Mind-blowing OTT deluxe reissue of one of the true Holy Grail’s of the UK’s psychedelic underground, A To Austr’s dazzling 1970 LP Musics From Holyground. Holyground was a label and recording studio – the UK’s first fully independent one – that was established in Wakefield in the late 60s. They released a slew of monster, mega-rare sides – legends like Gagalactyca, Astral Navigations, Bill Nelson’s fantastic debut LP, Northern Dream, Gygafo’s stunning Legend Of The Kingfisher, Thundermother et al – all recorded straight to mono in label head Mike Levon’s flat. A To Austr remains the central release to come out of this explosively creative scene, one of the most unique and magical UK psychedelic albums. The core group consisted of Levon himself, Chris Coombs and Brian Calvert with contributions from a pre-Be Bop Deluxe Bill Nelson and amazing female vocals from Yvonne Carrodus and ‘Denise’. The atmosphere is truly spectacular, with a lost England feel and a dusty underground vibe combined with stellar songwriting and the kind of stylistic range that sees them move from odd Kinks style vaudeville w/a heady dosed atmosphere through flashing psychedelic rock, aching acid folk, cranking psych/punk instrumentals and dazzling F/X soaked femme-fronted Eastern-tinged drone rock complete with explosive fuzz guitar. In many ways Musics From Holyground is the ultimate expression of the true late 60s/early 70s UK underground and represents the DIY/basement impulse better than any late-70s post-punk 7”. Long unavailable (originally pressed in an edition of 99 copies, even the previous vinyl reissue changes hands for a ton) this staggering labour of love edition is the ultimate version, with *that* cover shot faithfully reproduced on vintage 1970s bronze carton paper with a gatefold that opens to reveal a reproduction of the original lyric book and a stunning four page colour booklet that features memories from the players, amazing archival shots, cover photo out-takes and even three reproduced Holyground ‘business cards’. In an edition of only 500 copies, pressed on 180g vinyl with a heavy PVC slipcase, this is a triumphant reissue, the kinda package that makes you wanna force an iPhone up the nearest duds wazoo. One of my all-time Top 10 recordings, can’t possibly recommend this one enough. Reissue of the year and it’s only, uh, January. I wanna live inside this LP.

New limited self-released CD-R from Neil Campbell’s (Vibracathedral Orchestra/ESP-Kinetic et al) solo Astral Social Club guise, here with a series of recordings scored for electronics and guitar recorded in October 2011. Campbell is increasingly moving towards the kind of amalgam of psychedelic electronics, euphoric techno and heavy meta minimalism of Pita circa Get Out and this has got to be his most addictive and sensually disorientating passes through accumulated strata of angel tone to date, with a heavier guitar aspect that is particularly satisfying. Parts of this almost sound like Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” re-tooled with circuit-bending drones, ticker-tape melodies and flashes of pure white light that you would almost swear were coming straight from Heaven. This is massively adrenalized loop-minimalism that accrues layers of ecstasy on every pass to the point that it becomes one huge pulsating energy form that just keeps on keeping on.

Latest instalment in RVNG’s Frkwys series of collaborative releases: 08 sees the NY duo of Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho hook up with Laraaji aka Edward Larry Gordon, best known for his 1980 album Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance for Brian Eno’s ambient series of LPs. Laraaji plays an electronically modified zither w/a spectral aspect that is very appealing. This is an inspired pairing, with Laraaji bringing out Blues Control’s most phantom, otherworldly side across a series of slow-moving vistas that combine the hallucinatory tonal/rhythmic depth of Javanese gamelan with translucent exotica and creeping, barely-there synth stylings.  Aspects of Jon Hassell, early choral/devotional music, Mirror/Andrew Chalk (especially in the distant piano sounds), even Organum cohere around wraiths of zither and floating flowers planted deep in haunted rainforests where snatches of vocals appear deep in the mix and the occasional single note rises to the surface with all of the magisterial slow-mo beauty of Loren Connors. By far and away my favourite Blues Control jam to date. Comes with a download card with bonus tracks. Highly recommended!

Saxophonist Joe Rigby remains one of the most criminally unsung saxophonists to come out of the free jazz explosion of the late-60s. Crucially he was one of three wall-destroying saxophonists regularly called on by Milford Graves for the bulk of his most crucial performances and recordings in the late 60s and 70s, alongside Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover. During the loft era he worked with Ted Daniels from Sonny Sharrock’s group, Steve Reid’s Master Brotherhood and Charles Tyler’s New World Ensemble. This latest release was made possible by the vision of Roy Morris, owner of the Scottish Homeboy label that first brought to light the amazing Norman Howard recordings later issued on ESP-Disk as Burn Baby Burn, who brought Rigby to Scotland and organised the sessions that make up this incredible set. The first disc is particularly jaw-dropping. Here Rigby is teamed with a Scottish bagpipe trio, finally realising the dream of a free jazz/drone blow-out as visioned by the late Albert Ayler. The match is heavenly: Rigby playing with an astoundingly powerful tone, starting out with a fat Coltrane-like tenor sound and switching between sopranino and flute while the bagpipe trio – consisting of pipes, drums and congas/djembe/gong/percussion/handclaps – match his every move with clouds of breathy, perfectly articulated drone. It’s made all the more astounding when you realise that the players had never met prior to the session and had little to no knowledge of each other’s music. Rigby perfectly balances bold melodic statements with some wildly outside scorch, threading screaming feedback tones into the polyphonic drone. Plus the quality of the studio recording, engineered by VT’s own Subcurrent soundman, Kenny McLeod, really brings out alla the hysterical detail. This special limited 2xCD sub-edition comes in a hand-numbered run of only 50 copies, all signed by Rigby, with a second disc of all-solo work, recorded during the same trip, with Rigby playing takes on traditionals/standards like Coltrane’s “Spiritual” and Monk’s “’Round Midnight” as well as his own “Foundry Blues”. The whole deal comes wrapped up with extensive liner notes and some great snaps of Rigby with his beautiful wife Harriet. An inspiring document of one of the great/unknown voices of modern free jazz. Highly recommended! 

Gorgeous late-period set from John Fahey, recorded live at The Empty Bottle in Chicago in November of 1996 with an etching on the flip.

Deluxe vinyl edition of this legendary private press/real people/outsider music classic: Kenneth Higney was a struggling singer-songwriter when he cut Attic Demonstration in 1976, a demo record of such massive outsider vision that it dropped straight into the void, as well as the deep pockets of a band of committed record collectors. Initially intended as a calling card to help him get his songs covered by other artists, Higney soon branched out into selling the disc as an actual album, placing low key ads in a couple of NY papers and sending out a bunch of review copies. Only Trouser Press took the bait, saluting Attic Demonstration's 'cross between Lou Reed and Neil Young without the aid of melody.' Now officially available on vinyl for the first time, Attic Demonstration is one of the most endearing and intensely human 'real people' discs of all time, boasting Modern Lovers-styled road ballads sung with a Jagger-esque sneer and propelled on pegleg rhythms that would do The Shaggs proud, through meandering tonal wastelands where Higney's eye wateringly unarmoured vocals are supported by minimal chord patterns that progress according to the position of the stars. Hard to work out exactly what he was thinking at the time but this amazing record connects at a wildly personal angle to Jandek circa “Message To The Clerk” and remains one of the most baffling avant garage sides of all time, crossing numb acoustic ballads with psychotic downer moods and nailing outer space guitar to primitive avant garage ugh. Edition of 500 copies, fully remastered, highly recommended!

Historically potent unearthing of this amazing underground free jazz ensemble, reputedly Quebec’s first free improvising group. These guys had a very obscure LP on London in 1969 but this later set blows even that out of the water, recorded at Radio Canada’s Studio 13 on 13^th May 1973. Consisting of Jean Prefontaine on tenor saxophone and flute, Yves Charbonneau on pocket trumpet, Jean-Guy Poirier on drums and Yves Bouliane on double bass, the group were also involved in radical politics and contemporary avant garde art, at one point purchasing some land with the intention of establishing an artists’ commune. The music is simply phenomenal, played with the kind of otherworldly energy of the original Albert Ayler Trio, with the brass scraping the goddamn ceiling while bass and drums hook up with alla the ferocity of Han Bennink and Maarten Altena on Marion Brown’s wild Porto Novo side. Some of the more spacious pieces have the ghostly orchestral aspect of Bill Dixon’s compositions cut with a feel for genuinely radical sonics and mournful testifying brass w/long breathy tones punctuated by martial explosions of percussion. Indeed, this is up there with Eremite’s amazing Aboriginal Music Society box set in terms of uncovering major lost fire music ensembles. Fans of New York Eye & Ear Control, Duo Exchange, Babi, Sonny’s Time Now et al *need* a copy of this in their collection. 180g vinyl. Phenomenal and very highly recommended!

Number edition of 999 copies with beautiful silkscreened sleeves by Alan Sherry: The Ink Is Gone documents a stunning duo performance from Peter Brotzmann on clarinet, sax and tarogato and legendary jazz drummer Walter Perkins. Perkins played with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Ahmad Jamal, Art Farmer and Muhal Richard Abrams and his grasp of classic jazz form is beautifully sublimated by the power and force of Brotzmann’s love cry, resulting in a meeting that implodes past and future in favour of a profound simultaneity. A unique record in both players’ oeuvres and a beautiful object – highly recommended!

Unlikely vinyl reissue of this amazing Wildman/outsider garage psych/punk side, one of a string of albums cut by Ron Warren Ganderton while resident in the UK between the early-70s and early-80s. 1979’s Sound Ceremony is widely regarded as the apex of his cracked, personal vision with his endless, hysterically free-associating lyrics providing a running commentary on the jams, conjuring visions of himself as the ultimate in excessive rock gods, singing about his insane electric brain and how his beating heart is made of Rock. Rodd Keith and Kenneth Higney may be the closest parallel in terms of the kinda bandstand-quaking energy and belief Ganderton brings to the table but the music ain’t no slouch either, with a post-punk sound that touches on England’s Glory/The Only Ones in the way that they combined classic rock/roll moves with a nod to The Velvets. Throw in some Mike Rep/Tommy Jay style rock goofs and aspects of the amazing Smegma/Wild Man Fischer side and you have all the ingredients for one of the truly legendary/what the fuck off the radar rock/roll as personal deliverance sides of this or any age. A wild, wild boy. Edition of 500 copies, highly recommended. 

Deluxe exact repro edition of this legendary private press LP that touches on classic outsider avatars like Department Store Santas, Fugs, Shadow Ring et al with a shot of heavy hitters like The Kinks, post-Smile Beach Boys, Modern Lovers... "Deluxe and exact official reissue of one of the rarest & most unique gems of the 60s private press psychedelic underground. Home recorded in a suburban New York living room over just a couple weeks in 1969 by three enthused teenagers, and then self released by the band in an edition of only 100 copies complete with hand assembled covers and booklet insert. Dreams of rock stardom may have faded quickly, but from such humble beginnings these kids totally transcended their limited resources... an album overflowing with naive creativity, huge ideas, deep bedroom mysticism, and more then a hint of stoned teenage humour, not to mention a rather unusual assortment of instruments and some very unconventional but brilliant "studio" manoeuvring. Two singers/songwriters both with wonderfully deep, poetic & introspective lyrics and unique voices, chiming 12 string & electric guitars, unusually cool use of piano, crude drum kit, autoharp, banjo, tambourine, subtle bursts of fuzz bass, off kilter unison vocals, washes of reverb modulation, weird tape edits, and a seriously one-of-a-kind vibration. There's truly been nothing like it before or since... highest quality production throughout with better then ever master tape sounds and warm analog mastering, audiophile 180gm vinyl, exact reproduction of the original heavy weight cover with front & back mind-blowingly cool crude black & white art just like the original, exact reproduction of the thick insert booklet with gold printed covers on multiple colours of construction paper. Plus a bonus 7inch of two essential tracks intended for the original LP but left off due to time restrictions, complete with coloured construction paper picture sleeve and lyric insert. Without a doubt, the definitive reissue of this lost masterpiece. Released in full cooperation with founding member Eric Bergman. Strictly limited to 1000 copies" - TL.

Excellent compilation that restores a buncha tracks from this amazing early-80s DIY/basement psych/goofball garage band from Worcester, MA. Peace Love & Alienation bundles a bunch of tracks cut with outsider music legend Bobb Trimble behind the desk as well as live radio sessions and living room recordings. The Prefabs have an umbilical to the UK DIY sound with a riotous Swell Maps/Desperate Bicycles style filtered through an American teen garage aesthetic w/a nod to one-shot weirdos like Department Store Santas. The Trimble-produced tracks are particularly zonked, with a sound that approaches Index’s version of “Eight Miles High” overloaded with backwards bass, wacked tone generator and aggro vocals that are somewhere between The Television Personalities circa The Painted Word and The Afflicted Man. The group shared bills with Mission Of Burma and Willie Alexander back in the day, but even in that company were a real anomaly. The set comes with a 12” insert and a cool fold-out fanzine with original fliers and snaps. A revelatory reissue, highly recommended!

Qbico’s reissue programme dedicated to vinyl issues of Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple’s early tape works continues with this full-length album from Baroque Bordello, originally reissued as part of Kawabata’s Early Works 1978-1981 10 CD-R box set. Recorded in 1980, Abnormal Songs was originally composed to accompany a play entitled Alice In Nakedland scripted by Kawabata himself. His music was dumped but his script was used and here’s the rejected recording in its entirety, a stumbling non-pro DIY noise mixing inspired idiot-avant moves with early moments of intuitive psychedelic flash. Features Kawabata on guitar, bass, synth, percussion, keyboard and voice as well as Tetsushi Kawagishi on guitar, bass, keyboard and percussion, Iwaki Yasuo on percussion, keyboard, synth, guitar, bass, organ and trumpet and Hirashima on guitar and bass. Comes on light blue clear vinyl with yellow effects and artwork by Jose Carrillo Morales.

Since 1994 Seattle's Climax Golden Twins have been digging a deep fucking furrow between the kind of furiously exclusive small group models of free improvisation established in the wake of the formal revolution of the late-60s while simultaneously re-drawing the map by demolishing all of its most useless architecture and replacing it with lots of crude handmade shit. Over the space of a shadowy career that would make even Sun City Girls seem like desperate self-publicists they have dropped a ton of the most puzzling brain-massaging artefacts of the post-MX-80 age while never really enjoying much of a hoo-ha from what passes for an always-overweight underground cognoscenti except when someone got them mixed up with James Toth and Tovah Olson's old Golden Calves orchestra. So here's their new record, is what I'm trying to say. And it's long time you turned on. On 5 Cents A Piece the Twins whip through the kind of surf/modal/psych/doof three-way wild style that will remind you of why they're so tight with Alan and Rick Bishop while having you leap up to check the sleeve for lamination after you suddenly catch yourself like, wuzzat?, did I stick on The Blops box or Traffic Sound's Virgin by mistake? Their grasp is pan-temporal while their cultural reach is prodigious, capable of reconciling teenage Summer All Year Long surf licks with the kind of eschatological avant-garage birthed in the Cleveland flatlands by Rocket From The Tombs, Chocolate Monk/LAFMS-style hands-on avant and smoky middle eastern zazz. It looks good too and comes in a limited run of 500 copies on the Sun City Girls' own label on 180g vinyl.

Vinyl reissue of one of the classic ‘acid folk’ era Current 93 recordings, 1987’s Imperium. Comes with a bonus track, “Time Stands Still” and a printed inner sleeve.

Killer 1990 album from this legendary trio, tearing it up w/primitive biker rock, stripped down rock/roll and the amazing soul-scraping vocals of Fred Cole.

Much anticipated full length LP from Ms Donna Parker, a delicious squall of hand-beamed electronics, bone-grinding pulse work, primitive, blundering rhythms and a very personal, expressive way with globes of feedback gives this a similar feel to Jessica Rylan's revelatory homemade electro-satori albeit with the wordless aggro levels ratcheted up through the roof and a seam of pink-coloured neon psychedelia threaded deep in its heart. Indeed, Jessica produced and mastered the whole LP. Every copy comes with hand-coloured artwork.

Massively extended long form string/drone/Industrial jams from Midwest free jazz outfit Graveyards that push beyond the whole screwed spectral/orchestral arc of their recent work into new zones of lonesome tone : “What is up with the mail these days? Sometimes you get the weirdest things. Are "Dog Missing" flyers illegal now? Seems like it, cause just the other Tuesday I lurched out to check the daily box to see if my new copies of DIRGE or EVIL MINDED shown up yet, and there was this lone LP resting there. Had a post it note stuck to it that read:
"PLEASE HELP: OUR CREATURE THING HAS VANISHED. WE SUSPECT THE WORST. WE CANNOT GIVE DETAILS ON THE THINGS/ANIMAL OR HAVE ANY PICTURES< BUT WE DO HAVE RECORDINGS OF IT IN "ACTION". PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS RECORD (at any speed) AND CALL 237 - 4568 IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ON OUR MISSING CREATURE. AND RETURN MY STAMPS- THANKS- YR NEIGHBORHOOD LOOSE ANIMAL CULTURE CENTER"
Shaking my head, thinking how I just got a killer local platter to add to the animal sounds/droll Yankee/ chooltch industry recordings sections and put the record on.
Well, it seems like they are never gonna find this thing cause it SOUNDS like a super shy version of that horrible creature in the twilight zone flick that tries to scare the passengers and eat the plane. But this "Thing" hangs out in empty hangers and lightly scrapes its torn and rotten fingernails across HUGE rusty industrial size fans at 3am in a creaking wet unlit corner. Who would want this in their house? Sounds from this animal are rare, seems like this LP has like three light rustlings and the THING is gonzo, moved on...just like a ghost trace of it... good luck to them.
After jamming the "MISSING CREATURE" lp on every speed my numark can handle, I IM chatted fellow animal sound lp vet DILLOWAY and told him about the new local style missing thing section, and he said energetically:
"Dude, you should quick like go around the neighborhood and grip all those lps and put em out, don’t get busted say it's...I dunno... GRAVEYARDS or something... "
FUCK!!! Killer idea. So here it is - all the LPs from District 176 Howard St./Frandor with NO INFO and a crude handmade painted sleeve like from the hairy mitts of the said MISSING ANIMAL itself. If you find this THING.... shit, record it and do a FOLLOW UP. And leave it in yr NEIGHBORS mailbox. UUUGGHHHHHHHH. Title taken from a super tuff blueprint question from my Blueprint Reading 112 class last fall. Edition of 100. Inzane handpainted recycled covers, each one uber-unique. MISSING!!! THING!!! RECORDED!!!” – John Olson. Recommended.

Storeroom find of this killer rare side: For all the talk of Japanese saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe’s eviscerating power, he has a beautiful voice on the saxophone, a forlorn castrato, and his staggering control of the upper reaches of his horn results in some of the most emotionally articulate playing of any contemporary saxophonist. Much more so than his shadow, the late altoist Kaoru Abe, Urabe is interested in immediacy of communication and perhaps this is why he sees his spiritual allies as coming more from Rock – he’s a huge Lou Reed fan - than jazz. Still, by the very fact of the saxophone in his mouth, there are echoes of other horn-wielding musicians, whether unconsciously channelled or not. There are parts of So¯ingyokusaiseyo, a beautiful vinyl-only document of Urabe’s 2001 European tour, that have the same end-of-the-world feel as Ornette Coleman’s bluest work, while others find their reflection in the hysterical metal of Borbetomagus or Arthur Doyle’s reed-shredding attack. Still it’s Urabe’s expressive use of silence that most marks him off from anyone else, the way he holds a sound in his lungs for minutes before allowing it all to come screaming out, as if in an attempt to re-connect long-fried synapses, to tear a piece of himself back from the past. Despite the violence of his delivery the prevailing mood is deeply melancholic, with huge sections of nothing serving to supernaturally magnify the significance of the slightest gesture. Highest recommendation.

Hand-numbered edition of 350 copies in deluxe heavyweight packaging of this amazing/mysterious UK acid folk side, recorded in 1971. Only one original copy has ever shown up, seemingly a test pressing with a hand drawn cover, and nothing is known about the group, who appear to be a male/female duo. The atmosphere is intense and pretty dark, with lyrics documenting the breakdown of a relationship cut with visions of universal dread and vegetative entropy. Cut this with a classic blasted lost/downer atmosphere and two singing acoustic guitars and you have one of the true holy grails of UK acid folk. Highly recommended!

Stoopidly moving/eye-wateringly beautiful hard rock/psych session recorded in 1976 in Tucson Arizona by a group led by wildstyle guitarist Pete Fine, who can tear it up with alla the epic flare of Martin Weaver (Dark/Wicked Lady), Billy TK (Human Instinct/Powerhouse) and Tisziji Munoz. Fine carves out these totally epic, iconoclastic leads that have a really stubby, declamatory power to them while the rest of the group make with some early biker/metal moves fronted by male/female vocals. I love this disc; it has been the soundtrack to many a late-night record party. Usual killer job by Shadoks, with heavy duty/glossy sleeves, 180g vinyl and limited to 350 hand-numbered copies.

Original copies of this very limited LP, released in 2004 w/a beautiful paste-on-sleeve job by De Stijl. Xiao remains one of the most gloriously beautiful early blats from this tribe, with huge fields of percussive heliocentric beauty, punk/modal re-thinks of spirit-huffing axe gliss, supremely lonely country/blues phantoms and some inspired beat satori. Liner notes by Thurston Moore. Highly recommended!

Massive double disc set that pairs legendary Japanese free jazz saxophonist Akira Sakata with Jim O’Rourke on guitar, harmonica and electronics alongside the duo of drummer Chris Corsano and bassist Darin Gray. Akira Sakata has long been one of the key players on the Japanese free jazz underground, playing as a part of Yamashita Yosuke’s trio and forging alliances with players like Peter Brotzmann and Sonny Sharrock, who he played with as part of Last Exit. And That’s The Story Of Jazz... gathers a bunch of recordings from the group’s 2008 Japanese tour and it’s an absolute revelation. Sakata’s style bridges classic post-Fire Music Japanese freedoms with a wild mystic/psychedelic edge and the combined backgrounds of his three collaborators push the whole deal into some kind of post-improvised underground psych zone. Sure, there are raging multi-limbed blow-outs that worship at the altar of Church Number 9 where you can barely make out who is doing what but there’s a whole deal more, picked guitar and droning strings over weird acid folk meditations that cross Holy Mountain-era Don Cherry with Mark Fry and Yatha Sidhra, the kind of raggedy folk/punk euphoria more associated with Finnish tribes like Paivansade and Rauhan Orkesteri, rich Om-ing Coltrane-isms, spiky No Wave blats that reinvent Rudolph Grey and Von Lmo’s vision of free heavy metal... this record throws a spanner in any conception of what a collaboration with a first generation Japanese free saxophonist and three avant punks might sound like. And this is the sound. Highly recommended.

New 120 minute movie from James Ferraro in a run of 500 copies, packaged in a slim DVD slipcase with mock denim effect and last American hero style iconography. Not sure if this is the full-length movie that James was working on during his Hollywood retreat but it’s based in ‘crime-ridden’ Rochester, New York, in the near future and centres on a police officer who is brutally murdered and subsequently recreated as a super-human cyborg. The main plot of the movie revolves around a ‘Bug’ (code word for a member of an alien species that is similar in many ways to a very large cockroach) searching for a miniature galaxy which is also a vast energy source. ‘Acid Eagle’ is the president of Hell-TV (Channel 83, Cable 12) a sleazy television station specialising in sensationalistic programming. Displeased with his station’s current lineup (which mostly consists of softcore pornography), Professor Pizza is on a seemingly endless quest for something that isn’t so ‘soft’ and will ‘break through’ to a new audience. The rescue turns out to be fake; the two climbers are taken prisoner by a group of ruthless thieves. The driver is now a hostage trapped by his own seatbelt. However, the robot becomes smarter and more dangerous as it plays putting the boy and his friends in mortal danger. In addition to being an action film, the movie includes larger themes regarding the media, resurrection, gentrification, corruption and human nature and scavenges scenes from a host of famous and obscure straight-to-video horror, action and sci-fi movies.“Rapture Adrenaline is a virtual videogame car chase through the veins of hyperreality seen through fragments of US movies – mostly produced in the 1990s and diffracted by the euro-lens of Dutch subtitling and French dubbing. To achieve optimal melting these fragments have been transferred from tapes, DVDs and computer files to VHS.” A massively psychedelic/psychotic take on dystopian TV culture and Hollywood hypnotics from its most visionary celebrant/critic, in many ways the ‘ultimate’ expression of his Hypnagogic worldview. In addition the DVD comes with a new feature, Welcome To Candyland, where Ferraro guides us through a walking tour of Hollywood/LA, visiting the site of the OJ Simpson murder etc. Multi-region DVD. 

Damaged, stripped back garage/kraut jams with a burning basement edge and the feel of cheap drugs, think Crawlspace w/a line-up of all fried skaters or Simply Saucer via Sunburned Hand Of The Man: "Jovantaes are Lexington, KY. They emerge from (and possibly define) my town's peculiar skate/Kraut/nihil/garage axis, evoking the smell of stale Miller High Life and burning couches: stumbling match-grip surf rolls, howling chorused-out guitar, droning Adderall haze, and a singer who makes Will Shatter sound like Scott Walker. Imagine Moolah playing at a beach party on the edge of the Kentucky River, big gray globs of unidentifiable garbage drifting silently past and the dense wet air becomes gridlocked with mosquitoes"- Trevor Tremaine (Hair Police)

Long time since we heard from Justin Meyers of Devillock/Panther Skull/Glass Organ et al and it’s a welcome return. Resonating Upon Harmonic Ground comes in a run of only 150 copies and consists of a massive single track scored for glacial electronics, impenetrably deep silence, analog synth and concrete tape constructions. Intended as an extended investigation of “the interaction between field recordings and simple sine waves” the result is an oddly elegiac slice of minimalism with that specifically tactile, environmental atmosphere that Meyers always brings to the table. File alongside Yoshi Wada, Joji Yuasa, Charlemagne Palestine, Thomas Koner et al. Recommended. 

Staggering document of the entire April Flower tour that took place in April 2011 and saw Matthew Valentine and Erika Elder joined by Mick Flower (Vibracathedral Orchestra/Flower-Corsano Duo) on electric bass. This trio might be the single greatest ‘small group’ to grace MV’s back catalogue. Something about the way Flower is able to navigate with the vaguest and most subtly ‘implied’ directions seems to free the group sound to float all the way out there, resulting in some of their most effortlessly psychedelic and unequivocally beautiful visionings of deep rural psych. The set comes with 8 separate CD-Rs, all with their own Heroine style sleeve/title, housed in a tall oversize handmade art book with beautifully printed artwork, a VIP certificate and a thick booklet with colour covers that features a complete rundown of the shows, snaps and liners from Coot Moon and MV himself. It might just be the most gloriously crafted artefact to come out of the Child Of Microtones stable, a label that has long set the standard for tactile home-burned presentation. The shows come from Feeding Tube in Northampton 4/4/11, Saratoga Arts Centre, Saratoga Springs 4/5/11, The Church, Boston 4/6/11 (where the group are joined on drums by Chris Corsano for an amazing heavy psych set), State University Of New York 4/7/11, Death By Audio, Brooklyn 4/8/11 (where they’re joined by Jeremy Earl of Woods), Brickbat Books, Philadelphia 4/9/11 (a stunning set with guest spots from Willie Lane and Harmonica Dan), Wilkes-Barre, PA 4/10/11 and Mystery Train 4/11/11. The whole set is massively varied, with odd acoustic re-thinks of primo meat up against endlessly extended soft-as-snow renderings of haunted blues and full-blown free improvised navigations of the furthest environments. If I hadda pick a highlight it may well be the astounding Brickbat Books set that just sounds so great and has the group playing with at an all-time high of confidence and euphoria but really the whole set is a stone and one of the most necessary releases of the year. Edition of only 99 copies, so make your move. Can’t recommend this enough! To further prime you for the jams, our resident COMmentator, Blues Scholar Andrew Ross, gives us a close-up on one of the major discs:

Yorkshire Puddin’ – MV & EE with Mick Flower

“Picking one of my highlight shows from the box set, I opted for the opening night where the core trio played the Feeding Tube Records shop.  For whatever reason, the Feeding Tube venue always seems to conjure up something special when MV & EE play (check out previous Heroines like “Muy Alto” and “Toasted Cookie”) with a real creative edge and great quality sonics. The performance here on the April Flower tour is no exception with a real high-end folk art performance that is totally killer. The sonic mix on the recording itself is up there with the best, with the vocals really clear in the mix and the bass sounds so organic, almost acoustic at times. If that wasn’t enough there are a few live rarities/new tracks thrown in for good measure.
The set opens with “Drone Trailer” and keeps with the transcendental arrangement of late but with the dual vocals of MV & EE sounding particularly enchanting. There’s some delightful interplay between MV’s melodic solo expressions mixed with Erika’s pedal steel during the main instrumental break.  Next up is the set’s mind-blowing highlight, which is a 30 minute passage which runs “Hammer”, “Space Blues”, “Crow Jane Environs” and finally into “Death Is Your Friend”. Starts with “Hammer”, which is a spectacular re-think of the song’s arrangement. Previous versions have had a West Coast/Crazy Horse style feel to them but this particular arrangement comes across like a folk/blues mammoth.  Sparse restrained clean guitar, almost acoustic at times, combined with Erika’s vocals (doused in echo with long drawn notes) which are simply heart-breaking.  Some lucid wah-wah infused soloing from MV which is continually pinned down by Mick’s organic bass seals the deal.  Hands down this is my favourite version of “Hammer” yet.  This segues into “Space Blues” (only previously included on Double Double Raw) which is a short instrumental passage with a real psychedelic edge.  Some great high-end bass work and almost jazz-like runs from Mick overlade with space FX on the slide sounding particularly great.  Next is “Crow Jane Environs” from Liberty Rose (COM34).  Only previously available on the duo performance from Blasted Wavelength this is a vastly superior version and this is its only inclusion in the sets in this run of shows.  With its traditional folk lyrics and an arrangement that displays MV’s admiration of British and Celtic folk this is a radical re-interpretation of the folk source but with a real dark/psychedelic undercurrent that none of the current ‘psych/acid folk’ imposters would be capable of creating.  Eerie vocals over finger-picked inverted and transformed chord structures – it’s simply stunning.  But the real star of the track is Mick Flower whose high-end melodic bass phrasing takes it to a new dimension, coming across like a cross between Bert Jansch’s “Jack Orion” and The Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe Eugene” – check out the psychedelic guitar jam that erupts around 4m30s.  It doesn’t get much better.  This segues into “Death Is My Friend” which is another live rarity.  Only previously available on the Deep Space Circuit and Double Double Raw sets although the arrangement here borrows more from the studio version on “Liberty Rose”, albeit with a more electric blues feel.  It features those “Freight Train” style vocals from Erika with a mid-song rap that is as seductive to rival Kim Gordon’s on “Kool Thing”.  This develops into a sublime electric blues jam with some great hypnotic blues licks from MV pinned by a repeating bassline from Mick Flower in the same style as he did to those arrangements of “Get Right Church” and “Canned Happiness” on the Steal Yr Slice tour.  For anyone that read the recent article in the Wire on Bill Orcutt, it really does feel like artists like Orcutt and MV are pioneering modern interpretations of country and folk blues whilst still paying their respect to the source – recognising “the fact that you’re not Robert Johnson”.
“Crash Palace Of Records” is another new track (only previously available on the All Good Habs set, although that was recorded after this tour and so this is the real live debut) with the arrangement staying pretty true to the studio version from this year’s stunning Country Stash – albeit a month prior to that album’s release.  “Environments” is sufficiently different from the versions with Mick Flower from the Steal Yr Slice tour to keep even the completists more than intrigued.  It still has that raga feel particularly with the addition of Mick’s japan banjo interwoven with MV’s traditional banjo and some great space FX from Erika on the lap steel.  However, towards the end it breaks into a newer stretched passage which has a real heavy underground Tokyo psych feel to it coming across somewhere between live Hendrix circa 1970 and Takashi Mizutani.  In fact, anyone that enjoyed some of the heavier moments from Herbcraft’s Ashram To The Stars with those industrial/mechanical sounding feedback-drenched guitars should check this out.  This segues into the set closer, the road anthem of “Feelin’ Fine” which has a particularly sweet frazzled tone on the guitar on this one.
Overall, this set is totally killer (but it’s that middle passage that will keep you coming back) and has to rank up there with some of my personal favourites like Toasted Clam, Muy Alto, Double Double Raw, Wobbly Hall and even I Left My Wallet In The Trossachs.  If that wasn’t enough there are another 7 sets in the box set such as the mind-blower from Brickbat Books featuring Willie Lane.  It’s highly recommended!” – Andrew Ross.

Stunning new solo album from Nate Young of Wolf Eyes: Stay Asleep represents the fullest realisation of the kinda experiments in electronic form that Nate took out on the road a few years back when he toured on the same bill with Aaron Dilloway. It was there that the initial seeds were set for what would fully flower in his duo with John Olson as Stare Case, incorporating clean, up-front vocals in a classic desperate man style. Instrumentally that tour also represented a musical detour and Stay Asleep represents the first full articulation of his new style. Releases under the Demons and Moon Pool & Dead Band banners have seen him explore heavy/cosmo-gothick synth drone but here he plays it much more minimally, using re-wired electronics to create a series of muted, elegantly wasted constructs that trade simple melodic motifs for an atmosphere that is thick with dread. Here he seems to be connecting more with European avant traditions, incorporating aspects of MEV, Dome, Asmus Tietchens and Heldon as well as 20^th century classical modes. There are stark piano lines that could almost have been lifted from Lou Reed’s Berlin illuminated by slithers of electricity, odd baroque synth zones and random stabs of interference that are as zonked as ZNR’s Barricade 3, even a hint of Belgium’s Univers Zero. Both John Olson and Aaron Dilloway guest on the album, with Olson adding some beautiful reed work that further bolsters the weird decadent atmosphere and Dilloway contributing a particularly delirious tape pile-up. But it’s Nate’s show all the way and it’s a stunner, one of the most personal, strikingly odd and rigorously conceived solo electronics albums of the post-Noise underground and an instant weirdo classic. Plays at 45rpm, with full-colour printed inner sleeves. Highly recommended!

Edition of only 60 copies private press release from Campbell Kneale’s post-Birchville Cat Motel project, Our Love Will Destroy The World: lots of ritualistic hand-percussion and soft, phasing electronics on this one, giving it all of the miasmic power of the early Popol Vuh/Werner Herzog collaborations w/aspects of Pauline Oliveros and even NNCK thrown into the mix. It definitely has the feel of a journey, of some kind of narrative unfolding, as the percussion pushes the whole thing forward with alla the stoned determination of Dave Nuss jamming with Kalacakra while modulated sirens peal like headhunter horns. As the piece progresses computer tones w/a weird retro-futurist aspect start to take over, as if we’re coasting right into the heart of the machine. A singular release from Kneale that sounds quite unlike anything else in his catalogue. Recommended. 

Ron House is one of the great, instantly recognisable voices to come out of underground USA. His work with Great Plains and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments never failed to hand you your ass on a plate while the remarkable compilation of stray early activity that came out on Old Age/No Age and was reissued by Columbus Discount – Blind Boy In The Back Seat – was a dazzling compendium of under the counter culture rama-lama. Psandwich is Ron’s latest group and they marry his amazing vocals – vocals that get your back up as immediately as Iggy Pop or Genesis P-Orridge – with a killer avant garage attack. House still has a great feel for lampooning the culture that birthed and supports him and here he sets his sights on the ‘Columbus sound’ as well as hilarious scene politics, classic psychedelia (any track that references both the 13^th Floor Elevators and Bubble Puppy has the keys to my record collection), jailtime and – inevitably – plenty of drugs. The band themselves sound phenomenal, with an attack that’s somewhere between classic Flesheaters, NY punk and destructo Cleveland rock ala The Pagans. There’s a particular mood I get in that only the Columbus groups can unlock and this is a damn-near note-perfect soundtrack to lazy afternoons reading back issues of Creem and Black To Comm and sipping beer and falling asleep with the TV on. Love it. Edition of 500 copies. Recommended.

Excellent live set, stunningly rendered, from the trio of saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Barry Guy and drummer Raymond Strid. Tarfala formed in 1992 after a meeting at the Solo-92 Festival in Sweden. There have been two CDs so far on the Maya Recordings label but this deluxe 2xLP gatefold set with a bonus 7” and a large glossy booklet represents their first vinyl outing. This is classic high-energy free jazz, with Guy’s playing serving to drill them an elemental foundation deep into the earth, anchoring furious string navigations with massively heavy bottom end bombs that Strid knocks around all over the place, shepherding them into weird time fluxes that somehow combine static detail with constant movement. Gustafsson is, of course, one of the premier deconstructive thinkers on the saxophone but here his playing feels more focussed on classic free jazz grace and power, matching Peter Brotzmann in terms of lyrical fury and radical invention. Edition of 600 copies. Recommended. 

Nice set of field recordings, bell tones and home-assembled sonic architecture that walks the line between sound art, psychedelic pop (w/a heavy Spacemen 3/Spectrum vibe) and visionary environments from Raf Spielman who runs the Eggy Records imprint and who has released a buncha oddities via labels like Night People, Not Not Fun, Digitalis et al.

Great new solo DIY tape/loop/almost songs from the label that brought us the excellent Still Going In Offices compilation. Acolytes is cover for a solo London experimentalists w/connections to The Pheromoans who combines weird obsessively home-baked miniatures ala Alan Bohman’s Bunhill Row recordings with a post-UK psych edge that would marry murky early-Floyd isms with moves that are somewhere between Swell Maps circa Train Out Of It, Gus Coma and The Music Improvisation Company. Pretty great, edition of 275 copies. 

Excellent new album from this major guitar innovator who straddles classic UK folk complexity with a feel for third and fourth world sonorities and a tactile, exploratory style that makes him more of a spiritual kin than an actual promulgator of the world-gobbling form of the late John Fahey. In his excellent sleeve notes Bruce Russell of The Dead C lists Joynes alongside Guitar Roberts (aka Loren Connors), Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls and Bill Orcutt of Harry Pussy as the only other contemporary guitarists he rates as much as Joynes, especially highlighting the common ground shared with Bishop. It’s true, both guitarists are fairly omnivorous in terms of their magpie proclivities, but Joynes vision of raga guitar owes as much to the drone at the heart of the UK folk revival – Steeleye Span circa Ten Man Mop, Bert Jansch/John Renbourn, Davy Graham – as much as it does to Sumatran – or Congolese – ritual music. As such it feels as profoundly alien as Fahey’s re-wiring of The Blues, presenting a music that is at once immediately recognisable and expressively idiomatic as it is exaggerated, undermined, inflated and otherwise dicked with. Which is to say that Joynes is one of the few original voices to come out of the post-Fahey void and this fantastic record that flashes between revenant re-thinks of traditional material, melancholy slow-mo string pickers and travelling, hallucinatory drone works, is a remarkable testament to the endless evolutionary potential of Guitar Soli. CD edition of 500 copies. Recommended.

Excellent new album from this major guitar innovator who straddles classic UK folk complexity with a feel for third and fourth world sonorities and a tactile, exploratory style that makes him more of a spiritual kin than an actual promulgator of the world-gobbling form of the late John Fahey. In his excellent sleeve notes Bruce Russell of The Dead C lists Joynes alongside Guitar Roberts (aka Loren Connors), Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls and Bill Orcutt of Harry Pussy as the only other contemporary guitarists he rates as much as Joynes, especially highlighting the common ground shared with Bishop. It’s true, both guitarists are fairly omnivorous in terms of their magpie proclivities, but Joynes vision of raga guitar owes as much to the drone at the heart of the UK folk revival – Steeleye Span circa Ten Man Mop, Bert Jansch/John Renbourn, Davy Graham – as much as it does to Sumatran – or Congolese – ritual music. As such it feels as profoundly alien as Fahey’s re-wiring of The Blues, presenting a music that is at once immediately recognisable and expressively idiomatic as it is exaggerated, undermined, inflated and otherwise dicked with. Which is to say that Joynes is one of the few original voices to come out of the post-Fahey void and this fantastic record that flashes between revenant re-thinks of traditional material, melancholy slow-mo string pickers and travelling, hallucinatory drone works, is a remarkable testament to the endless evolutionary potential of Guitar Soli. Vinyl edition of 350 copies. Recommended.

Classic Americana underground rock moves from a new Baltimore-based project that features Lexie Mountain on vocals alongside Nate Nelson of Religious Knives/Mouthus, Nick Becker, Jake Freeman and Chiara Giovando. The sound is kinda like Royal Trux at their most FM-radio relevant, with huge blats of melodic moog defining the foreground while Lexie pulls out her best Jennifer Herema/Janis Joplin stylings (with occasional Meredith Monk-styled detours) and the songs work from a raggedy Suicide/Springsteen/Flesheaters/The Band base that would combine classic, iconoclastic melodies with weirdly deformed two-note keyboard drones and a fried hayseed basement style that is supremely beguiling. Can’t think of a recent release that so beautifully walks the line between classic rock and cultic underground confusion.

Reissue of a bunch of key documents – the Golden Calves Money Band LP and Century Band 12”  – from this pre-Wooden Wand/Vanishing Voice freakout jam band led by Mr James Toth and released in the mid-90s. The sound has that classically fractured post-ESP Disk Siltbreeze feel fully down, with Skip Spence style oblivion ballads further dislocated by almost Shadow Ring-styled idiot avant and drug-dazzled cultic jam blasts ala early Tower Recordings. The spirit of Jandek hovers over the bulk of the recording and Toth makes expressive use of Sterling Smith’s barbed guitar sonorities while orbiting the kind of cultic downer ballads that he would base much of the Vanishing Voice material around. A beautiful sound from a beautiful time. Comes with some hilarious in-depth liners where Toth fesses up to the multiple inspirations behind these still-magical recordings. If you’ve never heard these before then it functions as a key to a whole lot of what was to come later. Highly recommended.

Amazing new Australia underground jams from a dream-team hook-up that brings together members of VT faves Mad Nanna and White Woods, whose Bellplay cassette on Night People back in the day was a major office spin. The combo is perfectly balanced, with White Woods gorgeous post-Flying Nun teen folk/punk married to Mad Nanna’s collapsing basement style, meaning that these guys can navigate timelessly hazy male/female led DIY euphoric while simultaneously deconstructing and elaborating on post-Corwood approaches to song. One for the kinda savvy consumer who would dig The Bachs as much as The Godz – don’t say it ain’t you! Three tracks, plays at 33. Highly recommended. 

New live album from this legendary Texan psych group featuring Lisa Cameron, Joel Crutcher, Bobby Baker and SL Telles. Compiled over a bunch of dates and with a variety of devices across late 2009 this one covers all the bases, from mantric raga-fixated psych through post-Hawkwind feedback and electronics touch-downs and even some Satanic metal that could  pass for your favourite UK occultists circa 1974. Comes with a large fold-out zine featuring tour diaries, doodles and assorted ‘awkward moments’. Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies. 

New album from this contemporary London DIY group who expand on the atmosphere of suburban ennui and cracked English surrealism practiced by The Shadow Ring, Well Crucial, The Strolling Ones, The Homosexuals et al. The Pheromoans expand on the basic post-punk appeal of bedroom recordings with an approach to songcraft that would enliven it with all sorts of accidental, brokedown detail accompanied by odd social commentary and an obsession with the underbelly of consensus English ‘culture’. Some of the songwriting here wouldn’t be out of place on one of the early Flying Nun sides, particularly w/aspects of Axemen, but there’s a more deconstructive side to the group that infects the garage band blueprint and that makes for an excellent addition to the shelf somewhere between Walden, Lambkin, Treacy and Ball. Plays at 45. 

Limited vinyl edition of Wolf Eyes' classic Sub Pop debut, made available via John Olson's American Tapes and Aaron Dilloway's Hanson imprints. Comes in a beautiful, screened card sleeve with a fold-out newsprint poster. This features the classic Wolf Eyes trio of Olson, Dilloway and Young working some punishing drum-machine driven avant/electronic punk into who new realms of high energy hardcore spurt, joining the dots between Voivod/Sabs/Slayer, Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Xenakis and Black Flag. Features the single, “Burned Mind”, the classic “Village Oblivia” and more. A modern classic: Highest Recommendation.

Originally issued on Larkfall in an edition of 32 copies, Stella And Astrophel presents four tracks from Phil Legard’s (Ashtray Navigations/Churinga Canaries et al) Xenis Emputae Travelling Band that combine deep drone logic with electro-acoustic trance constructs and song forms that skirt the magick/folk fringes of the World Serpent catalogue. This one has more of an atmosphere of ritual and improvisation, with deep droning vocals opening out onto the kind of cultic flute/hand percussion/eternal volk of your favourite kosmische courier. Hand-numbered edition of only 45 copies. 

Very excited about the comparative upsurge in documentation of this singular French vocalist/tape composer/instrumentalist: Repas Frod presents the complete edition of what was originally released on CD in a version that was more focussed on its constituent parts. Here it is presented as two side-long compositions. Unlike so many tape composers or sound poets Tazartes’ work always has a fairly solid dynamic and a sense of direction and here he uses propulsive drum sounds and gunshot percussion to advance across a series of dense sonic landscapes, from his patented psychedelic accordion and dark torch song style through polyrhythmic constructions assembled from laminal accumulations of found sound that could almost be a more amphetamine Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion to a series of inspired ethno-forgeries that touch on the magic of Sun City Girls: “An extraordinary combination of culled found and taped fragments juxtaposed against drums, field recordings and mystery noises, sound loops, birdsong, keyboards and emanations of his own throaty drones and voice propelled by hypnotic, ritualistic rhythms balanced on a razor sharp edge. This is the complete work of Repas Froid; previously released on cd as brief tracks of source material and palette of various sounds. It includes archival and as of yet previously unreleased recordings from the late 1970s and early 1980s, strung together to form two long compositions. A French musician of Turkish parentage, Ghédalia Tazartès is an uncompromising character who defies categorization. Born 1947 in Paris, is one of France's most idiosyncratic talents. He has spent over 30 years within musical practice and experimentation, letting his musical work wander from chant to rhythm, from one voice to another. Utilising magnetic tape recorders into a rough collage and loose ethno-instrumental mulch, he paves the way for the electric and the vocal paths, between the muezzin psalmody and the screaming of a rocker. He traces vague landscapes where the mitre of the white clown, the plumes of the sorcerer, the helmet of a cop and Parisian anhydride collide into polyphonic ceremonies. The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.” – Pan. 

Deluxe edition of 200 copies 7” in a gatefold sleeve from a trio coming out of the Brisbane underground that features Joel Stern (Other Film et al) Alex Cuffe and Ross Manning playing invented instruments and appliances: speaker box, elastic dust shovel, latex pimp horns… this a fabulously weirdo recording, with aspects of pygmy music, Tori Kudo, hypnotic homemade psych, toy orchestra plays The Shadow Ring…

“Vinyl issue of two very important works by this early British sound poet and electronic composer, compiling one of Trevor Wishart's first ever pieces 'Fanfare & Contrapunctus' (from 1976) and one of his latest, 'Imago' (from 2002), documenting a modern approach in composition and an extremely unique progress in sound manipulation and music technology. 'Fanfare & Contrapunctus' (1976) "These two short pieces were made at the newly opened electronic studio at the Sydney Conservatorium, before the advent of music computer technology. The source material derives from free improvisations by Trevor Wishart and Martin Mayes using “soft trumpets”, pop-guns, French Horn and virtuoso eating noises, plus recordings of birdsong and other environmental sources." 'Imago' (2002) '…the universe in a grain of sand…' "Imago is a piece of magical sound metamorphosis in which the single ‘clink’ of two whisky glasses gradually metamorphoses into a multitude of other sounds, eventually alluding to the sounds of birdsong, a junkyard gamelan, the ocean and the human voice, but never entirely abandoning its links to this minimal source. The piece was made using sound transformation software written by the composer, available through the Composers Desktop Project, and the original source sound was taken from Jonty Harrison’s ‘et ainsi de suite’." Trevor Wishart is an English composer, based in York. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. He has been very active since the early 1970s in the area of electro-acoustic music (first with tape manipulation, later with computer pieces) and musical theatre pieces. Not only has he composed many significant pieces, but he has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art,” and contributed to the design and implementation of many software tools used in the creation of digital music. His compositional interests deal mainly with the human voice. He has also written two major books, 'On Sonic Art' and 'Audible Design'. The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly- lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.” – PAN. 

Glorious new privately released album from Wooden Wand with a virtual goddamn big band line-up that features guitar, pedal steel, plenty of organ, drums and slide. Wand has really hit his stride recently after a wobbly period around the Ryko LP and this might just be his most fully-accomplished and all-out gorgeous recording yet. The band have that constant, unfolding/revelatory style of The Hawks/The Band circa ’66 or Dylan’s studio band on Blonde On Blonde, allowing Toth to really roll with the phrasing and his songwriting here has a similar visionary/infinite aspect as classic late-60s Dylan, pushing past simple verse/chorus arrangements in favour of a constant unfolding. His lyrics are still some of the smartest/funniest/rawest of anyone of his generation and the degree of underground smarts and hard-won knowledge he brings to the table – he served time under Matthew Valentine fer gawd’s sake – means even the straightest of pounders are surreptitiously bent. The backing band are fantastic:  powerful, euphoric, hard rocking and the combination of off-the-cuff backing vocals, ripping guitar solos and epic beams of organ makes this the most rewarding singer-songwriter record of the year. In a righteous universe Wand would be the dude on the front cover of Mojo but in a world where dweebs like David Gray are touted as the heir apparent to Bob Dylan, well, I’ll continue to file him alongside Arthur Doyle, NNCK and The Bummer Road and feel damn good about it. Edition of 500 copies, ‘official’ version reputedly due on Fire Records sometime in the future. On coloured vinyl. Can’t recommend this enough. 

Fantastic new album from New Zealand’s Antony Milton, part of a series of recordings made to reflect aspects of specific NZ topography. This one was recorded in Punakaiki, a small beach town on the wild and rugged South Island in 2006. Originally slated to come out on CD, this cassette release marks its first outing. Recorded over the space of one week, this is an album that really takes you *there*, combining sad elegiac drones recorded beneath open skies with oddly affecting field recordings made in the bush and on the shore and a series of hushed, fragile songs that summon the ghost of Alastair Galbraith as if it was recorded straight to Walkman by Andrew Chalk. A mesmerising set from Antony and a continuation of PA’s recent stunning form. 

New album from Anthony Milton’s Clay Man In The Well project, recorded during a series of practices for a show with the equally great Metal Rouge. Here Milton uses banjo, SK1, Monotron synth, vocals, pedals and mixer to evoke a blurry widescreen atmosphere that combines fast smears of almost orchestral detail over haunted wraithlike vocals and a constantly peaking atmosphere. Shaun describes it as having a Loveless-meets-Popol-Vuh style and that feels as close as you’re going to get to its dizzying devotional appeal. 

Excellent split set from Family Battlesnake and Japanese psych/noise legends Astro on Bill Kouligas’s (Family Battlesnake) suave new vinyl-only imprint:”Delving into the realm of deep listening, transported by way of analog synthesizers, Family Battlesnake weaves an electronic web that cocoons the listener in warm cascading frequencies. Calls to mind classic electronic composers such as Charles Dodge, Eliane Radigue and even a hint of NWW. Family Battlesnake is Bill Kouligas, a London-based Greek who also performs and records with Sudden Infant. Astro is Hiroshi Hasegawa of the legendary and now defunct Japanese noise unit C.C.C.C. Sonic waves of squealing feedback and oscillating waveforms meld with biting distortion in the appropriately titled “Lunatic Luminescence”. Enveloped by haywire electronics and burbling loops & skree, Astro has constructed an impressive piece of modern electronic music of devastating magnitude. A fine document of pure Japanese sonic nihilism and fresh deconstucted electronic frequencies. The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker in a limited edition of 330 hand-numbered copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press jacket which itself is housed in a two-tone silk screened pvc sleeve with interweaving geometric designs.” – Pan.

Cool new DVD from Pseudo Arcana that features a selection of films put together by Anthony Milton using raw footage culled from You Tube by using the search terms “historical New Zealand Super 8 film”. The resultant visuals have a distant memory vague appeal with a ton of surreal historical detail, airshows, folk festivals, landscapes... all combining in strange abstract forms while Hi-Asobi – the trio of Milton, Peter Wright and David Khan - generate power drones and eerie blues-inflected abstractions that add to overall dream/reverie feel. No region, all players compatible. Comes with a free digital download of the sonics.

Wild collage work that presents the sounds of riot culled from a buncha different flashpoints, from concert halls to street brawls: “James Hoff’s How Wheeling Feels when the Ground Walks Away presents an audio landscape comprised of various historic riots, from the concert hall and music venue to the sounds of modern warfare. Presented in surround sound, the work relentlessly envelops the audience as the tumultuous panorama of over-layered riots travel around the gallery. Part of Riot Radio Ballad, which explores the performative and futurist aspects of spoken word, audio, and radio material. Curated by Mark Beasley. Commissioned by Performa. Co-presented by Performa and Artists Space. Produced by Mike Skinner and James Hoff - sound design Mike Skinner and James Hoff. James Hoff is an artist, editor and art curator living in New York City. He has been working with sound and performance since 2003. He is also co-founder and editor of Primary Information- an organization devoted to publishing lost works of the avant-garde and artists publications vital to discussions in contemporary artistic practice. The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 200 copies, pressed on a 140g one-sided picture disc, housed in a silk-screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.” – Pan. 

From out of nowhere, this set of solo acoustic guitar conceptions knocked us on our asses. Mauro hails from Belgium and was previously a member of big-deal Deus associates Evil Superstars and Mitsoobishy Jacson and has connections to European Industrial art/actionists Club Moral (whom he occasionally performs with) and DDV. But Secret Guitar has little to do with that particular subterranean world. This is a whole other strain, an approach to the acoustic guitar that is as exploratory and ragged as masters of the form like Jandek, Keiji Haino and Derek Bailey. Mauro works weirdly configured open tunings into various barbed shapes, sometimes threading passages of single notes into a weave of atonal, harmonically vibrating chords, at others hammering protesting overtones from single heavy downstrokes in a manner that sounds most like Christina Carter at her most clawing. Limited to 600 hand-numbered copies, Secret Guitar comes in an individually silk-screened cover (of which there are reportedly six variants) and includes an insert with some good liners. Who the fuck would have thought it? Highly recommended.

Heavyweight set of muscular electronic improvisations recorded during the duo of Peter Rehberg and Marcus Schmickler’s tour of the USA with sets from the No Fun fest in New York and Chicago: “Archival release documenting the 2009 USA tour of Peter Rehberg and Marcus Schmickler under the R/S moniker. Real time extreme music improvisations recorded at Lampo in Chicago and No Fun Fest in New York City. 'USA' is the second full length release by the leading electronic music duo, follow up to their 2007 'One (Snow Mud Rain)' on Erstwhile Records. Peter Rehberg (a.k.a. Pita) was a founder of the influential Editions Mego label based in Vienna in 1995 (formerly Mego). He performs throughout the world and has participated in many of the major festivals associated with electronic music, such as Sonar, Ars Electronica and All Tomorrows Parties. In addition to his role as mentor to many artists and label curator, Peter has published work on numerous labels such as Häpna, Mosz, Asphodel, Moikai, Ash International, Source, Touch. He has also collaborated with interdisciplinary artists such as choreographer Gisele Vienne and writer Denis Cooper (Kindertotenlieder; I Apologize), and has recorded and performed with many other electronic music performers including General Magic; Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm; Stephen O'Malley (as KTL); Christian Fennesz; Matmos; Sunn O))); Mika Vainio and Tina Frank to name but a few. In 1999 he received the Prix Ars Electronica Distinction Award for Digital Music. Marcus Schmickler is a key figure in German contemporary experimental music. While rooted in electronic music, Schmickler has a background in contemporary composition, having studied under the prominent Stockhausen collaborator Johannes Fritsch. Schmickler has created solo in a variety of different styles under the Wabi Sabi, Sator Rotas, and Param pseudonyms, as well as five techno-oriented CDs as Pluramon. In addition, he has long-standing collaborative projects, most notably with synth wiz Thomas Lehn, guitarist Keith Rowe, and pianist John Tilbury. The Lp is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, in a limited edition of 500 copies, pressed on 140g vinyl and comes in a poly-lined inner sleeve. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas.” – Pan. 

"The hyper-energetic Sam Hamilton is almost solely responsible for the currently booming Auckland experimental music scene, organising shows and festivals on what seems an almost daily basis. He is also no slouch in the performing arena himself, playing home made and/or deconstructed electronics and instruments to produce dense drones and evocative arpeggios... Chris O'Connor is for my money the most exciting and inspired drummer in New Zealand. A stalwart of the NZ improv and fire-music scenes he is also the only drummer I have ever witnessed pulling off a convincing drone performance- on drums! I could watch him play all night. 'Tidal Dee's and Harboured Dum's' is a soundtrack Hamilton and O'Connor created for the experimental feature film 'Anguish', by Tim Van Dammen. Featuring Hamilton on psyche guitar and electronics and O'Connor on drums it verges on Haino-esque territory as it takes one on a seat of the pants ride through the purplest realms of ecstatic rock." - PA

Major investigation of various occult topographical aspects of London from a duo of deep-listening Australians, Joel Stern (field recordings, manipulated objects, electronics) and Anthony Guerra (guitar and electronics). Guerra’s guitar embraces some beautifully mesmeric loops and microtone-laden bow-work while field recordings of birds and frozen autumn air situate the whole of the proceedings in some kind of reverse English capital. With titles like “Old Whitechapel Silence” this would work as the perfect zoned soundtrack to your next re-reading of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. Recommended.

Massively damaged drums/guitar exchange from Antony Milton and James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians/Gate et al). Dictaphone style fidelity masks pummelling no-count rock/roll moves that are as stupe as xNoBBQx and as fucked up as a phone-in contribution to No New York. “Debut release for this Stumps offshoot of Antony Milton (guitar) and James Kirk (drums). Extremely distorted psyche rock that sounds like members of The Dead C getting into a back alley fist fight with Mainliner outside some dodgy fishermans bar in Greenland. World weary vocals are buried somewhere in the mix below pummelling bass heavy riffage that sounds like its being sucked down into some black hole as the room mics implode. Short sharp tracks with about the same fidelity as one would expect from a circa 1980s cellphone. Gobsmacking.” – PA. Last copies.

The Garbage And The Flowers were one of the most bewitching and magical groups to come out of the creative explosion that took place in Wellington, New Zealand in the early 90s. While they shared many of the groups’ interests in nada fidelity, post-Velvets basement primitivism and radical re-thinks of rock-as-rock they were distinguished by Helen Johnstone’s heart-stoppingly gorgeous female vocals, her voice rising over the soft, blasted avant/folk debris like a goddamn slow-motion sunrise. Now relocated to Sydney, Australia, Quemada Records have gone and righted the relative scarcity of Garbage & The Flowers material by giving the deluxe reissue treatment to this amazing cassette that came out in 2007/8. The title gives the game away, it’s a recording of a stoned rehearsal complete with breakdowns, forgotten words and re-takes but somehow it functions as the perfect document of the fragile magic of the group. The songs are amazing, barely held-together by Helen’s vocals, a voice you could just melt inside, occasionally accompanied by zoned male back-up. Think early Royal Trux, Jandek, the more primitive environs of the Flying Nun back catalogue, the kind of blasted folk/rock that Xpressway used to deal in... classic moody downer rock deconstructed to the point of almost collapse and rendered with a perfect, slightly muffled basement/garage fidelity. The songwriting is inspired, with a heavy Third Velvets LP vibe, complete with post-Shaggs/Mo Tucker drums and massively complex/confusing clean guitar soloing. In many ways this amazing LP perfectly captures the VT aesthetic; devolved rock music with a cracked audio-verite edge and a ton of heart. One of the releases of the year? No question. Comes with a full lyric sheet so you can sing along. Taste the magic...

Stunning compilation that marks 30 years of one of the hands-down greatest underground record labels of the modern age, New Zealand’s Flying Nun Records. Two discs that remind you just how much of your favourite jams came out of a single imprint. Amazing tracks from The Clean, The Verlaines, The Chills, The Dead C, Pin Group, The Bats, Sneaky Feelings, Look Blue Go Purple, Bird Nest Roys, The Great Unwashed, Straitjacket Fits, Able Tasmans, Fetus Productions, Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, Garageland, Bressa Creeting Cake, Chris Knox, Headless Chickens, The Mint Chicks, The Phoenix Foundation, Robert Scott, Grayson Gilmour, The Gordons, The Stones, Children’s Hour, Doublehappys, Tall Dwarfs, Snapper, The 3Ds, Shayne Carter & Peter Jefferies, Bailter Space, Skeptics, Solid Gold Hell, Dimmer, Loves Ugly Children, High Dependency Unit, Ghost Club, The Subliminals, Shocking Pinks and F In Math. If you’ve yet to check in with the label then this is the perfect primer and if you’re already a devotee this might just be the mix tape of your life. Highly recommended!

New honey-thick stew of electronics, phased vocals, long lines of human breath and strings tuned to the heavens from this always electrifying Finnish margin-walker, here joined by members of Vapaa. Limited.

“Matthew Valentine opens it up to deliver a masterpiece solo album in what might just be one of the recorded highlights of his career so far: It was always going to be important that MV delivered an album that didn’t sound principally like an MV&EE album or any of the releases with the various augmented ‘Golden Road’ line-ups.  In that regard, he has succeeded in delivering a record that sounds like nothing he has done before while clearly building on prior musical and personal themes – a concept that recurs throughout this deeply affecting musical statement.

What I Became is particularly introspective and inward looking - at times fairly dark – and it shares aesthetic ground with career anomalies like Gene Clark’s White Light, Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue and Neil Young’s On The Beach. In fact, an even closer comparison may be Terry Reid’s River album with its notable side A/ B split loosely termed ‘City’ and ‘Country’. What I Became also seems to have a split focus, with the first side focusing on ‘physical surroundings’ and evoking the importance of that Home Comfort vibe through more up-tempo numbers, while the second side is more introspective and seems focussed more on personal aspects. The presentation of the album seems to support this ‘concept’ of the journey and what he became.  The inner sleeve acts almost like a scrapbook of MV’s life, with pictures from throughout the years pulling in various locations, homes, and personal acquaintances. At an informed guess this includes MV’s homes from Lower East Manhattan through to Maximum Arousal Farm in Vermont. It also features a various who’s-who of the psychedelic underground, including a shot of him hanging with the late Jutok Kaneko of Kousokuya, and it even goes so far as to include his influence on the free folk underground with a poster for the original Brattleboro Free Folk Festival. It’s then that you realise you are looking at a virtual time capsule and you feel the weight of personal importance that this release carries.

Opener “Continuing The Good Life” seems to act as the prelude or overture to the LP – a two and half minute instrumental with a single hooting vocal cry. It features some beautifully finger-picked country folk chords with subtle psychedelic and spectrasound arrangements, as if paying reference to his other work and sounds. Also some sublime single piano notes that remind me as much of English as American folk, with the influence of some simple Joe Boyd-type produced arrangements. At the end the song segues between acoustic guitar and an ‘environ’ looped soundscape, reminding me of some of the recent live transitions between “Environments” and “The Hungry Stones” from the “Steal Yr Slice” tour.
Next is “Hit The Trails” which is the wildest full-on song on the album. Again this seems to focus on the importance of physical surroundings as well as paying homage to MV’s love of playing live – “Hit the trails, up on the road”.  I read a few older interviews with MV prior to listening to this record and a recurring theme which came up was the influence of ‘where I live’ on the sound of his records.  This can be traced through his work from living around the area of 4^th Street and Avenue B in the Lower East side (“Av. B” later on this album) where there were small practice spaces and the remains of the Manhattan loft scene all the way to the influence of the open space of his surroundings in Vermont on his work in more recent years. “Hit The Trails” could even be a reference to walking the East Mountain Road itself, which is featured appropriately on the back cover shot. The track itself has more of a ‘live’ feel and sounds not unlike Thurston Moore’s “Trees Outside The Academy” with its blend of frazzled electric guitar and soaring arcs of notes over repetitively strummed chords on the acoustic. The way “Hit The Trails” is sung/spoken reminds me of Lee Ranaldo’s vocals on classic tracks like “Hey Joni” and “Mote”.
Next is a clear reference to the influence on MV of lunar sounds with the excellent space raga jam of “PK Dick”. This was originally released as a 7-inch on Time-Lag (TL043) back in 2007 as a Dylan-esque folk blues  w/rambling prose recorded on a 4-track. Here it’s radically re-worked with the original lyrics spoken over the top with the kind of gonzo rap-style delivery used on “The Beater” from Bollywoe (COM35). We hear the repeated mantra of “Ryan stepped up, everybody gave him a hand” from the extended title of the original accompanied by a space raga jam which includes hand percussion that is almost dub-like alongside enchanting harp and lucid spectrasound meanderings that come across like underwater guitars. It’s worth spinning back-to-back with the original.
Side one closes with the deeply personal “Stay” in anticipation of the more introspective side two. With gently strummed acoustic chords and a delicate arrangement of oscillating wah-wah tones, MV delivers one of his finest vocals to date. Overall, this album seems to have more of a focus on the vocals and the lyrics, and no more so than this track. The lines “I will always love you that way, why won’t you stay” could sound almost cliché in the hands of a lesser performer, but delivered here in a strained, raspy, emotional vocal style reminiscent of Dennis Wilson circa Pacific Ocean Blue you know it’s heartfelt and sincere – long drawn on the anguish of the soul.
Overall side two seems to work as a complete side as opposed to individual tracks. With a running order of “Ease My Eyes”, “Ave. B” and “Sweet Little Indian Girl”, all tracks are stripped bare and based around strummed acoustic guitar chords and vocals. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful. “Ease My Eyes” has some gentle finger-picked chords and an acoustic bass sound courtesy of Mike “Muscox” Smith that is so clear and organic you could almost be there in the room. MV has always displayed a strong influence from English folk and the interplay between the guitar and bass could easily be that of Nick Drake and Danny Thompson. Erika Elder makes her only appearance on this track, contributing some atmospheric slide as well as some haunting double-tracked vocals. The song closes with a restrained solo of single weeping notes. “Ave. B” retains the mood of the side with a reflective piece that possibly relates to the earlier days and sounds around 4^th Street, Avenue B and Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side. The side closes with the epic “Sweet Little Indian Girl” which is a dark blues masterpiece. It’s possibly a coincidence in light of the comparisons between Country Stash and David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name, but this song may have taken its title from Rita Coolidge’s character in Crosby’s “Cowboy Movie” from the same album. At almost nine minutes in it gives way to two simple chords accompanied by sporadic hand percussion that sounds like falling raindrops courtesy of Woods’ Jeremy Earl holding this fragile song loosely in place. With atmospheric vocals and lyrics that include “So please tell how far down I came, I don’t know what I’ve become” this is the darkest I’ve heard from MV this far.  Only the desolation of Neil Young’s “Ambulance Blues” comes close.
A deeply personal, psychedelic and at moments very dark release from MV – not psychedelic in the sense of far out ‘spectra’ but more in terms of its intense intimacy and sparse nature, particularly on the second half of the album. Even in the context of some of the recent Heroines and the stunning Country Stash this is a landmark release and it lines up alongside deeply personal albums like On The Beach and Blood on the Tracks or even Jandek’s Chair Beside A Window. It feels like a fully conceived artistic statement, with the cover and inserts working to enhance the experience. Indeed, the classic cover shot featuring MV at Maximum Arousal Farm with Mick Flower in the background (probably on the No Floor Tour April 2010) sanding his homemade Indian banjo stand seems to typify What I Became perfectly – an insight into the world of MV. I went wild over Country Stash and this is equally compelling though for completely different reasons. It feels like the solo album that MV was destined to make – if you are only going to buy one record this year it comes with my absolute highest possible recommendation.” – Andrew Ross. 

New live working from the free NZ trio who levitated a whole bunch of beards with their last release on Metonymic. This one features Richard Whyte, Rick Jensen and Dean Brown live on 04/12/04 in Wellington, New Zealand and works blasted skeleton forms from low-level percussive shuffle, slow hurricanes of malformed tone, pitched wine glasses and saxophone squawk. Parts of this sound like a huge abandoned galleon being slowly blown to pieces by slow-motion tides. Fans of AMM, NNCK and even later Shadow Ring might well wanna smoke on these bones.

"The Stumps are an improvising psych/noise/rock band from Wellington, New Zealand. They have been described as a NZ underground "super-group" by one writer; a "power-trio" by others. Although no-one is completely sure what these terms actually mean, what is certain is that The Stumps bring a wealth of talent and experience, and a certain heavyweight clout, with them to the table. The core lineup of The Stumps features Antony Milton (A.M., Mrtyu!, Nether Dawn, PseudoArcana label, etc), Stephen Clover (seht), and James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, Black Boned Angel, etc). The band also regularly collaborates with other improvising musicians; on Split Fleet Dodge the trio team up on one side of the LP with Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, Black Boned Angel) on keyboards and electronics. The Stumps have played extensively in New Zealand, including support for the Grey Daturas; two brief tours in Australia have been very well received, and plans for tours of Europe and the USA are underway. The Stumps also performed recently at the 2006 Lines of Flight festival in Dunedin, New Zealand, alongside the likes of Gate, A Handful of Dust, Omit, Birchville Cat Motel, Eso Steel and Lovely Midget. A CD release on Last Visible Dog records is also scheduled for early-2007." - Palindrome.

Killer, coherently-themed double CD (not CD-R – first ever on this label) compilation from this always-reliable New Zealand label, based around inspired extrapolations on the steady B flat drone (albeit 57 octaves below anything discernable by the human ear) said to resonate from the galaxy cluster Perseus. Think of it as another Harmony Of The Spheres. Either way there are some fantastically distended performances here from VT faves like Neil Campbell, Birchville Cat Motel, The Skaters, Keijo, Vibracathedral Orchestra, My Cat Is An Alien and Peter Wright as well as Blithe Sons, Eugene Carhesio & Leighton Craig, CJA, Anla Courtis, Hands Of Satisfaction, A.M/Uton, Moglass, seht, 1/3 Octave Band and The Nether Dawn. Comes in a fold-out three-panel sleeve with artwork by Jani Hirvonen and James Kirk.

CD version of the LP on Root Strata: "Hailing from Chicago, Zelienople have been etching out a place for themselves in the Windy City for the past five years. Constant collaborators with Souled American's Scott Tuma, this quartet mixes ghostly song structures with ambient drones better than just about anyone. With recent releases on Time-Lag, New Zealand's Pseudoarcana, and Tarentel's Root Strata imprint, the boys of Zelienople are rising like vines toward the canopy. "Stone Academy" picks up where 2005's brilliant "Ink" (recently reissued on CD by Loose Thread Recordings) left off. It balances the simple beauty of guitar-based songs with overwhelming, dark drones. The combination is as powerful as it is intricate. Each note, each chord is carefully chosen and perfectly placed; they never take too long or push too much. The attention to detail is magnificent. Zelienople have mastered the art of making expansive, luminescent drones sound as organic as the soil beneath your feet. "Stone Academy" reverberates like it's planted deep inside a lost cavern, hidden miles beneath the surface waiting for excavation. With rich textures and challenging soundscapes, "Stone Academy" is a wholly satisfying listening experience. The darkness is only a canvas for the light of these compositions to shine through. Zelienople offer up one of the year's finest aural adventures." - Digitalis.

Limited edition of 500 copies LP. Unknown Brain bundles some amazing 1971 lo-fi home recording from Tom Ardolino of NRBQ. NRBQ were one of the most out-of-time rock 'n' roll band ever to escape the 1960s, drawing on a roll-call of influences that would have the most hound-dog record collector rolling their eyes, with garage blues that were equally informed by Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Moondog, Paul Bley, the American song-poem factories, Link Wray, The Stones, Duke Ellington and Eddie Cochran. Their vision was of an unbroken American continuum of kicks, high-octane rock and classic popular culture as the central vehicle for outsider 20th century vision. Over the years they have cut a bunch of killer sides that continue to fly in the face of dud post-modern dud culture.
These tracks were recorded by Ardolino a few years before he joined NRBQ and while they reflect on the sound of the mothership they’re just as much a snapshot of the contents of the classic junk-guzzling record hound’s brain at the close of the 1960s, with Ardolino cutting exuberantly primitive versions of advertising jingles, Johnny & The Hurricanes organ stompers, muffled garage rock that sounds like The Novas or The Cramps, jazz instrumentals that are as eerie as your favourite  Saturn moments... if you can imagine Half Japanese cutting their own Basement Tapes drawn from 50s and 60s B-movie, comics and rock/roll culture then you’re almost there. There’s a particularly hilarious moment where Ardolino and friends are jamming on a church organ and the tape keeps running as they get busted by the reverend for drinking beer in the church. An absolute joy, released by Joshua Burkett on his own private imprint with screened sleeves and insert notes.

Fantastic new Japan-only CD from UK ‘power electronics’ innovators Ramleh, released to coincide with a series of live dates there. Beautifully packaged in a hard card gatefold sleeve with classic austere Broken Flag-style artwork and obi strip. There was always something particularly psychedelic about Ramleh’s vision of noise, which fed into their parallel incarnation as a rock band, and here the noise it as its most brain-arranging and oddly ‘beautiful’. Pulsing and drilling electronics complete with mangled shortwave sonorities are bathed in distant ghostly/choral vocals, giving the first track “Guidelines” the feel of an unholy ascension cut w/aspects of radical 20^th century composition. The second piece, “Memories Of Empire”, is a little more blunt, with harsh walls of feedback and the kind of dense microtonal minimalism of Phill Niblock set to stunning effect. Hands-down some of the best of the revived Ramleh material from the duo of Gary Mundy and Anthony Di Franco. Highly recommended. 

Excellent split cassette with the Auckland, NZ duo White Saucer’s side possessed of a quiet majesty that combines hissy rattlesnake percussion with thin wraiths of electronics and a subtly unravelling compositional style. The music feels closer to the work of Son Of Earth or even Bernhard Gunter than any concept of ‘NZ noise’, with sonics that operate at the very fringes of legibility and with an unnerving, invasive aspect that is particularly psychedelic. Currer Bells is cover for the duo of NZ sound artist Tim Coster and Angeline Chirnside and they play a very minimal form of electroacoustic improvisation that ranges from In Camera-style bell tones and drones through melancholy low-key computer music. 

Great cassette from this NZ duo who use junk, Dictaphones, percussion and vocals to create a kind of fractured vocal-led music that would detour choral masses and frail almost-song into zones of illogic breakdown. With tapes speeding up and slowing down, voids of chaotic microphone noise and sudden ascensions of Yma Sumac-via-Takehisa Kosugi style vocalese this is one of the weirdest and most inexplicably affecting of the Dungeon Taxis output to date. Recommended. 

Two amazing sides of amp-humping destructo blues, negative free jazz, post-Harry Pussy guitar squalor, Industrial gamelan and ultra-crude metal from one of the most ferociously form-gobbling free improvising duos of this or any age, with Matt Earle (Breakdance The Dawn/Craft Bandits et al) and Nick Dan jet-setting across two live sets that implode all over themselves. Totally fantastic. 

A new solo Dilloway LP is always cause for celebration round these parts: Infinite Lucifer, Chain Shot and Rotting Nepal are still regular spins and it’s hard to think of anyone with such a peculiarly personal approach to the accumulated strata of degraded loops. This one comes in an edition of 500 copies with a fold-out sleeve and takes as its ‘theme’ satanic biker gangs and associated culture. It opens with one of Dilloway’s more pastoral and eerily evocative pieces, with the sound of wind through grass and music box/wind chime sounds that come on like The New Blockaders running on empty, before a lonely female voice hymns a post-apocalyptic landscape completely denuded of people and Dilloway ramps up the metal percussion. Fantastic. The second side expands on the atmosphere of implied amplifier violence before dropping to a hypnotic twilight zone where cosmo-keys and arcs of classical tone flit past in what sounds like the initiation soundtrack of Satan’s Slaves. So file it next to Infinite Lucifer for maximal light. Recommended!

Staggering unreleased album from Campbell Kneale’s Birchville mothership, still the kings of contemporary planet-devouring NZ drone, released in an edition of only 100 copies on his new private imprint Don’t Fuck With Magic. This is a slice of raw celestial punk that has one eye fixed on the early Majora sound – Beyond The Rim/Here Time Is Space et al – and another on a particularly gorgeous vision of sheet metal minimalism that uses heavenly chord ascensions ala Ash Ra Temple/My Bloody Valentine to reconnect with the eternal music modes of Phill Niblock/Maryanne Amacher/The Dream Syndicate et al. Some of the most wildly transportive and sensual drone music ever made by Alice Cooper fans. Full colour slipcase sleeves: highly recommended but better make it fast! “Oly! If you are gonna have a title like THAT you'd better have your proverbial shit together, wouldn't you say? Slated for release on double LP as Birchville Cat Motel became rather long in the tooth, this one missed out on daylight as the band went to the guillotine. A world of grinding rainbow fuzz that drinks deeeeep from the heavy-psyche doom-trip chalice without even a whiff of anything that could be called 'metal'. Blinding, deafening, brain-erasing... this is catalogue-trumping stuff that kinda makes me miss this band.” – DFWM.

Second limited edition version of this great narcotic noise collaboration between Charlie Draheim and Justin Meyers' Devillock incarnation. Shuddering electronics, the crack of bone, electricity and metal, an endless tunnel of skin-mangled F/X and dense sunspots of guitar/organ collusion. One tape is a split, the other a mail collaboration. Edition of 100 copies with hand-screened covers and tapes in a slim white vinyl double cassette case.

Fantastic double vinyl upgrade w/bonus track presenting a new studio session of all-improvised material – the group went into the studio with nothing set out – from a trio that sees saxophone colossus David S. Ware accompanied by bassist William Parker and Warren Smith on drums, tympani and percussion. Recorded live in (((3D Sound))) this is a session that you can really get your head inside with Ware on lucid evangelical form and playing in a hallelujah style that tips the hat to Third Ear Recitation/Earthquation-era while demonstrating a maturity and emotional sophistication that is absolutely dazzling. Smith’s playing works as an odd spectral/tonal foil for Ware’s saxophone while Parker really makes his bass sing. A great trio record and for my money *the* group to take Ware – still the greatest tenorman of his generation - into the future. Highly recommended!

Album from this fantastic free jazz action trio featuring Matt Heyner (NNCK et al) on bass stunts, Matt Lavelle on trumpet and Ryan Sawyer on drums. Moves through great, pounding drums/trumpet face-offs that sound like a more martial take on Cherry and Blackwell's Mu to three-way time fluxing and wildly abstract silence/motion. Highly recommended.

Limited edition of 500 copies LP from Hair Police, with beautiful art sleeves assembled from hand-cut recycled paper and featuring a silkscreened B-side. Recorded while the group were trapped in a hotel room in Ohio during one of the worst snowstorms in history, this is classic bass-driven entropic noise/rock that occupies the same kind of low-end oblivion as early Neubauten, Skip Spence’s Oar etc while moving deeper into territory previously mapped by the less overtly aggressive tracks on Certainty Of Swarms. Recommended.

33rpm four track EP from New Zealand one-man band Kraus, co-member of Olympus alongside Stefan Neville of Pumice and founder of The Futurians/member of The Aesthetics. This great EP combines slowly-expiring instrumental damage aka the most brokedown side of the Xpressway label with a woozy fairground organ aspect that could be Sun Ra plays Silver Apples and some classic Corwood-plays-Beefheart guitar non-dynamism. Choice! 

Massive, monolithic set of minimal percussion drone from Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel/Our Love Will Destroy The World) and Ellen Rodda on Kneale’s own label in an edition of only 50 copies. Using nothing but two cymbals, the duo orchestrate deep sea dooms and funereal bells, at first operating at the very extremes of silence, then moving in great basso arcs that recall the orchestral construction of Thomas Koner’s arctic gong work or the intro to the first Black Sabbath album extended ala Harry Pussy’s Lets Build A Pussy. As the percussion accrues Industrial detail it starts to sound closer to Organums’s classic Birds’ Wings Were Glued To Their Bodies And Their Feet Froze To The Ground. No one does nada-minimalism with such blank bloody mindedness as Campbell Kneale. “Admittedly, the idea of a band solely consisting of 'two cymbal players and no overdubs' doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of a good time. However the deeply narcoleptic overtures deftly carved out of solid walls of live bo-ooo-ooo-m by Campbell Kneale and Ellen Rodda should really come with some kinda 'money-back-guarantee' to reset all your dials for timespace transportation. Free of cumbersome electronics of any kind, Ming almost  slips beneath the very idea of music altogether aligning itself more with thunder heard from afar... looming, booming, nocturnal ruptures, that by contrast make you more aware of the warmth and cosiness of your own bed. The most frail vibrations become music of unspeakable beauty and patient, patient, minimalism. A great emptiness. Bong O))).” – DFWM. 

New release on Campbell Kneale’s private Don’t Fuck With magic imprint in an edition of only 100 copies: dreamteam collaboration that pits Campbell Kneale’s current vehicle for maximal transmigratory bliss with Jan Anderzen’s Kemialliset Ystavat satellite Tomutonttu. This side is totally spooked, starting off in a weird whispering grass/forest of spirits style that’s somewhere between the great Paivansade LP on Eclipse and the early Keiji Haino compositions on the Soul’s True Love before breaking into a back-and-forth ghost fog-horn exchange that could almost be the titanic specters of Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter straddling the Golden Gate Bridge. This plays out as one long track though it does consist of several separate conceptions and the later pieces mutate into a kind of alien cosmo drone that combines Anderzen’s goofily psychedelic keyboard work with sobbing arcs of choral rainbows, expertly channeled tape work and the sound of punctured speakers broadcasting from Venus. This is hip! Full colour wallets. 

Amazing deluxe private press 7” from this unclassifiable Brisbane group who come over like Corwood plays the music of Moondog and The Godz. This amazing single pushes the sound even further into a strange ethno-forged zone where the complex overlapping rhythms of The Magic Band are a given a staggering Reich/Riley makeover, with horns, chugging guitars and brokedown junk instruments propelling the inspired, impressionistic vocals of Sarah Byrne into a weird free country brass hybrid that is somewhere between a stoned, cultic Spontaneous Music Ensemble and a buncha midgets playing the music of Albert Ayler. I’m struggling to put my finger exactly on what these guys actually do, suffice to say this is some of the most original, idiosyncratic and inspired music coming out of Australia today. And that’s saying something. Can’t wait for their forthcoming full-length on Negative Guest List. Deluxe screenprinted fold-out sleeves, edition of 200 copies. Yeah!

Ferocious new project from Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel/Our Love Will Destroy The World et al) on his own private Don’t Fuck With Magic imprint in an edition of only 100 copies. TMPLS takes the torrential aspect of the early Broken Flag sound and rewires it w/a psychoactive post-drone appeal, creating cacophonous barbed wire symphonies that threaten to re-wire your brain while speaking in tongues of pure thunder. Hard to think of anyone that can make such a brutal attack seem so euphoric and oddly musical, with all sorts of tormented spectra inhabiting relentlessly overdriven clouds of steel tone in a way that balances a controlled compositional feel with the instant satori of all-improvised power-tone ascensions. Listened to at the correct volume this one ranks alongside Metal Machine Music as one of the essential formulations of form out of freedom and is a massively addictive spin. Campbell Kneale’s half-hour still beats your life. “Annihilating Harsh Noise Walls (TM) that find their inspirational core in traditional Chinese waterfall paintings. Sorry kids, no prostitute-murdering, throat-slitting, rape-porn to be found here... TMPLS would rather pretend it doesn’t happen. Tones so chunky and micro-detailed you can drive monstertrucks through the pockets of air between the godalmighty cRRRRRunch. Speaker destroying blankness of asteroid-like heaviosity that tunes me in to a plain so high I only have Sherpas and goats for company. Oh yeah... it’s pronounced 'Temples'...Y'geddit?” – DFWM. Recommended!

New album from guitarist Chris Forsyth, also a member of Peeesseye. This is a full-band recording, featuring members of D. Charles Speer, Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Mountains, and it expands on Forsyth’s great private press album Dreams, with a vision of electrified Americana that’s somewhere between Glenn Jones and Cul de Sac’s re-visioning of the music of John Fahey through a more overtly Minimalist take on the kind of euphoric guitar exchanges of Television, all assembled in hypnotic instrumentals that take off on vertical ascensions of microtone-heavy euphoria to the point that the marching hallelujah melodies morph into dense vibrating structures that flash in front of you in the air. The addition of pedal steel and organ situate the music deep within a roots-music background that, combined with Forsyth’s guitar tone, sounds a lot like Richard Thompson circa I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight. Indeed if you can imagine Fairport scholars Television’s live rips through The 13^th Floor Elevators’ “Fire Engine” denuded of vocals and re-scored in the studio for maximum psychoactive effect then you’re close to the kind of endlessly riffing American Primitive appeal of this great LP. And unlike so much of the name-dropping that has happened in the wake of his passing, the dedication to Jack Rose on “New Pharmacist Boogie” makes a lot of sense.

Excellent follow-up to the duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk’s recent Echos Pastoraux LP, in gorgeous handmade sleeves by Chalk. Elodie is more instrumentally focussed and varied than the bulk of Chalk’s solo drone work, creating beautiful melancholy miniatures from combinations of piano, guitar, bells, music boxes and reeds. Parts of this set remind me of Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille’s Come Night album, particularly the lucid settings of Venusian guitar and the breathy saxophone but cut with the alien atmospherics of the great Steve Lacy/Yuji Takahashi/Takehisa Kosugi album Distant Voices. Indeed, this is the closest Chalk has come to cutting a dreamtime acid folk record, with an atmosphere that is somewhere between Joe Boyd’s Witchseason productions and some of the more pastoral Kosmische Musik sides. And when they do trip over into all-out drone - the instruments subtly smeared and now singing to themselves - the effect is uniquely otherworldly. Highly recommended. 

Edition of 365 copies with hand-screened white matte covers that bundles both of the peerless and long out-of-print cassettes from the duo of Justin Meyers (Devillock) and Tom Helgerson. What we said at the time: “Disarmingly beautiful guitar/electronics improvisations that work celestial cells of forlorn melody and totally degraded/overloaded recording levels into the kind of sad hymnals that William Basinski set to dissolve on The Disintegration Loops. Totally otherworldly, massively drugged and uniquely gripping.” “Slow wings of organ, fug and guitar blowing drifts of dense celestially-focussed pulse all the way along the arc of your spine.” Highly recommended.

Although primarily known as the greatest guitar player on the planet Keiji Haino is also one of the most radically inventive vocalists in experimental music. Black Blues – his duo of radically re-tooled acoustic and electric Blues - was in reality a showcase for his stunning range, from guttural blasts of lung power through high lonesome choirs. And who could forget his stunning castrato performance on Fushitsusha’s Double Live, still one of the great contemporary devotional works? Although we’ve had full albums from Haino dedicated to single instruments – hurdy-gurdy, electronics, percussion, acoustic guitar – we’ve yet to be treated to a solo vocal album, which is where this massive new release comes in. Recorded live in the depths of a cave in the village of La Haye de Routot and a church in the same village this is an emotionally high-wire solo vocal performance with stunning sound. At points it feels as if Haino’s whole body is resonating with sound, as convulsive explosions of epiglottal fury wrack his frame and turn the air purple. There’s also plenty of his haunted choral work, with high, mournful melodies dissolving into the air. At points the arc of the song is almost classical but then he drops into a gruff Black Blues howl that would reanimate the spirit of Blind Willie Johnson and drags the whole thing down the Delta. This is a beautiful document of an artist at the absolute peak of his powers and a necessary addition to any Haino shelf: “Keiji Haino is an individual that never ceases to provoke new ideas in the minds of those that meet him. And so, although he is usually surrounded by amplifiers, a myriad of effects pedals, and cables plugged into his guitar, he nonetheless amazed his audience with the power of the simplicity of his purely vocal performance and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 2008, as part of the InFamous Carousel Festival. The following year I had the opportunity to get to know him a bit better, acting as interpreter for his solo performance at Les Instants Chavirés in Montreuil. Being the intermediary for all his questions allowed me to fully understand the extent to which he attempts to give the absolute best of himself on stage, and how he leads a tireless quest for music. This led me to wonder if what he had done in 2008 couldn't be done without the technology, replacing the electronic amplification with the acoustic properties of a space. Solidifying this proposal did not take long; my musician friend and label associate, Eric Cordier, who has worked for 20 years with site-specific sound recording, knew of several acoustically interesting spaces in the region in which he grew up. And so we find ourselves en route to Normandy, in June 2010. We had a week consecrated to the exploration of one voice, and this is not just any voice; a voice developed outside of any school, through a unique journey, a voice simultaneously rock and spiritual, outside any taboo, a voice that shakes us to the core. This time, in addition, this voice is heard in its purest state. Of all the spaces visited, amongst them many churches and caves, a forest, a cliff, a tunnel, industrial wastelands, etc, it was in a quarry cave in the village of La Haye de Routot that he was able to release his entire being, offering up one hour of introspective song, so good that I believed at one moment I saw him disappear… in any case it was at this point that his voice and his body were able to melt into the space, or perhaps to become the atmosphere itself. This album presents this recording, preceded by those made in the church in the same village.” - Satoko Fujimoto

Debut issue for this excellent new underground/experimental music zine published and edited by Lasse Marhaug. Beautifully put together on heavy paper with high quality photography, this one features serious/funny/revealing in-depth interviews with Bruce Russell of The Dead C et al, C. Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core (lots about movies), Oren Ambarchi (classic interview that focuses on AC/DC and KISS), Daniel Menche, Sissy Spacek, Arcn Templ, Umpio, Sete Star Sept, Zweizz, Tommi Keranen, Chulki Hong and more. The interviews are all pretty great, veering away from the usual dull line of questioning and touching on all sorts of aspects of the artists’ life and influences that most people would never think to turn over. Funny, informative, perplexing – a fantastic read, highly recommended. 

Vinyl edition of this excellent album with 180g pressing and two-colour silkscreen sleeves by VG Kids. Another great side of post-Chris Knox/Alastair Galbraith-styled basement rock, loner folk breakdowns and classic, up-lifting Velvets motorik from Stefan Neville aka Pumice, 11 tracks that combine guitar, synth, drones, punked power chords and beautiful songwriting. As necessary as alla his releases. Recommended.

Reissue of this classic and much sought after 1992 ‘live’ album from The Dead C, recorded in the band’s practice space and originally released as a fake bootleg. Clyma Est Mort features some of the most radical and formally fucked improvised rock/noise of the group’s career. Robbie Yeats’ drumming is incredible, reformulating concepts of time as definitively as Sunny Murray or Milford Graves while playing with all of the primitive ferocity of the most feral rock/roll. Russell and Morley’s guitars sound completely destroyed - hovering over amplifier feedback, twisting like tortured metal, defying time, breaking down heavy metal chord progressions into quanta of mainlined drone – and they have all of the dynamic range of a fleet of bulldozers. Morley and Russell’s glorious dual vocals are the most wasted of their career. The version of “Power” remains a staggering free rock peak, still *the* greatest protest song to come out of the underground. Hell has come, indeed. And the ‘hardcore’ tracks are ferocious. Clyma is also the most cryptic and specifically nuanced of the Dead C albums: taking obsessive inspiration from The Fall’s Totale’s Turns; dubbing in audience applause, dropping weird, almost indecipherable references into the titles and sleeve notes, jump cutting from here to there – there’s as much to decode here as there is on John Fahey’s Voice Of The Turtle. The addition of a second disc that bundles a bunch of key 7” sides - a bunch of versions of “Power”, “Hell Is Now Love”, “Bone”, “Mighty”, “Peace” and “Radiation” – is just gravy. For a complete dissection of the mechanics of the recording and the arc of the times check out Tom Lax of Siltbreeze’s compulsive eyewitness account in his exclusive VT column. Also comes with a CD version of Clyma. Highest possible recommendation.

Edition of only 250 copies on transparent orange vinyl with hand-sewn book and download code, already sold out at source: “An idea started at a summer party at Sam Goldberg's Cool Ranch house for a collaboration turned into a full-length album over the winter months in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. Emeralds' Mark McGuire weaves his incredible guitar parts through synthesizers, loops, orchestral instruments, and singing assembled by Trouble Books' Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovka. Turned out just as awesome as we dreamed." – B&H. 

Fairly amazing and long-time coming live documentation of one of the killingest garage punk primitive rock/roll trios of this or any age, the Cheater Slicks. No one does ugly, pluke spattered teenage wasteland breakdowns with quite as much sass as these three and although evidence of their uniquely greasy live sound has been thin on the ground Columbus Discount have stepped into the fray with the first in a proposed multi-volume series of live jags that catches them in full flight. Cheater Slicks have always been much more than your mere local peddlers of retro kitsch and their reach goes out to everything from classic Texan psych through hunching rockabilly, weepy teenage garage and pre/post Spacemen 3 repeat-riff nirvana. Alla these styles are on display here, with our heroes breaking out some power-crying folk punk in amongst a couple of inspired covers – The Huns “Destination Lonely”, The Modds “Leave My House” – and some great extended bouts of six string savaging. Gimme this and a couple of high ABV US Micros and I’ll never watch a French movie again – that’s a promise! Comes with an insert, recommended!

More “I Am Driving In A Car” than “I Am Sitting In A Room”, Graham Lambkin of The Shadow Ring et al’s much-anticipated new solo album is as head-scratchingly brilliant and as confoundingly beautiful as anything he has released to date. First, the specifics: broken down to its basics, Amateur Doubles consists ‘simply’ of Lambkin driving around in a car with his family while playing some classic French oddball/prog from the legendary Pole cabal, namely Philippe Grancher’s 1976 album 3000 Miles Away and Besombes-Rizet’s classic 1975 Pole LP. So fucking what, you might ask? Well, uh, okay: if you know these records well it’s like hearing them in some kind of strange reverie, like a memory of hearing them, as the sonic space of the car gives them a weird, boxy distance, especially with the more floaty, melancholy flute and reed passages and the zoned organ sections. Indeed, Lambkin has radically re-thought the original recordings, remixing and re-editing them while adding details from other sources – the vocals of free improviser Amy Sheffer for one. Then there’s the environmental sounds, not chosen for their beauty or according to any aesthetic agenda - no fuggin’ fountains or bubbling water or expiring sheep - but the sounds of Graham and Adris Hoyos’s children in the back seat, the zoom of traffic, sometimes very apparent, sometimes engulfed by the Industrial scale confusion of the music, but always coming back to the quiet, protected space of the car, travelling through a particular moment in space/time. There’s something unmistakably melancholy about it, something nostalgic even, the quality of a family holiday remembered, complete with its own soundtrack and of course it also raises question about notions of listening and of listening to listening and whether, like Schrodinger’s Cat, the presence of someone else listening on a recording that you are listening to somehow changes or affects the recording or the relationship between ‘performer’ or ‘consumer’ or at least makes you hear it differently. But much more than any conceptual yucks that the piece may or may not have it’s uncannily powerful, very affecting and – in a way – the ultimate realisation of Lambkin’s long-running project to relocate mundanity, pointlessness and the everyday into a magical once-removed zone where it is re-presented in all its surreal and momentary beauty. Who would have thought that something so seemingly conceptual could be so intimately affecting? I know I’ll be living in this beautifully presented LP for a long time to come. Comes in a high gloss gatefold sleeve with a nice snap of Graham, Adris and their kids, pressed on clear vinyl in an edition of 500 copies, already completely sold out at source. Highly recommended!

Much-anticipated multi-region three-camera DVD edition of both sets from Sterling Smith’s performance with Chris Corsano and Mick Flower at The Cube in Bristol on May 17^th 2006. Both sets have an odd compulsive energy which is almost at odds with the characters of the players involved. Corsano seems to be more ‘inside’ the tracks than really propelling them, knocking them sideways and subtly deforming them while Flower’s playing is more in the pulse style that he brings to his work with MV & EE. The second disc is more overtly ‘explosive’, with Flower switching to Japan banjo, and the resultant tangle of strings is beautifully complex. But despite both musicians’ innate iconoclasm, the show is really Sterling’s, commanding the group with a quiet confidence, wrapping his tongue around the lyrics and getting into some cranking guitar breakdowns.

Massive split LP with two sides of primo-Japanese underground meat: Masami Akita aka Merzbow’s side is one of his most tactile and crudely-conceived outings in a while, looking back to Batztoutai With Memorial Gadgets-era in its combination of analog and digital soundsources, utilising sandpaper tones, sirens, feedback, disorientating jump-cuts and gunshot percussion for maximum mindfuck. A classic Merzbow side. The flip is even more spectacular, with Cris X aka Christiano Luciani joined by Japanese underground performers Keiko Higuchi on piano and vocals and Sachiko Fukuoka of Kousokuya/Vava Kitora et al on electronics, effects and vocals. Cris X plays a dark devotional form of holy drone using electronics, guitar, field recordings, cymbals, samples and effects and both Keiko and Sachiko inhabit the music like wraiths. Keiko comes across like Patty Waters circa “Moon Don’t Come Up Tonight” or Diamanda Galas circa “My World Is Empty Without You Babe” countering spare chords with an incantatory vocal that is truly chilling. The final piece is a duo between Schiko and Luciani recorded and mixed at home by Rinji Fukuoka of Overhang Party where the spectral atmospherics of Sachiko’s dazzling solo work meet the devotional drones of Cris X in a way that’s as remarkable as planet-devouring classic by Tangerine Dream, Nijiumu and Toho Sara. Edition of only 300 copies on white vinyl. Highly recommended!

Three-track follow-up to Stefan’s killer Nyali album that focuses on the noisier/post-Dead C end of his work. One long track with mournful Dictaphone vocals lapping waves of fuzz matched with a staggering proto-Japanese psych rock song and a final downer ballad seductively deformed by hermetic home recording process. All Pumice releases are mandatory purchases. Edition of 500 copies in black silkscreened paper sleeves with two postcards. Recommended. 

Every new Richard Youngs LP is in some way an event – his modus is so restless and yet his muse remains so distinctively personal that it’s always a thrill to see where he’s gonna dive in next. Amaranthine puts his vocals way up front for a series of four ecstatic bardic/future folk classics that ride in on wave after staggering wave of free form percussion, clanging household objects, shakuhachi and fuzz guitar. The vocals fall into the classic post-Summer Wanderer style of endlessly repeating, lilting phrases, here with a cracked use of F/X that smears them even further. At points he overdubs two vocals on soaring alternative trajectories, each rising like the mirror image of the last while shakers and liberated drum orchestras push the whole deal to new ritualistic peaks. Indeed, at points it almost feels like the closest Richard has come to cutting a devotional free jazz album, with almost AACM style rhythms and at points the kind of furiously beautiful combination of breathwork, vocalese and liberated percussion that lit up private press classic like Frank Lowe and Rashied Ali’s Duo Exchange. In many ways this feels like the ultimate ‘free folk’ album of Richard’s career, fully realising his vision of beautiful, hymnal Church Of England hypnotics over collapsing arrangements of percussion, fuzz, drone and breath. And those vocals! Simply put, a classic Richard Youngs LP that pretty much delivers on everything that made you fall in love with his music in the first place. Edition of 500 copies, highly recommended!

Massive, ancient sounding underwater drone broadcast straight from the bowls of infinity with rusty strings and clouds of overloaded organ generating the kind of dark ritual atmosphere of Coil’s Solstice series relocated to the bottom of the world. Sunken is the world-beating duo of New Zealand’s Stefan Neville (Pumice) and Antony Milton (Nether Dawn/Clay Man In The Well/Stumps et al) and they play a particularly affecting form of ceremonial drone that combines the violent majesty of Hermann Nitsch’s mass actions with the haunted electricity of classic NZ amp destruction – Sandoz, Doramaar, Flies Inside The Sun, Surface Of The Earth – and a deep, murky recording style that is pure Siltbreeze. The bulk of these jams wouldn’t have been out of place in a tape box in Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise’s front room in 1968, just great epic navigations of the nowhere zone with a heavy occult atmosphere that is truly transformative. A phenomenal side, one that sits perfectly alongside your Dreamweapon LPs and easily the best even vaguely ‘drone’ orientated release of the year so far. Can’t stop spinning this. On Metal Rouge’s own imprint in an edition of 300 copies complete with a digital download: “Sunken's previous two albums on Pseudo Arcana were long form chord-organ driven flights into the heart of the ecstatic blaring sun. Despite Antony Milton (The Nether Dawn, Glory Fckn Sun etc.) and Stefan Neville's (Pumice) lovecraftian attempts to posit Sunken as sea-shanties sung by sailors lost to Cthulhu at the bottom of the deepest darkest ocean, somehow their surging reed driven organs and vocal streams broadcast via cracked electronics seemed to suggest sailors breaking free of the weeds and swimming towards the light, and even, occasionally, breaking the surface. Their first vinyl release New Zealand Eels however, is a tentacle shot from the abyss to drag the sailors back down into the service of the lurker in the deep. Bleak, black and completely drowned, New Zealand Eels beams five submarine tracks from the lost to the lost through the milky darkness. With the vocal melodies pushed to the foreground and the instrumental origins of the music obscured as never before by damaged baby monitors, power starved dictaphones, tape saturation and spring reverb, Sunken are now finally, truly lost to the abyss. Two drowned sailors invite you to breathe in the water, forget about life on the surface and lay down with the kraken amidst the curling weeds. "What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men." – H P Lovecraft” – EC. Highly recommended!

Massive new live LP from Majutsu No Niwa, Rinji Fukuoka’s post-Overhang Party outfit, in a hand-numbered edition of only 250 copies. Four tracks that explode the group’s previous form, with instrumentals that combine Jimi at Woodstock/early Fushitsusha style guitar-smashing iconoclasm with loose free jazz rhythms and doomy mile high chord progressions alongside a buncha beautiful acid/folk ballads. The opening instrumental has gotta be their most scorched side of post-metal/psych since, uh, Magical Garden? The more punked tracks feel as loose and as lubed as classic Gasaneta but with a crude progressive edge that gives the nod to the Spectator label (Terje, Jesper & Joachim/Blues Addicts/Moses et al) while the ballads are spectacular, with that classic lonesome, reverb dosed feel of your favourite Flashback (w/an especially poignant Shizuka-esque feel) married to aching single note solos that just keep coming on. A spectacular side from these guys housed in a classic basement psych sleeve. What more do you want?!

Hand-numbered edition of only 200 copies LP from this raging full-on Tokyo psych unit, here featuring Anla Courtis of Reynols on second electric guitar. Up-Tight have always had a heady Rallizes aspect and here it is in full force, with a track that moves from an initial explosive twin guitar w/freeform percussion headcharge into infinite waves of F/X-heavy two-chord folk dooms before Tomoyuki brings on the “Sweet Sister Ray” amplifier violence and the track builds to a chugging monochord assault complete with planet gobbling vocals. An amazing slice of classic Japanese psych with a deep connection to the 1990s source, cool colour paste-on sleeves too. Recommended!

New duo jams from Chris Forsyth of Peeesseye and Koen Holtcamp of Mountains. Guitar/synth jams that comes across like a more sci-fi addled Rother/Dinger face-off, with flat-lined motorik grooves, cosmo synth and the kind of progressive avant/garage string burn previously favoured by Heldon. Edition of 500 copies. 

Fantastic art edition LP in a run of only 250 copies on 200g virgin clear vinyl from the duo of ex-Coil/Psychic TV Drew McDowall and Tres Warren of Psychic Ills/Messages (whose LP on De Stijl blew a whole bunch of minds). This one sort of takes off on a post-Time Machines/Eternal Music vibe but with an exacting minimalist logic that would locate distant Morse Code tones and blurry EVP sightings on the very fringes of liminality. There are vague, nagging melodies that could almost come out of the Goblin/Suspiria song book alongside long passages of single tone narcosis that feel like transports to the other side. The label describes them as using “automatic composition, drone and concrete music to create subterranean explorations on the nature of signals and time” and the whole recording has that indefinable/occult atmosphere that marked out the more exploratory Coil sides. A beautifully spooked modern minimalist classic, highly recommended.

Another instalment in the Decimus series of astrologically-themed electro-meditations from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band/K-Salvatore/Malkuth et al. This one comes in a run of only 250 copies with silkscreened sleeves. Minimalist, circling electronics and percussive tone patterns dominate 4, with an atmosphere that is somewhere between the stylings of Richard Youngs’ Festival recording, the more weighty of the Kraut-influenced Industrial music (Nurse With Wound/Maurizio Bianchi) and the phased tape/electronics experiments of Charlemagne Palestine. Recommended, as is everything in the series to date.

Another instalment in the Decimus series of astrologically-themed electro-meditations from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band/K-Salvatore/Malkuth et al. This one comes in a run of only 300 copies and is one of the darkest and most claustrophobic Decimus sides. Minimal/primitive rhythm box jams with all of the alien appeal of Tolerance and the rest of the Vanity cabal cut-up with psychotic/dark modulated and variously filtered vocals that have all of the uncanny appeal of the most deformed and threatening of the early Whitehouse sides. The sonics walk the line between ethereally beautiful and darkly threatening and if this hadda come out on Come Org back in the day you’d be auctioning your grandma for a copy. A superb side and a singular instalment in this excellent on-going series. Recommended.

Bewitching new solo LP from Solange Gularte aka one half of French acid folk experimentalists Natural Snow Buildings. Night Of Raining Fire comes adorned with Solange’s weird post-Darger cartoon artwork that serves to underlines the overall “Lost Girls” atmosphere. The sonics are beautiful, somewhere between Hosianna Mantra-era Popol Vuh, the sunbleached acid folk of Linda Perhacs and the haunted European exploitation soundtracks of the late Jean Rollin, with an impossibly ancient and otherworldly atmosphere. Plus the album really *sounds* great, with lush raga/drones hovering over distant blurs of reverb and singing up-front strings while Solange’s vocals melt all over them. Gorgeous. Edition of 500 copies. 

Two LPs of staggering a-musical disobedience, strangulated free vocal freak, feedback threnodies and the most primitive nod-out free/metal/garage/skronk this side of the Breakdance The Dawn crew from Oren Ambarchi, Nick Kamvissis and Brendan Walls (who plays alongside Andrew Chalk in Marsfield) with contributions from Lisa and Naomi Tocatly. By far the best thing this wild group have ever done, Puppet Island seems them take on the lumbering metal-dirge style of Kousokuya but w/an obsessive, destructive streak that is almost autistic. The drumming is amazing, with a Bill Ward plays The Shaggs feel over repeating thunder-struck riffs that sound as if they are being played by electrified rubber bands. Throw in vocals alternately sung by small retarded children or macabre puppets and you have alla the ingredients for some of the most deranged free rock of this group’s ‘career’. Pretty amazing, edition of 280 copies in a full-colour gatefold sleeve. Highly recommended. 

Another fascinating environmental transport from composer and Fluxus member Philip Corner: Coldwater Basin presents “a home recording of water running from a faucet into a sink” that was made on the Lower East Side of New York City “sometime in the 60s”.  Much more than how it reads on paper, it’s more about the sound of a room, the specifics of time and space, and the sound of their collision and unfolding. The recording is hissy and seems to slowly pan towards the delicate sound of the water that increases in volume throughout, with lots of background street noise and the hum of the city somewhere in the distance. The effect is curiously hypnotic as Corner points out in his notes: “... and I had always dreamed of passing an entire night bathed in this. It was never long enough.” Mesmerising, historically potent slice of minimalism, edition of only 180 copies with calligraphic design by Corner himself. 

Another major LP release from Richard Youngs, this time out with a series of vocal-led songs that take off on a blueprint of minimal, repetitive electro-metal with an insane bass-heavy bottom end. Some fantastic song-writing here, with Richard riding peak-after-peak of ascending, triumphal melodies while pugilistic drum machine lands doomy retorts and the massive bass stalks the shadow of the songs. “We Are The Messengers” is an instant classic, a mantric devotional/folk piece that works a circular vocal into a stirring lament while “Forever Hills Of Everyday” pushes the remit even further with fast, almost breakbeats pushing stationary bass shapes and wild, roaming fuzz guitar solos into the arc of single, soaring vocal lines. Hard to fully capture the odd, synthesised hard rock/progressive feel of the music but the pull between the electro/metal stylings and Richard’s obsessive and beautifully unadorned vocals makes for a truly magical side that once more sounds somehow completely singular and yet instantly recognisable. Edition of 500 copies. Highly recommended!

Cool archival release that bundles a bunch of peak-period jams from Sunburned Hand Of The Man, al recorded across 2006. Features a bunch of radically expanded line-ups, with the core group joined by Chris Corsano, Mick Flower, Bridget Hayden and Keith Wood. Weird, detourned, almost Magic Band scale jams go up against vocal goofs, string drones, Ubu-styled garage and all-out Xhol worship. Cassettes come in screened cloth cases with insert. 

A co-release with Tor Press, Menagerie #3 presents a compilation and zine put together by Jake Blanchard with the concept that the artists make music inspired by the visuals and vice-versa. This one features exclusive new tracks from Ben Nash, Isengrind, C.Joynes and Twinsistermoon and the A5 12 page litho-printed booklet features visuals from Jim Stoten, Simon Fowler, Adrianne Neal and Jake Blanchard. Edition of 500 copies. 

Limited edition LP in a run of only 200 copies from New Zealand’s greatest axe-strangler, Bruce Russell of The Dead C. The playing here is more overtly euphoric than many of Bruce’s earlier sides, his grip tight around the neck, tearing clusters of squeal from conveyor belts of fuzz. The opening duo with Australian noise/guitarist Marco Fusinato is fairly epic but it’s the all solo “West Space One” that best documents Russell at his most Hendrix/amp-destroying. Playing with a machine gun style that comes over like Band Of Gypsies jamming the outro to “Bury”, it’s hard not to anticipate Robbie Yeats staggering in and pushing the whole thing over the cliff. Russell’s solo sides often have a whole bunch of fascinating conceptual/hermetic weight to them but Antikythera Mechanism succeeds because of its status as ‘simply’ a solo guitar record and in its own way it feels as definitive as Donald Miller’s A Little Treatise On Morals, Jandek’s Interstellar Discussion or Keiji Haino’s Affection. Bruce does a lot of actual playing here – as opposed to just letting the guitar sing - and on the third side-long track his guitar sounds closest to Nicholas from Love Cry Want’s guitar synthesizer’, albeit with the dials set to “Iron Man”. But in the end it all boils down to this: Bruce Russell was in The Dead C and you weren’t. That’s why he can pull off fringed leather jackets when you would just look like a dope. And that’s why in his hands an all-improvised guitar album sounds like the goddamn keys to the kingdom. So listen up. Pressed on ultra thick white vinyl.  Highly recommended.