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DOA

War On 45 - 40th Anniversary Reissue

Sudden Death

In 1982, D.O.A. was ready to record a new album on the heels of their first two albums: Something Better Change and Hardcore ’81, which are still both musical landmarks to this day. But their legendary line up had changed, as Randy Rampage was ousted from the band. Chuck Biscuits’ older brother Dimwit Biscuits stepped in on bass with Chuck still on drums, Joey Shithead on vocals and guitar and Dave Gregg on guitar. While this line up only lasted for three months, the band traveled to L.A. and recorded demos at Mystic Studios. Eventually Chuck quit, Dimwit took over on drums and Wimpy Roy became the bassist. So, as a grand way of celebrating the 40th Anniversary of War On 45, which many a critic and fan hailed as one of the most innovative albums of its time and on a par, quality wise with their first two albums. Sudden Death decided to add some bonus matterial. First off, now included is a 12-page booklet of unique photos, posters and an extensive history of D.O.A. at that time, written by Canada’s godfather of punk Joey Shithead. Also, All eight tracks from the War On 45 1982 release are on side A and seven tracks from the pre-War On 45 demos that were recorded at Mystic onto Side B. So one has the Montgomery brothers: Biscuits and Dimwit, two of the greatest drummers of all time on the same LP. All in all, this album will hit one hard, the...

Mammatus

Expanding Majesty

Silver Current

Eight years in the making, Santa Cruz, California’s reclusive sons of tectonic riffage Mammatus return with Expanding Majesty, a sixty-nine minute magnum opus of kaleidoscopic guitars, soaring analog synths, wall-of-amps fuzz bass and one hundred feet drums. Four side-long pieces unfold across a double album in unstoppable riffs that span the meditative and joyful un-earthed flight of ’70s kosmische godfathers like Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream to the kinds of sub-surface thunder pioneered by Melvins and Sleep.

Motorbike

s/t

Feel It

***"Jerri fell off his moped so we started a band."—Motorbike. From that wreckage, a five piece rock'n'roll group was born. The cast: a familiar gang of Cincinnati players fronted by Welsh expat Jamie Morrison. Motorbike began writing and recording their self-titled full length in 2022 at Jerri's Checkered Flag Studios. The resulting twenty-six minutes make up one of the best r'n'r records to ever come out of the Queen City. Motorbike sound discernibly rugged and Midwestern. Loud, guitar-driven punk rock. Yet they can actually play more than three chords! From the hard-driving, rhythmic rush of "Throttle" to the tuneful power-Brit-pop anthem, "Spring Grove," Motorbike are living life in the fast lane and ruling every last second of it. A perfect ratio of beer drinking to hell raising. The boys execute these nine tracks like a band that's been around for closer to ten years than just ONE! Words can only do so much justice to the sonic caliber of Motorbike and the mileage that their debut full length is going to track well into the future.

Alvarez, Lorena & Alejandro Palacios

Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj

Not Not Fun

Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj (“landscapes for bending the clock”) is a collection of six collaborative improvisations between keyboardist / DJ Lorena Álvarez and multi-instrumentalist Alejandro Palacios recorded at the Nieve & Smog arts residency in Santiago, Chile in the spring of 2022. Theirs is a wispy, whispered chemistry, softly thrumming Rhodes laced with trumpet, guitar, and golden dust. The pieces unspool with a daydream logic of “hazy clocks and floating doors,” inspired by the holy trinity of Hassell, Riley, and Cherry. Both Álvarez and Palacios have carved eclectic bodies of work – the former as part of minimalist dance trios Cuerpo Docente and Los Bárbara Blade, the latter via psychedelic lounge-dub suites for Nonlocal Research. Yet Paisajes finds their common ground in more hushed, hidden terrain. Lulling, electro-acoustic landscapes of texture and resonance, shaded in wood, brass, and batteries, flowering at late hours in dimly lit rooms.

St. Louis, Anna

In The Air

Woodsist

“Born of a thousand nights lost in a surrender to stillness and contemplation, In The Air is Anna St. Louis’ second full length album and her most considered work yet. “It’s an outlook on the world that was formed when her immediate one was small. The intervening years since her last album found St. Louis in a small one-bedroom cabin in the middle of the woods of upstate New York with a new love and time to think of what she wanted to express with her music. For weeks on end, the only trips she took were to and from her job as the front desk clerk at a nearby hotel. The previous years she had spent on tour and performing constantly in the venues of Los Angeles felt like they had occurred in another lifetime. “St. Louis describes the writing period as one of a slow harvest; a fertile time but one that required a newfound patience. Instead of documenting her first thoughts, she spent more time with each song, going deeper with the themes and ideas she wanted to express. “This slower approach also guided the sonic textures of the album. Working with producer Jarvis Taveniere (Purple Mountains, Woods) in two extended recording sessions in Los Angeles in 2021, St. Louis used the studio in a previously unexplored way, opening up her songs to more experimentation featuring brighter tones and a more orchestral sound to accompany her new perspective. To that end, she was...

Torture Rack

Primeval Onslaught

20 Buck Spin

Torture Rack exists for one reason, to pulverize skulls and grind bones through bludgeoning gore-soaked death metal depravity. New album Primeval Onslaught continues that bloodstained legacy, witnessed previously on Barbaric Persecution and Malefic Humiliation, with a barrage of meat-torn-from-bone riffs and greased-flesh savagery. Death metal for degenerates and desecrators might be the proper way to characterize Torture Rack’s uninhibited slaughter. This sort of derangement doesn’t care about some rational spin or greater purpose that might be found to rationalize its existence. Its goal is only to smother out a victim’s life, bury the body in the backyard and venerate the carnage. Torture Rack’s songwriting and intent on Primeval Onslaught has been tightened like a garrote, filling each track with meathooks into the skin and precise, constant battering, rarely eclipsing the four minute mark. And like the most successfully persistent maniac, it’s in and it’s out before there’s been time to comprehend the pile of bodies left in its wake.

Bell Witch

Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate

Profound Lore

Pacific Northwestern doom metal monolith Bell Witch is releasing their new album Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate. For this new album, bassist / vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer / vocalist Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch’s bounds. Like 2017’s lauded Mirror Reaper, The Clandestine Gate is a single 83-minute track—a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future’s Shadow. While traces of organ and synthesizer hovered over Mirror Reaper and Bell Witch’s 2020 collaboration with Aerial Ruin, Stygian Bough Volume 1, The Clandestine Gate drew those instruments closer to the center of its compositions. The band reunited with their longtime producer Billy Anderson as they began negotiating these new compositional weights. On this latest, the band’s twinned voices build off of the chantlike textures of previous records while steering toward more developed melodic lines, structured harmonies, and rhythmic death metal growls. The immense gravity of a work like The Clandestine Gate, which features exclusive stunning cover art by Jordi Diaz Alama, allows ideas to simmer in a way that feels profoundly and somatically intuitive—not just a philosophical exercise, but an embodied truth. By slowing down both their creative process and the tempo of the music itself, Bell Witch digs even deeper into their long standing focus: the way life spills on inside its minuscule container, both eternal and fleeting, a chord that echoes without resolution.

Big Blood

First Aid Kit

Feeding Tube / Ba Da Bing!

“She can be a real pain in the ass,” is how Big Blood’s Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella describe having their daughter as a member of the band they formed in the wake of Cerberus Shoal’s dissolution. A band made up of family seems like an ideal situation. You get to play with those you love, and practicing/recording is always just a matter of going into the next room. “If you don’t have kids, I can imagine that is an obvious assumption,” Caleb says. “However, if you do have children, I don’t need to explain how much of an emotional mess this can be.” Parents don’t stop being parents, nor do kids stop being kids for band practice. “There are endless amounts of broader ‘life’ examples brought up at any given time while playing with Quinnisa, and I can’t help stopping to discuss them as they come up,” he says. He understands Quinnisa’s position. “She’s rightly annoyed at being parented in a ‘judgment free’ zone. Lots of practices end with her being tossed from the band.” His issues are nothing, however, to what she brings to the band. Quinnissa, who was 13 when First Aid Kit was recorded has skills. “She’s a total ringer and a complete pro in a live setting,” Mulkerin acknowldges. “She’s a lot more reliable than her grumpy parents.” Indeed, Quinnisa’s voice has developed into an astonishing powerhouse of force. While she has been contributing to Big Blood records almost since birth, First Aid Kit solidifies...

Stools, The

R U Saved?

Feel It

***The Motor City does it again, folks! From the birthplace of some of the most significant sounds of the past sixty-odd years, the Stools are certainly no exception to Detroit's musical legacy. The trio's self-professed "Nuggets vs. Killed By Death" sound is back in full effect on R U Saved?, which could be considered the first proper Stools full length after a slew of EPs and singles. Whether you're just hearing 'em for the first time or have been tuned in through past releases on Drunken Sailor, Goodbye Boozy, Third Man, and Big Neck—the Stools are at the top of their game here in 2023. Twelve songs in twenty-three minutes, a blaze of bluesy punk damage born from a steady diet of the Stooges, Negative Approach, and the Gories with a dash of that far-gone Memphis sound in the mix. The Stools are a fine-tuned unit across R U Saved?—an album chock full of replay value from the raw, unpretentious, and industrious Detroit trio. (STREET DATE - 6/02/2023)

White, Asher

New Excellent Woman

Ba Da Bing!

Asher White’s music is a complex and heartfelt reaction to the churn of the modern world. With tender intimacy and resounding anxiety, White takes a wide view through the lens of her own queer sexual politics and transgender identity; what does it mean to renew, to progress, to transform? What is lost, gained, or irreversibly altered? At 22 years old, White has developed a massive self-released discography: over a dozen albums since 2015, each one started the moment the last one was finished. New Excellent Woman is a distillation of these experiments and discoveries, a new achievement in songwriting that stands astride the cracks in the earth and lopsided ground. Songs jump between styles like a pubescent sex drive, all locked together by White’s ability to pull melody out of chaos. New Excellent Woman wanders a meticulous cut-and-pasted path paved by forebears like The Books and Animal Collective. It sounds like a live band, bursting with kinetic energy, but the album was constructed alone in her Providence, RI studio, where she arranged, performed, recorded, and mixed the record herself. The ingenuity of Dirty Projectors is laced with the catchiness and warmth of The Kinks, and maybe a dash of Elephant 6. It’s like an ADHD party and the listener is the first to arrive. New Excellent Woman is built from detritus, often quite literally: from the thrift store amplifiers and scavenged keyboards she uses to her penchant for discovering and sampling obscure YouTube videos into her songs. The thick fog...

Mournful Congregation

The Exuviae Of Gods - Part 2

20 Buck Spin

Returning with the second and final installment in the doom-laden The Exuviae Of Gods EP series, Part II once again contains two never-heard brand new Mournful Congregation tracks and a re-recording of an old classic from the band’s ’90s demo era. The EP opens with “Heads Bowed,” which the most fanatical Mournful Congregation fans will recognize from their An Epic Dream Of Desire demo from 1995, now given new life through the eyes and ears of decades of extreme doom songcraft and studio-work. After that look back, “The Forbidden Abysm” and the side-long “The Paling Crest” remind one how far Mournful Congregation have come, and yet remain as true to their original purpose as ever. Like the previous EP, artwork is once again handled by Karmazid, bringing the monadic into the dyadic. Thus perfecting the natural order of primordial principles… And so concludes the dual-pillar compendium of devouring gloom and exaltation that is The Exuviae Of Gods. A balm to quiet the restless spirit as the world awaits the inevitable birth of the years-in-the-making sixth Mournful Congregation album.

Clarko

Welcome To Clarko

Iron Lung

***"America's Little Brother" is back after a lengthy stay at the Deformatory for the Young and Well Adjusted. It's been a productive placement that has birthed the debut dozen dubbed Welcome To Clarko. An arms wide invitation to the double mad anxious new wave/brainpunk world of smart-mouthed subversion, man-made aneurysms, knee-jerk antagonism and juvenile gambling addictions. In short, a delight for the senseless.

SBT (Sarabeth Tucek)

Joan of All

Ocean Omen

Sarabeth Tucek emerges from a decade-long hibernation with a new double-album Joan of All under the new moniker SBT— a longtime nickname given to her by the many musicians she has worked with throughout her career. After retreating from the fevered pace of the record business to concentrate on other creative endeavors, Sarabeth began to piece together the music that would eventually become her most ambitious, personal project yet—the sprawling double-album Joan Of All, released on her own freshly-minted imprint Ocean Omen. Sarabeth Tucek officially broke onto the music scene 2003 performing a series of spellbinding duets with Bill Callahan on the acclaimed Smog album Supper. This was swiftly followed by a memorable appearance in the prize-winning Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary DiG! Sarabeth also contributed material to their 2005 EP release, We Are the Radio. One of Sarabeth's compositions covered by the band on that EP, "Seer," would later be retitled and released in 2006 as Tucek's debut single, "Something for You,” which became Steve Lamacq’s Single Of The Week on BBC Radio 6 Music. Her self-titled debut album produced by Luther Russell and Ethan Johns hit stores the following year and garnered rave reviews in the press, leading her to supporting Bob Dylan and unfaltering support at the BBC. In 2011, Sarabeth followed up her extraordinary debut with a raw, uncompromising album entitled Get Well Soon, praised as an unflinching meditation on the subject of grief. This release made many year-end lists and the title track was featured on...

Good Looking Son

Confirmed Bachelor

Feel It

***The all-encompassing bid to mid-thirties singledom, sung from that lonesome, soulful heart of Good Looking Son is here to awaken 2023. Following 2021's debut Fantasy Weekend EP—the Cincinnati project anchored by Keith Harman (the Cowboys) on vocals and piano returns in roaring fashion with ten new originals, finished off with a nostalgic rendition of a Bee Gees classic. Jerome Westerkamp's Checkered Flag Studios are once again the perfect basement analog backdrop for a caterwauling trip into blurry sixties-esque melodies, baroque tongue-in-cheek pop dashes, and liquored flurries of vocal brilliance that blossom across Confirmed Bachelor. The musicianship of the Queen City shines through with Westerkamp, joined by fellow Vacation (and Tweens) member John Clooney, and Andrew Jody (Barrence Whitfield & the Savages, Long Gones) contributing to the dynamism of tracks like "Long Form Girlfriend" and "Kathy's Coming." There's a certain twisted middle-American pop thing that Good Looking Son clearly bend towards the future. The next level...who knows? But enough to at least nod that discerning ear forward while jangling keys drive the shot clock past double zero, that's for sure. GLS leave this thing covered in glitter and great songwriting—castaways afloat in a vessel navigating one boozy mess of dirty water and sunshine pop. First pressing of 300.

Life Expectancy

Decline

Iron Lung

***Malicious and unfriendly musick recorded in a secret bedsit somewhere around the vital organs of England. A swirl of industrial noise amidst a barrage of Japanese and Swedish influenced speed beat hardcore. The wrest will be mystery. Ponder and fail. Limited to 150 blue shelled cassettes housed in a minimally adorned J-card. Recorded and designed by Life Expectancy.

Morwan

Svitaye, Palaye

Feel It

***Svitaye, Palaye is the third album from the Kyiv, Ukraine post-punk project, Morwan. The album was supposed to be the logical continuation of the previous album Zola-Zemlya, which was released in 2020. Initially, when conceiving the album in 2021, it was intended to be lighter, melancholic and somewhat danceable while maintaining the basic sonic style and aesthetics of the previous albums. However, the Russian invasion in Ukraine slowed down the work and made serious changes to the general idea of the album. The main theme of the album is the war. There are no specific stories or descriptions of the events of the war. It's more of an abstract and emotional thing. First impressions, moods or emotions experienced during certain events. Pain of loss, sadness, fear, hatred, anger, and aggression are all part of Svitaye, Palaye.

Shraya, Vivek

Baby, You're Projecting

Mint

Multi-disciplinary artist Vivek Shraya has a body of work that crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. Among her list of accomplishments is an impressive catalog of music—including the Polaris Prize-nominated Part-Time Woman with Queer Songbook Orchestra (2017) and Angry by her band Too Attached (2018), which CBC described as one of “Canada’s most incisive, radical and galvanizing albums.” After twenty years of releasing music independently, Shraya will make her Mint label debut with Baby, You’re Projecting. Unlike her previous musical offerings, which were more sonically compartmentalized, Shraya endeavored to create a genre-fluid album. Inspired by great female-fronted pop records (including janet. by Janet Jackson, Sheryl Crow’s self-titled album, and Lemonade by Beyoncé), Baby, You’re Projecting holds the breadth of Shraya's sound and style in one space. Ranging from house to hip hop to country, her singular voice and songwriting holds the record together and resonates in every genre. Produced by and co-written with frequent collaborator James Bunton (Donovan Woods, Ohbijou), Baby, You’re Projecting is a break-up album that explores Shraya's tenuous relationships with men. The record also features performances by Alanna Stuart (Bonjay), Christine Bougie (Bahamas, Amy Millan) and Kimmortal. It is being co-released with a 12-minute film titled “He Loves Me Until He Hates Me,” set to songs from the record and directed by award-winning cinematographer Gabriela Osio Vanden. Taking inspiration from '90s classics like The Bodyguard and erotic thrillers, the film creates a meaningful (and playful) look at the unpredictability of masculinity—how it...

C.I.A. Debutante

Down, Willow

Siltbreeze

With their 3rd vinyl long player for Siltbreeze, CIA Debutante have successfully out-flanked those critics who have been forever chattering, "will they ever be as big as Artery?" To paraphrase Fred Ward in Tremors; "Artery? Hell, Clock DVA!" All bristling aside, such questions & answers don't carry much weight these days. Such is the language of pettifoggers. And who's got time for them? We're trying to sell records here. Down,Willow sees our heroes Paul & Nathan attaining S.T.A.S. (Superior Third Album Status), honing in with a top gloss of new & proto experimental, post-punk, recitation & vibe. Imagine fusing The Fall's Grotesque & Morton Subotnick's Sidewinder into a sole entity? Sure, there's going to be lots of sparks, flash fires, smoke of all colors + bickering, but from this vantage, what a light show! There's even some shredding on here that sounds like they may have lit this fucker with Martin Kippenberger's copy of Guitar Hero. Please take it off, it's too good! If you've been paying attention to the bands countless tape efforts, or just their recent vinyl outings, there's no denying the Mach thunder Down, Willow is gonna roll across thine cranium. And should this be your introduction to the band, feel free to pretend none of the aforementioned bullshit matters. And welcome, adventurous new listener!

Ascended Dead

Evenfall Of The Apocalypse

20 Buck Spin

***NOW ON LIMITED ULTRA CLEAR WITH BLACK SMOKE VINYL!!! Ascended Dead return like abyss winds surging skyward from the ninth circle of Hell. New album Evenfall Of The Apocalypse heralds the dawn of the final march to extermination via barely-controlled death metal chaos and form-destroying necromancy. Ascended Dead play death metal the ancient way with an intrinsically malign pedigree and methodical cruelty scarcely heard nowadays. Flesh-peeling intensity at warp-speed, technically-frenzied leads that cut straight through bone and a relentless annihilating force that rarely ceases long enough to take a breath. Yet amidst this fiery conflagration a wholly deliberate and fanatical attention to detail and craft remain undeniable, allowing the pandemonium a distinct structure and memorability. While the band has more than enough skill and ability to perform a darkly acoustic piece like “Passage To Eternity,” a rare moment of respite, repeated spins through Evenfall Of The Apocalypse only serve to perpetuate Ascended Dead’s inexorable place at the vanguard of violent real death metal, carrying the banner into the future.

Janaka Stucky

Ascend Ascend: Live in Seattle with Lori Goldston

Neurot Recordings

"Praised by Jimmy Page as “riveting,” Janaka Stucky’s book length poem, Ascend Ascend, published by Jack White’s Third Man Books in 2019, gets a mesmerizing treatment on this album by the same name, accompanied by experimental cellist Lori Goldston. Goldston, known for her work with a number of acts—including Nirvana, Cat Power, and Earth—provides otherworldly layers of distortion and natural reverb over Stucky’s dirge-like vocal performance. Recorded at the All Pilgrims Church in Seattle while Stucky was on a 7-city tour produced by Atlas Obscura in 2019, the performance is served well by the room’s ambiance and was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Mell Dettmer—who has engineered albums for acts such as Earth, Sunn O))), Master Musicians of Bukkake, and Wolves in the Throne Room. "

Wong, Ryan

The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong

Rocks In Your Head

The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong, the latest offering by the Cool Ghoul and multi-hyphenate music man behind Supreme Joy, finds the songwriter charting sonic territories that might at first seem unfamiliar to fans of his past work in the Garage, Psych, and Post-punk genres. But under the wing of storied San Francisco scene scion Sonny Smith (Sonny and the Sunsets), Wong sidles up to a sound that bears a close kinship to the producer’s own playfully country-leaning works. New Country Sounds finds Wong’s boyish lilt exploring deep registers and deeper themes, coupled with unmistakably capital-C Country explorations on both guitar and steel. Wong the writer, however, continues to find himself owing more to Ray Davies than he does to Ray Price. Wong’s natural charm and humor set him apart from today’s crop of self- serious crooners. A laconic slacker sensibility persists throughout, lending Wong’s more winkingly macho moments an ironic distance that comes off cheeky rather than threatening

Talk West

Black Coral Sprig

Scissor Tail Editions

“Talk West is the project of Dylan Aycock. Aycock has forged a small series of intriguing and beautiful missives through the cassette underground with his explorations on guitar and pedal steel. On Black Coral Sprig, Aycock negotiates the terrain between stately and homely by stretching a ringing country tone into an all-encompassing atmosphere, much like the ambient realms of Stars Of The Lid. His unhurried, gentle playing style comes to reveal understated textures that weave into a whole alternately spirited, warming and often haunting.” —Preservation “Serene shades of Loren Connors and Bruce Langhorne’s The Hired Hand in Dylan Aycock’s (Talk West) Black Coral Sprig.” —MOJO

Fang

No Warning Shots Fired

Fang

It’s the 40th anniversary year of their inaugural, incendiary, nihilistic, and influential underground punk record Landshark! And this year, first wave West Coast hardcore punk scene and Berkeley punk alumni, released their ninth studio LP No Warning Shots Fired, consisting of 13 urgent and caustic hardcore punk, crossover thrash, metal, and crust tracks. Profiled in the 2017 documentary Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk, Fang have influenced the sound of and have been covered by many bands through the years. Metallica recorded “The Money Will Roll Right In” during the Master of Puppets sessions. Kurt Cobain named Landshark his sixth favorite record of all time. Butthole Surfers, Green Day, Nirvana, Metallica, Mudhoney, and many others have included songs by Fang on studio albums or in live sets. Fang features Sammytown on vocals, Tommy and Obi on guitars, and Brandon Brown on bass, all of whom have been the core lineup for the last eight years, with headlining tours in Cuba, Hawaii, Japan, Mexico, and throughout the United States. Drummer Steven Gonzales joined the band this past year. Fang are pending announcements for a return to Mexico in the fall, a 19-date European tour in August, and a Landshark 40th anniversary SF Bay Area event in June of 2023.

Cordero, Brent & Peter Kerlin

A Sublime Madness

Astral Spirits

***PSYCHIC ILLS keyboardist, BRENT CORDERO and SUNWATCHERS bassist, PETER KERLIN's first full length collab A Sublime Madness is the culmination of decades of circling each other's creative orbits. After years of casual jamming, numerous fledgling one offs, and touring sideman gigs. Here, the two sidemen synchronize orbits and create a sound with keys and bass as a molten center. The impetus to embark on a larger collaboration began with an off-handed suggestion after the two recorded an improv duet for Kerlin's, Glaring Omission (2020). Later, with touring canceled worldwide and the untimely death of Psychic Ills frontman, Tres Warren, it seemed like a good time to pick up the thread left hanging “from before” to create something to respond to the moment and/or escape into. But A Sublime Madness is not a strict duo album or a COVID bedroom record, by any stretch. Drummer, RYAN SAWYER (BENT ARCANA) provides torrents of percussion and each tune is built out as the two invite in a crew of past collaborators, legends, luminaries, cohorts and stalwarts: DANIEL CARTER (woodwinds), JAMES BRANDON LEWIS (tenor sax), JESSICA PAVONE (viola), RYAN JEWELL (percussion), CHARLES BURST (percussion), ADAM AMRAM (congas), AARON SIGEL (vibraphone), JESSE DEROSA (modular synth)—each person contributing their musical voice throughout. The result is an expansive sound and vision. A conjuring of spontaneous, collective spirit in which each player’s contribution is highlighted and distilled in conversation with each other over the arc of the record.

Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya

Orbweaving

Flenser

Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz became close friends in 2020, regarding each other as a lifeline when things were difficult in their personal lives. This friendship was born from music but quickly became so much more than that. The two met in person in 2021, when Diaz came for a recording residency at Johnston’s studio in New Mexico. It was during this session that they wrote and recorded Orbweaving, in the heat of summer in the arid Chihuahuan Desert. Orbweaving combines the best parts of Midwife’s “heaven metal” and Vyva Melinkolya’s sentimental, classic shoegaze in a way that distinctively elevates both artists. The record explores themes of hopelessness, calling on a higher power, being alone, and the sublime horror of the natural world. Orbweaving seeks to thematically and sonically create a web like structure—a gauze of sorrow and visceral connective thread. At night, Diaz and Johnston went herping (a term used by herpetologists to describe looking for snakes and amphibians) along the empty roads near Las Cruces. The asphalt retains heat from the day, and the snakes absorb the warmth by writhing across the pavement. They found rattlesnakes, roadkill, and orb-weaver spiders. The track “Plague X” was inspired by the lifecycle of cicadas; whose seventeen year periodical cycle took place in 2021. The group of cicadas that emerged are known as Brood X. In a post-covid world, one is no stranger to living in a plague year. The violent arrival of Brood X cicadas are alluded to...

Impetuous Ritual

Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis

Profound Lore

Australian death metal monstrosity Impetuous Ritual are unleashing their new album Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis. It is the follow-up to 2017’s Blight Upon Martyred Sentience and presents itself as the most unnatural, abnormal, and nightmarish Impetuous Ritual offering yet.

Akasha System

Ancient Path Complete

100% Silk

Originally self-released as a digital-only EP in the summer of 2021, Ancient Path Complete folds four additional tracks into its sidewinding saga of hidden mesa house and aerodynamic electronics, delivering on its creator’s lofty vision of music “for looking inward, to the center of being.” These are songs of spiraling tides, spirit guides, and shadowy forward motion, drawn towards some shared beacon beaming like a low moon across the desert. Akasha System (aka Hunter P. Thompson) speaks of the album as born during a time of “personal darkness, confusion, and uncertainty,” but its exorcism produced the opposite – assured, expansive, and illuminated. It’s the sound of growth and change being sought and found, new trails taking shape, forking towards fresh horizons. Windswept, wistful, and blazed by an inner light, APC “continues the path onward into your pure, creative core… into healing.”

Akasha System

Phytopia

100% Silk

From the forests of Cascadia to the rippling tropics of the Gulf Coast, Hunter P. Thompson’s music as Akasha System both reflects and refracts the environment of its origin – equal parts mirror, mixing desk, and meditation chamber. His latest, Phytopia, skews even loftier, a private portal into a primordial world of mist and mystery, framed by crystalline rivers, rainbow canopies, and hanging gardens. He describes its wavelength as “a waking vision,” teeming with “life, chaos, and magic.” Crafted across the past three years in his recently departed Portland, Oregon basement haven, Green House, the album’s nine tracks unfold with a shimmering, cellular symmetry – prehistoric and preordained, lush ecosystems in hidden harmony. A composite of synths, software, and spatial finesse, this is Akasha System at its most attuned and eternal, a forever expanding universe of percolating rhythm and fragrant air.

Wave Temples

Panama Shift

Not Not Fun

Over a decade since its inception, Wave Temples continues to refine and refract the project’s visionary mythopoetic exotica. Panama Shift presents a 20-track kaleidoscopic star map inspired by “the euphoric cults, both then and now, that come and go in the vast ritual of night.” Bleached keys, devotional synth, and driftwood percussion align in minimalist vignettes shaded by tape hiss and field recordings of streams, waves, wind, and birds. Dedicated to the late Japanese-born American anthropologist Yosihiko H. Sinoto (whose portrait graces the cover), famed for his excavations throughout the Pacific and French Polynesia, the album embodies a similarly voyaging spirit: “chasing ancient mysteries… and rekindling with the esoteric journey of the human spirit.” This is music of forgotten shores, sea air, and saltwater shrines, echoing in shells scattered across the altars of Atlantis.

Wave Temples

Portals

Not Not Fun

Expansion pack of Wave Temples transmissions accompanying the Panama Shift vinyl suite. Its creator contextualizes Portals as the first volume in a tarot-style card game of the same name, to be used for divining prophetic strategies. Each of the 13 pieces here unfolds like a glimpse to an inner realm – or a past life. Hazed vignettes of primitivist anthropological fantasia, warbly and windswept, suffused with déjà vu. Insects and macaws sing from the periphery, while beach fires glow along an abandoned coast, the tide like a language lost in the tunnels of time.

Cport Cistema

Say It

100% Silk

Lithuanian producer Simonas Činga debuts as Cport Cistema with a 7-track slate of low-slung steppers, melancholic jack, and baggy breaks, born of the struggle “to say whatever comes, to speak up – to say it.” Recorded across the past two years largely in Kaunas, the songs swell and swirl with kinetic dreams from city streets in uncertain times. Crisp rhythms cut through cold air, laced in bass, breath, and samples both vocal and cinematic. It’s music of atmosphere and anticipation, attuned to heady heights just beyond the horizon. The spirit of Činga’s heroes (Vynehall, BoC, Djrum) echoes through these mixes but ultimately their motion and emotion maps a world unto itself – elevated, liberated, forever freshly coming into focus.

Pyrex

s/t

Total Punk

***"Erupting onto the New York punk scene, Brooklyn based band Pyrex have made waves after releasing a handful of well-received singles and tapes and touring the US generating significant buzz. At long last, the group is releasing their highly anticipated debut LP PYREX. The LP delivers driving, scrappy hardcore-leaning post-punk that sounds like a mix between a lost KBD artifact and an Eastern European post-punk unknown. This LP explores dystopic and nihilistic themes both lyrically and musically packaged in no-brainer high energy punk. Pyrex delivers distorted, angular and heavily entwined bass and guitar hooks strengthened by linear, pummeling drums with raw, aggressive vocals. The trio have created an LP that is equally unchained and artful. PYREX is a wholly well-crafted, frenetic, dialed-in, oven-safe, microwavable, and collectable modern punk record with infinite playability"—Sims Hardin (STREET DATE - 5/05/2023)

Murmer

Tether

Helen Scarsdale

***Murmer is the long-standing project of American/Estonian field recordist and composer Patrick McGinley, and with Tether, The Helen Scarsdale Agency welcomes Murmer back to our roster, over a decade since he graced us with his last production for the Agency. His field recordings often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Such sounds emerge from a condition as being fleeting, inconsequential, or ephemeral and explode into that which is alien, sublime, and profound. Here lies the tremendous prowess of the contact microphone, as wielded by an accomplished musician! The source material cited by McGinley includes cables, fences, wires, and vents. There is a heft to many of these sounds as heard throughout all of "Taevast" with deep throbbing pulsations from arctic wind generating subharmonic patterns upon thick high-tension wires. Elsewhere the subtle dissonance from a rasping cooling fan blooms into a brooding ambience that is sublimely rich in its metallic timbres and complex reverberations. McGinley has long been an exemplary artist in the field of phonography even as he is less prolific than others. On Tether, he has produced a majestic if occasionally foreboding work on par with the mythic wire recordings of Alan Lamb, Jacob Kirkegaard's haunted resonance from Chernobyl, and much of the Touch catalogue for that matter!

Mclaughlin, Elijah Ensemble

III

Astral Spirits

***Elijah McLaughlin Ensemble III is an album full of shimmering harmonic atmospheres. It’s emblematic of the Chicago-based ensemble, whose music explores the textures and resonances of their string instruments, namely six and 12-string guitar (Elijah McLaughlin), upright bass (Jason Toth), and hammered dulcimer (Joel Styzens). Throughout Elijah McLaughlin III, they expand their usual palette by including analog synths, field recordings, and melodies from guest musicians cellist Katinka Kleijn and pianist Adler Scheidt. The group taps into overtone sequences made from sonic tapestries, following the music where it wants to go. Intuition is a key part of their work: McLaughlin’s music allows room for his collaborators to branch out and bring their own sonic imprint to the compositions. They listen to each other, letting each voice shine, and finding new textures and sounds together.

Taylor, Chad Trio

The Reel

Astral Spirits

***Superb new album from the trio of Chad Taylor (drums), Brian Settles (saxophones) and Neil Podgurski (piano). Recorded and mixed by David Stoller at Samurai Hotel Recording Studios, May 9th and June 24th, 2002.

Lunar Chamber

Shambhallic Vibrations

20 Buck Spin

Lunar Chamber, a hitherto unknown being of mysterious consciousness, now present in the physical realm for the first time with debut manifestation Shambhallic Vibrations, a tale of a journey eastward in search of enlightenment and what may lie beyond. Ensconced in mysticism, the five track nearly thirty minute pilgrimage advances unflinchingly through insane crushing riffs, bewildering solos, tranquil acoustics and illuminated ascendent melodies. “Spirit Body And The Seeing Self” details the start of the journey, self analysis, and the attempts at launching oneself into said “beyond,” while “The Bodhi Tree” is a mirroring tale of Gautama Buddha himself, having meditated underneath it in Bodh Gaya approximately 2500 years ago, attaining enlightenment. “III. Crystalline Blessed Light Flows… From Violet Mountains Into Lunar Chambers” is the ultimate pinnacle of the tale. Having reached a spiritual plane, pulses of light and dark; the very fabric of space-time itself churns. Knowledge is abundant here. Eventually, one is brought full circle, right back where everything began in normal life; albeit with a new sense of everything. But there is so much more to learn… a yearning thirst. Offering a deluge of jarringly brutal metal, overwhelming progressive physicality and instinctively accomplished memorability inspired by Buddhism, the East and esotericism, Lunar Chamber have just begun their quest of ascension and enlightened knowledge.

Cutler, Paul B.

Les Fleurs

In The Red

Fans of the innovations and originality that sprang from the L.A. underground of the late 1970s and ’80s often ask, “What’s Paul B. Cutler been up to?” A vital participant in the Los Angeles music scene of that period as bandleader, songwriter, musician and producer, Cutler’s work—in particular his guitar playing—with The Consumers, 45 Grave, Vox Pop and The Dream Syndicate is still admired by fans and an influence on anyone interested in that period and the styles that developed from it. In 2014, “Ryan Adams contacted me and wanted to form a band. He loved 45 Grave, he wanted to do some goth / punk, whatever you want to call it. That’s right up my alley. He’s amazingly talented and inspiring to work with. We did that for a while, and I wrote a bunch of songs.” Enthused about his new material, Cutler continued recording songs with just his signature electric guitar style and vocals. As this was developing, another vet of the early L.A. scene—Brad Laner of Medicine and Savage Republic—got in touch with Cutler. Soon Laner was mixing, co-producing, playing keyboards as well as adding the rhythm section. The overall process took some time, with songwriting beginning in 2014. When reflecting on the music that comprises Les Fleurs, “To me, and it does not sound like it, but because of the philosophy I had while producing it, it’s punk. I come from the original punk, before it was a genre. Before it was a ‘sound.’ When I...

Zozobra

Bird Of Prey

Profound Lore

Taking its name from the 50-foot effigy burned every year by a hysterical mob during the Fiestas De Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM, Zozobra is the brainchild of Caleb Scofield (Cave In / Old Man Gloom) and, to carry on his musical legacy, the two Zozobra albums Harmonic Tremors (2007) and Bird Of Prey (2008) can now be streamed everywhere on all streaming platforms once again. Also both albums will see their respective vinyl releases, the first time they will be officially issued on vinyl for widespread distribution (previous editions were tour-only editions and the Caleb memorial version). Following on the seismic heels of Harmonic Tremors, Bird Of Prey was originally released in 2008 via Hydra Head Records respectively and features drummer Aaron Harris (Isis), who also recorded and mixed the album. Scofield’s second full-length under the Zozobra moniker is a white-hot exploder shot through with snaking melody lines and implacable riffs. From front to back, Scofield’s signature roar is tempered by his own gleaming backup chants; meanwhile, an arsenal of guitars alternately churns and shimmers in the flames of Zozobra’s effigial namesake.

Zozobra

Harmonic Tremors

Profound Lore

Taking its name from the 50-foot effigy burned every year by a hysterical mob during the Fiestas De Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM, Zozobra is the brainchild of Caleb Scofield (Cave In / Old Man Gloom) and, to carry on his musical legacy, the two Zozobra albums Harmonic Tremors (2007) and Bird Of Prey (2008) can now be streamed everywhere on all streaming platforms once again. Also both albums will see their respective vinyl releases, the first time they will be officially issued on vinyl for widespread distribution (previous editions were tour-only editions and the Caleb memorial version). Harmonic Tremors was originally released in 2007 via Hydra Head Records and features drummer Santos Montano (Old Man Gloom) accompanying Scofield. It was recorded and mixed by Andrew Schneider at Translator Audio in Brooklyn, NY with art and design by Aaron Turner. Harmonic Tremors deftly traverses the far-flung fields of transcendental space rock and explosive dirge metal with alternately snarling and oscillating riffery, crippling bass quakes, and apocalyptic proclamations hurled end over end toward the cosmic unconsciousness.

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Love For The Underdog

Woodsist

John Andrews is something of an open secret in a certain corner of the music scene: a versatile musician and animator. A film school drop out whose work hat-tips tradition as much as outsider anti-aesthetics. He’s spent over a decade on the DIY circuit, playing early house shows alongside then up-and-coming peers Weyes Blood and Daniel Bachman. Today he is still out there projecting his sketchy hand-drawn animations during his performances in coffee shops, small galleries and non-traditional venues. Andrews’ painterly approach now introduces the listener to his version of New York City, the place he was bound to end up after years of dwelling in Pennsylvania farm towns and New Hampshire barns. There is handmade vibrancy to the world he’s imagined here: intimate moments seen from the interior, looking outward from hole-in-the-wall restaurants, theaters and the fragments of peace found within the restless and dirty street corners. Love For The Underdog, his aptly titled fourth release with the Woodsist label, was tracked live to tape in various studios and apartments across the Empire State with help from his bandmates in Cut Worms’ touring outfit, Max Clarke, Keven Lareau and Noah Bond. Buoyant melodies are supported by timeless string arrangements, translated from Andrews’ head to page with the help of friend Simon Hanes. The string quartet follows the tradition of Francoise Hardy, Harry Nilsson, Margo Guryan and Belle and Sebastian, giving the whole thing a cinematic ambience with stark shadows of an Edward Hopper painting. The lyrics tie together narratives...