Browse Misc

Segall, Ty

Three Bells

Drag City

***Ty Segall follows 2022’s acoustic introspection opus Hello, Hi with a deeper, wilder journey to the center of the self. With Three Bells, he’s created a set of his most ambitious, elastic songs, using his musical vocabulary with ever-increasing sophistication. It’s an obsessive quest for an expression that answers back to the riptide always pulling him subconsciously into the depths. Questions we all ask in our own private mirrors are faced down here—and regardless of what the mysterious “Three Bells” mean in the context of the album’s libretto, you can be assured that Ty’s ringing them for himself, and for the rest of us in turn. It’s a growing up and out of your head parable, but the farther out you get, the farther in you go. The two-headed suggestion of 2012’s Twins has grown ever more complex, as the outside/inside world of perception dissolves into a greater world of the senses — all six or seven of them! Since Ty deals in sounds, Three Bells rings with them most of all: sounds signaling the next phase, ringing to keep you stuck, or to set you free, with guitars like voices, questioning and answering the others in their turn.

V/a

Flux Gourmet - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Ba Da Bing!

In Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet, a dysfunctional group of performance artists undertake a month-long residency at an institute devoted to culinary disciplines. Food is interrogated for its sonic potential as the group mic-up, amplify, distort and transform what they cook in front of an audience. The noise that the characters in the film itself make is driven by food blenders, overflowing cauldrons of gurgling soup and sizzling frying pans (courtesy of The Sonic Catering Band), yet the music that soundtracks the culinary capers is engorged with aching melodies and wordless, airy vocals. Contributors include Cavern Of Anti-Matter, Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk And A Hacksaw and Trost’s band, Roj (formerly of Broadcast), and Nurse With Wound. Flux Gourmet is presented in a lush 2xLP package with an ornate, colorful design and Strickland’s detailed liner notes. Image, color, light and sound are integrated and heightened to delirious levels of hyperreality, much like Strickland’s past works, Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric. Flux Gourmet very much alludes to his past as a member of The Sonic Catering Band, which he founded back in 1996. The band split on several occasions and got back together to create new pieces for the soundtrack, concocting strange sonic morsels and treating recipes as if they were scores. The lines between what is on the screen and what is on the soundtrack are blurred, with the band (mostly) using the exact same equipment (which they loaned to the production) and recipes as in...

MXLX

Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru the Cracks

Ba Da Bing!

Matt Loveridge is a prolific multi-instrumentalist condemned to Bristol, UK. He has over sixty solo records under various monikers, done before and after his time in Beak>, none of which appear on major streaming platforms, nor get much attention. His work as MXLX is a miasmatic fog, and he tosses the listener deep into it. Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru The Cracks is his most celebrated release (if one counts hate mail), and it appears here for the first time both on vinyl and somewhere not on his own site. Songs swerve between ambient, electronic ambient noise, metal, and industrial. Vocal harmonies ride arpeggiated basslines and shimmering synth lines, ascending upwards before plummeting into distorted screams. And yet, Loveridge’s aggression does not overlook introspection. He faces one stripped of all pretense, creaking “I’ve got that dumb skull of yours locked in place,” apologizing, “I’m sorry for all that I’ve done in the name of myself” and laughing in one’s face, “Just kidding, I hope you rot in the ground.” Drawing from an obsession with literature, he’s converted a life stricken with bouts of depression and homelessness into febrile sonic turbulence. He channels the intensity of groups like Pharmakon and The Body, while embracing compositional noise like Colin Stetson. With droning organs, emotionless chanting, and fleeting walls of sound, his results have more to do with cosmic futility than petty score-settling. MXLX produces barren liturgies of raw emotion, like a fallen medieval monk given...

Frunk29

Sequentia

Not Not Fun

Paradisal axe master Marat Shainsky returns with a fresh 13-song suite of mantric jangle and coastal guitar instrumentals ripe for a world in need of cool breeze: Sequentia. Bleached bedroom cruisers, faded synth skylines, city pop miniatures, stereo organ bops, and sparkling ambient percolations weave in wide arcs across 53-minutes of refined remote dreaming. Whether wielding electric strings, sequential circuits, or skeletal rhythm boxes, Shainsky’s touch skews effortless and elevated, poised for escape to brighter shores. These are themes of leaving and leisure, of warmer climes and worlds away, suffused with haze, hope, and the great rose-colored unknown.

Geraldi, Phil

AM/FM USA

Not Not Fun

Itinerant journeyman Phil Geraldi has hitched and hustled from Humboldt Bay to Brooklyn to Portlandia and beyond, working in a variety of guises both artistic (cathode noise project Mystics In Bali, farmhouse show coordinator at Arcata’s Mex N’ Wow, mystic mixtape maker) and survivalist (bike courier, sex shop custodian, apartment photographer, pool boy). These years of bicoastal interstate migrations seeded the vision of AM/FM USA, his latest and loftiest solo creation. Two side-long collages of radio static, pedal steel, crickets, and great plains haze, the music moves between lost highway melancholia and truck stop concrète. Shades of The KLF’s meta-twang opus Chill Out echo in the ether, but overall Geraldi’s heartland mythos is grainier and more interstitial, scrambled by ancient airwaves across the big sky voids of North America.

Tegu

Forest Hills

Not Not Fun

Rogue Florida entity Tegu debuts with 12-track nocturnal dub fever dream, Forest Hills. Field recordings, tape loops, vocal haze, FX, and thrifted Yamaha keys coalesce and dissipate on narcoleptic night walks past palm-shaded ponds, orange orchards, and fluorescent swamps murmuring with birds, frogs, and insects. Recorded largely in a single 24-hour block of attuned lo-fi improv, this is music of peripheries and private spheres, traced in faint horizons of hanging moss, water, and moonlight. Lost tropics for liquid memories, treading shrouded pathways of constant change.

Chat Pile

Remove Your Skin Please

Flenser

***Released only a handful of months following the band’s breakthrough debut EP, Remove Your Skin Please signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band’s foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of Remove Your Skin Please signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. Heard in the gothy post-punk dirge of “Mask” and the dissonant extreme metal fervor of “Davis'', the more experimental ideas present on Remove Your Skin Please come off less like a selection of the band’s conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its member's own tastes and preferences. That doesn’t mean Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is diluted in the slightest as EP bookends “Dallas Beltway” and “Garbage Man” push its twisted take on the genre to new aural extremes in its instrumentation and subject matter spanning grisly serial murders to the slow festering death of the environment at the hands of mankind. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile’s tales of 21st-century American dread are, Remove Your Skin Please asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: If a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.

Chat Pile

This Dungeon Earth

Flenser

In the summer of 2019, a newly formed, Oklahoma City-based rock band called Chat Pile would release its debut four-track EP, This Dungeon Earth. Little did anyone know at the time, but this initial taste of grotesque, confronting, and visceral noise rock courtesy of four slacker Okies would kick off the story of what would soon be one of the most widely lauded underground acts in years. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, Chat Pile’s body of work is emblematic of a distinctly midwestern flavor of American dread, with This Dungeon Earth being no exception to the rule. While raw in presentation, Chat Pile’s debut EP comes across as anything but a rough draft. Much of the band’s hallmark traits, spanning the unhinged vocals of frontman Raygun Busch, the grotesquely contorted guitar riffage, and the industrial smack of heavily processed percussion, appear as far back as this earliest chapter. If anything, the raw, DIY-rooted origins of these uncompromising thirteen minutes of sludged-out carnage make This Dungeon Earth all the more impactful. Between its biting social commentary and gratuitous grindhouse insanity, the unfiltered brutality of Chat Pile’s debut recording has seen tracks like “Rainbow Meat”, “Face”, and “Ratboy” become mainstays in its notorious live shows. Although it depicts the band’s monstrous amalgamation of noise rock, sludge metal, hardcore, and more as it is just beginning to congeal, This Dungeon Earth comes off as the furthest thing from a simple intro and more of an...

Ecology: Homestones

s/t

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

***Ecology: HomeStones is a mysterious audio-visual project, allegedly created by The FPPC, an organization whose sole known member is Philadelphia-based sculptor and video director, Dylan Pecora. On the strength of a series of short, mesmerizing video clips, depicting an alternate world of pulsating flesh entities, strange fluids, and shadowy characters, set to a soundtrack of caustic noise, E:HS wormed its way into our subconscious, where it now resides (un)comfortably. Confounding, grotesque, and playful, Ecology: HomeStones' short films and accompanying soundtracks suggest an elaborate order of arcane processes and corporeal obsessions, calling to mind the works of Matthew Barney, Hermann Nitsch, and David Lynch, among others. (Those familiar with Pecora's work will see the artist’s fingerprints all over this; their credits include helping create props, creatures, and puppets for a wide range of highly visible media outlets, corrupting minds in plain sight, as well as birthing wonderfully surreal music videos in the underground for like-minded artists (see the Hyrrokkin & Merzbow video work for SGG, for example.) As evidenced by "Mothername" (and its accompanying short film) and the other tracks on the new self-titled album, Ecology: HomeStones carries megatons of ominous weight, even when the audio is separated from the fascinating visuals. The tracks pulse and squelch gloriously—collages of bizarre voices, gentle tones, hypnotic rhythms, soaring melodies, and distorted mayhem, structured for maximum impact. A perplexing work that is also quite enjoyable, Ecology: HomeStones' self-titled album will delight those already in tune with this project, but also stands alone, out of...

Dimension

Dimension Demo

Iron Lung

In proper Massachusetts fashion, this demo is a frantic, loud guitar driven chaos machine fully loaded with power chord whips, throbbing distortion, concussive battery and gravel shouts. Over before you know it but leaves a nice scar to remind you just exactly whose dimension you’re in. No filler, no nonsense and no time for lackeys, buffoons or charlatans. Dimension is ripping hardcore punk… the way nature intended.

Bradley, Muireann

I Kept These Old Blues

Tompkins Square

***Muireann Bradley is a young blues, ragtime, roots and folk guitarist and singer based in Ballybofey in County Donegal Ireland. Tompkins Square actually signed her when she was 13, but because of Covid and just “growing up", the process of recording took place over three years. She will be 17 in December, 2023. "This is my first album. Most of these tunes were originally recorded by the great blues men and women who were making records from the 1920s and 1930s right up in some cases to the early 1970s. I have also found inspiration for the renditions recorded here in the playing of some of the musicians who began recording this music in the 1960s and later, and who in some cases learned at the feet of the greats. Many of these guitarists played pivotal roles in the 1960s blues revival and subsequent 'rediscovery' of many of the greats of country blues. I grew up steeped in these old blues in the hills overlooking the valley of the River Finn just outside the town of Ballybofey in County Donegal. My father would play this music constantly at home and wherever we went in the car and talk about it endlessly whether anyone was listening or not, telling stories about the lives of these musicians as if they were legend, mythology or the evening news. My father could of course play all this stuff on guitar, I remember watching him when I was very young and thinking 'I want to...

Somnambulists

Ascending Planes

Zum Audio

***The four pieces that comprise Ascending Planes are open-ended compositions revolving around a contemplation of planes of consciousness that are meant to provide a structure or space for the listener to dwell in, live in, and think in for an ephemeral stretch of time. These pieces are a coalescing of thoughts from a lifetime of immersion into experimental film and music, minimalism, and drone music and concerns perception, space, durational sound, and the Imaginary. Born in San Francisco and currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY, Warren Ng has operated mostly under the radar for the past two decades as a musician and visual artist orbiting in and among the Brooklyn/NYC underground experimental music and film worlds, primarily in the present under the solo moniker Somnambulists.

Pollard, Robert

EAT 19

GBV Inc

Eat Volume 19: 240 page full color journal of Robert Pollard's gorgeous collage art.

Foetal Juice

Grotesque

Gore House Productions

***Prepare for a violent and relentless assault on your senses as Manchester's very own death metal behemoths, Foetal Juice, unleash their latest sonic monstrosity, Grotesque. With a sound that pays homage to early Death Metal and Grindcore legends, Foetal Juice is back with their signature blend of aggression, dark humor, and groove that will leave you gasping for breath. Grotesque is a cataclysmic ode to the very essence of extreme metal, offering listeners a harrowing journey through a maelstrom of brutality. Foetal Juice's lyrical content is as darkly humorous as ever, providing a wickedly entertaining contrast to the musical onslaught. Each track on Grotesque is a violent masterpiece, meticulously crafted to deliver a relentless assault on your senses.

Head Voice

Issue # 1 - Autumn 2023

Head Voice

***The debut issue of this new zine founded by BEN CHASNY, DONOVAN QUINN and JAMES TOTH in the spirit of early Tape Op. With features on MATT VALENTINE, PETER LAUGHNER, CHEVAL SOMBRE, NAOMI YANG, KRISTEN GALLERNEAUX and JASON QUEVER. 8.25" x 6". 84 pages. "Welcome to the first issue of Head Voice, a collaborative effort to discuss music and sound production that Donovan Quinn, James Toth, and I, find interesting. We were sitting around talking about how it would be cool if there was a zine that dealt with more underground musicians and unorthodox styles of recording and realized that instead of complaining that there wasn’t a publication like we wanted, we needed to do it ourselves. The world seems to be overflowing with tips and tricks and how-to-do-this and how-to-do-that, but we’re more interested in the music. We plan on talking to both musicians who record themselves and people who record others. We want to write about the joy of recording while keeping in mind the primacy of the music. That’s what is most important to us. Thank you for reading."—Ben Chasny

Hamburger, Neil

Presents Seasonal Depression Suite

Drag City

***The curtain rings down on 2023, and so much more, with the proverbial “Opus You Didn’t Know You Were Waiting For”—a new musical from Erik Paparozzi and Gregg Turkington—and the first-ever Drag City Christmas/Holiday album—Neil Hamburger Presents Seasonal Depression Suite. Through the lens of various guests stuck in a perfectly average chain-hotel during the holiday season, wallowing in self-pity and paranoia, reliving personal catastrophes both real and imagined, or simply trying to use the hotel vending machine. Influenced by everything from Thom Bell to Tommy to the trollish misery of Trip Advisor reviews, Seasonal Depression Suite provides another entry in the sprawling satirical critique of America that Turkington has been engaged in with his multifarious enterprises and collaborations since the early 90s. Features an all-star cast including: Neil Finn (Split Enz, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac), Annabella Lwin (Bow Wow Wow), Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls), Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, acclaimed singer/ performance artist Puddles Pity Party, voice actress Natalie Peyser, J.P. Hasson (Pleaseeasaur), enigmatic vocalist (and Frank Sinatra’s granddaughter) A.J. Lambert, Paparozzi himself and, of course, Neil Hamburger.

Cult Of Lip

Fuzz & Feedback Freaks

Kitschy Spirit

***CULT OF LIP is a Madison, WI based psych-rock band. Formed in Minneapolis in 2012, Cult of Lip continues to delve into the depths of ethereal washed-out shoegazing pop. Fuzz & Feedback Freaks compiles their past three EP’s into one release. Ronnie Lee constructs layers of thick noise and luscious guitar tones to envelope Hannah Porter’s dream-like vocals and driving bass.

False Maria

s/t

Helen Scarsdale Agency

If the white male hegemonic forces truly want to find a threat in queer, non-gender conforming art and music, that threat is manifest in False Maria. Heresies, transgressions, psychic self-immolation, and sexual deviance run amok with the litany of confessionals told by this unlikely proposition. According to False Maria, "this is the sound of addictions battled, abuse endured and lovers lost." Two entities exist with False Maria: the Los Angeles creature of the night Jhane P (she/her) and the mercurial Tomasz C (they/them) from the UK. For the past several years, their transcontinental conjurings have resulted in a steady stream of splits and self-released short-runs, all on cassette. Compositionally, False Maria leans into seasick tape loops and samples that ooze out of the more monstrous forms of Premature Ejaculation or even the Los Angeles Free Music Society (i.e. Solid Eye, Le Forte Four) with Jhane's vocal recitations of sex crimes and trauma leading the dance. With their eponymous debut for the Helen Scarsdale Agency, False Maria presents an opus of untidy, post-industrial malaise across this sprawling double cassette album. In comparison to their first fruits, this body of work shows a tremendous leap in production value with adventurous drum and synth programming that seeks to pull blood from the air with a sonic alchemy adjacent to Coil. The pulsing slink from "NHI : No Humans Involved" finds Jhane's vocals entwined with those of Himukalt's Ester Kärkkäinen, the Vegas death-industrialist cast from an equally tragic history of sexual anguish. By...

Socarras, Jorge & Mel Odom

The Archaeology of Eros

Dark Entries

Homoerotic poetry and art appear throughout the world’s civilizations for millennia. The Archeology of Eros, the first published collection of poems from cult music figure Jorge Socarras, taps into that continuum together with the collaboration of acclaimed artist Mel Odom. Each body of work representing a lifetime reflecting on and celebrating homoerotic desire and romantic sensibility, Socarras’ intimate love poems and Odom’s evocative drawings are beautifully juxtaposed in this elegantly designed book. Straddling the sensual and the archetypal, the contemporary and the classical, poetry and art join forces in exploring the mystery and wonder of Eros, affirming that same-sex desire has lived before even as it flourishes now. Jorge Socarras is known for his 1970s collaboration with pioneering synthesizer musician Patrick Cowley as the duo Catholic, as singer-frontman of the 1980s avant-rock group Indoor Life, and as half of the ongoing musical duo Fanatico. He was also cofounder of the Silence=Death Collective, the AIDS activist group that in 1987 created the eponymous poster design and slogan. Mel Odom’s award-winning art has graced numerous book covers and magazines since the 1970s, has been the subject of two books, and has been exhibited in galleries and art institutions, including in collaboration with gay literary icon Edmund White. The Archeology of Eros is the first creative collaboration between longtime friends Socarras and Odom. A portion of sales proceeds will go to the Visual Aids organization.

Marder, Marlene

Kleenex / LiLiPUT

Thrilling Living

***In 1986, guitarist Marlene Marder published a German-language diary documenting her time in Kleenex/LiLiPUT, Zurich’s first all-female band. Thrilling Living is proud to offer a lavishly illustrated English-language edition, featuring over 200 images, including fanzines, interviews, flyers, and photographs, and updated with a new introduction and afterword by editor Grace Ambrose and translator Jen Calleja in addition to the original foreword by Greil Marcus. This is the most extensive document of this influential group, unparalleled in its depth and candor. Neither memoir nor scrapbook, but something defiantly in the middle, Kleenex/LiLiPUT is a compelling example of what it looks like to document one’s own life, and all the insights and messiness that entails. This project is an interpretation, a translation, a republication, an attempt to expand and enhance Marlene’s unruly original. First released by Nachbar der Welt Verlag, the publishing imprint that preceded Edition Patrick Frey, Thrilling Living is proud to make this important story accessible in English for the first time. Designed by Conor Lumsden and produced in a one-time edition of 2000 copies, this 288 page, 8.25” x 11.25” book is beautifully offset printed in Belgium by Die Keure

Bendlin, Brian & Linda Smith

Opposite Of Shadow

Bamboo Dart Press

***Opposite of Shadow, a collaboration between old friends (and former THE WOODS bandmates) LINDA SMITH (artwork) and BRIAN BENDLIN (writing), is an exploration of place, time, memory, and the natural world. It is the companion book to Brian Bendlin’s music CD 13 Groves. Linda and Brian have been friends and collaborators for almost forty years. An album of mid-1980s tracks by their band the Woods, So Long Before Now, is available from Dot Matrix / Modern Harmonic. Linda Smith began making music in Baltimore during the early 1980s with various bands. Following a move to New York City in 1984, she formed The Woods with Brian Bendlin, Peggy Bitzer, and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. After purchasing a four-track cassette machine during that time, Linda began to record her songs at home; from 1987 to 2001 she released music on such labels as Harriet, Feel Good All Over, Slumberland, Shrimper, and her own Preference label. In 2021 Captured Tracks released a vinyl collection of her home recordings titled Till Another Time. Since then she has returned to recording new music, with Untitled 1-10 Plus 1 (Almost Halloween Time Records), and A Passing Cloud, a collaboration with Nancy Andrews (Grapefruit/Gertrude). She received an MFA in visual art from Vermont College of Fine Art in 2008. Brian Bendlin moved to New York City from the Midwest in the 1980s. He was the first drummer for the band Crash, and has been a drummer and percussionist in numerous bands and ensembles, including Robin Crutchfield’s Dark Day,...

Ragana

Desolation's Flower

Flenser

Ragana is a duo whose members alternate duties on drums, guitar, and vocals to produce some of the most unique and affecting dark music in metal today. The two-piece came together in 2011 in the DIY punk scene of Olympia, WA and are now based in Olympia and Oakland, CA. In their time together so far, Ragana have self-released five albums and teamed up with genre-favourite Thou for a split release in 2018. The following year, Ragana released their heralded We Know That The Heavens Are Empty EP and have quietly been working on new music ever since. The band signed with The Flenser in late 2022 and now present their forthcoming debut album for the label, Desolation’s Flower. On Desolation’s Flower, Ragana draws upon a number of influences from the flora and fauna of their Pacific Northwest origins to the darkly nostalgic folk of Mt. Eerie and, yes, their Olympian forebears Wolves In The Throne Room, synthesising them into an experimental, highly idiosyncratic take on black metal. Held together by an intense focus on raw emotion and haunting atmospherics, Ragana shifts seamlessly from tender, mesmerising vocal harmonies to piercing, heart-ripping screams and back again, yielding music that is heavy, beautiful and punishing all at once. Written over the past few tumultuous years, Desolation’s Flower is the band’s most devastating effort to date, containing seven incantations of loss, rage, pain and hope. Expertly engineered by the masterful Nicholas Wilbur at the Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington (Planning For Burial, drowse,...

Moeller, Brendon

Pathways

Constellation Tatsu

***Pathways is the new album by renowned electronic music artist Brendon Moeller. Known for his innovative fusion of deep techno, dub, and ambient sounds, Moeller once again pushes the boundaries of the genre. Brendon grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Throughout his childhood and teenage years, he learned piano and drums, finding particular inspiration in the music of artists such as Fela Kuti, My Bloody Valentine, De La Soul and Kraftwerk. However, it was not until 1993, when Brendon moved to New York City, that his own individual style began to develop. With NYC as his base, he has worked with several prominent labels and collaborated with artists like Mikey Dread, Speedy J, Mutabaruka and MATRiXXMAN. With dozens of EPs, singles and albums to his name, Brendon’s love for experimenting with sound has created an endless source of inspiration to continuously self-reflect and advance his music. Brendon is consistently striving to reinvent himself and skillfully influence the dub scene in the process.

Monokle

Ultraflowers

Constellation Tatsu

***Ultraflowers is the new album by Monokle, the acclaimed Russian electronic music producer and composer based in St. Petersburg. Known for his distinctive blend of ambient, glitch, and experimental sounds, combined with great energy. Monokle crosses many stylistic boundaries but always remains recognizable by his melodic, warm and eclectic electronica-based sound.

Onodera, Yui And Takashi Kokubo

Thousand Bells

Constellation Tatsu

***Yui Onodera and Takashi Kokubo are two visionary artists hailing from Japan, known for their exceptional ability to create captivating and immersive sonic experiences. The compositions seamlessly blend Yui Onodera's minimalist sensibilities with Takashi Kokubo's mastery of traditional Japanese instrumentation, creating a sonic tapestry that transports listeners to a realm of serenity and introspection. Grammy-nominated Takashi Kokubo is a veteran musician, composer, and sound designer who has played a significant role in shaping the ambient music landscape in Japan. His works have graced film scores, installations, and solo albums, earning him a dedicated global following. Yui Onodera is a composer, sound artist, and producer known for his deep understanding of minimalism and ambient aesthetics. He has released numerous works on esteemed labels like KOMPAKT, Room40 and more.

Sage, M. & Zander Raymond

Parayellowgram

Moon Glyph

***Parayellowgram is a collaboration between M. Sage & Zander Raymond. Raymond is a visual artist & synthesist based out of Chicago and Sage is a musician & educator in Colorado. Their duo work is dewy and lush; trickling modular synths dance among piano, clarinet, field recordings, violin, percussion and baritone guitar. Exhibiting patience and measured thinking, 'Parayellowgram' adeptly crafts pastoral environments through intricate details and skillful variations, enhancing the repetition with a refined touch. The ideal soundtrack for slowing down and observing the natural world.

Display Of Decay

Vitriol

Gore House Productions

***Prepare for an unrelenting assault on your senses as Edmonton's very own death metal titans, Display of Decay, unleash their latest masterpiece, Vitriol. Drawing inspiration from the early death metal pioneers like Cannibal Corpse, Malevolent Creation, and Cryptopsy, Display of Decay has crafted an album that pays homage to the brutal and aggressive roots of the genre while infusing their own unique sickness into the mix. Vitriol is an auditory journey into a realm of relentless brutality, where thundering drums, guttural vocals, and savage guitar riffs converge to create a sonic onslaught that leaves no room for compromise. The album's title aptly captures the corrosive nature of the music contained within—a raw, unfiltered expression of musical aggression that grips you from the very first note and doesn't let go.

V/a

Imaginational Anthem XII: I Thought I Told You - A Yorkshire Tribute to Michael Chapman

Tompkins Square

***Michael Chapman (1941-2021) released his debut album Rainmaker in 1969 on Harvest. He went on to release over fifty albums and influence many with his evocative songwriting and guitar prowess. From heady jams to expressive ballads to experimental noise, Chapman’s work continues to inspire. Tompkins Square recruited Henry Parker to curate a collection of covers by working musicians from Chapman’s home turf in Northern England. With stunning artwork by local artist Bunty Marshall mapping the important places in Michael’s life, this 12th volume of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem series is the ultimate tribute to a very dearly missed artist.

Maggot Brain

Issue # 14

Maggot Brain

***Maggot Brain is a full-color, quarterly magazine edited by noted Detroit scribe MIKE MCGONIGAL: 100+ pages packed with phenomenal content—art, music, literature, unpublished archival material, and more—with a simple promise to only exist on the printed page. The cover features the new cover design with an unseen photo of Anthology of American Folk Music hero HARRY SMITH gracing the cover, plus an archival interview with Black Mountain / Bauhaus fabric arts pioneer ANNI ALBERS, the reissue of a forgotten LOU REED album, CAT POWER's sense of humor, and tributes to RODRIGUEZ and PEE-WEE HERMAN.

Torn The Fuck Apart

Kill. Bury. Repeat.

Gore House Productions

***Prepare for an auditory onslaught as Torn The Fuck Apart unleashes their highly anticipated fifth studio album, Kill. Bury. Repeat. This Kansas City death metal trio once again proves why they are at the forefront of the genre, combining technical precision, relentless brutal blast beats, and a blood-curdling storytelling that will send shivers down your spine. Kill. Bury. Repeat. is a horrifying journey through the darkest corners of the human psyche. With each track, the band weaves intricate tales of murder, madness, and mayhem, immersing listeners in a world where nightmares come to life. From the guttural growls to the searing guitar work, the musicianship displayed on this album is unparalleled, showcasing the band's mastery of their craft.

Acid Twilight

Shadow Wrangler

Not Not Fun

Argentine modal master Acid Twilight’s third raga saga maps a dusty plain of tumbleweeds, circling vultures, and bleached bones, across which rides a nameless stranger: Shadow Wrangler. Inspired by visions of high noon dread and the textures of psychedelic twang, they turned westward, layering shakers, synths, spurs, and six-string navigations into 12 crooked canyon instrumentals. Shades of spaghetti western, Spacemen 3, and outlaw country whisper in the wind, but ultimately AT’s mode is more silhouette than song, at the axis of campfire jam and commune improv. Loping and loose, windswept and waterless, blowing over the sand of trails long since vanished. Another smoke signal rises in the distance; another scorpion sunset begins to dim. The Wrangler rides on.

Hugh B

Live From The Gonsch

Not Not Fun

Live From The Gonsch showcases Sydney head (and O.T.I.S. label boss) Hugh Burridge aka Hugh B’s lesser known domestic dub mode, low-slung and low volume, tracked on headphones during hidden hours, often with his daughter strapped to his chest. The album’s eight cuts are built from rhythmic modular loops layered with snaky bass, swampy guitar, and occasional hazed vocals, dub-mixed to 2-track cassette through hand-built FX (Burridge runs a boutique delay pedal business). The mood throughout is loose, soupy, and slippery, shaded in echo and spring reverb, glimpsed through tall grass. The title alludes to Burridge’s recently retired Skylab radio show, “Mornings From The Gonsch,” which repped a spectrum of home recorded modes, from bedroom dub to hybrid new age to lost synth songcraft. Here he blends these muses into a woozy fusion all his own, dub-adjacent daydreams of time, money, stasis, and absence, hummed and half-heard beneath a bleached blue sky.

Axis: Sova

Blinded By Oblivion

God?

***Chicago's Axis: Sova hit the beaches of southern California with Ty Segall to make a total hi-fi classic. Often feral and consistently catchy, Blinded By Oblivion is lit up with interlocking drum kit + drum machine, adventuresome guitar, bass, and harmonic vocals on every song. Icy lyrical perspectives, rendered in a sunshiny natural paradise, transmit the fun and fraud of human polarities with urgency and an occasional eye roll. PLAY LOUD.

Maida, Sal / Mitchell Cohen & Friends

(Vol. 2) The White Label Promo Preservation Society: More Flop Albums You Need To Know

Hozac

***The White Label Promo Preservation Society returns with another collection of essays celebrating albums that fell short of cracking Billboard’s top 100, but belong in the libraries of discerning music-obsessives. Among the artists who turn up in these pages are members of the pop, rock and soul pantheon, as well as many who remain obscure or underappreciated. Sal Maida and Mitchell Cohen and their dozens of contributors take a trip from the Kinks and the Beach Boys to the Violent Femmes and Teardrop Explodes. Get ready to spend your money at used vinyl stores, garage sales and flea markets. 383 pages. First edition of 600 copies. "The ultimate treasure map for striking gold in used record stores"—VictimofTime.com

Optic Sink

Glass Blocks

Feel It

***Expanding on the magnetic, minimalist post-punk frontier first chartered on their 2020 Goner debut, Optic Sink return with their second album, Glass Blocks. Hot on the heels of their recent EP on Spacecase Records, the Memphis trio of Natalie Hoffmann, Ben Bauermeister, and Keith Cooper ventured out to Lawrence, Kansas to record at the home studio of Caufield Schnug (Sweeping Promises). The resulting seven originals and a rendition of LiLiPUT's A Silver Key Can Open An Iron Lock, Somewhere define Optic Sink and their remarkable style with a clarity and power seldom realized in a studio setting. Hoffmann and Bauermeister command the high end of the mix with a gamut of perfectly dialed synth and percussive tones while Cooper's bass serves as rhythmic anchor. There's far more to dive into, whether it's the cold, driving beat of "Modelesque" or the minimal, percussive brilliance heard on "Glass Blocks". Perhaps the best part of the formula is the sheer amount of natural energy that gleams through the mix. Like a warm refraction of musical chemistry and originality, Optic Sink have struck gold with Glass Blocks.

Leopardo

Solo Recordings 2019-2022

Feel It

"Tasked with creating the idyllic segues of Wes Anderson’s new reboot of The Shining, Romain Savary puts you in a box with a fox, a computer from 1998 and a bottle of port. It isn’t garden variety, it’s simply a garden; there are bulbous purples and meek yellow-oranges, and where they begin and end is anyone’s guess. It isn’t the pastoral Impressionism of the prior Leopardo LP, on which you can almost hear the sunshine, taste the mountain tops. Just as the Velvets often lived in the oblivion of sunbeams, Leopardo knows the finer things in life are quiet anticipation, rigorous conversation on a scenic drive, minneolas, gusts of wind. Like with the band Cheveu (remember?) you can’t help speculating on a film out of tunes like “Temperature”. There are people who enjoy reading Rimbaud on oceanic vacation as much as they like blowing lines off a washing machine in a Midwest winter basement, and this is for that type of lifer."—Brandon Gaffney

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Escorts

Feel It

***So long as there has been madness, there has been art that tries to arrest its shape, art that tries to capture its lack of coherency and fashion something beautiful out of the stupidity. On Escorts, Advertisement leans into the romance of such foolish, magical thinking. The LP—their second, following 2020’s American Advertisement—is an impressionistic ode to the tragic comedy of contemporary life. Advertisement metabolizes the sounds of good nights gone awry with startling clarity, shifting effortlessly from glossy, leather-doused glam rock to glitching, Kraut-inspired spirals, Scott Walker-tinged empty pub revelries to industrialized club loops. Running off the back of American Advertisement, as well as a string of standalone singles with Hardly Art Records and Fire Talk Records, Advertisement devoted the bulk of the intervening years between LPs to touring alongside the likes of The War on Drugs, Surfbort, Sheer Mag, Spiritual Cramp, and Narrow Head. Throughout the course of the American Advertisement tour cycle, the band became increasingly disaffected with the stylistic limitations of the live band oriented, English-invasion-meets-Americana rock ethos that defined their first LP. In search of something more formally exciting, Advertisement scattered across the country, landing in between Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City. They proceeded to piece together the tracks for Escorts in a piecemeal fashion, passing a slurry of Frankensteined home-demos back and forth over email in what became a slow, methodical exchange of ideas. Advertisement reconvened in Los Angeles during the summer of 2022 to record Escorts, enlisting the help of engineer/mixer...

X.Y.R.

Memory Tapes

Not Not Fun

Vladimir Karpov’s latest X.Y.R. saga frames its gaze on the rose-colored remembrance of things past: lost summers, starlit swims, young love, distant dreams. Memory Tapes acts as both soundtrack and ceremony, spun from soft-focus synths, muted metronomes, and flickering amber light. Originally issued by Russian hub Fuselab, the NNF edition includes a track not on the Russian physical edition (“Rybinsk Lake Shelter”), a track ONLY on the physical edition (“Surf’s Up”), plus an extended mix of “Happy Thoughts,” along with a revised j-card design. Another wispy, whispered vision of veiled realms and reveries by one of the 21st century’s supreme summoners.

Flat Worms

Witness Marks

God?

***Hitting flat and hard with their bass-drums-guitar and vocals alignment, Flat Worms use a buzzing combo of blunt force and surreal lyrics to hammer the absurdity of the status quo, as it deserves. Our social experiment continues to implode before our eyes; Witness Marks offers both critique and compassion, with songs that corkscrew through shades of exhilarating, dizzying and ambiguous spaces in between times of crisis and complacency.

Shine Grooves

Watching The Breeze

100% Silk

Yekaterinburg musician Andrey Kurokhtin operates in intertwined capacities – producer, engineer, synth and drum machine technician, label boss (of hand-stamped “non-commercial music” imprint Hanagasumi), electronica shopkeeper – but his passions collide in the microcosmic reveries of Shine Grooves. Watching The Breeze collects 13 cuts composed across a decade of activity for an expansive portrait of the project’s signature chemistry of minimalist rhythms and whispered emotion. Woozy, windswept, and flecked with grit, the tracks zoom in and out of delicate flux, triangulating liquid acid, deprivation chamber house, and the outer reaches of dub techno. Hints of Kompakt, Basic Channel, and glitched radio transmissions flicker in its ether, but ultimately WTB maps a groove shinier and more scattered, lost blossoms from a life behind the lights, attuned to the invisible.