Pan-Dolphinic Dawn. Martens uses translucent new age sonorities, water sounds, delicate keyboards and the sound of praeter-human transmissions translated via boom-boxes to create the kind of artificial exotica of Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Black Joker et al. One long track based around Blavatsky’s Voice Of The Silence and a series of shorter blats. Edition of 500 copies.

Edition of only 320 copies LP from this American duo who have shared vinyl and bandstands with Wooden Wand and Hush Arbors. Indeed, Wooden Wand is perhaps the closest comparison in the way that they hi-jack classic American outlaw balladeering and dark country environments and explode them with post-Velvets jams, touching on the back catalogue of Peters Laughner and Perrett across a bunch of fuzz damaged stompers featuring Mo Tucker drums, Lou Reed-styled chord solos and good time harmonies. A more country inflected Spacemen 3? On split duo-tone colour wax. Forthcoming LP from these guys on De Stijl.

Numbered edition of 99 copies LP from this East Coast USA guitar army generating the kind of axe-on-axe euphoria of behemoths like Vermonster and Superconductor. First side is a five-piece head-dive straight into the void ‘vibrated into being’ at the Helderbeg House, flip is a nine-piece levitation recorded live at Bard College. With colour paste-on sleeves.

Unbelievable collection of rarities, unreleased jams and primo material from Smegma, still the most beautifully damaged free/rock/DIY/Industrial group to come out of the LAFMS camp. This mind-boggling six LP set collects the group’s first three 7”s,"Disco Diarrhea", "Flashcards" and "Pigface Chant", their first two classic LPs, 1979’s Glamour Girl 1941 and 1982’s Pigs For Lepers, a two LP extract of the Live 73-82 Double Tape Spontaneous Sound and a collection of rare compilation tracks. The set also comes with a DVD that features Mike Lastra’s Smegma documentary, The First Ten Years, as well as some bonus live footage. Listened to with 21st century ears, this is a hell of a lesson, featuring some of the purest non-musicianly moves ever dictated by the contours of a bunch of unrepentantly individual souls. It would still be several years before the kind of kind of obsessive punk minimalism on view here would fully percolate into the sub-conscious of 20th century America but Pigs For Lepers sits nicely alongside such discrepant modern behemoths as the first Modern Lovers LP, Half Japanese's “Calling All Girls”, Pere Ubu's 1st, the early LAFMS sides and the first two Velvet Underground LPs as a prime example of goofily liberated American rock form. Loops, found sounds, group gropes, almost Dead C-style dirge/jams. It's all here. A stunning package, hand-numbered in a run of 600 copies. Highly recommended.

Hand-numbered edition of 50 copies 3” CD-R, part of La Station Radar’s ‘Fake Tape Series’. New solo work from Katie Leming of Cro Magnon. Atmospheric guitar/vocals/synth/drums constructs that float Katie’s murky vocals into a zone that parallels Reiko Kudo’s work while generating a deep bedroom-psych atmosphere. Some percussive string/vocal pieces that could almost be Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast and a massively downer cover of Leonard Cohen’s “The Butcher”.

Hand-numbered edition of 50 copies 3” CD-R, part of La Station Radar’s ‘Fake Tape Series’.  More electro-raunch from the duo of Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club et al) and Paul Walsh, recorded live at Batley swimming baths in July of 2009. Aggressively nuanced electronics that combine chuffing rhythms with hotwired crackle and amorphous bass tones. Somewhere between the more ‘Industrial’ stylings of early Kluster/Conrad Schnitzler and Astral Social Club?

Hand-numbered edition of 50 copies 3” CD-R, part of La Station Radar’s ‘Fake Tape Series’. A single extended piece from Youngs and Paine, with Richard’s soaring vocals pushed up-front over a Silver Apples-styled pulse and delayed electric guitar, keyboard, shakuhachi and backwards F/X, expanding from a basic vocal refrain to an almost Can-styled deep-space jam. The Horizon Project sounds closer to Ilk than the usual duo material and the presence of Edwards Youngs on narration further bolsters the progressive tendencies. Excellent. Last copies, sold out at source.

Deluxe gatefold LP reissue of the Japanese guitar army's greatest side, the synapse-splitting Satori. This is pure guitar excess, with a series of movements that work as further ascensions of heavy modal guitar bliss, combing crunching riff psychosis with long flights of pure psychedelic steel and some proto-doom/metal moves. Still one of the classic Japanese underground guitar albums, this is Flower Travellin' Band's second official LP, released in 1971.

Edition of only 200 copies hand-numbered LP, the vinyl debut for Bill Nace’s (Northampton Wools/Blood Stereo/Vampire Belt et al) extended solo guitar experiments. Nace uses various preparations and plays the guitar on his lap, building from clanging blues-infected single-string squeal through sanctified feedback and hovering tones before sounding doomy percussive bells and taking off into all-out guitar splurge. Aspects of Too Dead For Dreaming seem too reflect on some of Heather Leigh’s earlier pedal string work, an area ripe for further exploration.

More spectacular Suicide/Scientists-damaged psychoactive minimalism from Moon Duo, the duo of Sanae Yamada and Erik Johnson (Wooden Shjips). This one ‘does it’ even more than their previous Sick Thirst and Scared Bones releases, using repeat-grooves as taking off points for endless fuzz solos ala Les Rallizes Denudes. Excellent.

Brand new EP from the current greatest live band on the planet. This one expands on the more extended aspect of the group’s recent live set, with a long A-side that dissolves from collage and high lonesome song into vectors of intuitive string think that are as beautiful as any ’72 Dead set. The flip captures two shorter tracks straight out of the teenage garage. Fantastic. Bring on the LP.

Excellent collection of recent work from Antwerp’s Daniel Renders aka Cassis Cornuta, a European thinker who took a similar aesthetic stance to early Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders way back at the dawn of the 70s, making anti-music, noise and art-prank statements using broken turntables, Korg synths, vacuum cleaners, fucked-up pianos, microphone feedback, primitively executed sound poetry and industrial debris purloined from Smegma. Cornuta’s story makes for a fascinating secret history that sheds further light on the culturally decimating power of avant garde theory in the hands of punk primitive kids, documenting a dramatic cultural engagement played out across countless long-lost cassettes and private performances. This new Ultra Eczema collection gathers material recorded between 2005 and 2009 and it’s dominated by lonely/minimal analogue keyboard work that comes out of the same solitary universe as Edmond De Deyster (indeed one doughball has already suggested they are one and the same person) while combining cracked drum machines, gurgling melodies and that classic fried middle-European avant punk appeal. A fantastic collection, edition of 300 copies with inserts and with multiple holes punched in the centre, should you want to skew the sonics even further. Highly recommended.

Fantastic collection of outlaw visual art and goofy photography from Dennis Tyfus, still the most cracked graphic artist to come out of post-Noise Europe. “A 60 pages zine made as a contribution to the "changez, een belgenshow" exhibtion at 21 rozendaal in een schede/holland. This zine collects the short period right before this exhibition. All work is made or found between November 4th, when Tyfus joined the subhumans of Hair Police on a tour through Europe and December 31st. Besides a lot of drawing in the tour van, this period included a residency at Codalunga in Vittorio Veneto (which also resulted in a exhibtion), a sinterklaas performance with Benjamin Verdonck, great second hand store found imagery, a ceiling fan party, a Jacques Beloeil show, a Ludo Nich show, and the first ever baking cookies attempt.. well collected in a 60 pages black and white zine (with a full color cover). Limited to 600 copies.” – DT.