Browse Cassettes

Omni Gardens

Golden Pear

Moon Glyph

***Moon Glyph Records head Steve Rosborough returns as Omni Gardens with a brand new album entitled Golden Pear. The fuzzy, warm and buoyant moog timbres of Moss King return but Golden Pear is a dreamier and more lush affair; incorporating a wider palette including mellotron flutes, vibraphones, marimbas and self-captured field recordings. A tranquil, pop atmosphere permeates the album as the songs flutter between bleary, unhurried tunes, warbly soundscapes and odes to lazy afternoons. Created for relaxed home listening, this is Golden Pear.

Neutral Milk Hotel

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Merge

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Named Best Album of the 1990s by Magnet Magazine, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea gives us JEFF MANGUM’s powerful solo acoustic work, full horn section marches, history, religion, and sex—everything you hoped for and more! Now available on 180-gram vinyl! Includes coupon for an MP3 download of the entire album.

Bikini Kill

S/t

Bikini Kill Records

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a Best New Reissue 8.7 rating from Pitchfork. This is the 20th anniversary reissue of BIKINI KILL’s debut 12" EP. Originally released in the fall of 1992, Bikini Kill comprises four songs recorded by IAN MACKAYE at Inner Ear Studios; one song from the band's 1991 demo cassette, record by PAT MALEY (Yo-Yo Studios); and one song recorded during Bikini Kill's live performance April 4th, 1992, at Washington, D.C.'s Sanctuary Theater. The vinyl reissue includes a new fanzine in the form of a 34"x21" poster featuring interviews with Ian MacKaye and MOLLY NEUMAN (BRATMOBILE), liner notes by LAYLA GIBBON (Skinned Teen, MRR), excerpts from the band’s zines (Bikini Kill #1 and #2, Jigsaw #4), and photos from the band members' personal archives.   Bikini Kill was a feminist punk band that was based in Olympia, WA and Washington, DC, forming in 1990 and breaking up in 1997. KATHLEEN HANNA sang, TOBI VAIL played drums, BILLY KARREN (aka BILLY BOREDOM) played guitar and KATHI WILCOX played bass. Bikini Kill is credited with instigating the Riot Grrrl movement in the early ’90s via their political lyrics, zines, and confrontational live performances. The self-titled EP, originally released in the fall of 1992, comprises four songs recorded by Ian MacKaye at Inner Ear Studios; one song from the band's 1991 demo cassette, record by Pat Maley (Yo-Yo Studios); and one song recorded during Bikini Kill's live performance April 4th, 1992, at Washington, D.C.'s Sanctuary Theater. This EP...

Cheree

Factory

Cherub Dream

***"I never did sleep well in this society" screams Vanessa on the opening track of Cheree's Factory. As you might expect from an industrial/noise/punk debut, their sound is characterized by harsh pummeling guitars over a pounding drum machine with biting vocals spitting anti-capitalist lyrics, feedback, and the occasional sample. Cheree is a 4-piece band from Oakland, CA, that started in 2021 and in the short time they've been playing as a band, they've earned a reputation as the bay area's loudest and best industrial projects in a while. LP pressed on limited clear vinyl in an edition of 200 copies.

Edren, David

Relativiteit Van De Omgeving

Not Not Fun

Antwerp synthesist David Edren describes his latest solo collection in conceptual terms: a harmony of space and time, elements and environments, perception and impermanence. Conceived in the morass of 2020, he began envisioning a widescreen suite of electronic compositions connected to the hidden rhythms of what surrounds and affects us. The 12 tracks of Relativiteit Van de Omgeving trace a chain of miniature terrariums, from misty meadows and moonlit gardens to cosmic vistas of asteroid showers. It’s music both subtle and symphonic, attuned to the sweeping planetary clockwork of water and wind, birds and insects, seeds scattered in soil forever being reborn: “skating the thin ice of ideas, like a heroic water strider.”

Spitting Image

Full Sun

Slovenly

***Only longtime and well-connected west coast punks—and any lucky dirtbags, cowboy hat goths, and broken-down romantics who have passed through the sagebrush hills and smoky casino bars of Reno, Nevada sometime in the last decade—know Spitting Image. Unless you heard them on a few small run cassette tapes or 7" records with cryptic art and far-out distortion, or at a party they ritually summon to any warehouse, parking lot, basement, or Great Basin lake shore they can find, you didn’t. But thanks to Slovenly Recordings, who share a hometown with the band and have sought out the finest and grimiest punk sounds from every corner of the globe, the rest of the world at last receives a report back from these scuzz punk art freaks on their deep trip, deep in the desert: Full Sun. And it’s dark, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad trip. Donovan Williams’ merciless drumbeats drive downstroke rippers like “Devils Bloom” and “Still Thing,” and tracks like “Broadcast” and “Plea Dealer” play up the conversation between Jack Scribner’s beating-heart bass and Julian Jacobs’ alternately schizophrenic and soaring guitar. The 12 poems that make up this record pull together the stranger fringes of the ‘80s wave—Wipers, Gun Club, Sonic Youth, Television, early Siouxsie—with basement hardcore and hints of krautrock, psych, and industrial that show the band’s “fascination with repetition, patterns, transposing things and ideas into new contexts.” These sounds aren’t genre conventions to mash up and reference; they’re tools to express a razor sharp focus on...

Have A Nice Life

The Unnatural World

Flenser

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.8 rating from Pitchfork. For years, fans of Connecticut’s post-industrial doomgaze two-piece Have a Nice Life have restlessly awaited the band’s second gloom-fueled, autobiographical meditation. Now, San Francisco label The Flenser is proud to unleash The Unnatural World. With eight songs clocking in at 47 minutes, The Unnatural World is Have a Nice Life’s most monumental release yet—a colossal, perfectly orchestrated work that leaves listeners comatose on the ground beside their record players. This second full-length delivers doom and gloom at a new level, more focused and soul-tearing than ever. The weight of sound is matched only by the band’s piercingly uncomfortable and personal lyrics dredging up themes of modern legend, religious insecurity and crushing depression. Wave after overwhelming wave will slam listeners down into psychological depths of existentialism and woe.  Like its predecessor, the band’s 2008 debut Deathconsciousness, The Unnatural World maintains intensity from quiet lows to staggering highs. No speaker will do it justice and none of you are worthy!  “[Have a Nice Life’s] Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett’s musical project is as much an ambitious and frustrating piece of conceptual art as it is a crushing and soaring rock record.” —Brainwashed12.85

Giles Corey

s/t

Flenser

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Note new price. “‘Some time in the Spring of 2009, I tried to kill myself. Six months before that, I used a Voor’s Head Device for the first time.’ This line opens the 150-page book that accompanies Giles Corey, an intensely personal, intimate portrait of depression that took me almost four years to make.” —Dan Barrett Giles Corey’s haunting self-titled debut is back in print! The Flenser is pleased to offer a new version of this cult favorite as a double LP housed in a gatefold jacket, with the same 150-page book that accompanied the previous versions. Giles Corey is the gloomy folk-driven solo project from Have A Nice Life mastermind Dan Barrett. Here, Barrett forgoes the post-industrial trappings of Have A Nice Life in favor of an intimate singer-songwriter approach. While thematically related to his other work—dealing with subjects like suicide, death and the paranormal—Giles Corey feels more personal, with impressive shifts from quiet desperation to cathartic outburst. Over the years the album has gained a fervent following, and has sometimes been compared to a religious experience. It is dark yet purgative enterprise not for the frail of heart. The accompanying book is an integral part of the album. Its examinations of the life and times of cult leader Robert Voor parallel the themes within the lyrics and offer further immersion for the reflective listener. In Barrett’s own words: “The album follows a story arc of emotions that are detailed in the accompanying book, as much...

Guided By Voices

Scalping The Guru

GBV Inc

Scalping The Guru is an archival Guided By Voices release, envisioned and sequenced by Robert Pollard as a cohesive album, featuring select tracks from four GBV EPs released in 1993-1994 by Domino, City Slang, Siltbreeze and Engine Records. These hard to find records are essential for fans of Vampire On Titus and Bee Thousand, with classics including “My Impression Now,” “Matter Eater Lad,” and “Big School.” They feature the line-up that includes Robert Pollard with Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell, Jim Pollard, Dan Toohey, Greg Demos, and Larry Keller. Recorded on four-track cassette by Tobin Sprout, with some songs lovingly fucked with by Mike Hummel.

Abdallah, Salum And Cuban Marimba Band

Ngoma Tanzania

Domino Sound

***Sweet and joyful sounds from the first half of 1960’s Tanzania. SALUM ABDALLAH AND CUBAN MARIMBA BAND were at the forefront of “muziki wa dansi”, the emerging dance music scene influenced by Cuban 78s, dance music crazes like the twist and cha cha cha, and the local sounds of their home country. Hailing from the smaller town of Morogoro, they rose to be stars across the country. Out of over 100 sides recorded for local labels, mostly Mzuri Records of Kenya, these twelve songs are the cream of the crop. Only a few of these have ever been re-released in any form, and that hasn’t happened for several years. Lots of toe tappers, smile enhancers, and downright dancers, with a few slower and simpler songs to round it out. Taken from 1961-65, these twelve songs shine a brighter light on an already bright light that was Salum Abdallah, taken away from this earth all too early at the age of 37. The 12 song LP comes in an old style tip-on sleeve with lyrics in Swahili with English translations on the inner sleeve.

Wedding Songs

S/t

Domino Sound

***Originally released on Philips Ethiopia in 1973, this seemingly impossible to find LP is available once again to the lucky humans of the world. With a mix of modern and traditional instruments these fourteen songs go through the progression of an Ethiopian Amhara wedding sung in Amharic. With the trio of singers, LEMMA G. HIWOT, ZENEBECH TESFAYE, and SELAMAWIT G. SELASSIE, alternating turns at the microphone, and sharing call and response duties, a relentless frenzy of hand clapping incites dancing and smiles. The consumption of tedj (honeywine) and the swirling love of a wedding was captured in the studio with euphoric energy to take away to play over and over again when the festivities are over. With hand screened covers and an insert of wedding photos accompanying the liner notes, this is the next best thing to an invitation to the real thing. A co-release with Mitmitta Musika of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.

Redda, Tewolde

Eritrea's Guitar Pioneer, 1970-73

Domino Sound

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Note new price.  From Asmara, Eritrea (formerly Ethiopia) TEWOLDE REDDA revolutionized the sounds of traditional Eritrean music by amplifying his kirar, playing his Eko electric guitar, and recording six singles in the first part of the 1970s. Including the first Eritrean songs to use a horn section, traditional songs reworked into his new sound, and originals influenced by radio broadcasts from the United States military base in Asmara, Kagnew Station, these ten songs originally released on the Philips, Amha, and Yared labels show off his talents with stringed instruments, a talented back up band, and often the hand clapped beat shifting into double time near the song’s end. Tewolde’s thick, deep voice sings songs of love over somber and joyous tunes. Comes in a tip-on sleeve with extensive liner notes, lyrical translations, and unpublished photos. A co-release with Mitmitta Musika of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.

Malignant Altar

Realms Of Exquisite Morbidity

Dark Descent

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Note price increase. With only two demos under their belt since inception in 2018, it may seem Malignant Altar have been somewhat quiet by modern standards. This entity has not been slumbering or resting on their laurels, rather crafting the most fetidly obscene album imaginable. With ’80s horror influences, the band introduces a barrage of offal that festers in the phantasmal form of rotten riffing and drudging drums, layering themselves a thick and tarry swamp of instrumental decay. Vocally, the snarly puke that fits the malignantly mesmerizing riff-scape gloriously ensures only the most befitting disgust emanates into one’s speakers from the altar of putridity. Now, some of these metaphors might lead one to think Dark Descent is referring to a regressive band of simple playing ability and limited talent. This would be unforgivably far from the truth, as the restless drumming and technically-edged riffs invoke the likes of Demilich amongst the flow of revolting hooks. Thundering along, through five more typical tracks and a suitably spectral interluding instrumental, the momentum of this record is unforgiving and yet they do not forgo dynamics either. Two years incubation in the crypts of sentient slime and what lurches forth from the slumbering spew is nothing short of magnificent. These Texans have flavor in their death, and know when to add flare or just ride out some obliterating groove ’til the neck is granulated from headbanging.

Scarcity

Aveilut

Flenser

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early COVID peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s COVID epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and...

Segall, Ty

Hello, Hi

Drag City

***Hello, Hi: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, Hello, Hi pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday. Hello, Hi is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through. Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, Hello, Hi is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it—throughout Hello, Hi, Ty Segall charts a passage through...

Archer, Nate

Wild Tigers I Have Known: Original Soundtrack Recording

100% Silk

Nate Archer’s new score to his brother Cam’s celebrated 2006 feature film Wild Tigers I Have Known was conceived as radio transmissions coloring the emotional landscape of the confused adolescent protagonist, Logan. A mix of glittering synths, sampled voice, stark rhythm, and surreal moods, the tracks conjure a sense of “slight menace, or a slowly lifting veil,” as Logan wanders Santa Cruz suburbia, at the threshold of the wilderness of adulthood.Archer’s background in basement psychedelia (Rahdunes) and leftfield tribal electronics (Leisure Connection) bleed through in the soundtrack’s disorienting diversity, alternately ominous and innocent, hedonistic and hallucinatory. These are less songs than wavelengths, as much internal as external, pulsing with the promise and pain of desires still unnamed, futures yet unknown.

Torrello

Out Of Office

House Of Silk

D.C.’s sleeper cell groove sensation Kenny Torrella aka Torrello debuts on 100% Silk’s revived mirrorball subdivision House of Silk with a starry 11-song suite of daydream disco and vacation mode motion: Out Of Office. These are classic off the clock anthems, for cutting out and cutting loose, island hopping through shades of vapor funk, leftfield luxury, and uptown filter house, sensual and interdimensional. Torrella’s eclectic palette of passions – smooth jazz, animals, Moodymann – feed into his joyous, jazzy sound, between memory and fantasy, escape and epiphany. A low altitude cruise over private marinas and white sands, where life’s white noise fades to pink, and inner rhythm takes hold.

Acid Twilight

Mustang Zodiac

Not Not Fun

Buenos Aires slow burner Acid Twilight’s second collection of modal voyaging spans 52 minutes of “curves and cliffs, immense dunes and quiet lagoons, nights through the desert in the light of the full moon,” attuned to a muse both contemplative and kaleidoscopic. Mustang Zodiac took shape quickly, sourced from sprawling sessions on organ, synth, guitar, and miscellaneous percussion, then focused into their ritual essence. Mantric ceremonies of keys and shakers, insects and wind, played outdoors under cryptic constellations. Music of flickering starlight and ancient ways, coaxing hidden embers while flames lick the dark.

Scout Island

Laurentian Voyage

Not Not Fun

Named for a familial forested retreat on Wisconsin’s Shell Lake, Scout Island is the vessel for Jungle Gym audio boss Jared Carrigan’s compact and compelling instrumental guitar vignettes. His latest, Laurentian Voyage, charts a rich trip down river through the North Woods of Minnesota and beyond, a formative landscape of his youth and recent Covidian isolation. The collection’s 19 tracks flow through twilight psych, sunset jangle, dockside devotionals, and whispering pines soft rock, a gallery of glimpses into scenes and seasons come and gone.  Lean guitar figures ripple, riff, refract, and reverberate, framed by filtered drum loops, organ, synth, or bass. The mood softly sways between reverie and reflection but skews more autumnal as it unfolds, a sense of waning warmer days, a paler shade of light, campfires long since lit. Even so, the embers of memory cast their own warmth: faces, cabins, summers, music drifting out across the water. The clarity of fleeting moments, captured in snippets of strings and melody, slicing through choppy waves like the nose of a boat towards distant lightning.

Thick Air

Pillars Of Creation

Not Not Fun

Maine’s psychedelic fountainhead Matt LaJoie traffics in a multitude of mind-expanding entities (ML Wah, Herbcraft, Cursillistas, Endless Caverns, etc) but even by his standards Thick Air is a heady sphere. Longform improvisations on a Yamaha PSS-270 and loop units born of deep listening and higher consciousness, channeling notions of French mystics and astral planes. Pillars Of Creation takes its title from the iconic 1995 Hubble Space Telescope photo, and radiates a similarly interstellar mood. Bass tones wobble in spiral patterns beneath slow blooming arcs of celestial keys, like dawn breaking on some nameless gaseous moon. Gradually a gravity takes hold, drawing its disparate harmonic cosmos into a unified field, bound by some vast astral unknown.  LaJoie cites intuition and accident as foundational to the Thick Air genesis, trusting the freefall process of creation and decay, motion and miasma. Tweaking presets through banks of FX in pursuit of a levitational singularity, soaring and swimming through solar winds, forever unfolding and unfound.

X.Y.R.

Aquarealm: Sub-Aquatic Compilation

Not Not Fun

Companion offering to the recent LP, Aquarealm Mixtape interweaves an array of choice album tracks with a selection of discography deep cuts for a one-hour saga of shape-shifting aquatic bliss. Drawing on the classic X.Y.R. palette of Formanta Mini, Korg M1, FX, a loop station, and field recordings, the mix’s 16 songs slipstream seamlessly, despite being sourced from across a decade of work – testament to the constancy of its creator’s vision and the renewable vastness of his muse.

V/a

Imaginational Anthem XI - Luke Schneider Presents Chrome Universal - A Survey of Modern Pedal Steel

Tompkins Square

***Curated by in-demand Nashville pedal steel maverick and Third Man recording artist Luke Schneider, the eleventh volume of Tompkins Square’s venerable acoustic guitar series Imaginational Anthem features exclusive tracks by legend BJ Cole, as well as leading exponents on the instrument including Susan Alcorn, Luke himself, and British expat / Nashville hotshot Spencer Cullum among others. Nashville native and Merge recording artist William Tyler has written a beautiful detailed history of the pedal steel for the package.

V/a

Polish Sausage Sauerkraut! - A Collection Of Gizmos Covers

Gulcher

***A collection of Gizmos covers (from the ’79-to-’81 era), sent in to the Gulcher braintrust by True Believers from around the world. About half the bands herein are fellow Hoosiers (Cowboys, Gentleman Caller, Last Four Digits, Mysteries Of Life, Phil & Michael Combo, Aaron Poehler, Vess Ruhtenberg, Walking Ruins), two hailed from Boston via Bloomington (Unattached, Boll Weevils), while eight are of the more far-flung variety, representing Brooklyn (Lame Drivers), Los Angeles (Lucas Aaron), Washington DC (BBQT), Canada (Band From Planet X, Phone Jerks), Sweden (Makeouts), Argentina (Victima Del Vaciamiento), and Peoria, Illinois (Brody Maag Hits). A huge Thank You! to everyone who contributed, as well as to everyone who continues to carry the torch for real rock‘n’roll.

Abortofacient

In the Crypt of Gore

Nuclear War Now

***Abortofacient plays disgusting underground death metal in the style of early Cenotaph, Rippikoulu and Lord of Putrefaction. 20 minutes of decrepit filth.

Heinous

Ritual, Blood And Mysterious Dawn

Nuclear War Now

***Anticipated debut album of Belgium’s maniacal entity Heinous. All new tracks of hammering Black Metal with possessed vocals (recorded at night in an abandoned fortress), grandiose keyboards and a massive production.

Delivery

Sounds of Delivery 2021-2021

Feel It

***Pro-duplicated cassette release compiling the "Yes We Do" and "Personal Effects" 7-inch releases. 6 tracks as a repeat program on yellow shell cassettes w/ white imprint.

Montgomerie, Jo

From Industry Home

Helen Scarsdale Agency

An elegant decay amassed from the sounds of detritus. That may be an apt introduction to the work of Jo Montgomerie. Of course, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has a long standing infatuation with disintegrated sound in various forms. So, it makes perfect sense we should publish her work! That said, Montgomerie has a fascinating strategy to her long- form smears of blackened mascara ambient and smoldered noise. As a teenager she was a classically trained musician with an eye towards a career as a concert pianist; but a bad audition may have closed that door yet it opened another in her career in sound design, foley work, and post-production. It may be of note to some, that she was an uncredited soul responsible for thousands upon thousands of audio clips rendered for Boomkat during a lengthy tenure at that institution. These forms of production and editing necessitate a flawlessness which also hides the process entirely; and Montgomerie began to ruminate on that which was left on the cutting room floor (or the digital version of such a space). And thus, she took these unwanted sounds, telescoped them into sinewy drones, forced them to collapse in a crucible of noise, and even rarified their essence into fluid harmonic tones. The source material to much of her work is the urban landscape of her Manchester home, but she also will recontextualize traditional instruments and even the creaks, groans, and snaps of her own body. Amidst the thickets of details, obfuscating noise, and...

Sonic Youth

Evol

Goofin'

***NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!!!  Released in May 1986 on SST Records and Blast First! in the UK, EVOL was the third studio album by Sonic Youth and showed the first signs of the band transforming their No Wave past into a greater alt-rock sensibility.  “EVOL … mark[s] the true departure point of Sonic Youth’s musical evolution,” noted Pitchfork, “In measured increments, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo … bring form to the formless, tune to the tuneless, and with the help of Steve Shelley’s drums…, [impose] melody and composition on their trademark dissonance.” "If Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s opus, EVOL was crucial research. There’s a directness that makes everything feel close. It is pure tension with little release. The entire record is a shadow." Stereogum likewise praised the album as one, “full of suspense…, the cornerstone [of] the Sonic Youth sound…, ground zero for the combination of chiming guitars and atonal skronk… muggy delirium…. the virile ‘Tom Violence’ sounds less written than coaxed from a cauldron, the sort of song that fogs windows. The off-kilter ‘Starpower’ … is sung in a frosty [Nico-evoking] monotone [by Kim Gordon]. ‘In The Kingdom #19,’ featuring Mike Watt on bass and … vocals...

Invunche

Elal

Nuclear War Now

***Shamanic sorcerer EL INVUNCHE awakens from his ancestral slumber to cast a devastating psychedelic spell! ELAL tells the origin tale of the legendary Tehuelche hero and serves as a promo for the new Invunche full-length due out later this year on NWN.

DAI

Demos 1989 - 1992

Nuclear War Now

***In the late 1980s, the former Czechoslovakia was an incubation chamber for some of the most unique and expressive extreme metal ever produced. Coinciding with the rise of death and black metal, the demise of Communism produced a fertile scene of disaffected youth eager to embrace these new radical modes of expression. By the end of the Communist era, the Iron Curtain had become culturally porous, permitting the influx of art and music from the West that catalysed underground movements in Eastern Bloc countries. Filtered through a youth movement still shaking off the hangover of authoritarian policies, cultural isolation, and the promotion of Soviet values, the sights and sounds of the early Czech scene were unlike those emanating elsewhere in Europe. While bands such as Master’s Hammer and Root are widely heralded now as progenitors of Czech black metal, a lesser known contemporary act called DAI fully embodied the same approach. The four demos collected on this double LP were recorded between 1989 and 1992, a transitional period for Czech society. Like the aforementioned bands, DAI’s early recordings were primitive in some respects but displayed an idiosyncratic approach to black metal that sets them apart. And these demos by one of the most obscure Czech acts to emerge during black metal’s second wave should be every bit as revered as the early recordings of Master’s Hammer, Root and others.

DAI

The Advent

Nuclear War Now

***After releasing a series of demos between 1989 and 1992, DAI received an offer to record a full-length album for the Czech label, Monitor Records. Started a few years earlier, Monitor was extremely prolific, mostly focusing on Czech rock and punk bands, but it ventured into metal with releases such as the Ultrametal compilation in 1990, Ritual by Master’s Hammer in 1991, and various thrash bands such as Debusterol, V.A.R., and Krabathor. By 1993, Monitor was the preeminent label for extreme music in the newly formed Czech Republic, working with other significant bands like Torr and Root. DAI entered the studio in the summer of 1992 to record what would be the band’s only full-length release, the monumental album The Advent. Released in 1993 on CD and tape, The Advent is wildly eccentric. As if viewing the death and black metal produced in northern and western Europe through some kaleidoscopic distortion, DAI produced a uniquely unconventional work, the oblique sensibilities of which rivaled the contemporaneous works of Master’s Hammer. Indeed, had DAI continued releasing music, the two bands would likely occupy similar stations in the history of black metal. Instead, following the release of The Advent, DAI disappeared, leaving behind a concise but distinctive catalog. And given the extreme rarity of the demos, few people outside of the former Czechoslovakia likely ever heard the demos preceding the album. Consequently, DAI mostly remained an obscure curiosity known primarily to collectors. This new edition marks the first reissue of The Advent since...

Künst, Heimito

Post Exoticism

Shrimper

On his second release, Heimito Künst further explores his brand of minimalist, personal psych that is in league with two of Shrimper's favorite Youngs (Richard & La Monte, apologies to Angus, Loretta & Neil). He further expands his palette by adding tuba and voice (used as drone) to Post Exoticism. First edition is a hand dubbed, numbered edition of 100 featuring artwork & hand painted covers by Dennis Callaci.   On s/t (2021): "Synthesizers, field recordings, magnetic tapes together with percussion, various microphones and stringed instruments fill the listening of this musical elegy. In his debut album Heimito Künst takes us inside kaleidoscopic sound visions in which, between references to the darkest and most disturbing kraut sound and experimental sequence plans based on noise polyrhythms, he makes us glimpse wave structures that lead us directly to breathe the author’s panic dust." – It’s Psychedelic Magazine

Gizmos

The Gizmos Eps 1976-1978

Gulcher

***"THE LEGEND OF THE GIZMOS 1976-1978 - Are we legendary yet? Infamous? An embarrassment? One version of the myth begins in 1974 when I met Ken Highland and Bob Richert in Bloomington, Indiana. A couple years later, just as Ken was about to enter the Marine Corps, Bob convinced him to make a record. Ken brought together various friends to become his instant band the Gizmos. No gigs, almost no rehearsals--ust some songs and a day in a 'studio' (a guy’s spare bedroom). And voila! The Gizmos became the first Indiana punk-rock band, even though we were barely a band, and neither Ken nor I were in Indiana for very long. Somehow we came together again in 1977 to record enough for two more EPs, played two live shows at the Bloomington library, and disappeared again (until our 2014 return). Ted Niemiec was the one original Gizmo who remained in Bloomington, and producer/manager Bob formed another band around him. Most importantly, guitarist/songwriter Dale Lawrence joined the new group. This lineup acted like a real band--played lots of shows. They even did a short tour that resulted in three songs from the fourth Gizmos EP being recorded at Max’s Kansas City in NYC. But eventually Ted also quit, leaving Dale to regroup a third time for a Gizmos lineup that included zero original members. But that story happens after this story (Dale’s Gizmos did a split LP and recorded lots of archival stuff that has been released since then). So, y’know,...

Gaoled

Bestial Hardcore

Iron Lung

***Perth, Australia is known for lots of things but by far our favorite item is that it's the most isolated city in the whole fucking world. And if you've ever spent time in an isolated place you know it does some real damage to your psyche after a while. Growing up there must trigger all kinds of violence and paranoia. Musically, GAOLED (pronounced 'jailed') is exactly that, violent and paranoid power violence encrusted hardcore punk. Criminally raw. Originally released by the band themselves, 'Bestial Hardcore' has been largely unavailable so Iron Lung Records has made this utter filth available to a wider audience. People like to pretend they know what raw sounds like but this is genuine article. Bestial indeed.  200 pro-printed cassettes in toxic yellow shells with 4 panel J-Card housed in a clear/clear Norelco box. Recorded by Will "Whoopa" Hooper, at Stable Sound Studios, June 2021.Mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios. Art and layout by GAOLED.

X2000 / Dauðyflin

Dauðyflin / X2000 - Split

Iron Lung

***"After share some stage in Scandinavia, X2000 (Sweden) and DAUÐYFLIN (Iceland), and made pogo punx jump in the pit, they bring the team together again for a split cassette! Both into Tupa-Tupa Dark HcPunk atmosphere, X2000 is more hypnotic drenched by chorus, while DAUÐYFLIN is more infused by noise! Tupa-Tupa, Jump around, Jump up and get down!" —Symphony Of Destruction.  Originally released on Symphony Of Destruction outta France, Iron Lung Records has finally made this essential piece of pogo noise available to a North American audience. We just had to. 200 pro-printed, purple shelled cassettes housed in a 5 panel J-Card sleeve inside a clear/clear norelco box. Mastered by Daniel Husayn. Art by Gabriela Ruiz.

Cremation Lily

Dreams Drenched In Static

Flenser

Cremation Lily’s debut album for The Flenser, Dreams Drenched in Static exists at the convergence of consciousness and disintegration.  Artist and multi-instrumentalist Zen Zsigo’s ingenuity and vulnerability is on full display throughout the course of the album’s ten tracks — glacial soundscapes float alongside earnest lyrics that capture the author in the midst of collapse.Written throughout a culmination of years of chaos, Dreams Drenched in Static serves as part diary and part comfort blanket.  The album was penned over countless sleepless nights and documents the liminal moments at the edge of sleep and the distressing thoughts that often accompany late-night R.E.M. disturbances. The lyrics were largely written in the darkest hours of the morning and serve to evoke reflection, depression and meditations on death that seem to haunt these early hours.Through the use of radiant tape hiss and degradation, guitar noise, frenetic vocal melodies and field recording samples, Cremation Lily creates a distinctive sensory experience.  At times ambient and atmospheric, at others meditative and euphoric, Dreams Drenched in Static floats back and forth from fantasy to reality.  Zsigo’s penchant for creating and dismantling traditional songwriting by using one-of-a-kind home-modified devices such as cassette walkman, micro-cassette dictaphone, circuit-bent Casio keyboard, various sequencers and self-created and tape loops weathered by nature and environment, creates an aqueous and all-encompassing aural encounter.  Zsigo comments, “The processing on the album and the concept of it is a product of how it was made.  After expressing pain and suffering in the recording of the songs, I...

Sonic Youth

Sister

Goofin'

***NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!!!  “Let’s get something straight. There is no album in the entire corpus of indie rock—not Loveless, not Surfer Rosa, not Psychocandy—that reaches the heights of invention, joy, and magic of Sonic Youth’s sublime fifth album.... The haunted reveries of Sister remain with you for years, even if you only hear them once” — Stereogum. 1987’s Sister was another notch in the band's move away from No Wave, yet still maintained their experimental approach. Gordon, Moore, Ranaldo and Shelley were coming into their own at this point, combining elements of noise, punk and pop. They had also become better songwriters since their previous album, providing better context for their noisier elements and incorporating the dissonance of their earlier releases into more traditional song structures. To quote Stereogum once again, “Sister is the sonic manifestation of refracted light. It’s a record that changes you.”

Parc

Wave Iridescence

100% Silk

Vancouver producer Jeremy Rawkins aka PARC’s 2nd collection further finesses his signature fusion of dexterous rhythm dynamics, liquid field recordings, and digital synth ambience into an immersive, aerodynamic domain: Wave Iridescence. Embracing the limitations and tonal saturation of 80’s and 90’s digital synths and converters, the tracks gleam and slipstream with a sleek, weightless futurism, conjuring visions of fiber optic clouds and lost biodome terrariums. Rawkins cites notions of organic electronics, randomized beauty, and the peripheries of dance music as inspiration, but ultimately the sound he maps is too fluid and prismatic for effective categorization. It’s music of heights and breaks, precision and vertigo, loops and radiance – vivid cybernetic heavens forever in flux.

Forgiveness

S/t

Not Not Fun

Moscow duo Forgiveness fuse tower block trip-hop with stargazer downtempo into a smeared Soviet Balearic haze, equal parts dust, dreams, and delirium. Collaborators Alexander Kalinin and Ilya Kasharokov share a history of deejaying, production, and party promotion in various guises (Michura, Ellipse) and vibes (lo-fi, breaks, beyond), but their debut was born from “bedroom jams” of MPC, synth, guitar, FX, and field recordings, seeking a smokier synergy. The album’s eight tracks float between quiet and cosmic, blissed and busted, a sleepwalker’s paradise of secret streets and low-hanging clouds. Loose but never lost, the songs sway, slip, and slouch through moonlit alleys of rhythm, echo, breeze, and melody, vivid vignettes for lone souls in the outer limits of the afterhours: “Judge nothing. Forgiveness is key.”

Wydraddear

Which Stems From The Sap

So Called Hell

Reclusive French conjuror Wydraddear returns with a three-pronged rite of passage, born of a bewitched and ancient woodlands where the trees bleed an “esoteric force.” Which Stems From The Sap unfurls in a slow, spectral gloom of churning drones and weeping synths, in thrall to old gods and forgotten spells. Rippling and ragged, buried but still burning, the dark arts outlive even those who doubt them most.