Compilation of 1992-95 material from this long defunct but still legendary free-form US power trio based around guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer/vocalist Adris Hoyos. Hard to think of anyone outside of The Dead C that intuited such an exhilaratingly devolved take on standard rock moves but the proof is all in here, with Adris’s omnidirectional free-form drumming style building precarious bridges between free jazz blurt and hardcore skullfuck, while Orcutt’s guitar weeps like an open wound, with the kind of barbed tonalities of Jandek and Henry Flynt married to primitive-as-hell non-musicianly bluster. Adris’s vocals are post Patty/Yoko in the most punkingest sense and titles like “Nazi USA”, “I Fought The Police” and “Fuckology” are to die for. If you dig The Magik Markers, you might wanna follow the trails. Highest recommendation.

The Lithuanian free jazz label NoBusiness have really outdone themselves with this stunning archival set. Ensemble Muntu were one of the key ‘forgotten’ free jazz groups that sprung up in the space between the original fire music explosion of the late 60s and its comparative rehabilitation sometime in the 90s. Muntu relied on the NY loft scene (as documented on the Wildflowers set) for survival, regularly gigging at Rashied Ali’s Ali’s Alley and Sam and Bea Rivers’ Studio Rivbea. Muntu are also remarkable for providing an early rallying point for a bunch of players whose profiles would effectively rocket in the decades to come, with William Parker on bass, Rashid Bakr on drums  and Arthur Williams and Roy Campbell Jr trading the trumpet stool alongside guest players like violinist Billy Bang. Muntu’s sound is approximately post-Ornette, the same post-boppy parallel lines and fleet horns, but it’s cut with a primitive, guerrilla elan that is extremely persuasive. Bakr’s drumming is great throughout, riding the rhythm one minute before dropping out into loose tonal stomps the next. But Moondoc is the focus, with a facility on the alto that would combine flights of overtone violence with fat, bluesy phrasing and an unusual melodic sense. The whole package is housed in a slipcase and comes with a triple fold-out wallet that bundles both the original private press albums that Muntu released – 1977’s First Feeding and 1979’s The Evening Of The Blue Men – as well as a third unreleased disc that features a trio Moondoc/Parker/Bakr gig from Ali’s Alley from 1975 and a 114 page book that features a ton of posters from the time, a map of the NY loft scene, period snaps and extensive in-depth historical essays. Easily one of the best archival collections of the guerrilla spirit of free jazz’s loft years. Highly recommended. 

Warehouse find of a bunch of copies of the all-time g reatest Dead C album. Totally wasted/gratuitously disembowelled rock form from three of the most primitive avant gardists ever to huff on axes. Supremely drugged atmosphere, a drummer who plays lead, Morley’s great, universe-defining vocals and killer nod-out destructo rhythms. Highest recommendation.

Debut album from this SF-group who balance a dreamy garage-zone sound that is all beams of keyboards and tambourine in a way that filters post-New Wave paisley revivalism through a hazy fidelity and a capacity for moody hooks that is pure folk-punk. There’s also a heavy post-Velvets vibe that manifests itself in a vocalist with a penchant for wasted Peter Perrett-isms and a Mass Ave. style strut that Willie Alexander would’ve easily wrapped his lips around. Ain’t hearing the New Zealand influence that most commentators have been throwing around tho: think more west coast USA garage revival as played by post-Byrds teenage no counts (The Dovers/The Choir) jonesing for the McGuinn zone of endless euphoric Rickenbacker riffs. Then transplant it to Siltbreeze. The cover perfectly articulates the overall isolated teen w/a penchant for fuzz vibe of the disc. One of the label’s most unaccountably addictive releases of late. Recommended.

New full-length album from this group that have morphed from an avant rock unit into a uniquely ferocious free metal/thug/biker/prog project featuring Adam Kriney (Owl Xounds) on drums, keyboard and flute, Evan Sobel on electric bass, guitar and harmonium and Ninni Morgia. This is their most self-consciously ‘epic’ outing thus far, with King Crimson (Red-era) styled breakdowns, bass riffs and tempo shreds, almost Slayer-esque bombast and doubled electric guitar leads that come straight out of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. If you like yr prog with a black Vertigo label, a ton of wail and nods to the daffiest metal then get on board. Comes with free MP3 download.

Totally killing compilation that does a fantastic job of mopping up all of the recent avant garage free punk action currently shaking the sidewalks of Detroit. Major a-formal touchstones would seem to be The Electric Eels, Cheater Slicks and the fucking Dead Boys, all given a no-technique/everything in the red post-Noise overhaul. For every sucker punch from previously hailed cells – excellent tracks from Tyvek, Little Claw, Human Eye– there are some major discoveries – Heroes & Villains, Frustrations... This has alla the coherent menace and potential brain-bombing style of the best punk/hardcore scene comps (with the Dangerhouse aesthetic maybe the closest comparison). As a map of the outer reaches of blitzoid guitar-based high energy rock – from the place that virtually gave birth to it – this is nothing short of necessary. Highly recommended.

“About 15 years too late! Finally out. This is the first 7" in a yearlong monthly series of limited 7"s that will really be all over the place. Anything goes: from the acid of Pierre Elitair to the mincecore of Agathocles or a prank by Frieder Butzmann! This first one could actually be an LP! As usual with noisecore, grind or mince, this one has more tracks on it than 5 LPs together! 10 songs by each band, Agathocles drills holes in your skull and pours in a cocktail of ass-grinding diarrhea recorded on a rehearsal right before their Mexican tour! This is no fancy pants studio recordings but the raw tapedeck deal, muffled grunts and painful fastness. On the flip side Sissy Spacek (aka John Wiese) takes it away with some Gerogerigegege styled noisecore shaving off your nose and eyelashes, feels like the recording is actually sitting in a giant amp!!!!! A brutal slap of preparé right there! Comes in a fold open cover design by Debby Tyfus with lyrics etc. Limited to 300 copies.” – DT.

Hand-numbered edition of 50 copies 3” CD-R, part of La Station Radar’s ‘Fake Tape Series’. New solo jams from Neil Campbell’s Astral Social Club that are closer to his contribution to Vibracathedral Orchestra than anything I’ve heard from him of late, with high electronic melodies carried in on constantly phasing waves of drone.

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.

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”.

Wow – insane that anyone would even think to hunt down and re-release this, but this is a major public service for anyone attuned to the glorious sound of the late-60s European commune scene. Reportage: Spela Sjalv has been misattributed to the group Trad Gras Och Stenar but it’s actually a series of field recordings put together with Trad Gras’s Bo Anders Persson and Solveig Bark, an experimental composer and contemporary of Folke Rabe et al. Released in 1970, the LP is a document of various non-musicians making experimental/ritual/spontaneous sound across a bunch of contexts. There are ecstatic percussion and string jams that float whole rooms full of voices, stumpy acoustic dirges, traditional folk melodies re-birthed as tickets to tomorrow, NNCK/Vibracathedral-style primitive drones, solo ragas... the section with children singing and playing on the second side is particularly out and a lesson in the potential of spontaneous body soundings for alla the modern would-be sound poets out there. It succeeds not just as a convincing document of ‘music’ made by ‘non-musicians’ but as a time capsule from the Swedish underground and a transposing of Trad Gras/International Harvester/Parson Sound’s monolithic drone work to festivals and acoustic folk settings. Comes in a replica sleeve. Highly recommended.

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.

Whenever someone mentions PCP-huffing Bikers in a blurb, that’s when I reach for my Fraction LP. Acid Archives describe this one as projecting “visions of a biker high on PCP driving over a cliff at 100mph, laughing and screaming all the way.” The label blurb references the Fraction LP alongside a bunch of grails of gone including Nicodemus, Ya Ho Wha 13, Raven, Heitkotter and Kenneth Higney. The story is that the Circuit Rider LP showed up as a private press album with virtually nada in terms of documentation round about 1980, though there are suggestions that it was actually recorded in the early 70s. The group are on a serious Doors-jag, with minimal Robby Krieger-style runs generating a doofy take on the atmospherics of “When The Music’s Over” , albeit with a psychos-for-satori overhaul and a buncha lyrics about riding freights and getting high with the ladies. The group are a little more primitive in their chops than Fraction but when they get to testifying over Zig Zag Wanderer-style riffs about ‘burning up highway/put my foot to the floor/smoking at the starting gate/on fire at the finish line/shot off like a bullet/into eternity – yeah!’  the effect is just as fucking blasted. Featuring a vocalist who teleports between sleazy, oracular and drunk-in-a-bikers-jacket at the slightest sniff of fuzz, it makes sense that Acid Archives would’ve listed this as one of the Top 10 private press LPs most likely to be owned by a serial killer. This album has got VT written all over it. 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.

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?

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.

Limited edition of 200 copies CD-R on Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never’s own label. Monolithic Kraut styled electronic jams from the duo of Keith Fullerton Whitman and Geoff Mullen. “Geoff Mullen and Keith Fullerton Whitman welcome you to the new-domestic. The moving hallway is dotted with TIF frames and leads you to a center room location radiating with CMYK hum. This sonic-grand-tour was recorded live to glass, over one day in Providence, Rhode Island; a machine groove epic in movements that offers up total sonoronarrative immersion while kindling thoughts of Paul Verhoven-like industrial safehouses in which doomed plans are made. Coming from inside the walls of this micro-future, GM/KFW surge a permeating drive that shows lost footage and reveals forgotten locations, levels below. The CS-50/MT-68 combo-splices finally unveil the screen -- tomorrow into Gateway. The chimes from within lead you deeper and the screen behind you shuts off. The finale take on almost a dare I say Haruomi vibe; west meets east without overt crystallization of dialectic black helicopters and blurred out kanji. Nice and wide and deep stereo balance to boot. Seminal synth war/drama action from East coast legends that commit to the landing and stick it.” – DL.

Limited edition of 200 copies, on Daniel Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never’s label. Innercity is Hans Dens, a member of the Dreamtime Tapes Sounds community alongside Lieven Martens/Dolphins Into The Future et al. His sound is based around degraded loops and minimal keyboard sighs, generating oceans of sound that are dense with weird, sub-aquatic life-forms. The main thrust of In Fetal Aura is a recreation of pre-birth states and womblike stasis using repetition, sublimation and disarticulated sound and there’s a grainy complexity to his compositions that is close to William Basinski. “Innercity is the brainchild of Belgium's Hans Dens, a wiz from the Dreamtime think tank who has been prodigiously translating his vision journeys to DAT since 2008... anyone familiar with 666 MINUTES AT BOTTOMS OF BLACK LAKES will understand IN FETAL AURA as a natural outgrowth of his process, refined via the destruction and adaptation of loop based bedroom concrete, kraut and new age towards an auditory dreamsystem language all his own. He's also the barron of nu school Bontempi BT series jammage; the Italian stepchildren of the Casio MT series, imbued with aliased, bit damaged refuse from a time when things were simpler. IN FETAL AURA is a trip; a moving picture of animate life in pre-semiotic states of development. Within that trip Innercity reflects biological diversity in spirit form, beautifully shifting from one amorpha to to the next via repetition and mutation, like spirits basking in the coptic glow of life before consciousness. Don't fear the path to amnesia; an infinite patch wipe.. the incomplete return.” – DL

Edition of 50 copies cassette from Attic Cassettes, back from the dead. Kat Fitzgerald is a Canadian solo artist with a huge Aaron Dilloway crush, creating minimal tone pieces from tape loops and scavenged sound. Odd, unarmoured abstracts with an awkwardness of construction that best resembles Jessica Rylan/Can’t’s homemade electronics.

1971 solo LP, the only album that Japanese guitar god Kimio Mizutani (Uganda/Love Live Life +1 et al) cut as a leader. Here he heads a big band that also features keyboardist Kuni Kawachi and pianist Masahiko Satoh. Julian Cope has a blind-spot for this album in Japrocksampler  - but then he dissed the Brush LP, so go figure... I picked it up when it came out on CD years ago in Japan and I still dig it. It mostly consists of delicate orchestral arrangements blown to pieces by Mizutani’s fuzztone lead guitar, generating the kind of surreal headspace that would meld operatic Eastern sonorities with outside garage punk stylings and progressive jazz. If it hardly put Mizutani on the map, it still stands as one of the weirdest marriages of Japanese chamber music and endless distorto guitar ever sunk by a major label. This reissue comes in a replica sleeve and on heavy vinyl. Another fascinating slice of Japanese underground rock history.

Limited self-released cassette from Keffer documenting her new collaborative project with Scott Martin aka Hobbledeions. Synth, beats and distant female angel vox combine in some of Keffer’s most straightforwardly beautiful bedroom jams. Flip is Martin’s solo project, with crude breakbeats and rolling synth.

Gatefold LP reissue of this 1971 Japanese psych monster monster, with a group led by guitar god Kimio Mizutani (who blew apart Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalo’s classic Uganda LP while also cutting the killer solo album A Path Through Haze). This album made #6 in Julian Cope's Japrocksampler countdown, with a single massive freak-out free/rock blast on the A - "The Question Mark" - backed up with four tracks of huffing sax/organ/guitar/drums shakedown on the flip. A classic Japanese side, recommended.

Edition of 200 copies CD-R on Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never’s own label. Dog Master Teleportation – aka DMT – presents music reformulated and overdubbed by a quartet of players, including KGB Man (aka Daniel Lopatin), Shaun Trujillo, J. Glennon and P. Giordano. The music is minimal, with translucent electro-stylings that feel like the extracted DNA of lush synth soundtracks isolated and made sidereal using extreme compositional process. All the recordings pre-date the OPN LPs and they cover a fairly wide spectrum, from punked 20^th century avant garde moves to Industrial-scale electro confusion. “Manic Shooter's DMT is sonic weird hieroglyphs from combination Taos, New Mexico and Long Island; the hybrid of which mirrors the effect... bent clues will set you on a path while others are meant to deceive you. Powerlines whisper instructions in a non gendered voice. Mystical Hasid rapper vaporizedendlessly in interlocking dimensional mechanism. Remember this was during the initial Bush era, pre-dating 911 and thus Junior's eyeballs hadn't yet been upgraded to format terrestrial. Mirror plates in the eye cavity is how they found terrorists. Shooter was the first to command green missle control, similar to a Tartan warrior he refracted the beams himself and thus took the problem into his own hands. DMT is an in and out enhancement of this frightening time, as if the lingering confusion of a post-Inside Edition childhood had naturally spawned the devastated political mis-en-scene, building up to the 911 simulation telecast we witnessed while en route to Yusef Lateef's class when we got word of the attacks. This is also a historic document containing some of the first ever KGB MAN overdubs, as well as marking the first time in RIAA history that anyone has ever exclusively fucked with Prince of Darkness and Alphaville on a sampling level, but beyond recognition, musique concret style, plus a touch of cartoon Skinny Puppy meets Mike Patton isolated in a hotel room with a portastudio while on tour with Bungle in '97 vibes. I have recommended Trujillo to be committed to the Material Eye Institute for dog master evaluation. Enjoy it while you can and as Lou said, "watch out for worlds behind you." – DL.

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.

“The first time I've met Jeff Hartford aka moose jaw aka NOISE NOMADS was around 4 years ago in providence, a tense looking bear putting a mic in front of a amp, leaving the audience alone with a whale of feedback, pretty pretty pretty confused!! He walks out after kranking open the amp, a minute later a giant REAL Christmas tree walks thru the audience trying to find the way back to the amp, kicking people over, I guess this show was right after Christmas time and Jeff found it somewhere or he stared at a young kid that was about to decorate it. I was very impressed by his show, both sound and performance wise, there was a seriously intense vibe there, felt like he could snap at any given moment and squeeze you to death with a Christmas tree.. Noise Nomads' live sets are always strange, confusing and amazing, an amp iiiiiiiiiiiiiii-ing while the man goes running around the block, a mountain of amps that start talking after he picked a fight with them, a sludgier drummer does not exist. It was definitely not the last time the man amazed me, his duo set with PAUL FLAHERTY (which is released on American Tapes), the loner car rides I shared with him to his area in the valleys of Northampton, his amazing monthly zines and tapes, his drumming with grey skull, his drawings etc.. It's a total psycho package; everything is there; visuals, sounds and a great dude! The first side of this record was recorded a bunch of years ago and is just voice and tascam! An amazing swollen beast of sound poetry, gargling waanzin, and muffled barking! The b side is the same dude a few years later on his knees in my living room screaming thru a bass drum and a contact mic attached to a bunch of pedals, harsher than a prison full of parrots to be released! There should be more paintings like Kim Gordon's NOISE NOMADS!!!  Limited to 300 copies” – DT.

The duo of Pascal Nichols and Kelly Jones continue their world-beating run of flawlessly executed free jazz ritual with this beautiful set, released in a hand-numbered edition of 123 copies with full-colour artwork fixed to a thick block of wood and with a cloth pouch for the disc. All Cows Are Sacred features two tracks that showcase some of the duo’s heaviest playing. The first track has a particularly aggressive feel, with feedback tones, smears of breath and harsh cymbal sonorities turning the air to slashing steel ribbons and building towards the kind of epiphanies of klang more associated with Chie Mukai’s solo work or a heavy metal Sean Meehan. The contrast between the players on the first track is particularly electric, with Nichols playing it caveman, just thugging out on the drums, while Jones floats zoned devotional motifs from east to west with heart-fluttering delicacy. Nichols makes great use of the throat microphone, sounding like Hassan-i Sabbah himself, and the second track opens up with the sound of the duo teleporting into a nebulous zone of slow motion breath, unravelling melodies into ancient devotional atmospheres. Can’t think of a comparable run of releases that has been so uniformly flattening and this is another major instalment. Bear in mind that postage will be a little more on this one than a single CD due to weight. Highly recommended.

Limited edition of 50 copies cassette from the newly revived Attic Cassettes. Rubber Fish come from Mexico and play a form of psychedelic noise rock as crude and confused as early Reynols.

More communal jams from the Funeral Folk collective, with a sound that moves from macabre forest folk through full-tilt monolithic freak rock ala Trad Gras Och Stenar/International Harvester et al. Edition of 550 copies, full colour sleeves, already sold out at source.

Great new project from Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards et al) and Josh Alper that mainlines the DIY art-pop moves of Dan Treacey’s Television Personalities, Ed Ball’s O Level/The Times et al. Freakbeat psych styles with primitive pro-Mod instrumental settings and a sharp modern art appeal. “The Art Museums ARE into: art, poetry, WHAAM records & films about Mods…The Art Museums ARE NOT into: flared trousers, drip coffee, dirty sneakers.”

Blazingly heavy three-way that pits violinist/improviser Tony Conrad against two visual artists, Jutta Koether and John Miller. Koether plays synth, dropping naive clusters of atonal chords into the path of Conrad’s disembowelling violin while Miller plays some squealing acid-soaked leads. Easily one of the most intense and densely psychedelic outings for Conrad outside of his duo with Keiji Haino and one that ranges from tiny, mesmeric string tonalities through avalanches of feedback. Edition of 500 numbered copies on blue vinyl.

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.

New edition of 50 copies CD-R from Ashtray, on Stuart Arnot’s (Ghost Of An Octopus/Smear Campaign et al) own label. Some of the most unforgiving Ashtray material here, with a first impenetrable wall of smoggy psychedelic excess giving way to that weird electrified/cyborg Euro-weirdo style of recent releases.

New second edition. Second CD on this new Glasgow-based label, with stunning hard card fold-out packaging with full-colour photography and stamped credits. Meursault is the solo guise of Mr Shaun Falconer, a do-er that has dunk deep in the back catalogue of Keiji Haino, Loren Mazzacane, Hisato Higuchi and maybe even Christoph Heemann and William Basinski and come up with a beautifully personal take on avant guitar forms, elegiac slow-mo poetry and the sound of light-dissolved drones that glide to earth with alla the grace of a storm of cherry blossoms. Very affecting, heavy with a sense of place and time and one of the best discs to come out of Scotland since, well, uh.... Recommended.

New second edition. First CD on this new Glasgow-based label, with stunning hard card fold-out packaging with full-colour photography and stamped credits. Meursault is the solo guise of Mr Shaun Falconer and this first album crosses forlorn, nautical piano forms with beautifully blossoming drones and a regally stoned, devotional atmosphere that's somewhere between William Basinski, Andrew Chalk and Organum. Very beautiful and recommended.

Unlikely reissue of this counter-cultural classic from American assemblagist, painter and artist Allan Kaprow, originally released on LP by Mass Art in 1966 and distributed by Something Else Press. This is Kaprow’s instructional manifesto for the creation of something “that doesn’t remind you of culture” and the ruthlessness of his anti-art critique feels as prescient now as it ever did. The recording still has the power to upend and confuse arbitrary concepts of life versus art and given the right combination of individuals and circumstance its application remains extremely potent. Nicely packaged with floating text screen-printed onto the jewel case, great to have this seminal recording available once more, a key influence on Fluxus, future performance art and more...

"Snake Apartment let twelve gross inches of ugly, noisy punk slither out of Rhode Island. Heavy scuzz rock drenched in syrup puts on its studio shoes and has a loose night out on the town, sounding like a shelved Am Rep gem just dusted off and released to cumsumers. Here's a small glimmer of hope for middle aged losers who enjoy late Black Flag, Flipper, Brainbombs, Drunks With Guns, God Bullies, and TAD, and neo hipsters and indie label CEO's falling over themselves with glee over bands like Pissed Jeans and Clockcleaner. Limited to 500 copies, all on green card green vinyl. Get it while the gettin's good." - PU.

Limited edition of only 200 copies LP reissue of an obscure 2007 CD-R release. Hailing from Australia, Curse channels the disembodied spirits of fringe singer-songwriters like Roy Harper, Bill Fay and Syd Barrett while filtering his song concepts through a claustrophobic post-Xpressway logic, using a ton of murky lo-fi effects, warped children’s voices, haunting vocal drones, tapes, lead guitar that shadows Loren Connors’ work circa Hell’s Kitchen Park and the kind of raggedy man-on-the-brink style of Alastair Galbraith and Peter Jefferies. A singular release with a classic private press/weirdo feel.

Major new LP from Ducktails and easily one of Matt Mondanile’s most beautiful, out of time creations. A perfect visioning of Hypnagogic Pop’s retro-futurist appeal, with instrumentals that are as naïve and as wide-eyed teenage perfect as anything on the Department Store Santas LP and an approach to the jam that is primitive  in its execution but maximalist in its ambition and its time-phasing potential. Although the arrangements are fairly simple, they have all of the utopian neverland appeal of the lesser known ends of the Beach Boys catalogue. Landscapes includes some re-mastered tracks that originally appeared on the Parasails cassette. Genius liner notes by Skaters road-mangler Charles Berlitz which are worth quoting in full:  “Dear Matt, It's confetti for memories! your buddy Charles and the Sunday afternoon gripfest staring, check this out: "Little Man Tate" and "Little Big Man", super funny, as well as a dusty tough to read flick called, you know i got carrots for brains, "Pipeline"! So, you know every trilogy needs the curveball, and well, "Pipeline" has got to be uncle charlie. I found these videos in the basement of chateau terrace antwerp, but it's super gritty kitty down there and i just grabbed three quickies. So I just put on your jams, and i am gunna watch Pipeline's surf visions and scope your memories and sunbake. but man, Pipeline's front flap video tape protection is busted, so i am gunna trade it with "You Got Mail's" front flap, at this point i have to duck into my roomates zone and grip his RCA to Mini jack, but he has a sign posted that reads "STAY OUT OF MY ROOM". super funny, but later I am gunna take the sign, cross out "ROOM" and insert "DREAMS", put the sign on my wall, let somebody specials red orange lipstick make out with it, so that the guy knows he's a cutie and chazzi's touched by freak. But so check it, i had to grip this RCA to Mini jack so that i can grip your memories and watch Pipeline. Hey man, for real though, member when we were on the beach in barcelona, before our car got towed, and we were cruising to beverly hills cop soundtrack, The Master and Carmen San Diego were in the back, we got to the beach jumped in the water drank beer ate coconuts and got massages while staring at boob people. at that moment, like when we snuck into the berlin film festival and danced Ocean's 11, wow, my roomate just came home, he's wearing a long party wig and telling chazzi that he shagged all night long in a squat called "Duel 3", no joke; but yeah, I cannot, for the parrot in me, forget those times, to each his own future, So wait, back to Pipeline,, no wait, i got to tell you about this party last full moon, my roomate throws one every month when the moon's light eclipses that of the rational minds hesitations, and well i had to dj, i wanted to, but i brought the parrot along, you met him right? he is always there when chazzy does the radio show or when monopoly needs vocals on a bamboo track, but neither of us invite this guy to the parties where those other dreams come true. its not cool, so i brought him along, you know his name right? Belafonte, so belafonte and i start dj-ing, you know that song from Police Academy called "I got to be somebody" by Jack Mack and a Hearttack? stars and ecstasy, for real, and jel doctor was getting me buckets of beer, cuz it was so hot and the air is full of short stuff, so i flip the records and repeatedly fend off requests for beat it and dirty diana, and all of a sudden Belafonte has drank all my beer and is smoking cigarettes, there are no tickets for free coldies, and i get pretty pissed, i kinda let Belafonte have it, you know, telling him that I cant take him anywhere, gnorm the gnome style, and he's like "alright, you go get some more beers", wow, your mirror jam just cruised in - memories... so, yeah, Belafonte is like "go, get some more beers and let me talk some of these girls into dancing with us and you will be calling me Most Valuable Vertabrae, birdtalk magazine style, so i get a bunch of coldies cuz tod god just came through with some bready poo, i come back to the dance floor, and well, i guess Belafonte burnt his head on his own cigarette, and this girl named Manon, but he understood as Emanuelle, like schnikies!! well his head is burnt and this black paint starts rubbing off his head, and i notice that there is paint on my neck, my face, and on her face, and her neck, and so on and so forth CSI style, and everybody kind of understands, the girls have taken this black paint and are marking it on their bodies like war paint initiation style, and they are petting Belafonte like he's the unattainable, i had no idea that this parrot was a model for Birdtalk Magazine back in its hey day, group therapy is affective... later i asked Manon for some affection, and she said "no, your feet are too dirty", on account of me wearing flippers to a dance party, and was like cool, its not even july 4th yet, but then, as i walked away she was like "Three O Clock, meet me at the Zoo!" no joke, Belafonte and me were like ah kuku ah kaka bamboo-for-two style... Stories are forever and i got to get back to PIPELINE, which is hitting the screen right now, and its definitely not about surfing and reminds charles of when Ebay and you stayed at the new york dante's microchip apartment and it was so hot and you guys passed out next to each other in your undies exclusively like siamese pipeline limbo style, if i had hoagie it would have been chazzi to chucky in like 4 doners and sixty seckies... Thanks for the memories Matt, i miss you man, i think Belafonte and I will get deported soon and i will meet you in Cali. Love, Charles Berlitz.”

New solo work from Sam Meringue, aka Explorers, Matrix Metals, half of Yoga et al. Flashback Repository is a crude Xerox-psych take on James Ferraro and Spencer Clark’s Hypnagogic memory-recovery process, positing a universal storehouse where all of the waste consciousness of humanity resides. It sounds like abandoned machinery heard through a fog of tape hiss and dreamtone, with keyboards spooling loops of wasteland texture beneath hallucinatory vocal forms and far-away melodies. The feel is closest, perhaps, to the early Skaters style, with peaking drones jump-cutting into keyboard carousels and flickering dreammachine actions, all rendered in a way that sounds as if its beaming across the decades, from the future as much as the past. A reissue of an obscure cassette from Meringue’s Outer Limits Collective, the LP comes with a stapled together booklet featuring ‘explanatory’ text. Edition of 425 copies. Highly recommended. 

Mind-blowing out of nowhere debut for this solo UK underground project based in the Wirral in Merseyside. Forest Swords work as a Hypnagogic update of classic UK underground modes, importing psychedelic hip-hop and R ‘n’ B production styles into the kind of eccentric art-pop settings of Simon Wickham-Smith and Richard Youngs, Two Daughters, Dome, The Shadow Ring et al. The music is hypnotically lush minimalism, sometime using synthesised ghost vocals over dubbed-up Julian Lynch style bass and beautiful smears of drone. Forest Swords talks of his love for Aaliyah’s work with Timbaland and there’s a sleight of hand going on here which is comparable to Daniel Lopatin’s seductive use of screwed hip hop styles in drone/underground settings. Here Forest Swords come over as a Hypnagogic Aphex Twin, with the stoned production style of Selected Ambient Works usurped by crude minimal Spacemen/Velvets guitar and some F/X heavy DIY remix styles. It’s a fantastic trip, with something indefinably bleak/lovely in its evocation of lonely late night England. Dagger Paths consists of specially re-mastered versions of tracks from the out of print cassettes Miarches and Glory Gongs along with brand new material. Full colour pro-printed sleeves and insert with a MP3 download. A classic UK underground side, bolstering the tradition while taking it somewhere else completely. 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.

You might have spotted Julian Lynch’s name as a member of Ducktails and Predator Vision, but behind the scenes he has been amassing a fairly formidable catalogue of solo CD-Rs that are near perfect articulations of Hypnagogic pop. Orange You Glad is his debut LP, a collection of four track recordings cut at home in Ridgewood, New Jersey and in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is a student of ethnomusicology. The album consists of a series of songs and instrumentals that exist in a zone that is totally beyond technique. The recording is crudely sophisticated, with an instinctive, naturally musical feel even when the sonic aesthetic is beyond the whole Xpressway/Siltbreeze ethos of destroyed fidelity. The bass is non-rhythmic in the extreme, appearing now and then, just out of place and time, functioning more as harmonic/melodic brackets that help to focus the music towards some kind of tonal center. The drums are crude, the guitar a punk blaze of almost-Kurihara style tremolo and fuzz. The gorgeous, soaring vocals at first seem to work against the grime of the music, the kind of high multi-tracked harmonies that would re-locate The Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” into the raggedy environs of Tori Kudo’s Guys N Dolls play the music of Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper but it’s an inspired marriage, with the massively devolved nature of the jams colliding with the angelic vocal arrangements to birth an atmosphere with the kind of benign punk urgency first postulated by the early Modern Lovers. Then there are the instrumentals and mood-pieces, where Lynch brings in aspects of his ethnological studies, with Eurasian melodies and even high-life style guitars crowned by coronas of circular reed work, peaking in an instrumental with a clarinet part so beautiful it feels as if it was plucked right out of your dreams as you fell asleep in front of the TV aged 12. It’s a truly unique album, one that combines savagely primitive rock breakdowns with some of the most gorgeous Hypnagogic stylings to come out of the whole Ducktails/Predator Vision/Real Estate scene. Orange You Glad announces a major new voice. 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.

Vinyl reissue of what was an obscure limited cassette on Not Not Fun from Sam Meringue’s (Explorers/Yoga/Flashback Repository) Matrix Metal project. This one is described as alien lounge music and it uses keyboards, 1980s soundtrack styles and huge clouds of brain-fogging static to hallucinate incidental music for the birth-pangs of galaxies. Call it Hypnagogic Kosmiche. Edition of 500 copies with full colour covers and digital download. Highly recommended. 

Massive full-length from Joe Knight aka Rangers who had a previous cassette on Not Not Fun. Heard this described as ‘mirrorball funknagogic pop’ and yeah, it’s fully mainlined H-Pop that expands on the Ariel Pink/James Ferraro blueprint by importing massive bass riffs (that at points sound like PiL), screwed and chopped production styles and fully structured songs that confuse DIY prog with 1980s pop. Think of the more guitar-focussed 80s skateboard vid soundtracks of Lamborghini Crystal cut with an Eighties frontman beaming vocals straight from late-night MTV. The whole album has a Roxy Music-bootleg vibe, a fuzzy mirror onto an alien pop music with cold, dreamy synths and monster bass. Suburban Tours is a collection of pop songs that take the raw material of Knight’s extended collage-based cassettes and turns them into classic psychedelic instants. All the tracks were recorded after Knight relocated to San Francisco from the suburbs of Dallas, Texas and there’s something melancholy in his evocation of 80s/90s teenage USA cut up with a confused love/hate for what he calls suburbia’s “failed connections with nature” – fake lighting, golf courses, air conditioning, gated communities... Todd Ledford describes it well when he says: “But despite the loneliness and melancholic themes there is a remarkable amount of color to his music. Like it's the sound of what he'd want to have playing on his headphones while riding a bike thru these neighbourhoods -- the sound necessary to make these places seem lively and fun.” Either way this is a major Hypnagogic statement. Full-colour pro-printed sleeves with MP3 download. Highly recommended.

Rarity: Packaged in a sprayed corrugated-card slipcase with full-colour insert and limited to 77 hand-numbered copies, Empty Kingdom compiles a bunch of live-to-tape and studio creations from Heath Moerland’s face-tripping noise project. One of the most primitive, hands-on free electronics units outside of Nautical Almanac, Sick Llama make totally evocative use of broke-down media and tape rot to conjure the sound of yr brain bouncing slowly down a flight of cotton wool steps. This is another beauty, some of the most damaged and claustrophobic bad-trip psychedelia you’ll ever dose yrself with. Recommended. OOP.

Amazing new LP (first of two proposed volumes) that bundles the best of the many self-released CD-Rs/tapes released by Jonna Karanka aka Kuupuu, featuring material from the albums Sateen Suutelemat, Kulta Sulka, Kuupuu, Kevatlauluja and I Can Walk The Dark. Beautiful, full-colour pro-printed sleeves with art by Jonna: Kuupuu is working cover for the solo thoughts of Jonna Karanka, a beautiful cog in Finland's free folk underground. Jonna also records as Kukkiva Poliisi and is a member of the all-girl acid-folk freakout ensemble Hertta Lussu éssÑ alongside Merja Kokonen (aka Islaja) and Laura Naukkarinen (aka Lau Nau). Kuupuu are the most immediately entrancing sub-radar group to come out of Finland yet, combining a wild avant garde aesthetic with a love of lo-fi fug, beautiful, tranced folk forms and perilous doses of pure glee. Their many recordings combine child-like, ultra-naãve nursery rhyme vocals and melodies with corridors of starlit percussion, sawing purple swathes of string, impenetrable forest rituals, beautiful song forms and some staggering psychedelic tongue action. Totally otherworldly.

New 1st edition limited black vinyl self-released EP from the Wooden Shjips crew, this time a solo off-shoot from Ripley Johnson. This EP has kind of a similar feel to those great, early 12”s from Spacemen 3 where they would extend a single riff to infinity. The A side here is a classic Velvets/Spacemen repeat-o jam with flares of ostrich guitar while the flip lifts a muzzy teen-stoopid organ riff ala The Seeds/Music Machine that heads-out into the kind of eternal brain-floating mode of “Up In Her Room”. Very limited supply.

Deluxe double vinyl edition of Castro's recent album complete with bonus single: It's not what you dreamed - singer/songwriter Nick Castro hasn't gone and hooked up with an entire orchestra made up of all 12 of Erika Elder's cute little sisters but he has recruited Joolie Wood and John Contreras of Current 93 and Chris Guttmacher of Cul de Sac - amongst a cast of more than a few - to cut this new slow-burning acid folk studio album, one that touches on UK dandelion-sniffing cornerstones like Mellow Candle, Stone Angel and Caedmon while upping the vertical/head-spinning quotient with a ton of barbed, almost medieval-sounding drone figures.

Jailbreak is the duo of pedal steel/vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock/roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the ‘New Weird America’, where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina Carter for a quartet show that took the roof off the building and the skin off their fingers. Since then Corsano and Leigh have worked together as part of Taurpis Tula and as members of Thurston Moore’s Dream/Aktion Unit. Jailbreak play improvised music that dispenses with traditional notions of call and response or dialogue in favour of a profound simultaneity that would birth instant forms from the application of high energy strategies. Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar sources and deforms them with overdriven electricity, playing a form of future-blues exploded by super-charged currents. Corsano detonates time, literally blows it to pieces, in favour of a profound polyrhythmic feel that would confuse past and future. Yet the whole thing rocks like it hasn’t a braincell to spare, re-connecting avant garde tactics and ass-whooping rama-lama with alla the revolutionary fanfare of the most radical counter-cultural two-chord punk. Their debut LP is called The Rocker. It’s all you need to know.  “For those of you who've been worried that the Free Power Noize scene has become a little too tame, (and seriously who isn't somewhat concerned about that), a new screamin' creamin' duo -- Jailbreak --explodes to the rescue. The world's wildest free drummer (Chris Corsano: Cold Bleak Heat , duos with Mick Flower, Bill Nace etc.) and the world's wildest free steal pedal guitarist, (Heather Leigh:, Dream Aktion Unit, Jandek, etc.), pits two of the landscapes most intense pyromaniacs against each other in -- "The Rocker" -- a blast-furnace of blisteringly joyous witch-howling assaults on the essence of whips and chains and repressive injustice gone legal.  Both of these magisterial musicians are capable of extreme dynamics and subtleties, but those concepts don't get in the way of this monster-truck of a record. And why should they when drums and guitar can slash and burn in a riotous electric smash fest like this crazed merry madcap of an album.  Over the top ... Way! As the full frontal music rips through my naked and defenceless eardrums, images emerge of an old and demented grandmother, strapped into her rocking chair by disciples in heat. (ooooohhhhh yyyeeeaaahhhh!!!)  The more she violently rocks and chants with insane exhilaration, the more the treacherously imprisoned souls of Hell claw at their walls of liquid fire, desperately trying to free themselves from chains of Human and Sub-human limitations.  It sounds like 100 pall-bearin' viciously possessed drummers lifting 100 gone-bonkers zombie lovin' guitarists into another realm of escape, one that reality hasn't presented as a release, until now. The 1st time Heather & Chris played together, (a first meeting improve 4tet performance -- Babes on the Loose), I watched in disturbed horror as Heather crashed her steel pedal to the stage and sliced her hand while trying to play upside down. Then she passed out.  Corsano rushed to her aid, but had to stop and bandage his own bloodied digits, as rivers of crimson soaked the frightened platform.  (They obviously survived).  This recording picks up where that chaos and bedlam left off, and if possible, lifts the ante higher, into a maelstrom of American psychotic pandemonium gone-a-hunting in Scotland. A catch-and-release band for sure that attacks the jailers and frees the innocents ... just before the death penalty can be brutally administered. I liked it.” – Paul Flaherty. Highly recommended!

Limited solo LP, distributed by Olde English Spelling Bee, the first release on PussyGutt’s own private press. Alter is solo cover for Blake Green of PussyGutt and they play a symphonic, monochrome take on doom metal that combines Witchfinder General-style atmospherics with bombastic progressive rock and endless fuzz. Like the whole Dark/Wicked Lady/Martin Weaver scene scoring a Jean Rolllin movie. Edition of 300 hand-numbered copies.  

Killer new album of fucked-up country blues from Don Howland’s amp-humping punks Bassholes. Here the drums/guitar set-up is bolstered by Derek DiCenzo on lead guitar as well as the great Tommy Jay of Mike Rep & The Quotas, Adam Smith, Pete Remenyi and Mark Wyatt. The sound is insane, with wailing gutbucket blues guitar torn straight from the source played over oil drum percussion and the kinda Industrial scale fuzz confusion that would puzzle even Mouthus. The lead guitar comes tearing out of the fuzz, with Hendrix-style blues muscle that is as inexplicable as the explosive soloing on Bowie’s mix of Raw Power. Elsewhere they sound like a buncha Pebbles-crunching plukes playing junkyard Pretty Things riffs at the Xpressway HQ. Phenomenally fucked up rock and roll at some kind of sociopathic peak, including an inspired cover of Tommy Jay’s classic “Tough Luck Roy”. One of the best rock/roll records of the year. Recommended. 

Taster for a forthcoming LP on Olde English Spelling Bee from New Jersey’s Big Troubles. Great brokedown bedroom pop with murky vocals, insistent guitar lines and the kind of Modern Lovers/Swell Maps-worship that inspired the early Pastels sides. 

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.

Self-released CD of solo acoustic jams from Brokaw (Come/Thurston Moore et al), whose LP on Vin Du Qualitite Select blew a whole bunch of minds. This is a collection of studio recordings of original instrumental material that represents a personal tangent on the post-Takoma-school, with tracks that run from melancholy slow-motion memorials through rolling country-punk settings.

Another great document of solo string thought from Brokaw of Come/Thurston Moore Band et al. A side features six solos for tenor banjo that have an eerie, timeless quality while the flip features a single massive track scored for deep space electric guitar and melodica that blurs the line between Sandy Bull and Roy Montgomery as beautifully as anything on the Drunken Fish box. Thrid edition of 100 copies, private press, with paste-on sleeves.

Limited vinyl edition of the Cold Cave/Prurient collaborative UK tour cassette that came out in an edition of 100 copies in 2009 with the addition of a brand new track. Very different in tone from what either group has done before, Stars Explode presents a series of very beautifully slow-moving drone compositions that have all of the ancient tectonic power of Nijiumu’s Era Of Sad Wings. Heavenly choirs of synth vibrate on the very edge of the horizon while arcs of symphonic underwater keyboards bubble to the surface. The beats break through on the third track, a jack-hammer Suicide-style instrumental before breaking into a final track that combines epic/euphoric drone melodies with macabre F/X-contorted vocals. Aspects of Coil, Klaus Schulze, Walter Wegmuller.... but truly its own thing. A major step outside. Highly recommended.

Edition of 100 copies cassette from Cursillistas, a ritualistic acid/folk outfit that conjure the kind of cultic confusion of galactic explorers like Siloah, Dom and Ghost using bowed strings, drones, smeared vocals and acoustic instruments. Split with Love Cult. Sold out at source. “Brand new split cassette from Portland, Maine based Cursillistas, who recently had superb LPs on Time-Lag and Digitalis, and Love Cult from Petrozavodsk, Russia. First up is Cursillistas' epic 23 minute 'Great Salt Desert', a superb weirded out blues drenched, desert dried, psychedelic mirage. A real fine side summing up how awesome Cursillistas are, if you haven't checked them yet, don't miss this side! The b side opens with Love Cult's 'Breadcrumb Pony Tail', a swirling blissful distortion dripping psyche dream, a really beautiful 11 minute wonder. This is followed by 'Somn' a more crushing electrifying piece with tinkering and rattling from unrecognizable objects, distorted feedback blurts and what sounds like then objects trying to communicate. Limited to 100 copies with parchment paper (either gold or ivory) cover with black and white print.” - BR

Taj Mahal Travellers were a name that was regularly associated with Marcia Bassett’s Double Leopards, a group that formulated a specifically US-underground take on Takehisa Kosugi’s deep-space drone environments. Yet her solo work has seen her move away from the more organic/psychedelic aspects of the Double Leopards experiment, focussed more on metal sonorities and vertical ascensions of tone than pools of dilated reverb. But this new limited cassette featuring Bassett on guitar alongside cellist Helena Espvall (Ghost/Espers et al) is the closest her solo work has come to the narcotic appeal of Taj Mahal Travellers. There’s an orchestral feel to the music that is a little more ornate than Bassett’s normal style, with the feel of two people interacting more directly than the normal fug of F/X would allow. Still, there’s still a huge amount of depth to the recording, with bowed and vibrated strings combining in vortices of magical anti-gravity tone to conjure ghosts of drone. With full colour covers. Recommended.

Inspired reissue of the first ever release on Mike Rep’s Old Age/No Age imprint back in 1985. Mr Al Martin aka Nudge Squidfish is an integral part of the Columbus Ohio scene that nurtured Jim Shepard, Mike Rep, Tommy Jay et al. The scene still feels like one of the last holdouts for classic rock/roll culture, still worshipping Lou Reed and 70s Dylan, still reading Creem magazine and cutting crude DIY albums that were only a muzzy tape recording away from the albums of their heroes. If you picked up the Tommy Jay album that came out last year then you’ll have a vague idea of the breadth of territory covered here. Squidfish comes across like a young Roky Erickson at points, though the music falls both sides of pre and post-psych, moving between wide-eyed teenage garage and crunching, Buck Dharma-styled guitar freak. There are also some more experimental tracks - with Squidfish unravelling like Syd Barrett over tapes and F/X - and even some vaguely disturbing/funny answering machine messages, making this the perfect ticket to the brain of the fried circa 1985. Guest appearances from Tommy Jay and Mike Rep as well as two tracks penned by Jim Shepard. Being spinning this non-stop at VT. Highly recommended.

New four track EP from this legendary Ohio-based underground rock cabal with connections to Jim Shepard et al who mainline classic post-Creem rock jags ala Reed/Bowie/Young combined with a supremely crude basement jam aesthetic and a line-up that features a bunch of hard-hitting song writers. Anyone who tuned in to Tommy Jay’s amazing Tall Tales Of Trauma LP will recognise the opener, “I Was There”, here re-done in a classic solo Roky/punk style and the rest of the rec takes in countrified gas huffers, cranky garage bombs and loose psychedelic ballads while cutting em all up with spirit, fuzz and liberated freak moves. The sound of basement USA, then and always.

Thudding thug-punk violence from this Pittsburgh group who play minimal reductive riff wattage that would wall-of-sound The Stooges’ Funhouse/Kill City (complete with Mackay-styled sax blurt) to the point of zen-profundity.

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.

New album from the Glasgow-based trio of Andrew Paine, Alistair Crosbie and Brian Lavelle. Moving on from the eerie electro-Albion stylings of their Coil-influenced debut, this sounds closer to a space station in orbit in the clouds above Cologne in 1972 with subtle Karoli-isms from Crosbie on guitar and flashing Kluster/Harmonia style keyboards.

Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies private press LP from a group led by Chicago’s JR Robinson and featuring Chris Brokaw (Come/Thurston Moore Band) and Mark Shippy (US Maple) on guitar. Robinson injects reverberant field recordings into the mix while the two guitars are left to sing through a sea of feedback and F/X generating waves of dark tonal grandeur. Aspects of modern avant classical, Coil’s Time Machines, Taj Mahal Travellers. Paste-on sleeves.

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. 

Excellent new country/psych/rock album from this NNCK-related group featuring Jason Meagher, David Shuford and Dave Nuss. This is as near perfect a slice of mind-fried rural psych yet laid by these guys, with the kinda sharp rhythm section, soaring unison vocals and crunchy period-perfect fuzz guitar previously unheard of this side of The New Tweedy Brothers. There’s also a heavy Dead feel, with some of the studio pyrotechnics of Aoxomoxoa, the roots feel of American Beauty and a nicely dazed fourth-world-is-this-world modal feel. When the passages of ginchy organ tone kick in it sounds classically teenage but there’s a level of smarts to the arrangements and the intellectual heft of the music that situates it firmly in the modern underground milieu, even if it’s a splinter scene that worships the Stalk-Forrest Group, SRC and San Francisco’s Charalatans more than Taj Mahal Travellers and Angus MacLise. Edition of 500 copies.

New album from the duo of Jan Anderzen (Kemialliset Ystavat) and Jani Hirvonen (Uton) with a heady Godz/ESP freak division feel. Lots of chanting, percussion, woozy use of F/X, Angus MacLise worship…

Edition of 450 copies split LP between two new ritual/synth zone solo females. Psychic Reality is San Francisco’s Leyna Noel who has released a bunch of cassettes and CD-Rs over the past year or so. She uses drum machines, Kraut keyboards and modulated vocals to conjure a mauve zone somewhere between Zola Jesus and P.A.R.A. LA Vampires is the solo persona of Amanda from Pocahaunted et al relocated to a dub-inflected electro-jam context with muzzy flutes drugged into submission by lolloping drum machines, repeat bass riffs that could almost be PiL, ethereal keyboards, Cosey Fanni Tutti-styled brass and F/X-filtered vocals. A cool double header of modern psych ritual.

Unbelievable new album from this massively wasted psycho-delic Houston rock group. Rusted Shut play wretched, junk-addled monochord rock that would condense the most sociopathic refusenik/scum style of all of the most pluke-addled brain-donors – No Fucker, Motorhead, Black Flag, Black Sabbath, The Butthole Surfers – and run it through a fuzzed-to-the-fucking-max sludge of Stooge-rock logic. Not sure of the history of the sonics included here, but it’s subtitled 1997-2009 so I’m guessing it’s compiled from material across the decade and it kinda sounds that way, with a variety of attack strategies that range from the hallucinatory production logic that defined their amazing Hot Sex EP through grimy, three chord jams torn to shreds by hysterical, throat-shredding vocals. With titles like “Heart Of Hell”, “Chemical World”, “Shot In The Head”, “Addiction” and “Slaughter Slaughter”, this is pretty much the ultimate in low-life psychedelic sewage. Phenomenal.

Much-anticipated vinyl reissue of the joint #1 entry from Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler, Speed, Glue & Shinki’s 1971 album, Eve. The chapter on their drug-addled exploits was probably the most entertaining in the book and it’s cool to put the sonics to the legend. Eve is a supremely crude blues/psych/stoner album that takes cues from western dunderheads like Black Sabbath, Cream and Led Zeppelin and misinterprets them as perfectly as Blue Cheer’s vision-over-technique re-think of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Songs about drugs, getting wasted, getting high, proto-metal three chord sludge fests and wailing ‘acid’ lead guitar make this one of the most mindlessly inspired rock records ever to find its way to the desk of a major label. Gatefold sleeve. Last copies!

Debut LP from this great Brooklyn-based group who manage to marry two/three chord minimium technique garage euphorics with a cracked Shimmy Disc aesthetic (think Daniel Johnson/Jad Fair/King Missile/Dogbowl) and damaged paranoid/compulsive lyrics. The songs kinda glide along on fuzzy, narcotic chord changes with a faraway sound that is pure garage band while the schizophrenic lyrics slip past your internal censor, occasionally jarring your brain the way the kinda flip pathos of the patrons of The Duplex Planet would back in the day. Indeed, there’s a kinda smart cartoon feel to many of the scenarios played out here and combined with the simple/haunting stumble punk moves it makes for a bewitching record and one that I’ve been returning to again and again. Recommended.

Brand new album from these Kansai-area reprobates, a high energy power/punk trio-now-quartet that feature a frontman equally possessed by peanut butter-era Iggy Pop and Soundtracks-era Damo Suzuki and a guitar/drums set-up that is as brain-scramblingly fleet as The Magic Band and as crude as Harry Pussy. Live these guys combine explosions of snot and vomit with sobbing, misanthropic rants, dedications to The Beatles and Keiji Haino and some of the most disobedient group interaction since The Germs. This latest Japan-only studio album features a bunch of classic live staples and re-jigged earlier recordings. Alongside Afrirampo, Oshiri Penpenz have pretty much exploded the west Japan underground scene. Highly recommended.

New album from this French-Canadian duo with a heavy Chrome vibe all but obscured by muffled production values. Declamatory vocals over squelchs of synth, crude drum machines and repeat fuzz guitar give this a kind of stumpy refusenik style that would fit in well at the Manchester Musicians Collective back in the day, though there's a whole bunch of sci-fi moves here that make it a little less 'suburban' than that particular branch of prole art.

Excellent reissue of this obscure Euro DIY/post-punk EP from a Belgian group who shared label space with the great Cultural Decay (recently reissued by Sacred Bones). A classic angular guitar attack informed by the whole Manchester early Fall/Joy Division sound. This 1981 EP was AA’s first and only release and the combination of hypnotic repeat guitar, snappy drums and oiky vocals makes for some cool proto-psychedelic primitivism. Edition of 500 copies.

Limited edition of 500 copies vinyl edition of the new studio album from Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel’s doom/drone project. Verdun is the closest Kneale has come to the kind of majestic sludge of Japanese demi-gods Corrupted, with spare, military percussion and thundercracks of downer chords illuminated with desolate symphonic European choral settings. Epic.

Limited single of raucous free-pop squall from this solo project of Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt. “Brian Chippendale replaces the riffs of Lightning Bolt with fried electronics, reeds, and gleeful vocals in the rhythmic pounding pop of the summer on this solo single. This is a split release with the Corleone Record Group of Rhode Island, and strays from the normal Skulltones aesthetic featuring 9 color silkscreen blooming toilet artwork done by the artist himself.” – ST.

Full-length compilation from this all-girl group that bundles their out-of-print Make A Mess 7” with their Captured Tracks single  and one new track, “I Start With Your Name”. Alla the romance of The Shop Assistants with a totally endearing punk primitive garage edge that spills over into some great fuzz guitar jams that could almost be Flying Nun vintage. 

Four way split from Art Fag that bundles excellent tracks from a bunch of underground action. 60s garage damaged punk/pop from Crocodiles, almost Beat Happening styled DIY from Graffiti Island, out-of-focus girl pop from Dum Dum Girls, melodic destructo rock from Pens. 

Another massively addictive 7” from the duo of Andrew Savage and Jason Kelly, who mainline Velvets guitars, (early) Beach Boys melodies and classic garage-soul arrangements. The flip, “Powerful Lovin’” is one of the best organ driven soul-punk testimonials since, uh, The Lyres’ “She Pays The Rent”.

Excellent EP from this all-girl trio from San Francisco. Not as punk-primitive as Vivian Girls, Grass Widow play a form of dreamy lo-fi pop/rock that owes a buncha moves to The Raincoats, specifically their feel for combining odd arrangements, enthusiastic harmonies and scramble-punk guitar, and the faraway sound of the Flying Nun roster of the 1980s, with new wave/post-punk guitar tones that combine motorik fluidity with a cool garage band feel. This new wave of girl-punk groups routinely get compared to The Shop Assistants but none of them really display the kind of emotional depth that that group could channel on tracks like “Somewhere In China” and “All Of The Time”. But Grass Widow, while sounding less specifically like The Shop Assistants, write songs that are every bit as emotionally engaging.

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.

Great split LP that pairs the black/ritual noise of Prurient aka Dominik Fernow with a killer side from Providence’s Kites that almost matches Jessica Rylan’s work in terms of hands-on primitively rendered electronics married to sing-song kid’s melodies and fucked-up dunderhead keyboards. Parts of this sound like the kinda K Records/New Blockaders hook-up you never even took the time to imagine. But here it is and it sounds fucking fine. Recommended.

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.

Raging full-on big band studio side from Matthew Valentine and Erika Elder, with the duo joined by Doc Dunn, J Mascis, Mike Smith, Jeremy Earl of Woods, Justin Pizzoferrato and Mango Zanahoria. The duo nail the live favourite “Get Right Church” with a great fuzz/wah groove that is totally addictive, while “Summer Magic” gets a doomier/heavier re-think with EE and MV’s voices suspended in space while the fuzz crackles and twin leads collide. “Wandering Nomad” may be their most euphoric twin guitar blaster to date, exploding out of the gate with wailing lead strings over heavenly distorto chords. Something about the studio process feels more inventive than on previous EP albums, with the result that this feels more like Anthem Of The Sun than Working Man’s Dead and it’s a real guitar album, with the vocals perched on high plateaus above some of the best, up-front six string jams of their studio existence. Dig the sleeve too. Recommended. 

Raging full-on big band studio side from Matthew Valentine and Erika Elder, with the duo joined by Doc Dunn, J Mascis, Mike Smith, Jeremy Earl of Woods, Justin Pizzoferrato and Mango Zanahoria. The duo nail the live favourite “Get Right Church” with a great fuzz/wah groove that is totally addictive, while “Summer Magic” gets a doomier/heavier re-think with EE and MV’s voices suspended in space while the fuzz crackles and twin leads collide. “Wandering Nomad” may be their most euphoric twin guitar blaster to date, exploding out of the gate with wailing lead strings over heavenly distorto chords. Something about the studio process feels more inventive than on previous EP albums, with the result that this feels more like Anthem Of The Sun than Working Man’s Dead and it’s a real guitar album, with the vocals perched on high plateaus above some of the best, up-front six string jams of their studio existence. Dig the sleeve too. Recommended.

The Wizards Of Kansas’s 1970 album for Mercury is a great example of sky-caressing post-hippy trance and is much loved by collectors of counter-cultural bliss the world over. Still In Kansas is a totally necessary precursor to that LP, a collection of 68/69 recordings and demos that includes beautiful early versions of “Codine”, “High Flying Bird” and “She Rides With Witches” and is drawn from the time when they were still using the Pig Newton prefix. Sounding somewhere between Jefferson Airplane circa Crown Of Creation, blues-blasters like John Mayall and Sky Saxon and The Seeds of Future this is a great blast of back-then for anyone who still cares. And that’s gotta be you. Recommended.

Great new single from this Brooklyn group whose previous 12” on Captured Tracks wooed a ton of people. Two raggedy pop songs in the VU-beamed-from-the-edge-of-the-world style of the early Clean. With full colour insert.

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.

New, long-time coming triple LP set documenting a fistful of international noise actionists originally compiled by Steve Underwood between 1997-1998, with tracks from Japanese bomb-gods MSBR and Government Alpha as well as classy international puke-guzzlers of the calibre of Smell & Quim, Putrefier, Macronympha, Con-Dom, Taint, Pain Jerk, Skin Crime, Richard Ramirez, Onomatopoeia, Deepkiss 720, Hailstorm, Thirdorgan, Expose Your Eyes, Dogliveroil, Mlehst, Small Cruel Party, S. Core, Contagious Orgasm, and AMK. Hand-numbered edition of 500 copies with stapled, glossy booklet.

Major new split single with a classic whirlwind raga from Vibracathedral Orchestra and two tracks from Barry Dean’s UK psych project, joined on the first track by Mick Flower of Vibracathedral on guitar and organ and Pete Nolan of Magik Markers on drums.

Much-needed vinyl issue of the work of the late Washington Philips, preacher, vocalist and player of a hand-built 'Dolceola', a particularly celestial-sounding strummed harp/dulcimer that was played with keys like a piano and was marketed as a "miniature grand piano". Phillips cut a series of gospel sides in the late 1920s that still sound completely otherworldly and have little parallel in the folk/blues continuum. Supremely benign atmosphere combines with beautiful bell-tones that reflect on aspects as diverse as the improvisations of William Parker, the Highball settings of Harry Partch, the lunar blues of MV & EE and the Venusian magic of primer-era Scorces. This limited edition of 500 copies comes with a Folkways-style wraparound sleeve and insert that reproduces and advertisement for the Dolceola.

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.

New set of ultra-primitive femme-punk refusals from this Mexican group with connections to Los llamarada who marry classic agit moves with destructo garage form. Hand-numbered edition of 375 copies.

"Newest Blackest Rainbow hot on the heels of some truly killer releases from the artists involved, both who seem to have really pushed there sounds and vibes to new levels this year... Barn Owl's side has been mastered by local jammer Ben Nash, and its three tracks of sparse drone layered with bleak guitar epic-ness, tingling chimes and dark mountainous whispers. The guitars here sound delicate and beautiful, but it remains bleak and empty, if you enjoyed their LP on Not Not Fun then this is a real treat. Tom Carter's 16 minute 'Train Kept' follows pretty damn nicely from his recent 'Shots At Infinity' releases on Important, a far cry from his more psychedelic folk experimentations, here he slashes and riffs like many a legend, and maybe, just maybe, it's a slight tribute to a certain band too? This is a fully wild piece of work. Black sleeves, pasted stark landscape cover, with a insert of liner notes. Limited to 380 copies." - BRR.

“The second 7-inch from San Diego’s BEATERS, who’ve sprung from the ashes of San Diego punk/soul/garage legends THE SESS. Led by JEREMY ROJAS, their brand of “pre-apocalyptic” mutant-punk fuses early-’80s punk with a gamut of paranoia and weirdness, and live the band stands out as a true propulsive force. Limited to 500 copies.” – ZM. On the Dum Dum Girls/Crocodiles own label. 

Reissue of a CD that was originally available only in Japan from a group led by Jim O'Rourke on guitar and featuring Chris Corsano on drums and Darin Gray (Loren Mazzacane et al) on bass. Recorded live at the Pit Inn in 2006, the music moves from minimal trio interactions with Corsano on percussion and Gray and O'Rourke generating slow storm clouds of Industrial klang through to fuzz-inflected free jazz blasts that take Masayuki Takayanagi as their obvious formal model. Corsano's playing is especially key and is as immediately recognisable as ever, serving to provide focus for the more minimal sections and explode the more outré. A great set from some six of the surest hands in contemporary sound-as-thought.

New release on this label run by Dum Dum Girls/Crocodiles with three tracks from the Philadelphia duo of Rob Garcia and Sarah Everton. Primitive girl/boy pop that combines soaring harmonies with echoed vocals, motorik guitar and a crude dreampop cover version of The Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says”. Edition of 500 copies. 

At last: the long awaited limited edition deluxe vinyl version of this already-legendary solo vocal side by Richard Youngs, previously only available as a gift and then a limited CD-R from Richard himself. Youngs isn't the first leftfield thinker to use folk music as a vessel to pirate out into the depths of intuitively mapped space, and the curve of his career matches much of what has recently been happening in terms of transatlantic New Weirdness. His revisionist approach to the fountainhead aligns him with more contemporary spirits like Matthew Valentine and Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny, players who have adopted avant garde strategies not as a massive break with the past but as a resumption of a suppressed tradition, making overt the connection between 'basic' folk modes and experimental approaches by working roughhouse musical gestures into sublime new alphabets. Albums like 2004's River Through Howling Sky and 2003's Airs Of The Ear are inspired amalgams of archetypal folk device and ecstatic future reverie. But the Summer Wanderer album may be his deepest pass to date. Its' three disconcertingly unaccompanied vocal performances match Anne Briggs's early Topic recordings in terms of bleak, oblivious beauty while highlighting the common Ur-drone that runs through the spine of his back catalogue. I don't think I've ever enjoyed the art of precise vocal phrasing and intimate joy in sound quite so much as I do when I spin the first side of this LP; it's a supernaturally effective performance. Highest possible recommendation: a modern masterpiece and one of Richard's most affecting solo releases. Immaculately pressed heavy vinyl edition that really sounds fantastic with a gorgeous paste-on cover and hand-lettering. Numbered edition of 525 copies.

Rarity: Warehouse find of a bunch of copies of this eye-popping book, long out of print: Anyone who has spent any amount of time immersing themselves in the recent deluge of potent Swedish psych/prog releases - the amazing Baby Grandmothers CD/LP, the Trad Gras Och Stenar DVD et al - is gonna want to put a weekend aside to wrestle with this monster. Lovingly compiled by Tobias Petterson, this huge hardback compiles every obscure psych/prog/acid folk/avant garde release to come out of Sweden in the glory years of 1967-79 and comes with full colour repros of every single sleeve, a full write-up with biographical details and a rarity scale. Scattered throughout the book are some amazing colour pictures of benign outdoors Be-Ins with beautiful hippies smoking pot in the afternoon sun and jamming on electric guitars as well as collections of memorabilia, press releases, repros of concert announcements, complete label discogs for the legendary Silence label etc. It almost looks as good as Barry Miles' amazing Hippie book! To top it all off, the book comes with a CD featuring a three-part unreleased jam by the always explosive Baby Grandmothers. Highly recommended.

Massive slab of temporal disruption from one of the most consistently wowing figures to come out of the cultural meltdown of the 1960s. Conrad was a key mover in the Lower East Side rock and avant underground in the early to mid 60s, playing with Lou Reed, John Cale and Walter DeMaria in Reed’s frat-rock combo, The Primitives, and standing in with early line-ups of The Velvet Underground. But it was his activities as part of The Dream Syndicate/Theatre Of Eternal Music, a group dedicated to extending waves of single note bliss into whole new zones of psychoactive ecstasy, that were to have the most far-reaching cultural impact. Alongside John Cale, Angus MacLise, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, Conrad founded a whole new approach to sound, working tiny pulsing intervals into long monotonal drones generated by bowed strings and vocals and birthing a minimalism several cells more blasted than the saccharine soundtracks associated with bigger hitting names like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. Fantastic Glissando dates from 1969 and features four tracks of degraded sine-wave oscillations that approximate the roar of a fleet of V-2 bombers.

Companion volume to the Euro-release Blank Check, Bounced Check sees the trio of saxophonists Paul Flaherty and Wally Shoup and drummer Chris Corsano live in Seattle in 2005 and this is another instalment in the group's on-going headcharge into rock-informed post-Fire music pugilism. Marrying explosive energy-as-form moves with an umbilical that runs straight to blues-inflected jazz freedom, this is a music that is constantly in flux, re-configuring itself second-by-second as speed-of-thought exchanges evolve into pure simultaneity. Another monster.

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.

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. 

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.

Limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies from the duo of James and Jessica Toth (aka Chazz Improv and Norma Bates) with Max ‘Mev’ Wicker, their first release outside of Toth’s own Mad Monk imprint. Some classically bleak Kraut-inspired dirge bombs cut-up with the kind of blues breakdowns and deranged avant-gardisms that best defined Toth’s previous Hassara outings.

Reissue of an early American Tapes release (run of 10 copies in 2000) documenting a particularly primitive tape, huff, grunt and lung session from the Wolf Eyes duo of Aaron Dilloway and John Olson. Total pre-lapsarian handmade soundworld feel ala Chocolate Monk: "Recently re-listened to this and played it for Olson...asking him to guess who it was... he guessed Prick Decay....ha!" - Dilloway.

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.

New cassette from this spectral Portland-based duo with some very delicate ribbons of drone and high, still tone breaking to light in abrasive mandalas of slow-rushing Technicolor static. Aspects of eastern drone workings by Ikuro Takahashi, Akio Suzuki and Takehisa Kosugi given a little of the airplane hangar tone-scope of Starving Weirdos or Pelt circa Empty Bell. Comes in a numbered edition of 100 copies with individually inked and sprayed tape labels in a silver sprayed case and ink drawn cloudscapes.

New solo album from Glenn Jones of the much-lamented Cul De Sac, here playing both 6 string and 12 string acoustic as well as banjo. Jones is my hands-down favourite of the new generation of American primitive innovators, with a feel for memorable melodies married to a lucid, story-telling style and tracks that feel as completely conceived as Fahey himself. Plus his liner notes are always a treat. The album takes off on a fantasy of Barbecue Bob in the Fishtown area of Philadelphia and runs through Jones’ first banjo piece, a tribute to his old muse Wendy Ritger, a track inspired by Robbie Basho’s “Redwood Ramble” as well as a stand-alone tribute and a very touching dedication to the magical Swiss writer Robert Walser.  Another great record from Glenn.

Limited two-track 7” in a run of 400 copies from this great band who manage to combine an almost classic 60s/70s rock/cowpunk delivery with a barbarous destructo edge, powerful vox and a recording aesthetic that would blow up the backline altogether, leaving a guitar banging a bunch of chords lifted straight from The Birthday Party and played early Rough Trade-style. A side is the raunch, the flip is more hypnotic and minimal. Both rule.

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.

Very limited split-EP from Magik Markers and Sic Alps, edition of 600 copies, to celebrate their co-headlining west coast tour of December 2009. The Markers side is the group at its most psychedelic, with an extended almost Spacemen 3 style wah/wah space rock feel, Elisa’s vocals gobbled up by delay, Pete pounding like Mani Neumeier and long sections of drugged string wrestling. Three tracks. Pretty great. Sic Alps present three tracks that somehow reconcile The Kinks with Simply Saucer via some supremely fucked-up arrangements and heady studio alchemy with help from Lars Finberg (Intelligence) and Ty Segall. Already sold out at source, won’t be around for long.

Long-awaited return from Shaun Falconer’s solo guitar/dreamtone project after, what, a few years? The last Meursault disc was awash in minimal synth styles and extended avant electronics but Caol brings it back to the guitar, with elegiac instrumentals built around single notes floating endlessly in space, vibrating with little coronas of F/X in a way that brings to mind Loren Connors’ desolate late-night string poetics or even early Taku Sugimoto. The melodies are simply, hymnal while the atmosphere is deep and extremely heavy. This is more about solo guitar playing than loops or trickery and it feels all the more powerful for it. Packaged in the usual high-class plastic sleeves with original photography. Recommended.

Edition of 248 copies self-released by Tom on his own Wholly Other imprint, with hand silkscreened gold on black matte sleeves. Brand new 2009 solo guitar recordings from that might well be the best of his solo sides to date. Two sides of fully-extended six string assault, starting out in an ultra-minimal creeped-out Ry Cooder slide style before building to whole new peaks of there in a blitz of almost Hendrix-esque immolating guitar noise. Dig the MC5 reference in the title too.

“YES!!! Finally!! Angus and Bon Scott would def. label this knockout collab as grade A T-N-T!!! Here's how it went down: The Machines were kicking it Brooklyn style last January for some jam time with Burning Sess Core, and the Tovinator had a solo slot in Glasslands on Super Bowl Sunday. Seeing how we both were worked up from the Pitts power plays and amazing Puck and Queen B quality time, Thurston added fuel to the fire and suggested that Conrad hit the stage with Tovah. Seeing how Tony only had his pajamas and an rusty old auto harp in tow, the aural jam scape was destined to be stripped down and tense. So here are the results!! Tovah on tin can "voice", tapes, and the sheet metal/spring "mailbox" sculpture and Tony on unprocessed auto harp. No drone sound in sight, just a clanging, echoed, tangled sharp barbed nasty JAM. Super duper, like nothing else in either discography. Could be seen as a celebration in real time to the STEELERS, with STEEL and STRINGS. Amazing!!!! Edition of 200 in super weird covers, hand numbered.” – John Olson.

“When Iowa City freak-out free-rockers Raccoo-oo-oon called it quits last year it left a bummer scar in the Midwest underground scene. But time is a great healer, and so are new bands. So out of the ashes of the RAC pack comes Wet Hair, a synth-punk-trance duo composed of keyboardist/vocalizer Shawn Reed and keyboardist/drummer Ryan Garbes, and Dream is the band’s debut vinyl full-length after a series of increasingly shredding limited-edition cassettes on their own Night People label. Piling together an unlikely trash heap of Suicide-style drum machine beat-bops, zone-droned krautrock keys, and fucked up outsider crooning, the LP’s four tracks careen across a spectrum of moods and mangled melodies. Recorded at Flat Black Studios by Luke Tweedy and mastered by Pete Swanson, Wet Hair’s cult electric annihilation has never gleamed with such razor-edged weirdness; this is their dream made real. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with artwork by Reed and Garbes, plus a pro-printed full-color 11x11 insert.” – NNF.

Much-anticipated new studio album from the Wolf Eyes trio of Nate Youg, John Olson and Mike Connelly. The sound is a radical upgrade from the last ‘canonical’ Wolf Eyes disc, Human Animal, in that the electro-percussion is replaced by real drums and overall Nate’s vocals are closer to the dark, voice-from-the-void style of his recent solo shows with Aaron Dilloway. The peeling back of the distortion and F/X on the voice gives it a much more desperate edge and the sonics add to the whole tense, up-tight atmosphere, forsaking the pummeling style of old in favour of a tumultuous a-rhythmic assault that works in waves of oppositional tones and smears of electro-acoustic confusion. Some parts of the album – “We All Hate You” for one – almost sound a little bit like Sonic Youth circa “Confusion Is Next” albeit with a less rock-focused attack and with aspects of junk ritual, free jazz and basement electronics. Still, anyone jonesing for the primitive monomaniacal attack of the “Stabbed In The Face” era is well catered for with the title track, a barrage of vocal hysteria and knock out percussion. Always Wrong is a radical re-think of maximum disruption strategies that sees them move well ahead of the generic next-generation noise that came up in their wake. Recommended.

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.

Fantastic new Japan-only CD from Hiragi Fukuda, who you might have spotted as a member of Doronco Gumo on their Old Punks LP. With this new album, Fukuda expands the Doronco Gumo line-up with *two* ex members of Les Rallizes Denudes, bassist Doronco and drummer Mimaki Toshirou alongside violinist Eriko Sato of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. The sound kind of takes off on Doronco Gumo’s weird amalgam of death-decadent balladeering, idiotically stupe destructo rock and Hiroshi Nar styled primitivism but overall the group rock harder and wilder than on their previous outing, even dropping into a classic mirrorshades La Dusseldorf/Suicide style groove on the blasted opener “TV Dinner”. Pretty impressive that Rallizes members are still involved in radical reformulations of the urge to ugh a whole bunch of decades later. More please. Recommended. 

Massive triple LP set from this extremely popular French cult in an edition of 500 copies. Sold out from the label in seconds and sure to be a major rarity by, uh, at least next week. “New album from the French duo of Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, aka Natural Snow Buildings. Shadow Kingdom continues their journey through some of the finest experimental folk laced with beautiful drones, all recordings are new. This follows their highly sought after releases on Students of Decay and Digitalis, as well as their ultra limited private press releases that they've self released. The duo have amassed a cult following from what was until last year almost entirely in response to internet blogs and downloading as before then there were not largely available releases. This is perhaps their follow up to the now classic 'The Dance Of the Moon and Sun', it’s as epic as that previous double disc effort and featuring their trademark beautiful folk wanderings as well as their extremely dark sides delving into intense ambient drone, which somehow retains an air of sheer beauty. This is an almost perfectly executed album surpassing the 2 hour mark by a hefty chunk, but at no point does the sheer beauty of this music diminish. 3 LPs, plus the CD version (with 2 tracks not on the wax), and an insert. Limited to 500.” – BRR.

New 'overground' album from Richard, with a focus on *those* vocals that give it the feel of a lusher, more musically arranged take on the minimal hypnotics of the classic Summer Wanderer. Here Richard plays bass guitar, harmonica, organ, percussion, piano and synth across a series of powerful, elementally simple songs that orbit repeated phrases and re-statements of melody. If you’ve see him live recently you’ll recognise “All Day Monday And Tuesday” but the rest of it is all new and it has a stark emotional power bolstered by vocals that situate him firmly within the lineage of classic English voices.

Another stunningly beautiful package from Eli Keszler’s Rel Records. This one is the debut duo release from Keszler and Ashley Paul. Here Keszler plays bowed percussion and cymbals while Paul tears wild altissimo sustains from saxophone and clarinet, confusing the kind of static jazz minimalism of the Tamio Shiraishi/Sean Meehan duos with the sound art of Ikuro Takahashi and Harry Bertoia. The way Paul strains to modulate high, lonesome pitches has some of the melancholy grandeur of Kaoru Abe though the overall feel – constant high-tones spinning in clouds above subtle scrapes and roars - makes it feel closer to a more tactile take on eternal music than anything approaching free jazz. The dynamics of the flip are a ‘little’ more conventionally reed/drums, though Paul opts more for weird, inflating tones than anything approaching runs, while Keszler is more focused on expressive texture than time. The final track crosses strings with thuds of percussion that feels like a more improvised take on the electro-acoustic confusion of the first New Blockaders LP. Pressed on 160 gram copper plate pressed virgin vinyl, the record is housed in a black inner sleeve. The textured paper cover features a layered silk screened drawing while the inside contains grey pasted notes with an attached 8x24 inch three part multi-tone picture printed across a fold-out frosted vellum book. All silk screened, hand assembled and drawn by Ashley and Eli. The record comes in a limited hand numbered edition of 300 copies.

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.

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. "...and we're back on track; creel pone here returning from a two-month hiatus with this superb collection of minimal bleepery from noted library music composer cecil leuter (aka roger roger) originally issued by the neuilly label in 1971...this isn't exactly the funk & bleep fest of leuter's recently reissued "pop electronique", instead a set of short, thematic pieces consisting of abstract electronics, gated vocals, rudimentary rhythm-box studies, and some inspired sun ra/cecil taylor lineage keyboard abuse... impressively distorted/lo-fi bursts (sounding like worn-down/pre-owned tape) followed directly by screaming high-end sweeps & gurgles. some of it is in the same ballpark as the ruth white creel pone production-wise, yet this has much more festive feeling about it... when i listen to this i imagine french teens sitting on shag carpets, melting their johnny hallyday singles in pots of boiling water upon discovering this alien future-music. but of course this was only distributed internally by neuilly at the time & had to wait 35+ years for mr. creel pone to come along and liberate these sounds from the collective unconscious..." - Creel Pone.

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. “creel pone treatment of this private-press lp of late 70s spectral computer music by daniel arfib ... aside from conrad cummings’ review of the lp in the fall 1981 issue of computer music journal, i’ve seen nary a mention of mssr. arfib’s early digital synthesis work ; which seems something of a glaring omission in the historical annals given the particularly misted nature of these pieces, often utilizing an upgraded spec of stockhausen’s rhythm-to-pitch methodologies (sharing something in common with denis smalley’s “pulses of time” - composed roughly around the same time) ... the bubbling, overloaded overtone-blobs & distant wind-creep & resonant jaw-harp-like attacks of “voyelles d’eveil” (based on interpolations of the harmonic series) start out the disc, making way for the considerable more noise-oriented (pitched, narrow-band noise, that is) “le souffle du doux” (slow arcs of octave-doubled tones slide in & around morphing mathematically-proportioned drones) ... but the real clincher for me is the side-long “l’approche de la lumière” - starting out as a shifting morass of dissonant tone-combinations before a series of chugging, low-bit white-noise formations (not entirely dis-similar to the sort of crunchy bit-rate distortions emanating from beloved sn 76477 i.c. found in many space invaders-lineage console arcade games !!!) pave the way for a full-volume explosion of rippling, panning harsh noise (seriously ; listen to this at a fair clip & tell me it doesn’t resemble certain factions of the contemporary chip-noise / circuit-bending wave !!!) ... once again ; an impossible-to-grip title, hidden in the back-closets of the early academic electronic sound-research sector made tangible thanks to mr. c.p. p.c.’s tireless efforts ...” – CP.

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. “A reproduction of this über-obscure 1969 italian leo-label library raer (in mono, no less) from giuliano sorgini ... if you’ve already got sorgini’s name on your radar, most likely you’re either :: (1) a collector of italian library-music lps (of which he’s got many under his belt) or :: (2) an avid fan of spanish director jorge grau’s 1975 film “non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti” (aka “the living dead at manchester morgue,” or, more commonly, “let sleeping corpses lie” ; widely repped as “one of the best zombie films ever made”) to which sorgini lent his formidable film-score talents ...
starting here with some fine farfisa rumble, sorgini layers on piles of spectrally-processed (read : band-pass filtered) chord-clouds, before a huge wave of bleep-heavy musique concrète noises take over the scene, obliterating any trace of rhythm and/or melody ... in fact, over the 13 short vignettes here, both the farfisa and melodic percussion elements act out the leitmotif(s), but rarely are they left to be for more than a few seconds at a time before crashing, tape-speed manipulated noises interject, lending a flair of orchestrated madness seldom heard amidst the “groovy” studio-library sides of the time ...upgraded c.p. spec here, including full-color everything ; even high-quality reproduction(s) of the lp itself in the “gatefold” ... as we wind down to c.p. #100 (the planned “final” volume, we’re only 10 or so away) expect these next few to be real doozy’s ...” – CP.

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. “whoah. here’s one you’re not likely to have heard/seen evidence of ; mr. p.c. c.p.’s treatment of german painter günter maas’ sole lp release, privately-pressed in 1969 ...“klangbilder” contains four extended pieces, ranging from oskar-sala-esque sheets of detuned electronic sound (composed on the then state-of-the-art siemens synthesizer utilizing an experimental photo-electric coupler which converted his paintings into control-voltage !!!) to dark musique concréte pieces utilizing evil-sounding mass-chants & “traditional” processing ... the record builds in a linear fashion, climaxing with the intense “reise” ; ten minutes of turbulent environmental noises & dissonant, rasping synthesized tone clusters ...a completely eye & ear opening set ; one of the more “advanced” clusters of early electronic music to cross my desk in some time ... if you’ve found resonance with andre almuro’s dark concrète and/or toru takemitsu’s wind-swept score to “woman in the dunes” ; this is something you’ll need to hear for yourself ...” – CP.

Deluxe vinyl edition of this classic solo album from Heather Leigh (Jailbreak/Scorces/Jandek et al) originally released in a tiny edition on cassette by Fag Tapes. Two fully-extended high metal masses for amplified pedal steel and vocals that blow all notions of form, fidelity and frilly fucking folk-picking fops to the kinda sweet metallic ribbons previously worn as crowns by Keiji Haino, Jojo Hiroshige and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks. Very different in tone and attack from the recent Jailbreak LP, Jailhouse Rock has a more amorphous sound, with muzzy smears of guitar caked in NZ-style fuzz and clouds of high string tone that conjure the miasmic electronics of Maurizio Bianchi. One of Heather’s most blasted sides with all-new nuts artwork by Heath Moreland. “Jailhouse Rock is in fact a wax reissue of a long OOP 2006 cassette classic on Michigan crud factory Fag Tapes. It was a fave of ours that year (and every year), so it feels extra celebratory to be able to offer up a freshly remastered (by Pete Swanson) LP edition of the album for global re-appreciation. Sprawling, long-form descents/ascents into mythic electric disorientation, powered by her trademark recipe of FX-soaked pedal steel and voice. Jailhouse feels loosely more aligned with a mid-aughts drone/noise aesthetic than the outsider dirt road Americana of her Devil If You Can Hear Me LP (also on NNF), but the distinction is a slight one. Side A swims in swooping sheets of vox and tempestuous wind tunnel dynamics before slowly dying away to wheezing disembodied harmonica. The B piece begins in a more overtly beautiful mode, a trinity of crystalline notes picked and stretched until they’re transformed into a rapturous sky of textural distortion. Sensual and vertigo-inducing in equal measure. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with brand new paint/collage artwork by Heath Moerland (of Sick Llama, Slither, Odd Clouds, etc). Edition of 400.” – NNF. Highly recommended!

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. "A reproduction of this dynamic 1970 lp, originally co-released by the (deep breath) "municipalidad de la ciudad de buenos aires", the "secretaria de culturia" and the "ls 1 radio municipal de la ciudad de buenos aires" in a tiny internally-distributed edition, consisting of four extended pieces by argentinian composers hilda dianda, nelly moretto, and luis mar°a serra from the tail-end of the 1950s through the end of the 1960s... The underlying theme that binds these 4 pieces is most certainly their use of space - especially notable in hilda dianda's opening piece "a-7" - a lone cello plucks out an atonal array of notes with only the occasional eruption of tape-sound to keep them company... on her "dos estudios en oposici¢n" the tape-sounds are left to themselves in a shining display of restraint coming across like a lost luigi nono tape piece (albeit considerably more subdued)... On the "flip", nelly moretto introduces her "composici¢n 9b", a creepy blend of spoken word/sound-poetry with filtered noise and extensive tape processing, occasionally piling up into a giant jumble of disembodied voices; a spectral choir... finally, luis mar°a serra's "invocation" works a few dissonant plucked guitar notes & string-scrapes into a powerfull morass of shifting pings and grinding metal; a notable guitar/electronic forebear... Prior to the arrival of this sublime creel pone i'd never heard of any of these composers - once again a grand eye/ear-opening measure c/o mr. p.c. c.p..." - Creel Pone.

A landmark recording in every way: the last recording of the ‘classic’ Jandek line-up of Sterling Smith, Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson and the first Corwood release to bear the 0800 catalogue number. Great cover art too that looks back to one of the most enigmatic Jandek cover shots, The Gone Wait, via a 60s/70s portal that finds its echo in a track titled “Gone Waiting”.  Sterling’s guitar has a hypnotic metallic resonance while Neilson gets more tangled up in elemental tones than actually driving the thing backwards or forwards. Youngs’ bass playing works as the centre of gravity between the two, triggering vertical ascensions from dense barbed wire tones and clipped chords. Sterling’s vocals are a little more declamatory and aura-less than on earlier live sets but this is a guitar record the whole way, with some of his wildest demolitions of the limits of six strings.

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.

Debut LP for a new private press imprint run by percussionist Ben Hall (Graveyards/Brokenresearch) and guitarist/inventor Chris Riggs. This is a two guitar/drums blow-out described by Hall as taking the Blue Humans’ legacy of rock-inflected electronic improvisation out of noise and back into free/jazz modes. Joe Morris is, of course, one of the most inventive guitarists ever to use jazz theory as a launching pad for nosedives. Here his musical persona is a little crankier and more ‘Industrial’ than on previous outings, still trading in actual notes but smearing them and misarticulating so that its more about timbre, the specific metallic quality of the strings, than melodic development. Indeed, the whole group have a distinctive ‘metallic’ feel, with Hall playing skittering rhythms cut up with tiny architectures of cymbal klang while Riggs, well, it’s hard to know *exactly* what he’s doing but his playing expands on aspects of his solo work , running a conveyor belt of cycling timbres and rhythms that seem completely divorced from the nature of the guitar yet are in actuality intimately related to the specifics of its construction. While the music couldn’t really be described as ‘high energy’ – the pace is slow, corrosive, deliberately nuanced – Glass Key presents some of the most aggressively aformal and unequivocally blunt music to come out of this Michigan think-tank to date. Hand-numbered edition of only 300 copies in heavy card envelope sleeves with full-colour paste-on art. Recommended.

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 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. "Creel pone here resuming the regular one-a-week schedule for the next few weeks/months... starting off with easily the noisiest creel pone since Pierre Henry's "Mise En Musique" (possibly even more so!) - a split lp of socialist text-sound & musique concräte by composers Max Keller and Martin Schwarzenlander. The A-side piece, Keller's "Sicher Sein..." (1976) interjects continuous, ululated German/Austrian texts with jabs of random, synthesized noise, sample-and-hold bleeping and piercing high-drones. But the real score here is on the b-side c/o Schwarzenlander's two pieces; "Erst Wolt Ihr Den Petersbrunnhof Dann Hellbrunn und Schliesslich Gar Schloss Mirabell." (1976) is a woozy plunderphonic piece rife with atonal synth, wafting along until around the 8-minute mark, when some rather nasty speaker-clip sounds rise and take over. "Unter Dem Pflasterstein ( noch immer ) Liegt der Strand." (1977) hits us pretty much straight away with a minute-long rise into sheer volume, followed shortly thereafter by a dense bit of harsh tape cut-ups and continues on-track until the piece's climax. Politics aside - this is just incredibly impressive music; its date-of-inception causing many a double-take around these parts. Fans of the Logothetis creel pone; take note." - Creel Pone.

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. “ ... nicely timed replication of this 1969 vanguard “cardinal” series lp, offering a pair of side-length “automatic” buchla pieces by composer / producer michael czajkowski (then and now known mostly in music circles for his odd, post-production contributions to buffy saint-marie’s “illuminations” lp) ... recorded at nyu’s famed intermedia center (see: charlemagne palestine’s 60s electronic music, morton subotnick’s “silver apples,” etc ...) this one falls squarely into the “hands-off” master-patch canon of synthesizer music (see: douglas leedy’s “entropical paradise”, george harrison “electronic sound”) ; using a stereo-panning “groove” as something of a leitmotif throughout, czajowski introduces a series of alternatingly dense / sparse patterns into the fray, all bathed in the buchla’s trademark “hot” spring reverb ... even amidst the second side’s floating filter-blobs, there’s always a rhythmic underpinning that comes & goes, sometimes only as a master-clock click, but the re-appearing as crude drum-machine lineage patterns and stroboscopic filigree ... one of the better recent c.p. titles for the “synth-mafioso” set ; way more tapped-in to current sensibilities than anything subotnick ever wrested from the early buchla beast(s) ...” – CP.

Wild three-way session from the Nmperign duo of trumpeter Greg Kelley and saxophonist Bhob Rainey alongside percussionist Jake Meginsky. Partly forsaking the lower case navigations of deep space that made up the bulk of previous instalments, here Rainey and Kelley come over like Albert and Donald Ayler circa New York Eye And Ear Control, raising the sky with modulated tongues and hallucinatory eviscerations of the horns’ most phantom registers. Percussionist Meginsky is a great addition, moving from explosive tectonic activity through celestial high-end scuttering. When the trio head-out into barely-there bowed tones and Urabe/Shiraishi-styled feedback the effect is beautifully psychedelic. Hand-numbered edition of 300 copies with art paper inserts.

Box set document of an all-synth night that took place in Brooklyn in late 2009 featuring full sets (one side of a cassette each) from Taylor Richardson’s (Infinity Window et al) Prehistoric Blackout, Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never, Carlos Giffoni’s new electro project No Fun Acid and Keith Fullerton Whitman. Great range of styles, from flashing techno to flat-lined kosmische bliss. A cool overview of the solo synth scene circa now. Comes in a moulded plastic box with vellum insert. Recommended. 

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. “Mr. p.c. c.p. offers up his replication of this 1978 lp, originally produced by brasilian composer rodolfo caesar for his gravação especial imprint, covering three pieces composed during the 4 years prior at the grm in paris (both a-side pieces ; caesar was in residence there from 1975-76) utilizing then cutting-edge synthesis methods alongside instruments designed & built by the brothers baschet ...the three pieces here all utilize the extended mid-70s musique concrète vocabulary, with much use of gauzy, low-end haze & scraping string-playing (recalling the work of fellow grm alum andre almuro) along with keening, high-frequency synth (possibly the coupigny ?) work & associated rapid-fire processing & tape-assembly methods afforded by the then state-of-the-art studio ...certainly one for the fan of the darker end of the early electronic music spectrum ... remarkably, in all my years of following this music, i’ve never even come across mention of either the original lp or caesar’s name ; once again, much thanks to mr. p.c. c.p. and his efforts.” – CP.

Debut LP from Scottish minimalist electro-acoustic improvisers Ali Robertson and Malcy Duff aka Usurper. When Ali recently mentioned that his first introduction to ‘sound poetry’ was hearing Bahamanian guitarist/vocalist Joseph Spence it made a lot of sense and made me see how what he was doing with Usurper connected not just with underground avantists like Nmperign, The Bohman Brothers, Morphogenesis and Hiroshi Kawani but with more feral/less theoretical styles of folk, punk and DIY. In a way the group’s use of household items, marbles, straws and tiny appliances is the ultimate DIY/folk-based approach to improvisation, generating complex new alphabets from reinventing day-to-day crap. And there’s certainly a sense of humour - never wacky but at once aware of the ridiculousness of their set-up and exuberant in their commitment to odd soundings and convulsive meat poetry. This limited LP, in a hand-numbered run of only 200 copies, comes complete with a comic by Malcy and a trio jam on the flip that features UK underground stalwart and A Band member Sticky Foster. Beautifully packaged in the custom Rel style too.

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. "Mid-70s rundown of the "psychedelic era" quÇbÇcois electro-acoustic composer-scene; contains pieces by the well-known (hugh lecaine) to the time-obscured (just about everyone else including the recently re-discovered micheline coulombe st. marcoux.) especially strong pieces include peter huse's "space play" from 1969 (again: space + early electronix = winner, every time), michel pongtin's "la mart du pierrot", and of course the st. marcoux & lecaine pieces. occasional mis-steps hurt the head (i could do without the recast wedding march in the pedersen piece, although parts of it are extremely edit-heavy, also the synth sounds in the david paul piece are dated; and i'm not talking about the upside of dated synth sounds...) but do not cloud the overall vision. leave it to mr. p.c. c.p. to trawl the globe, slowly enlightening us to the goings on in electronic music studios the world over, one era/studio/batch/record at a time..." - Creel Pone.

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. "...every so often there's a creel pone that breaks out of the underlying cold/academic vibe and reminds us that it wasn't all brimstone & hellfire back in the "era" (although i specifically see a "1983" cut-off date on the foil-seal and a "1984" production date on the print-work... hmm...) - case in point; this reproduction of a bizarre private-press lp, as assembled/produced by "the electronic music club of edmonds community college" in 1984 (?)... This falls pretty damn far from the creel pone tree, stylistically... but then again this really isn't all that different from the "conrad & sohn" record; short song-length vignettes made on several modular-synth rigs, with the occasional vocoded vocal about some space-conceit or whatever... a few "out-there" collage-concräte beasts, but for the most part: songs. It's funny to think of a record that came out of a community college as "academic"... it's about as academic as the "original compositions by junior and senior high school students" pieces on the creelpolation (if not less-so !!!) - but even still, after a few listens this record certainly won me over with it's uniquely singular vision. a few pieces on here (specifically the richard perkins radio-static-flip) rival the dub taylor creel pone for sheer head-scratch... and it's certainly revealing to listen to a few early 80s hobbyists fumble their way around an electronic music studio... Definitely not one for everyone, but for those infatuated with "outsider" concepts in music as applied to the new-wave era... well, you'll find gold within..." - Creel Pone.

Fantastic album from this all-star garage band featuring Bleeker on guitar and vocals, Martin Courtney on bass and vocals, Julian Lynch (whose solo LP on OESB was a massive VT highlight in 2009) on guitar and Matt Mondanile (Ducktails) on drums. Bleeker takes the beautiful suburban teens play wasted rural psych feel of Real Estate deeper into a basement zone where the lonesome Americana of the first two LPs by The Band combine with Lynch’s wailing guitar solos (still pitched somewhere between Ed Kuepper and Tori Kudo) and some odd, melancholy instrumentals to birth the perfect late afternoon/sun going down in suburbia/end of teenage soundtrack. Love this. 

Opening with a blur of Penderecki-esque electro-acoustic drone, Heatless Ark/Dirty Ark is a major release from this new Australian group, following a bunch of cassettes on NNF. Their remit is pretty diverse and they have a constantly fluctuating line-up yet they somehow manage to float seamlessly from This Heat-styled Industrial rock instrumentals through haunting femme-led keyboard and drum trances deformed by leagues of watery dub (complete with sublimated echoes of The Fall’s Bend Sinister and Simply Saucer’s Cyborgs Revisited) and even a bunch of tracks that could almost be Jandek’s outer-space follow-up to Put My Dream On This Planet. A classic weirdo record and a snapshot of a whole new Australian underground. Edition of 300 copies, all of VT’s copies come with the bonus cassette album Dirty Ark. One of my favourite NNFs – highly recommended. 

Edition of 330 copies from this mysterious one-man project with links to the whole shady Outer Limits Recordings cabal. Bermuda Telepaths is/was the fleeting pseudonym of a publicity shy American multi-instrumentalist - Sam Meringue -  with an umbilical connection to the soundworld of James Ferraro. Indeed, so close is their working relationship that Ferraro even passed off one of his releases as a James Ferraro album. The 90210 disc released on New Age and previously attributed to Ferraro himself was actually a collaboration with this guy who, like James, continually changes his identity from release to release. Explorers presents his first vinyl album and it’s a beauty. Whereas James’s creations are densely populated with the ghosts of hyper-real popular culture, complex loops and ascensions of cheap keyboards, Explorers’ vision of Hypnagogic Pop is much more lonesome and alienated. There’s an emotional distance to the music that is quite affecting. The murky, boombox fidelity is a major part of the sound, further degrading the whole Xerox-psych feel of The Skaters to the point that the keyboards are smeared into deep washes of celestial shortwave, broadcasting from just beyond the veil of memory. The sound is keyboard dominated, with loops of twilight effects bolstering the alien aspect of the music and the use of primitive tape-edits effecting jump-cuts from one soundworld to the next, all seeming to rise out of primordial electronic soup. But it’s the way the melodies are partially occluded by the fidelity, barely able to escape the gravity of recollection, that gives the set its powerful sense of poignancy. Bermuda Telepaths is always just one crucial step beyond full articulation, existing on the very cusp of consciousness, a dreamtime that is forever out of reach. Fantastic primitive Hypnagogic psych and one of the most haunting/haunted releases of the year. Highly recommended.

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.

Mind-blowing reissue of one of the all-time greatest Japanese underground artefacts, Far Out’s epic 1973 stone, Nihonjin. Far Out, led by Fumio Miyashita, would eventually morph into the kosmische synth outfit Far East Family Band but this proto-debut remains the most wailing, guitar-heavy statement of his career. The album consists of two long tracks ala the early Ash Ra Tempel albums, the 18 minute “Too Many People” and the 20 minute title track. “Too Many People” emerges from a void of delay and the sound of winds blowing through space to a triumphal phased keyboard intro that in turn gives way to a simple, descending guitar pattern and an aching lead vocal that is blown apart by some of the most ecstatic single note guitar histrionics of your lifetime. The effect is comparable to Funkadelic’s side-long Maggot Brain jam, with a clean fuzz sound exploding in arcs of tone over a crunching rhythm section. The title track brings in some sitar and heavier raga stylings and another beautifully bleak vocal over loose nod-out rhythms but the destination is still guitar oblivion, with more endless soloing to the point of destruction. A total classic, back in print. Numbered edition of 1000 copies, this was in Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler Top 50. Highly recommended.

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. 

Brand new compilation of early work form this revered, rediscovered master of odd, brain-erasing new age minimalism. Emmanuel cut the classic Wizards side in 1982, an LP long-championed by VT and one that has since had an inordinate influence on the contemporary underground. This is a glorious companion piece to that side, a series of early unreleased works that run from Crumar organ, Echoplex and 4-track reel work through beautifully evolving compositions using real-time tape loops and polyrhythmic synth drones. The whole set has that beautiful sun coming up in your mind feel that defined Wizards, with soft blots of keyboard melody generating repeat architectures somewhere between the mile-deep visions of Klaus Schulze and Terry Riley’s early tape/delay pieces. Comes with a full colour gatefold digipak with photography and liners from J. D. 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.

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. 

Excellent LP, run of 450 copies, from Daniel Martin-McCormick aka Sex Worker. Three long tracks that combine Hypnagogic keyboard patterns with minimal Kraut-styled keyboard melodies ala Cluster/Harmonia and punk-primitive disco stylings. Beautifully bleak in a 3am neon style, The Labor Of Love is intended as a series of “protest songs articulating Daniel’s heavy anti-sex trafficking/enslaved bodies activist agenda” and it has the feel of abandoned backlots, of empty freeways in the middle of the night and huge industrial space. Some of the moodiest and most atmospheric keyboard zones to come out of the current synth wave, cut up with bursts of vocals that have all of the amphetamine energy of Klaus Dinger in La Dusseldorf. 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.

“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. 

Another major unearthing of early unreleased tapes from Bobby Beausoleil’s occult Orkustra, a band that turned up on a buncha classic SF psychedelic-era bills before Beausoleil’s involvement with the Manson murders meant that he had to reconvene the group behind bars where they recorded the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. This beautifully assembled double LP set in a heavy gatefold sleeve with a large booklet bundles recordings from their Haight-Ashbury era, with the group mainlining the kind of free rock experiments that would see the west coast jam band style open up to incorporate aspects of folk, ethnic and ritual music. At points there are echoes of the English free/rock scene with string drones and primitive percussion that could almost be the Third Ear Band or even High Tide. But there’s still that dark, mesmeric atmosphere that defines all of Beausoleil’s best work, particularly in the horn section, which moves from modal oboe smoke signals that give the set a weird English neverland feel through massed brass levitations that look forward to Lucifer Rising with the sound of final trumpets peaking over slurred chords and extended guitar solos. If you dig the live form of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the more rocking Ya Ho Wha sides or just the sound of satanic hippies jamming a musical mass that would erase their own brains, then this is surely your trip. “I had recently arrived in San Francisco when, in the fall of 1965, I conceived of assembling what I described then as "the first electrified symphony orchestra." My 18th birthday had just passed and I possessed only modest abilities as a musician, but, being prone to such crazy notions, the concept seemed perfectly reasonable-this was the Haight-Ashbury of the mid-sixties, after all! A few months later a stable musical ensemble somewhat resembling my original conception had come into existence. What I had imagined would be an "orchestra" of a dozen-or-so musicians proved in practice to be unmanageable. Instead, a coalition of five instrumentalists from various musical traditions—rock, classical, jazz, folk and blues—emerged as the core group. For what was essentially a reconceived rock band, the instrumentation was extremely unusual, comprising some combination of violin, oboe, standup bass, guitar, bouzouki, flute, organ, drums and percussion. All of the melodic instruments were modified for electric amplification. The Orkustra's brief day in the sun did not allow an opportunity to record a formal album. However, some recordings of the band's practice sessions and live performances were made. These precious few artifacts have been carefully restored and compiled by Mexican Summer into a comprehensive double LP album.” – Bobby Beausoleil. Hand-numbered edition of 1000 copies. Highly recommended. 

Edition of 400 copies LP from this west coast psych trio featuring Amanda from Pocahaunted and Britt from Robedoor. Using drums, guitar, piano, brass and vocals Topaz Rags generate haunting, minimalist dirges based around repeated vocal phrases, insistent piano and builds to nowhere, combing classic west coast cultic confusion with dark, lumbering jazz rhythms and doomy, magisterial atmospheres. Indeed, the recording quality is particularly narcotic, smearing the vocals and giving the piano and bass a dubby sub-aqueous depth by using a combination of boombox and four track recordings. Think Opal’s Happy Nightmare Baby sung by Squeaky Fromme while under the spell of Nina Simone with Yasushi Ozawa on bass. Excellent.

Massively important reissue of this remarkable three-way higher-minded drone set that almost functions as the third Taj Mahal Travellers album. Recorded in 1975, hot on the heels of the Taj Mahal saga, the set features Japanese composer and one-time Mr Yoko Ono, Toshi Ichiyanagi alongside Takehisa Kosugi of Taj Mahal Travellers and Michael Ranta of Wired/Harry Partch collaborator et al. The sound is dominated by Kosugi’s deep-space violin tone, with sudden dooms of piano, deep-field percussion that sounds like the birthpangs of planets and otherworldly vocals suspended high above a quivering backdrop of drone. The playing is a little more aggressive and violently nuanced than Taj Mahal proper, touching on aspects of MEV as well as Keiji Haino’s Nijiumu group rituals but the atmosphere is totally immersive and it doesn’t let go for a second. Truly one of the classic Japanese avant/psych summits. Numbered edition of 1000 copies. Highly recommended.

First ever vinyl comp from NNF is a killer, all-female, all exclusive, with tracks from Zola Jesus, Islaja (with Samara Lubelski and Blevin Blectum), Pocahaunted, Talk Normal, US Girls, Topaz Rags, Tickley Feather, Inca Ore, HNY, LA Vampires and Valet. Recommended.