“The Gagmen are Aaron Dilloway, Nate Young, Joachim Nordwall and Dilloway's old pal Andrew W.K, here grouping together for an almighty, previously unreleased LP of atavistic headwreckers of the most fucked and unnerving calibre - completely unmissable for fans of Wolf Eyes, Dilloway’s ‘Modern Jester’, Nate Young’s ‘Regression’ sessions, or anyone looking to ignite/summon new//dark energy. Put three of experimental music’s gnarliest dudes, and their pals, in a room and this is what you get; 40 minutes of charred and gungy electronics with tormented vocals that sound like they just crawled out of a Brooklyn sewer. If you’re remotely familiar with anyone on board, or their various actions between the charts and the gutter, your expectations will be met side-on with seriously some of the most engrossing levels of raw tape manipulation and throttled analog synths that you’ll likely ever hear, harking back to their respective pinnacles of this era;- from Nate Young’s now classic ‘Regression’ seshes, to the body gurns of Dilloway’s ‘Modern Jester’, and Nordwall’s crushing ‘Monstrance’ collaboration with Mika Vainio. A Swedish newspaper wrote “What the hell is this?”, in a review of The Gagmen’s debut gig in a posh Stockholm hotel, which should already have you sold, but keener ears will no doubt be already primed for the calibre of grot on offer from these dons of the trip metal underground. The mode is slanted and chemically enchanted, with Andrew W.K. sounding like he’s partied too hard on his pair of severely blunted...
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11/27/2020
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11/27/2020
“Ancient Indonesian tradition meets doom metal in profoundly Ur ways on Stephen O’Malley and Senyawa’s collaborative commission for choreographer Gisèle Vienne, highly recommended if you’re into Sunn O))), Keiji Haino, Nazoranai, Phurpa, KTL. Following a decade of creative bonds forged between theatre director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne and doom sayer Stephen O’Malley that spans multiple soundtracks (solo and with Peter Rehberg in KTL) and visual artworks, the pair travelled to Indonesia on a commission to explore the country’s rich culture in 2018. They immersed in a magical world of performative rituals where they encountered Wukir Suryadi, an experimental musician and instrument builder whose acclaimed releases both solo and as half of Senyawa have invigorated the avant and experimental rock scene over the past decade. The six tracks of ’Bimi Sakti’ document groundbreaking ventures between Senyawa and O’Malley, yielding an incredibly powerful mix of electric guitar and bass guitar amp worship blended with the remarkable range of tonalities from Senyawa’s custom-built bambuwukir, plus traditional pipes and possessed vocals. Practically without precedent in the modern musical sphere, the 44’ release speaks to a resounding mutuality and common musical philosophy between two musicians who are usually geographically separated by a hemisphere. Slow to start, but culminating in a wholly dilated musical vision, the performance effectively collapses eons of musical practice and thought into a singular yet timeless expression of beauty and anguish that transcends the sum of its parts. Fleshing out the frequency spectrum between flighty, avian flutes and sprawling subharmonic...
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07/24/2020
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07/24/2020
“Spanning proper techno artillery, Trance riffs and noise excursions, ’Melody Depleted’ expands on the ruffcut but classy ideas put forth on her tapes and 12”s for the likes of Peder Mannerfelt Production, Börft and Jacktone over the past half decade. It serves a broad but singular showcase of her ability to generate club punishing rhythms, barely-tamed electronic noise and surprisingly sensitive ambient space probes that revel in electronic music’s capacity to evoke fine spectra of technoid feelings with a say it-without-saying-it instrumental finesse. In an emotive arc that takes in crude, rushy rave futurism (‘Im Laughing’) thru to dark, bolshy industrial tekkers (‘The Harm That I Dream For You’) and an outstanding nine minute finale of deep distance ambient hypnagogia (‘Hypnic Jerk’), Isabella’s first album most deftly transposes a sense of pre-millenial late ‘90s techno warehouse dread into a world dealing with its own register of worries. And like the work of Jasss, Nkisi or Helena Hauff, Isabella proves highly adept at translating the most vital, if elusive, aspects of her reference points with a totally fearless, up-to-date but timeless swerve. Big hitters like the Peder Mannerfelt-esque breakbeat techno ballistics of ‘Roll Doll’, the wide-eyed, doomy trample of ‘Organ’ and the Stingray-meets-Colin Stetson styles of ‘Take One And Two’ share space with full on EBM techno boosters in ‘Send’ and ‘Mind Tear’, while the roiling synth noise of ‘Mnesia’ and the Drexciyan organism of ‘Through The Kitchen’ diffract her vision into adjacent areas of experimentation that make for a murkily...
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05/01/2020
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05/01/2020
“Slowdive’s Simon Scott debuts his new ‘Index' project with a visceral new sound that absorbs and transmutes political, ecological and psychic dread into a caustic, dissonant style of drone and textural sculpture for iDEAL Recordings, a worthy follow-up to last year’s ’The Sacrificial Code’ album release on the label by Kali Malone. Recorded in Los Angeles between 2016 and 2019, and featuring the voice of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, it’s a multi-layered album that comes highly recommended if you’re into anything from Throbbing Gristle to Ilpo Väisänen, Arthur Russell to Basic Channel. ‘Kainos’ sees the veteran UK composer, field recordist, drummer and mastering engineer explore a prism of formative musical influences from the post-industrial music of Coil, Throbbing Gristle and early Black Sabbath, to the non-musical and conceptual inspiration taken from the turmoil of Brexit - including recordings of the Houses of Parliament - thru to the radical feminist scientific writing of Donna Haraway, and the conceptual vigour of Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto, ‘The Art of Noises’. The album’s title ‘Kainos’, from the ancient Greek meaning “new” or “fresh”, characterises Scott’s efforts to glean something practical from the world’s current state of chaos, enacting a tectonic shift from bucolic sonic signifiers to signposts of the post-industrial world that could hardly be more apt at at a time when electronic and ambient music are prized for their safe and sterile wallpaper qualities, rather than a potential to evoke and invoke more powerful feelings. Based around modular synth-mangled recordings of the Houses...
MP3 $9.90
03/06/2020
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03/06/2020
“‘In Demons In!’ offers a transfixing peek behind the curtain of pure black hole drone dynamics by visionary collaborators Jim O’Rourke & CM Von Hausswolff, meeting on common ground after 26 years of international correspondence. It amounts to a vitally definitive entry in both artists’ catalogues, marking right up there with the most engrossing wonders of O’Rourke’s Steamroom volumes, while manifesting some of the most fascinating results from Von Hausswolff’s ongoing investigations into drone music’s paranormal properties. In other words: it’s Grade A+ zoner music, essential listening for followers of Roland Kayn, Jaap Vink, Deathprod. Initiated in Tokyo 2016 and completed over the proceeding two years in Japan and Sweden, the uncompromisingly adventurous results are galactic in scope and visceral in presence, conjuring scales of abyssal bass and diffused, atomised, abstract dark matter that make the listener feel like a speck of stardust floating in infinity. Using sound as a magickal tool for psychic transport and to finely model notions of the metaphysical that typically elude human comprehension, these two extended pieces feel to collapse billions of years into a glacial moment. Location recordings made in Kathmandu lend a barely-there iridescence, like microbial filaments flickering in the endless darkness, to their plunging, subharmonic basses and vaporised mid-upper registers, where spectral forces comb thru the piece to very gradually alter the weightless keen of our perception. It’s a masterclass in Cybernetic drone, a universe of sound created in a closed system gradually shifting within its own parameters, mutating into infinity.”—Boomkat
MP3 $7.99
05/31/2019
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05/31/2019
“Rich, multi-layered vocal studies and shortwave electronics from avant-garde polymath John Duncan (LAFMS, collaborator with Pan Sonic, Chris & Cosey, Jim O’Rourke and countless others), bolstered by synths, drum machines and arrangements by Joachim Nordwall. Highly recommended if you’re into anything from Scott Walker and Pere Ubu to Jay Glass Dubs, Coil and Ilpo Väisänen’s classic Liima Versions. Venerable avant-garde composer John Duncan follows his prized cycle of cover versions ‘Bitter Earth’ [2016] with ‘Conventional Wisdom’; a truly beguiling suite of original, stony avant-blooz songs produced in collaboration with iDEAL boss Joachim Nordwall, and marking another high point in both of their respective catalogues. After coming out as a vocalist to memorably striking effect in 2016, Duncan compounds the effect by placing his original lyrics in stark arrangements ranging from shortwave radio-streaked dark ambient settings and Mika Vainio-esque isolationism, to deathly dubs driven by Nordwall’s rugged rhythms in a style that heavily recalls Jay Glass Dubs’ recent ‘Epitaph’ LP. An original and close associate of LAFMS co-founder Tom Recchion, and collaborator with everyone from Chris & Cosey to Asmus Tietchens, Merzbow and Andrew Mckenzie (The Hafler Trio), Duncan is well versed in the art of f*cking with music. Doing so since the ‘70s, it’s only in recent years that more “typical” song structures have crept into his style with most transfixing effect, gathering the attention of many who previously weren’t necessarily exposed to his music. Whether stemming from a perverse pleasure in twisting popular music, or a matter of...
MP3 $9.90
05/24/2019
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05/24/2019
“Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, controversial occultist and iconic founding member of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, brings to a close a series of collaborations with Carl Abrahamsson which now spans three decades and which finds P-Orridge narrating over immaculate ambient tapestries, delivered at time-dilating pace. Electing to use their own names, ’Loyalty Does Not End With Death’ is the final part of a spoken word trilogy initiated in 1990 with the Psychick TV & White Stains side ’At Stockholm’, and proceeded by their ‘Wordship’ [2004] album as Thee Majesty & Cotton Ferox, and is the first appearance the pair have had together on vinyl. It’s the sound of two cosmically-travelled minds crossing paths again after a long absence in which they’ve been able to chew over the bare essentials - love and magick - via vibrant poetry and beautifully charged forms of ambient music. In nine parts they conjure a warmly meditative space, where Abrahamsson’s characteristic tones, cut-up electronics and gentle rhythms comfortably lay the bed for Genesis, who inhabits and enlivens the pristine scenes like an observant dark interpreter, translating the incomprehensible and revealing the divine through their psychedelic prism. The spellbinding results were recorded in New York and Stockholm 2017/18 and could feasibly have occurred at any point between 1990 and now. They are blessed with a pacing, intuition and timelessness that pays testament to an enduring creative friendship, taking the form of writing, interviews, photographs and film for nearly 35 years, bringing to resolution...
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04/26/2019
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04/26/2019
“Epic, brilliantly curated two hour collection of new and exclusive material celebrating iDEAL Recordings' (1998-2018) 20th anniversary featuring JASSS, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke (an epic 17 minute trance-enducer - honestly worthy of its own LP), Ectoplasm Girls, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Prurient, Puce Mary and many others... We always say this - we hate comps - they’re almost always shite - but this one’s a bit of a mindmelter, featuring 20 new and exclusive tracks commissioned by label bossman Joachim Nordwall to celebrate the occasion of his label’s 20th anniversary, almost 1 track per year of going against the grain. Trust when we say that Nordwall's selection skills and sprawling network of interconnected artists has yielded a frankly ridiculous tracklisting, including a 17+ minute steamroom special from Jim O’Rourke, a pulsing electroacoustic killer from Stephen O’Malley, a rare new hookup between Prurient and Carlos Giffoni, brand new ambient/field recording peach from JASSS, an amazing fizzing drone tribute to Folke Rabe by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, plus Puce Mary and Jesse Sanes aka JH1.FS3 on fine fine form, and just too many others to mention - over two hours of exceptional music. The story of iDEAL starts out in London 1998, when Nordwall was living the hardscrabble life: working in an underwear shop near Liverpool Street station; living in a filthy Bayswater apartment; scoring industrial records from the Music and Video Exchange; getting drunk in cheap pubs, and dreaming of starting a new record label and platform. He called it...
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11/16/2018
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11/16/2018
Ectoplasm Girl Nadine Byrne returns with her first solo album in 4 years, a woozy, unnerving and dreamlike soundworld somewhere between Laurie Anderson, James Ferraro and Ryan Trecartin. Huge recommendation...Ectoplasm Girls’ Nadine Byrne lures listeners into woozy mental states on Dreaming Remembering, her soundtrack to a short film of the same name, providing a solo follow-up to A Different Gesture: Collected Soundtracks 2011-2012, and her first outing since Ectoplasm Girls’ New Feeling Come [2016], which were both issued by Joachim Nordwall’s ever-incredible iDEAL Recordings.One of three Stockholm-based Byrne sisters along with Tanya, her partner in Ectoplasm Girls, and Ambra, who has recently provided EG’s live visuals, Nadine operates at the intersection of intuitive sonic and visual arts. Where Ectoplasm Girls tend to a bewitched sort of industrial experimentation, Nadine’s personal work is defined in terms of its relative, mutable electronic sleight of hand, with vocals handled by the mysterious Sarah Kim.As the title connotes, Dreaming Remembering is about intimate reflection and the space between awareness and uncertainty of recollection. In that noumenal gooch, Nadine works an incredible freeform, uncluttered sound best resembling the illusive nature of dreams and their elusive memory. In her mind and out of her machines, they feel out a spectrum ranging from mirage-like vignettes like Atlas thru to curdled proto-techno buzzes and grubby drone intonations with wickedly possessed vocals.Extracted from the visuals the material here has a cumulative effect that mesmerises and unsettles throughout the album, bringing us out at the other end in a way...
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06/01/2018
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06/01/2018
“The prodigal return of Venezuelan artist Carlos Giffoni to the avant-electronic music scene he was instrumental in shaping with the seminal, hybridising No Fun Fest and No Fun Productions label, which was home to debut releases by Oneohtrix Point Never, and classics from Haswell and Prurient during the late ‘00s to early part of this decade. If yr into 0PN or Keith Fullerton Whitman, this album f u c k i n g r u l e s Carlos’ first new release in 6 years, Vain was drawn from hundreds of hours of improvisations made at his Malibu studio, offering a tumultuous narrative in affective abstract swells and pulsating rhythms that trigger curious sensations and emotions ever familiar to his variegated, extreme, yet essentially organic output. Despite not releasing anything for the past 6 years, Carlos still sounds like he lives and breathes electronic music. Where those ‘noise’ artists who originally played at No Fun Fest and released on his label have arguably carved out major career paths from myriad mutated genres, Carlos’ music still feels captivatingly ancient yet advanced and uncannily hypnotic. In a cascade of minimalist arps and cloud dynamic harmonies, the album’s story starts in the vortex of Vain’s Face and sweeps thru the granular flux of The Desert to a staggering piece of noise techno dissonance in Erase The World, which calves away into the curled plunge of Hands and the anxious needling of We Pay The Price. At the mid-way point it...
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06/01/2018
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06/01/2018
Very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists such as Diseño Corbusier, Xeerox / Krishna Goineau, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, Jasss firmly builds on that heritage with a uniquely pensive balance of percussive suss, synthetic bite and reverberating spatial dynamics that makes her music heavy-as-sin and deliciously deft with it, patently forgoing Industrial music’s angry guy glare in favour of far more feminine and latinate pressure systems. She does so with an aching patience in the opener, Every Single Fish In The Pond, escalating from a lone cymbal motif and location recordings to a pulsating darkroom boldness by the end of an incendiary scene-setter, before really getting her fangs in with the clenched but driving EBM torque of Oral Couture, recalling a spiked Toresch or CTI hovering at the darkroom’s entrance. From here on in a dream sequence of events take place, morphing from febrile, hash-induced triplet pirouettes in Danza thru the martial free jazz/industrial cut-up of Cotton For Lunch, to a definitive apex of sprung, stepping cybergoth in Weightless, with a pause for Alberich-like reflection on Theo Goes Away, before the voodoo rises once again with the druggy swagger of Instantaneous Transmission of Information, and her stoic, blunt-edged mauler, To Eat With Dirty Hands. It’s rare to hear industrial music done with such variation and individual distinction as Weightless, making it shine in a field so often associated with greyscale and monotone signatures. Highly Recommended!
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09/14/2017
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09/14/2017