New Releases

Dat Politics

Powermoon

Tigerbeat6

French electronic band DAT Politics returns to Tigerbeat6 with their brand new EP. The followup to 2012’s Blitz Gazer album, Powermoon sets itself up smoothly in the group’s evolving universe, launching incandescent shooting stars like “Fox Box Sound” and “Trance Mission” alongside gravity-free lullabies like “Boogie Mind” and “Ghost Town.” The final moonquake comes from the collaboration with Drew Daniel’s The Soft Pink Truth on a booty version of “Hold That Pose (My Mother Told Me).” DAT Politics has toured the world extensively since forming in 1999, displaying incredible energy on stage and generating a cult-like enthusiasm for their eminently danceable brand of electro-pop. Founding members Claude Pailliot and Gaëtan Collet are also known for their side projects Tone Rec and Skipp, and have influenced a generation of young electronic composers across the globe. The group has appeared at loads of festivals over the years—Warp label night in England, CTM in Berlin, Sonar in Barcelona, Dour Festival in Belgium, and Donau Festival in Austria—and remixed a bunch of great musicians like Jaga Jazzist, The Blow, Architecture in Helsinki and YACHT.

Warren, Richard

Rich Black Earth

Decimal

Richard Warren returns with the third offering of his very own Ditch Trilogy series of releases, his brand new album ’Rich Black Earth’, released through Decimal Records. Containing lead single track ‘Judgement Seat’, the sound is stripped down to a wrought iron core, revealing an intriguing collision of country soul and primitive apocalyptic blues, Southern Gothic and English romanticism. Over a 15 year career, Warren has amassed a sprawling and mercurial back catalogue, his live shows being described as “Deep blues, almost Lynchian in their haunting twang”. He plays London’s Plough & Harrow on 2nd November. “Channelling that strange post-Elvis, pre-Beatles world of rockabilly and echo - Sun and Joe Meek - and turning it into something different again” --Bucketfull of Brains

Far Out Fangtooth

Borrowed Time

Siltbreeze

Borrowed Time is Far-Out Fangtooth’s second full-length LP for Siltbreeze and follows an excellent one-off seven-inch effort for the HoZac label. In the two years since the band’s debut, Pure & Disinterested, their sound has matured; their direction, finessed. While the first LP carried heavy Sonic Youth / Christian Death vibes, Borrowed Time segues in and out of the fuzz / feedback pop of The Jesus & Mary Chain, the smoldering post-punk darkness of Sort Sol and the crashing, echo-laden psychedelia of Five Day Week Straw People.  Look for the band out on the road in late 2013.

Davis, John

Spare Parts

Shrimper

Spare Parts is the first solo album from singer / songwriter / multi-instrumentalist John Davis since the release of Blue Mountains in 1997. In contrast to his collaborative work with The Folk Implosion, Davis’s solo work in the ’90s was about as solo as solo gets. He played all the instruments and did all of the cover art for records like Pure Night and Leave Home, as well as for assorted singles and compilation tracks. Having been there and done that, Davis charts a new course with Spare Parts, right down to the cover art, which was done by Boston-area painter and photographer Walter Crump. No less than eight musicians and three engineers lend their talents to the ten tracks and 65+ minutes of this double-LP. (Be warned: the songs are long.) Appearing most frequently are drummer and percussionist Jose Medeles (Breeders, 1939 Ensemble, Portland Ore’s Revival Drum Shop) and cellist and violin player Megan Siebe (Anniversaire, Simon Joyner and The Ghosts). Siebe also appears as a member of a trio of backing vocalists that includes Laura Burhenn (Mynabirds, Bright Eyes, The Postal Service) and Sarah Gleason. Simon Joyner produced the strings and backing vocals, and contributes backing vocals himself to the track “Blood Feud.” Mike Friedman plays lap steel on “You Won’t Cry” and “Southwest,” and Chris Deden plays drums on “Upon a Train.” The record was mixed by Brandon Eggleston (Mountain Goats, Swans, Scout Niblet, tUnE-yArDs, Modest Mouse). Spare Parts mines an acoustic singer-songwriter vein while avoiding a...

Rodman-Melchior, Letha

Handbook For Mortals

Siltbreeze

Known by the alias Tretetam, Letha Rodman-Melchior has released singular sound constructs on CDR and cassette since 2008 on such labels as Ikuisuus and Robert & Leopold. For her first-ever vinyl release, she sheds the veneer of mystery and comes clean with this sweeping haboob of sound, as deft and defying as horns on a hen. From the vantage of time and deep insight, some (i.e. Tom Lax) say Tretetam / Rodman-Melchior’s unique audio gems find a middle ground between United Dairies (notably HNAS) and Vanity Records (ditto Mad Tea Party). But why not the let the artist herself fill you in on the Handbook for Mortals backstory? “From early on, I found that I liked listening to blended sounds of familiar things; TV, lawnmowers, children playing outside. I noticed that when I played records, I wouldn’t flip them over because I found comfort in hearing the needle stuck in its groove. “When I lived in Chinatown on Canal Street in New York, I loved to lay in bed and listen to the vendors shouting, blending with the heavy traffic and tiny wind chimes; I would pretend I was someplace else, somewhere I didn’t know. I love that feeling. “I became interested in field recording after hearing Salmon Run by Graham Lambkin, and had found a website called The Quiet American. I began piecing my tracks together under the name Tretetam, and was influenced by Lambkin, Marcel Türkowsky, Emiliano Maggi, Moondog, Maya Deren’s films and more recently Aaron Dilloway’s Modern...

Pampers

S/t

In The Red

After two incredible 7-inch singles released on the band’s own excellent Jack Shack Records, Brooklyn’s Pampers are proud to announce their debut full-length on In The Red. Pampers are a four-piece—two guitars, bass and drums, plus echo-laden vocals—and there’s a postmodern art-punk angle afoot here, yet the band’s relentless, breakneck tempos and all-out aggression tilt more punk than art. Self-described as “thug pop,” the band’s sound is a brutal, psyched-out pummeling with hooks fighting to be heard beneath the din. It’s certainly more thug than pop. Produced by Ben Greenberg of The Men, Pampers’ twelve tracks explode with opener “Eruptions” and don’t let up until “Head Bag” fizzles out in a whirl of guitar noise and equipment buzz. Everything in between is a cavernous whomp of mongoloid vox, primitive drumming and a cloud of warped sonics swirling above the rock ’n’ roll thud.  “I only caught the last song of Pampers’ set and mainly remember them being very, very loud.” —Brooklyn Vegan  “They’re awesome and you all are missing out by not seeing them perform. Seriously, they’re great.” —Impose

Artemiev, Eduard

Solaris Ost

Superior Viaduct

***BACK IN STOCK!!! It’s only appropriate that Solaris, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s psychological sci-fi classic from 1972, contains an equally original and mind-bending score. Solaris explores the inadequacies of time and memory on an enigmatic planet below a derelict space station. To reinforce the film’s chilling setting, Tarkovsky commissioned composer Eduard Artemiev to construct an electronic soundscape reflecting planet Solaris’ amorphous and mysterious surface; Artemiev rose to the challenge with a prophetic work that defies the era’s technological limitations while evoking unparalleled emotional responses even today. Artemiev’s score—centered around variations on Bach’s “Chorale Prelude in F-Minor,” a somber piece for solo organ—sounds majestic alongside dissonant crescendos and formless, ambient tracks. Armed with the massive ANS synthesizer (aptly named after Russian occultist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, who pioneered thought behind the synesthesiatic effects of music), Artemiev drafted sine waves on glass plates for the machine to interpret. The only prototype of the ANS was destroyed shortly after the Solaris soundtrack was recorded. Luckily this artifact of transcendent composition married with technological innovation endures as a masterpiece of early electronic music. Superior Viaduct is honored to present the first-time official release of Artemiev’s original soundtrack for the film (not to be confused with the previously available re-recording of the music). This deluxe package comes with three unique front-cover designs and is recommended for fans of Cluster, Iannis Xenakis, and Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet.

Purling Hiss

Paisley Montage

Richie Records

***A slight return to the red-hot, fried and twisted garage/psych/punk blasts we’ve come to expect from MIKE POLIZZE’s PURLING HISS. He’s way off the leash on this one, up Hiss creek with nobody to paddle home. Recorded in various Philadelphia-area basements and men’s rooms over the course of 2007-11, the sessions were stunted and aborted as each successive borrowed practice amp blew smoke and crapped out under the strain of Polizze’s fiery fret work. Originally a cassette-only release, but just about every tape was quickly scattered and smashed along the Schuykill Expressway after being left on the roof of the tour van. Edition of 500 copies.  

Corrections House

Last City Zero

Neurot Recordings

Corrections House is the collective compulsions of Mike IX Williams (Eyehategod), Scott Kelly (Neurosis), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Sanford Parker (Minsk) and their minister of propaganda, Seward Fairbury. A mysterious cooperative of lost souls, forged unwittingly by the impetuous forces of nature and altered states of consciousness, Corrections House is without control of their destiny.  Debut album Last City Zero conjures an impossible-to-pinpoint kaleidoscopic synthesis of mechanical decomposition, atmospheric abnormalities, and poetic putrefaction. Embracing the unkind, the diseased, the forgotten, the morose, the group’s lush anti-soundscrapes and shadowy verses—at once beautifully hideous, graceful and terrifying—are a direct manifestation of societal ruin and psychological decay.  The transformation of time and space; death begetting life and veils being torn; an imposing dissonance too penetrating to dismiss—Corrections House systematically creates and destroys through audio disease and transcendent musical deconstruction. All things in all ways. There is nothing else.  “[U]nique and devastating” —Invisible Oranges  “It’s both heavy and definitely dirty” —Dig Boston

Wiggin Band, Dot

Ready! Get! Go!

Alternative Tentacles

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Note price increase. The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World quietly debuted 44 years ago and eventually became the crown jewel for outsider music fans for its charming and discordant pop songs. Frank Zappa said The Shaggs were “better than The Beatles” and Kurt Cobain regarded them as “so obviously the real thing.” Now, Shaggs’ singer and songwriter Dot Wiggin is back to break the silence and share her uncommonly cute, uncanny music on her first-ever solo album—a mix of never-recorded Shaggs songs and new classics written by Wiggin and her band! Ready! Get! Go! retains The Shaggs’ essential qualities without missing a beat or trying to recreate what once was. The material ranges from raw, punkish indie to pretty melodies, all with Wiggin’s trademark whimsy. Her lyrics are simple but haunting, without ever becoming formulaic or gimmicky, and her peculiar, sweet voice rolls along the different musical styles with surprising ease, tying Ready! Get Go! together. It is exactly what one wants to hear after a 44-year musical hiatus—something reminiscent of The Shaggs, but refreshingly matured.  “Speed Limit” is a danceable track with a catchy chorus chant that showcases the innocent, fun-loving side of the band, whereas “Boo Hoo” shows their capacity for melancholy. “Speed Limit 2” offers rambunctious and berserk rock ’n’ roll noise that comes as a powerful surprise and delight. “Banana Bike” is an unrecorded Shaggs song given new life with Wiggin’s signature bashfulness. Upbeat and heavyhearted, “The Fella with a Happy Heart,” is another classic...

Enbilulugugal

Noizemongers For Goatserpent

Crucial Blast

Enbilulugugal’s debut album Noizemongers for Goatserpent was a putrid eruption of lo-fi black metal, harsh noise and experimental, anti-musical weirdness, infused with a Black Legions-style mix of invented mythology and garbled language, that arrived with a splat on the black / noise underground in 2004. Originally released as an extremely limited-edition CDR by the now-defunct Rusty Axe label, a home for some of the most demented experimental black metal of the past decade, it has been out of print for nearly a decade. This vicious, hideous mass of churning, blackened hatred and brain-warping chaos has been resurrected as a deluxe double-disc set that features more than an hour and a half of bonus filth, all re-mastered for maximum ear-hate by Enemata Productions, and presented in a new digipack design with artwork from acclaimed underground illustrator Jeff Zornow. The first disc features the original album, a twenty-nine “song” assault of hyper-distorted blasphemy blasted out in minute-long eruptions of noise and violence. Barbaric black metal riffs and monotonous, primitive blast-beats are bathed in corrosive static, while bursts of stomping, catchy punk rock, insane cut-up experiments and harsh electronic noise all surface in Enbilulugugal’s bubbling bouillabaisse of blackened filth. The album still sounds as extreme as it did back when it first came out, and while there’s a perverse, utterly profane sense of humor in the song titles and cranked-up, psychotic visuals, Enbilulugugal was dead serious in its drive toward depravity and extreme violence through black noise.  The other half of the...

Circus Devils

My Mind Has Seen The White Trick

Happy Jack Rock

Founded by Robert Pollard, completed by the Tobias brothers Todd and Tim, Ohio’s Circus Devils have been lurking under the radar since 2001. They’re back with two new albums for 2013, both released on the same day!  The trio continues to stretch their musical muscles on My Mind Has Seen the White Trick, a set of thematically unrelated pieces that at times ventures into jazzier territory. The terrain remains darkly mysterious, as always, with multiple layers to explore and reward the listener on repeated plays. Unlike the trio’s albums of the past, the music was written to match the vocal melodies, instead of the other way around. It may be the birth of a new Circus Devils.

Circus Devils

When Machines Attack

Happy Jack Rock

Founded by Robert Pollard, completed by the Tobias brothers Todd and Tim, Ohio’s Circus Devils have been lurking under the radar since 2001. They’re back with two new albums for 2013, both released on the same day!  On When Machines Attack, the trio delivers a collection of eighteen sonic postcards from a probable future forecasting civilization’s approaching doom and the opportunities to cash in. The cast of improbable characters on display includes the “Controller” who introduces the album, along with Johnny Dart, Bad Earthman, Doberman Wasp, The Brain of the Iron Fist, and more. A satisfyingly unsettling listen from top to bottom (or perhaps unsettlingly satisfying?), it’s perfect for late-night car trips—driving alone, of course. Keep watching the skies!

Circuit Des Yeux

Overdue

Ba Da Bing! / Lewis + Lynn

A few artists have had studios built for themselves—Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios a notable example—but certainly few albums have had studios built for them. Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr and Cave’s Cooper Crain erected USA Studios in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood over a few weeks in January 2013 for the two months of recording sessions that make up Overdue. Founded with the acquisition of a one-inch Otari MX-70 tape deck (modded to 8-track) and a vacancy in a friend’s apartment, the studio endured hundreds of hours over its brief flash of life.  Fohr’s fifth LP under the name Circuit des Yeux (her fourth to see release) weaves a sonic Bildungsroman, documenting the transition from collegiate cloister in pastoral Bloomington, Indiana, to the noisy, haggard Chicago South Side. Even with the hand-constructed baffles and grandmother-sourced quilts thickly covering the walls (and, intermittently, a light crust of sloppy snow), the sounds of Little Village are literally embedded in the recording. The strains of nearby norteños pierce the floorboards and the elevated trains murmur just a few dozen feet from USA Studios’ flawed sanctuary. The songs rise above the din, however—full orchestrations (“Lithonia”) and damaged hallucinations (“Acarina”) alike.  Fans of Fohr’s prior, more experimental work are not catered to with this immeasurably more sophisticated new effort—but nor will they, or any other listener, be disappointed.

Super Wild Horses

Crosswords

Dot Dash

Melbourne duo Super Wild Horses stitch together an intricate patchwork of guitar, drums and keys over dual harmonies and sparse arrangements. Forming the group in 2009, Amy Franz and Hayley McKee have carved a name for themselves locally and internationally as leaders among the lo-fi garage / DIY scene currently exploding out of Australia. In support of their critically lauded debut LP, Fifteen, the pair toured the USA, including a slot at the venerable Goner Fest in Memphis; back home, their on-stage energy put them on festival stages including Big Day Out, Golden Plains and Sydney Festival, and earned them invitations to tour with the likes of Best Coast, Foo Fighters, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, The Drones, Thee Oh Sees, Pond, Dum Dum Girls and Ty Segall. Following the 2010 release of Fifteen, the two-piece took some time to experiment with compositions and textures, adding layers to the more immediate garage sound of their debut. “This time around it was really important to us to allow space for us both to push our song ideas,” says the band. “Rather than just finish a song and whack it straight on the record, we worked more on the structure of each song until we were confident it was in the best shape it could be.” In 2012, Super Wild Horses bunkered down with producer Mikey Young (of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control) and engineer Jack Farley (Twerps, Beaches, St Helens) to complete work on their sophomore...

Exwife

New Colors

Evil Weevil

***Starting as a two piece (drums & guitar), MATT HARVEY and NICK BOLTON added PHIL CONNOR on bass, rounding out the sound of EXWIFE’s New Colors. Dealing with the depressing reality of the present, as the cheerful nostalgia of youth has been pushed to the past, Exwife take influence from loud rock bands like Pissed Jeans and Bleach-era Nirvana as their cue to put together one heckuva solid LP. Limited edition of 500 copies.

Safewords

Safewords

Deranged

***Taking nods from Sisters Of Mercy and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, SAFEWORDS burn the drum machines and chorus pedals on the altar and combine equal parts Wipers and Christian Death to bring you (post-mortem) 11 tracks of catchy death (rock)-(post) punk that will have you locked in your bedroom flipping this piece of wax over and over again ‘til the sky’s gone out.

V/a

Virus 100: Dead Kennedys Tribute

Alternative Tentacles

“In 1992, Alternative Tentacles—the label co-founded by Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra—decided to celebrate its 100th release with the largely in-house DK tribute Virus 100. Solipsism aside, the disc succeeds: Everyone from Neurosis and Napalm Death to Mojo Nixon and L7 contribute renditions of DK’s manic, twangy, hardcore anthems. The approach ranges from faithful to hilariously skewed, though Virus 100’s most infamous track is Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s grinding, funk-industrial version of ‘California Über Alles,’ which first appeared weeks earlier on the band’s debut, Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury. Even Faith No More’s crooning piss-take of ‘Let’s Lynch The Landlord’ works, perhaps because Mike Patton reverse-engineered the treatment that Biafra previously gave Elvis’ ‘Viva Las Vegas.’” —The AV Club (10 Surprisingly Good Tribute Albums)  “… a brilliant tribute album to one of hardcore punk’s all-time greatest bands.” —PunkNews.org

M.O.T.O.

Pack Your Troubles In Dreams

Blast Of Silence / Svart

***Well this is it. Another masterpiece from the master of the obvious PAUL CAPORINO. Pack Your Troubles in Dreams was M.O.T.O.´s first nation themed release and it is now available for the first time on vinyl. Recorded in Australia with members of COSMIC PSYCHOS and THE SPAZZYS. (many Cooper's Black & Tans were consumed during the making of this musical tome). Recorded mostly at Mogadon in Bendigo, and the rest at StaticAttack near Cockatoo. Later mastered by GARRET HAMMOND in Brill Basement studios (USA). Over one year in the making and finally available as a gatefold LP. Here´s what Jay Mazeffect from Blow Up That Radio had to say about this album: "Pack Your Troubles In Dreams is a more raw sounding effort, hearkening back to the many cassette and cd-r releases that M.O.T.O. had put out for so many years (’Ampeg Stud,’ ‘Terramoto,’ and ‘Rock, Roll, And Dismember’ to name a few). It's not quite lo-fi, but it's thrown the sheen applied to ‘No Way Street’ out the window and just tears through these 18 songs with a reckless abandon of a man more concerned with rocking then worrying about the needles going into the red. M.O.T.O. is proof positive that rock and roll doesn't need to be pondered over, forced, or even high brow. It just has to shake your metaphorical ass. This album does that in spades. Rating: 10. Been playing this nonstop since I got it.” Imported from Finland.

Radioactivity

S/t

Dirtnap

***BACK IN PRINT!!! Note new price. RADIOACTIVITY is a continuation of THE NOVICE, JEFF BURKE’s band while living in Japan. Jeff has since moved back to Texas, and out of respect to the Japanese lineup of the band, has changed the name to Radioactivity. Some of these songs are re-purposed Novice tracks, while others are brand new. Jeff is one of the most distinctive songwriters in the punk rock underground, and these songs will sound instantly familiar to any fans of THE MARKED MEN or POTENTIAL JOHNS. Band members include Jeff Burke, MARK RYAN and GREGORY RUTHERFORD, whose credits read like an all-star lineup of Texas punk and garage rock royalty, including members of The Marked Men, MIND SPIDERS, BAD SPORTS, WAX MUSEUMS, THE REDS, VIDEO and The Novice.

Stranger, The

Watching Dead Empires In Decay

Modern Love

***Polymath JAMES LEYLAND KIRBY must surely have one of the most confounding CV’s in the business: he spent years taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallying against the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well known record labels for reasons you’ll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twin with a series of ‘tributes’ and channelled his love of everything from Falco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Stockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7”s back in the early noughties. But at the same time he was responsible for releasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (Hell Interface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrial electronic records, brought New Beat to the world’s attention and, in 1999, made his first album as THE CARETAKER, a project that would go on to release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recent times. Since then he’s also produced an incredible suite of releases under his own name, scored various film projects and released three EP’s under the ‘Intrigue & Stuff’ banner which are, for our money, so ahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the end of the decade. All of which brings us to Watching Dead Empires in Decay, a new album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms THE STRANGER and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful...

Cowley, Patrick

School Daze

Dark Entries

***BACK IN PRINT!!!  Received an 8.3 rating from Pitchfork.  Perhaps one of the most revolutionary and influential people in the cannon of disco music, PATRICK COWLEY created his own brand of Hi-NRG dance music coined "The San Francisco Sound." This very special LP features a compilation of restored Cowley productions unearthed in the garage of vintage gay porn company Fox Studio. Spanning nearly 90 minutes, the 11 tracks (originally recorded between 1973 and 1981), epitomize Cowley's forward thinking and his affinity for mixing elements of varying styles of music. Simply put, Cowley was a musical trailblazer ahead of his time. His credits as a producer include SYLVESTER's "Do You Wanna Funk,” PAUL PARKER’s "Right on Target" and collaborations with JORGE SOCCARAS of INDOOR LIFE—this is just the tip of the iceberg. An early victim of AIDS, Cowley passed away at the age of 32; these recordings shine a new light on the experimental side of a disco legend who was taken too soon from us. Featuring over 80 minutes of music, this compilation contains soundtrack music from two Fox Studio films, Muscle Up and School Daze, never before released on vinyl. The tapes were restored and transferred using the same speed and pitch settings, then remastered for vinyl by GEORGE HORN at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA. The vinyl comes housed in a glossy dual pocket gatefold featuring classic gay porn imagery from the Fox Studio vaults plus an essay from Indoor Life vocalist, JORGE SOCCARRAS. For Patrick's 63rd birthday,...

Albino Python

The Doomed And The Damned

Riding Easy

H.P. Lovecraft & dark horror inspired stoner doom metal with female vocals from the deserts of Arizona.

Salem's Pot

Watch Me Kill You

Riding Easy

Limited reissue of the 2013 two-track 12" from Sweden's doom mongers.

Orchid

The Mouths Of Madness

Riding Easy

The BLACK SABBATH of our century, have finally completed their second full-length effort "The Mouths Of Madness". Orchid have kept their 70's doom hard-rock vintage vibe, with wonderful melodic guitar solos and fantastic vocals by the heavily-charismatic, Theo Midnell. On their new album, the band have some psychedelic-inspired songs that have stretched out a bit, with a longer duration and some serious riff alterations. Recorded at SF's Hyde Street Studios (Dead Kennedys, Mr. Bungle, Joe Satriani, Exodus) and produced by Will Storkson. Comes in a deluxe package with outer cardboard sleeve.

Kid 606

Happiness

Tigerbeat6

Happiness is nostalgic, starry-eyed and idyllic. Sonically influenced in equal parts by yacht rock like Christopher Cross, Doobie Brothers, Toto, and charming electronica like Mike Ink, The Orb, Oval, Border Community, the Field, and Tangerine Dream, its truest intrinsic inspiration comes not from other music, but from real life events like relocating from Berlin to Los Angeles, being newly single, beaches, road trips, hiking, sunsets and cuddling. The album is the complete opposite of 2012’s Lost in the Game, which was a cryptic exploration of disorientation, psychosis and depression. Instead of indulging in melancholy, these songs draw from the most cheerful moments of the here and now, connecting them to the best memories from childhood and late adolescence.  “Cute Never Dies” is a perfect title and song to usher in this new set—picture µ-Ziq’s happier melodies supplemented with orchestral cuts. “Coronado Bay Breezin’” occupies the same top-down contentedness space as Nate Dogg’s classic “Where I Wanna Be” refrain, while appropriately playful “Happiness Is a Warm Kitten” offers a squishy soul hug replete with vocal stabs. The older and wiser Kid606 hasn’t lost his knack for epic track titles; “If I Am Only Allowed One Song on This Album with Cut Up Female Vocals Then This Song Is It” is a beautiful and exuberant builder with bassy beds made for the cooing vocal cuts. Melodically driven in a way that supersedes the transitory Lost in the Game, Happiness gives way to thoughtful euphoria—blast “Party Gambas” and its joyful pad sweeps,...

Vatican Shadow

Remember Your Black Day

Hospital Productions

***Remember Your Black Day is the debut album proper from VATICAN SHADOW, the first material conceived and produced as a full-length by DOMINICK FERNOW for the project following almost a dozen tapes (mostly released on Hospital Productions) and vinyl editions (released by the likes of Blackest Ever Black, Modern Love, and Type) over the last three years. None of the eight tracks included have been released before on any other format. At a time when the scene is saturated with "noise techno," the album is almost celebratory by contrast, balancing caustic licks of distortion and oppressive bass with cleanly mixed synth tones and ricocheting claps in a shell-shocked, surreal soundsphere. With production assistance from JUAN MENDEZ (SILENT SERVANT), the album includes the most direct and propulsive Vatican Shadow material yet, continuing an evolutionary shift away from the complex, collage-based narrative of those cassette releases into more visibly direct contact with the listener. There is a functional connection to dance music here, honing in on the human element embedded within a subject matter so fraught with inhumanity.

Heldon

Interface

Superior Viaduct

Richard Pinhas is an artistic iconoclast. A French intellectual as likely to collaborate with Magma as the radical philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Pinhas released seven albums under the Heldon moniker in the 1970s that flaunt the mastery of progressive rock and early electronics while still being thoroughly avant-garde. The genre-expanding innovation of his ’70s output is best encapsulated on Interface, the group’s sixth album (and second with the stripped-down trio featuring drummer Francois Auger and keyboardist Patrick Gauthier). Interface is a sonic tour de force where Heldon avoids every logical category vis-à-vis infinite climaxes and rhythmic explorations that sound impossibly futuristic. As with much of the Pinhas’ music from this period, Interface is heavily influenced by the guitar treatments of Robert Fripp (King Crimson), especially those in collaboration with Brian Eno. More experimental than virtuosic, Pinhas applies feedback and a jazz-like looseness to create otherworldly soundscapes. Interface is loud, dark and unrelenting with a maximal approach to minimalism that would go on to inform the cold wave scene in the late ’70s. Few recordings are as menacing, although certainly Miles Davis’ Dark Magus and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music come to mind. It is Heldon’s most crystalline work, building to the epic crescendo of the title track. Many fans consider this to be their masterpiece, but more importantly, Interface is a record that will continue to unfold for centuries to come.

My Cat Is An Alien With Nels Cline

Ocean Above Your Heads

Starlight Furniture Company

The idea of a recording collaboration by Nels Cline and My Cat Is An Alien was born one day in Torino, Italy, while Cline was touring with Wilco in 2007. After two other intersections of their respective orbits (first at Victoriaville, then at a UK All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2006), Cline eventually mailed them a CDR of prepared and heavily effected electric guitar improvisations, recorded in a small studio in Los Angeles. He tossed them off with little concern about exactly what would happen to the recordings, though his familiarity with i fratelli Opalio and their work steered the technically proficient jams familiar to fans of Nels Cline Singers, Scarnella or L. Stinkbug deep into zones of space noise, bold cosmic disruptions and nattering squibs from decommissioned satellites.  Exploiting the carte blanche they were given to do whatever they wanted with his recordings, Maurizio and Roberto Opalio opted to maintain as much as possible the spirit of free improv and instantaneous composition; Cline’s recording remained unheard until the actual recording session in 2012. Upon recognizing the planets were in proper alignment, Roberto and Maurizio’s Alien Zone studio in the Western Alps vibrated with the first playback of the CDR and My Cat Is An Alien’s simultaneous real-time accompaniment, without overdubs or outtakes. The results throb like an Argento soundtrack for an astral perv lair, recalling vintage cassette gorp from the golden age of industrial, when field recordings of howling dogs were repurposed as documents of institutional degradation and mind control....

Group Rhoda

12th House

Not Not Fun

Mara Barenbaum's solo vessel Group Rhoda emerged last year with one of 2012's deftest debuts, Out Of Time - Out Of Touch, an alluring sound-garden of jittery drumbox, moody exotica, bedroom dub, and aloof shadow theater melodies. Tours both foreign and domestic soon followed, during which she began blueprinting 12th House, her sophomore collection. Recorded and produced in collaboration with Ben Versluis in San Francisco, the album's eight songs snake through similarly entrancing terrain as her past work but the production is starker and spikier, almost post-punk in its clarity. From witchy island pop ("Day Ruiner," "Dust") and dizzy, micro-cosmic disco ("Coral Castle") to paisley circus-psych ("Disappearing Ground") and wobbly, haunted house dub ("Space Race," "Blk Mtl"), the record is rich with rhinestones and reflections, her vocals detached but discerning, casting strange dimensions into the music: "Finally you look away / you look a way / do you see ghosts walking around? / it's your town / it's their town too." A free-spirited and fascinating follow-up by one of California's most intriguing young pioneers. Mastered by Ruud Lekx. Artwork by Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough.

Cross Record

Be Good

Ba Da Bing!

Between melody and discord, Cross Record’s first full-length LP Be Good forges a quiet path through myriad sounds. Strings, clarinet, flute, steel drum, bells, tape distortion and other instrumentation support Emily Cross’s enchanting vocals while allowing for silences to build like black holes. Her lyrics conjure a dark beauty that leaves an effect long after the album has completed.  The record follows a string of self-released recordings by this enterprising 25-year-old. Released on Lay Flat as a 300-press LP in September of 2012, Be Good is getting formal distribution via Ba Da Bing. Along with the last remaining copies of that original pressing—a beautiful, white-vinyl album with poster insert—the label is releasing the album in a limited CD run. Cross has just moved from Chicago to Austin, and is presently at work on her next album, which will be released on Ba Da Bing.

Oranssi Pazuzu

Valonielu

20 Buck Spin

***AVAILABLE AGAIN ON SILVER VINYL!!!  Known thus far in North America only to the most attentive and adventurous of black metal fans, Finland’s Oranssi Pazuzu has channelled Valonielu, their first album on a US-based label (and third overall), to legions of fellow travelers seeking transcendence. The band name, a combination of the Finnish word Oranssi, which means “orange” and for the band symbolizes cosmic energy, and Pazuzu, a mythic demon of the wind, conjures perfectly the band’s unequaled, singular take on Psychedelic Cosmic Black Metal—celestial and boundless but malevolently grim and harsh. Oranssi Pazuzu’s second album Kosmonument, released by Spinefarm Records, was received with great critical acclaim as a brilliant work by a band developing into something all their own. On Valonielu, Oranssi Pazuzu sharpens their songcraft into a more succinct and salient statement, invoking ’90s-era Darkthrone yet reaching farther out into the psych and experimental multiverse. From the beginning chainsaw riff of album opener “Vino Verso” (“Askew Sprout”) to the climactic, world downfall of final track “Ympyrä On Viiva Tomussa” (“A Circle Is a Line in the Dust”), Oranssi Pazuzu masterfully establishes a cosmology all their own. Having found a new home on 20 Buck Spin in North America, Oranssi Pazuzu breathes ascendent new life into an often stagnant present-day black metal scene. With Valonieulu, the band offers not a sleepy, pale grey shoegaze record masquerading as black metal, but a vibrant, colorful cataclysm incorporating psych and space rock that cannot be easily categorized as any...

Ultra Bide

DNA vs DNA-c

Alternative Tentacles

Straight-up skull-shattering is what comes to mind after hearing Japanese noisemongers Ultra Bidé for the first time. Hyper-energetic and relentless, they never take themselves too seriously not to have fun. Their first US record in over ten years documents the trio’s dual bass and drum attack—a monster that pounds the listener into a custard donut, ever so thick and creamy, cooked by Satan. Singer / bassist Hide is the confident guide across the menacingly complicated galaxy of DNA vs. DNA-c, a perilous journey through regions of psychedelia and primal, fuzzy punk rock. Avoiding complete obliteration by the massive blackness of outer space, Ultra Bidé heads directly toward the stratosphere. “Phase Is Massive Power Attack Weapon” feels like being cooked from the inside out by a colossal space microwave, only to awaken in the alien strobe light of “Front Line,” with its sinister space sounds chewing gruesomely through one’s viscera.  Ultra Bidé has the musicianship and vigor of heavy music experts. Hide’s vocals drive the trio’s insane dragster far past the supersonic barrier, and its vivacity is startling. These guys have been doing it since 1978 and show no signs of slowing down. The band will tour the USA and Canada this fall following the release of DNA vs. DNA-c.

Davis, John

Ask The Dust

Students Of Decay

Hailing from Northern California, John Davis is a sound artist, composer and filmmaker who has released music on labels such as Root Strata and Digitalis. With Ask the Dust, he offers up a moving suite of compositions employing a plethora of instrumentation: guitar, piano, tape loops, Max / MSP, field recordings and the newest addition to his arsenal, a complex assortment of Blacet synthesizer modules. Davis uses the synth not as the crux of his recordings but as a tool among many in his kit, weaving oscillations and mangled or rhythmic tones through pastoral webs of processed guitar and field recordings. To this end, the richness of his palette cannot be denied, nor can his prowess as a masterful arranger of abstract sound.  Opener “Superpartner” is a jittery array of pure sound that refuses to sit still, developing slowly and accruing detail and a sparring partner in the form of delicately treated acoustic guitar. Perhaps the record’s defining movement, “Synecdoche,” begins with a contemplative, almost romantic piano arrangement, sparse and beautiful—a moving miniature abruptly broken apart and replaced by a bed of layered sine waves and guitar haze that somehow matches the radiance of what preceded it. Striking in its attention to detail and compositional deftness, Ask the Dust is Davis’s most refined set of recordings to date, a deep album that rewards focused and repeated listening.

Secret Pyramid

Movements Of Night

Students Of Decay

Secret Pyramid is the solo project of Vancouver-based musician Amir Abbey, whose previous output includes The Silent March cassette (to be reissued on vinyl by Students of Decay in early 2014). Movements of Night finds Abbey further develop and refine the haunting, faraway sound-world that earned the aforementioned release well-due praise. “A Descent” opens the record; its title aptly portends the track’s dirge-like drones and throbbing cycles of low-end. Throughout Movements of Night, Abbey deftly navigates the properties of sleep and unconsciousness, charting a course that is equal parts harrowing and funereal, tranquil and sublime. Juxtaposing the everyday with the obscured, the half-there melodies and arcs of hazy guitar histrionics of “Closer” dissolve into “To Forget,” a track that posits a more familiar, tangible atmosphere in which radiant drones are tethered to a driving bassline, recalling perhaps a lost ’70s Popol Vuh Herzog soundtrack. “Escape” closes the album on a nostalgic note, akin to the feeling of waking from a wondrous dream which one knows one cannot revisit. With Movements of Night, Abbey casts his net into the abyss of the unconscious and returns with a potent paean to the dreamworld.

Theologian

Some Things Have To Be Endured

Crucial Blast

The latest offering from NY synth-death master Theologian, Some Things Have to Be Endured features eight new tracks of punishing black industrial, apocalyptic darkwave frequencies and nerve-rending electronic deathscapes.  The album is made up of collaborations between Theologian (a.k.a. Leech, also the mastermind behind the renowned power electronics outfit Navicon Torture Technologies) and a lineup of female vocalists from the industrial / noise realm and beyond, with contributions from Rachael Kozak (Hecate), Kristen MacArthur (Sewer Goddess), Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), Shari Vari (Void Vision) and professional opera singer Melissa C. Kelly. The tracks shift from grinding sonic dread to ethereal coldwave beauty—blasts of rumbling, blackened synthcrush met with washes of haunting electronic melody—while remaining rooted in Theologian’s bleak, jet-black industrial sound.  Co-produced with Derek Rush (Dream Into Dust) and mastered by James Plotkin, Some Things Have to Be Endured contains some of the most moving and dramatic music to emerge from Theologian’s black sonic abyss, and comes adorned with striking photography by Ione Rucquoi that makes this one of the more visually arresting releases in the artist’s growing catalog.

Castevet

Obsian

Profound Lore

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!!    New York’s Castevet is one of the most invigorating, unique and musically advanced bands in the extreme metal underground. Emerging from the same scene as Krallice, Liturgy and Tombs, they possess a sound unlike any of their contemporaries. The trio incorporates influences ranging from avant-garde dissonant black metal (Ved Buens Ende, Deathspell Omega), neo-classical, jazz and progressive metal, and while they are often associated with the American black metal movement, they defy categorization.  With the addition of Krallice bassist / vocalist Nicholas McMaster to the band’s ranks, Castevet pushes their songwriting and artistry to a new level. Sophomore album Obsian paints an even denser, more complex sonic picture than their acclaimed Mounds of Ash debut, with a musical fortitude far beyond their contemporaries in the American black / extreme metal scene.

Pollard, Robert

Tonight’s The Rodeo

GBV Inc

Robert Pollard returns with his latest single Tonight’s the Rodeo. The A-side is a preview from a forthcoming 2014 solo album; “Astral City Slicker” is the full three-minute-plus version of the 51-second “Suit Minus the Middle” from Honey Locust Honky Tonk.

Moving Finger

Smokin The Crack Of Dawn

Goner

***MOVING FINGER—don't call it a side project. Featuring power couple JB HORRELL and LAUREL FERDON (of EX-CULT and NOTS respectively), along with PATRICK GLASS (NOISE CHOIR) and NATALIE HOFFMAN (Ex-Cult, Nots), Moving Finger takes psychedelic punk to a level that few dare to tread. Fantastic, forward-thinking avant-punk that reminds us of the early days of UK or Cleveland experimentalism in the late ‘70s where primitive technique and ambitious ideas lead to some great music. Edition of 400 copies.   "Sounding like they could have been featured on the off—kilter punk compilation Cleveland Confidential alongside bands like the Styrenes and the Easter Monkeys, Moving Finger are an exercise in primitive noise, stripping songs to the bone before thrashing through them altogether. It's a formula that worked well for hardcore bands in the early 80s and it works here too."—Memphis Flyer

Nots

S/t

Goner

***Power-trio from Memphis made up by NATALIE HOFFMAN (EX-CULT), CHARLOTTE WATSON (MANATEES), and LAUREL FERDON (MOVING FINGER). NOTS take the path less traveled when dealing with song structure, societal conventions, or the laws of thermodynamics. Impossibly cool nuevo no wavo! Edition of 400 copies.