Hecker, Tim

No Highs

Kranky

The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers—this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electronics shiver and shudder against pitch-shifting assemblages of crackling voltage, mantric horns (including exquisite modal sax by Colin Stetson), and cathedral keys. Throughout, the pieces both accrue and avoid drama, more attuned to undertow than crescendo. Hecker mentions “negation” as a muse of sorts—the sense of tumult without bombast, tethered ecstasies, an escape from escapism. His is an antagonism both brusque and beguiling, devoid of resolution, beckoning the listener ever deeper into its greyscale alchemies of magisterial disquiet.

Hanson, Cory

Western Cum

Drag City

***Cory Hanson’s third solo LP follows upon 2020’s luminescent Pale Horse Rider, upping the heat to molten lev- els, six strings at a time. In search of further adventures, Cory draws with vampiric glee from the madness coursing through the world outside; a spiraling shitshow that’s reawakened a compulsion in him—an old ambition, even!—to crush brutality and elegance together into a fresh set of rocks to hail down upon us. Western Cum is a high-stepping, hard-dancing, first love/heartbreak, tonight’s-the-night, future nostalgia kind of good time—the sound of gui- tars through the speakers of luxury cars. Like the dream you had once, alone, asleep in an amplifier, blasting Guns N’ Roses through every last orifice in your body. And it’s coming through!

Kid Congo & The Near Death Experience

Live In St. Kilda

In The Red

Live In St. Kilda is a twelve song live album from a one-time-only show in which Kid Congo Powers was backed by The Near Death Experience. Kid Congo says, “How did I hook up with The Near Death Experience you may ask? One fine day Kim Salmon, my long time Scientists Surrealist Beast of a friend, wrote from Australia to ask me to play at his book launch for his biography Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand: Kim Salmon And The Formula For Grunge on November 9th, 2019. The launch was to take place at the Memo Music Hall in St. Kilda, a seaside suburb of Melbourne. A royal command performance for the king of Kim? How could I say no to such an honor? What to do about a band? It did not take more than a minute for each of us to suggest Harry Howard and The Near Death Experience as the logical choice. I was a massive fan of the band already and we shared crossed paths as expats claiming out our musical in 1980s London. Harry with Crime And The City Solution and These Immortal Souls, Dave and Clare with The Moodists, Kim with the Scientists and me with Gun Club and Fur Bible. Needless to say it was fantastical to get together and make a playlist for Kim featuring covers by Suicide and Shangri-La, with mine and NDE’s songs as well. The night was magic—I still am floating on a surrealistic pillow remembering the night....

NOFX

Double Album

Fat Wreck Chords

***2021 saw the release of NOFX’s highly acclaimed, 14th studio album Single Album. What fans didn’t know then, is Single Album is only one half of what has ultimiately become NOFX’s very first double album; the second half of which is aptly titled Double Album. Reuniting with punk-rock legends BILL STEVENSON and JASON LIVERMORE for producer / engineering / mixing duties; it’s not hyperbolic to say NOFX are making their best music now. But that's not to imply everything else they’ve done was mediocre, either. Double Album reminds both ardent fans and casual listeners that NOFX weren’t born to follow trends. Indeed NOFX have carved their logo into the veneer of punk-rock culture for decades. With nearly 40 years in this circus, you’re going to meet people and do/see/conspire to get all the wildest shit done. Remember how one of the stipulations of the NOFX book Hepatitis Bathtub was that none of the band members could see what the other ones were writing about them? Well, this time, Mike got permission to blow up the foibles and peccadillos of people in song for maximum velocity and hilarity. There’s “Joanna Constant Teen,” a 78-second tribute to the dominatrix that spent six weeks in Fat Mike’s NYC-based Airbnb during the production run of his musical, Home Street Home. “Alcopollack” is about booking agent David Pollock, who has worked with the band for over 30 years and has lost more than his fair share of clients for his too-brazen honesty. “Fuck Day Six”...

Carlton Melton

Resemble Ensemble

Agitated

Carlton Melton, from Northern California, are now a practicing four-piece in the arts of melted-minds psychedelia. With the added kraut-oomph and sike-flutter of fellow Californian Anthony Taibi (whom you may know as being a member of White Manna, and also DDT with Andy) Rich Millman, Andy Duvall, and Clint Golden have now embellished the Carlton Melton sound. Pushing forward as a quartet, the band recorded Resemble Ensemble in July 2021 at Anthony’s home studio, 3D Light in Freshwater, CA. Anthony did all the recording and mixing. The Melton Magick Karpet settled, and our favorite contemporary sikedelic warlods plugged in, amped up and let it flow—and flow it does—from the krautrock fuelled pszych-raga of "Prescribed Skies," the fluid dronescape of "Elsewhere" that welcomes you into its arms with a warming tone, almost a missing Spacemen 3 demo at the feast here. "So The Story Grows" has the drone scraping through a murk of dazzling feedback and pummel, with the fuller sounding Melton giving the genre a proper wobble, hold on to your brains people. "High Alert"—whas this? Synth and guitar interplay jambusting, this is the Melton wigging out and almost interweaving 70s high table rock with some odd and downright perverse synthfunkpunk rhythms. Get weird or get wired—or both. Easily done here.. Closing out the album with "Route Thirteen" is the road trip home. They’ve been, they’ve massaged and mangled your synapses, plug in the satnav and take the higher-route home, if you get our drift.

Úlfúð

Of Existential Distortion

Dark Descent

Bred in the land of ice and fire, Úlfúð are the latest addition to Dark Descent’s flawless, ever-diversifying roster. Championing their personal blend of black and death metal (with emphasis on the former), the band’s debut album Of Existential Distortion uniquely captures the desolate vastness of the volcanic wastelands like only Icelanders can. Úlfúð’s first full-length is a masterclass in songcraft, showcasing a stunning balance of entrancing atmosphere, haunting melody, and deathless violence. Artist Bahrull Marta was summoned to conjure the breath-taking artwork, whilst photographs by Alma Líf Þorsteinsdóttir adorn the inlay with visions of each offering. “We are extremely excited to be releasing our first full-length album with Dark Descent! This album heralds our entity and declares our intent; to immerse you in our ritual of catharsis and cacophony! We cannot wait to share our music with you. The time is nigh!” Úlfúð’s (pronounced “ool-wooth”, meaning animosity or hostility) were formed in early 2015 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The band self-released debut EP First Sermon in 2018 and recorded debut Of Existential Distortion in 2020. A release truly worth waiting for!

Disintegration

Time Moves for Me

Feel It

***From the minds of Haley Himiko (Pleasure Leftists), Noah Anthony (Profligate) and Christopher Brown (Cloud Nothings), Disintegration's Time Moves for Me EP transcends the post-punk and synth pop sounds of the past into something entirely new and futuristic. The Cleveland group recorded these four songs in summer 2022 and self-released them on cassette shortly after. Himiko's soaring vocal range carries the EP forward atop a mix of sounds that draw from the worlds of minimal synth, programmed percussion, noise rock guitar, and pure pop melody to create an incredible seventeen minute debut. Feel It is proud to present Time Moves for Me on a vibrant 45 RPM 12" and cannot wait to hear what Disintegration does next!

Whitney's Playland

Sunset Sea Breeze

Meritorio

***Whitney's Playland is the pandemic-era project of Inna Showalter and George Tarlson, longtime friends and veterans of the music scene (Grandma’s Boyfriend, Blades of Joy, Modern Charms). Having grown up in and around San Francisco and inspired by their experiences, their music is about the usual things in life: love and loss, sometimes with a wry and sardonic angle. The result is a dreamy pop landscape reminiscent of Yo La Tengo, Guided by Voices, the Sundays, and Dinosaur Jr. The band expanded into a four-piece in late 2022 with the addition of Evan Showalter and Paul DeMartini.

Bobby Would

Styx

Digital Regress

"Bobby's back with a brand new swing. Styx is, conceptually speaking, his boatman's call, two thirteen minute sides of Greek mythology-referencing purgatorial guitar murk, one half on terrafirma, the other floating down the river of the damned... If you remember those first two records on Low Company, or even the pair of records he made under the Itchy Bugger moniker, then you'll already be well acquainted with the openly sardonic, narco chimes of Styx. The fidelity remains of the characteristically 'submerged' variety, which at this point is as much of an instrument as anything actually played. It's a bit post-39 Clocks in that sense, kinda like the Cocoon or Exit Out, the hazy gloom a lot of the appeal. 'You're definitely doing the hype thing,' he sings on 'Hype On.' Are you talking to me, Bobby? 'Cos I've done a number on you here." –World Of Echo Music

Country Westerns

Forgive The City

Fat Possum

***Nashville rockers COUNTRY WESTERNS are proud to announce their sophomore LP Forgive The City. Marking the band’s second full-length release for Fat Possum, this barn-burning collection is also their second to be helmed by famed producer MATT SWEENEY (who even contributes his lead guitar stylings to a few tracks). The album is heralded by the sinewy, melodic new track “It’s A Livin’,” which is out now via all DSPs and is once again is accompanied by an official music video directed by MIRANDA ZIPSE (Miranda and the Beat). “It's a Livin' is the last song I wrote for our new album. It’s meant to be a tribute to musicians and travelers who are waiting for the road to open. And also a promotion of forgiveness in general,” says vocalist and guitarist JOSEPH PLUNKET. “It’s about the last go around and wondering what’s left out there. An encouragement to those who have to push through and keep moving and also an acknowledgement of a time to lay it down. It has pretty obvious vibes of a pandemic spent in Nashville and the actual lyrics are less pretentious than this description. I wrote it on my Danelectro 10-string which gives it a cool aggressive jangle.” Because no eagerly-awaited album release would be complete without shows all across the nation, Country Westerns will head back out on the road for a second time with the kindred spirits in indie rock heroes Titus Andronicus. See below for the full list of upcoming Country Westerns...

New Pornographers, The

Continue as a Guest

Merge

***Over the past 20 years, THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS have proven themselves one of the most excellent bands in indie rock. The group’s ninth album and first for Merge establishes them alongside modern luminaries like Yo La Tengo and Superchunk when it comes to their ability to evolve while still retaining what made them so special in the first place. A dazzling and intriguing collection of songs, Continue as a Guest finds bandleader A.C. NEWMAN and his compatriots NEKO CASE, KATHRYN CALDER, JOHN COLLINS, TODD FANCEY and JOE SEIDERS exploring fresh territory and shattering the barriers of their collective comfort zone. Newman began work on Continue as a Guest after the band had finished touring behind 2019’s In the Morse Code of Brake Lights. Themes of isolation and collapse bleed into this album, as Newman tackles the ambivalence of day-to-day life during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Newman says that Continue as a Guest’s title track also addresses the concerns that come with being in a band for so long. “The idea of continuing as a guest felt apropos to the times,” he explains. “Feeling out of place in culture, in society, being in a band that has been around for so long—not feeling like a part of any zeitgeist, but happy to be separate and living your simple life, your long fade-out. Living in a secluded place in an isolated time, it felt like a positive form of acceptance: find your own little nowhere, find some space to fall apart, continue...

Cluster

Cluster II

Superior Viaduct

Cluster was the pioneering German duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Formed on the cusp of the 1970s, they were a part of West Germany’s nascent Kosmische Musik scene. The group would use restrained improvisational techniques similar to Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, working with both electric and acoustic instruments (organ, guitar, tone generators, cello, etc.) to create a singular sound that Julian Cope called “a huge beating heart, planet-sized and awesome.” Originally released in 1972 on Brain, Cluster II features six pieces of atmospheric, proto-ambient drones – a step forward from Cluster's 1971 self-titled debut, which had all untitled songs. On "Im Suden," hypnotic bass pulsations and repetitive guitar patterns flow serenely, while side two opener "Live In Der Fabrik" dives deep into Roedelius and Moebius' foreboding industrial soundscapes and synergistic textural interplay. As Roedelius told Uncut magazine in 2022, “This feels like a breakthrough? Well, we were just getting more into it, and getting more experienced at being able to elaborate it. Conny (Plank) was working with us again—as well as being a multi-talented artist, he was a very experienced sound master and great human being. He contributed as a fellow musician, adding sounds with his mixing table such as reverb, delay and other effects enriching the whole pieces so that they finally became somehow unique.” It’s no surprise that when Neu! guitarist Michael Rother first heard Cluster II, he suggested a collaboration with the band—resulting in the supergroup Harmonia who would make their first album together the following year.

Cluster

Zuckerzeit

Superior Viaduct

Cluster was the pioneering German duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Formed on the cusp of the 1970s, they were a part of West Germany’s nascent Kosmische Musik scene. The group would use restrained improvisational techniques similar to Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, working with both electric and acoustic instruments (organ, guitar, tone generators, cello, etc.) to create a singular sound that Julian Cope called “a huge beating heart, planet-sized and awesome.” Following the release of Cluster II, the duo relocated to the village of Forst where they built a home studio and began to collaborate with like-minded artists such as Michael Rother and Brian Eno. 1974’s Zuckerzeit, Cluster’s first album made in their countryside studio, marked a major shift in their music from experimental noise to avant-pop. “Hollywood” starts things off with infectious loops, analog drum machines and sweeping synth. “Caramel” seems to pick up the pace even more; its sugary groove promptly dissolves into a sea of ethereal keyboards, amorphous layers and sparse chords. For Zuckerzeit, Roedelius and Moebius developed the tracks individually. They recorded in separate rooms on different days, although each piece flows into the next seamlessly. While Rother is listed as producer on the original Brain release, he was reportedly not present at the sessions and simply loaned the band some equipment. Bringing together Cluster’s haunted melodic sense and motorik rhythms, Zuckerzeit reveals not only how much the band grew from their experience in Harmonia, but also how instrumental they were in their later collaborations with...

Westing

Future

Riding Easy

“Late in 2021, Slow Season announced they’d become Westing, and that Ben McLeod (also of Nashville’s All Them Witches) was now in the four-piece on lead guitar alongside guitarist, vocalist and keyboardist Daniel Story Rice, bassist Hayden Doyel and drummer / recording engineer Cody Tarbell. Their new LP (fourth overall for Riding Easy), Future, is not coincidentally titled. “Says Rice, ‘We wanted to hit the reset button on some things and so we included a new band name to that list. Fresh start, for the psychological effect of it. We first met Ben in 2014 opening for All Them Witches in San Diego, and we did that again in 2016 and he and Cody corresponded about tape machines, music production, and other similar nerd stuff. We started swapping a few ideas early in 2021 and then flew him out for four days in August 2021. We got Future mostly down in that short span and did some remote stuff for overdubs, but nothing major. Obviously, our creative processes jelled pretty well to allow for such an efficiently productive session.’ “So the story of Westing, and of Future, is about change, but the music makes itself so immediately familiar, it’s so welcoming, that it hardly matters. For about ten years, the Visalia, California, outfit wandered the earth representing a new generational interpretation of classic heavy rock. The tones, warm. The melodies, sweet. The boogie, infectious. They went to ground after supporting their 2016 self-titled third album, and clearly it was time...

Roberts, Alasdair

Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall

Drag City

***Critically-acclaimed, criminally-overachieving Glasgow- based singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts is known as a superlative original songwriter as well as an interpreter of traditional songs from Scotland and beyond. For the past twenty years, his recordings have alternated between these two complimentary poles, with ‘pop’ records such as The Amber Gatherers and A Wonder Working Stone nestling in his expansive back catalogue alongside “folk” albums such as No Earthly Man and What News (with Amble Skuse and David McGuinness). Additionally, all of these records possess a further dimension, derived from their collation of songs together into one album-length statement. This is part of Alasdair’s great achievement in his career—for him, this thing of music and song hasn’t come the eons it’s travelled to simply entertain. These impulses fully present and well honed, Alasdair returns to his roots with Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall, his fifth full-length collection of traditional song. Recorded live in the studio, it is an entirely solo collection of twelve traditional ballads and songs sparsely arranged for acoustic guitar, piano and voice. The majority of the songs originate in Alasdair’s homeland of Scotland, with a couple from Ireland and one from Prince Edward Island on Canada’s eastern seaboard too.

Heartbeeps

Cum Together

Slovenly

***"Brothers and sisters, it’s time to Cum Together… RIGHT NOW! Bordeaux, France’s HEARTBEEPS have emerged from the ashes of TV KILLERS (Estrus Records / Dead Beat Records), for a punkarolla orgy with current and ex-members of SWINDLERS, WILD ZEROS and HOLESHOTS, and their debut Cum Together LP is a megabash of adrenaline charged, twin-guitar crunch recorded in imperfectly hissy analog, where steamrollin’, stolen riffs drill through frantic garage based punk rock. Tip-top,raw, and tippin’ it’s beret to Saints, Pagans, DMZ,MC5, Radio Birdman and The Damned, because that's the way it should be."

Sister Grotto

Song for an Unborn Sun

Flenser

Midwife’s Madeline Johnston has gone through several different iterations of her music project. In 2015, she moved into Denver’s premier DIY space Rhinoceropolis, where she began learning recording on her own and primarily focusing on Sister Grotto, a long-form ambient based project. Working alongside artists like Colin Ward and Dani Rev, she was inspired by her roommate’s tenacity and artistic outpouring. Madeline recorded Born to Lose / Born to Leave, Blindside, and Song For An Unborn Sun during the first half of her residency (before she started the project that would soon become Like Author, Like Daughter). Time is a major element in this group of recordings. Tracks were played in real time, slowed down, and played on top of, repeatedly, and has been referred to as an ambient sludge record. Components like the Casio SK-1, endless loop cassettes, delay and pitch shifters distort the passage of time - Layers, repetition, and analogue delay fold it back in on itself. Not unlike the sentimentality and difficulty distinguishing landmark moments of this time period for Madeline, the music itself is a sort of frenetic and meditative blur. Some of the tracks on Song For An Unborn Sun were later re-worked for the first Midwife album. Most importantly, “Song For An Unborn Sun” and “Placeholder” which became the song “Way Out.” Song For An Unborn Sun was originally released as a split in 2016 on the small run cassette label Terrible Pleasures. Side A was by Sister Grotto,...

Telephone Numbers, The

The Ballad of Doug

Meritorio

***"There’s always good music in San Francisco, you just never hear about it till someone somewhere else finally pays attention. The Telephone Numbers and contemporaries live in the tiny spaces between row houses in the outer districts of San Francisco. You can hear them earnestly strumming through cheap practice amps choked with probably too much reverb and trying to craft ambitious sounds with no career ambitions and few resources. These bands were rarely invited to play the bigger venues in their own hometown when it mattered. They had their own intimate shows wherever they could beg for space, and that’s maybe more fun. Thomas Rubenstein is 100% from this subculture of record geeks and renters, haunting bedrooms studios and fog-damp garage practice spaces. He writes tragic love songs that pull from classic power-pop and 80s/90s indie. He does in fact have a Teenage Fanclub tattoo and is rarely not listening to Prefab Sprout or some other over-the-top heartbreaking pop on the way to earn his hourly wage. He recruited a whole host of pals to help him make The Ballad of Doug, which may or may not be a concept album about the rise and fall of the Gin Blossoms. The touches of violin, layers of guitar and soaring backing vocals make this seem bigger than just a DIY record, and it is. These tunes are worthy of some historic festival slot or hit parade appearance, but for now you can dream with the vinyl on your deck or the...

Kommand

Death Age

20 Buck Spin

Death Age maintains the armed to the teeth savage militancy of earlier material from LA’s Kommand, now taken even further into enemy territory with more grisly wartorn brutality than ever. Like the coordinated bombardment of an entire continent, Death Age is an air raid siren for imminent cataclysm. The ominous atmosphere on Death Age heralds the single-minded concentrated objective; to batter, demolish and destroy with no quarter given. Death metal of this kind taps into the most primitive, untamed instincts, advancing like a convoy of tanks through occupied territory, heedless of whatever or whoever stands in its path. From opener “Final Virus” to closer “Collapse Metropolis,” Kommand’s vision of a dystopian hellscape, cities permanently scarred by heavy weaponry, and those unfortunates who survived the onslaught never relents or offers respite. Death Age thus renders a terminal epitaph on the bloody trash heap of near-future history.

Spirit Possession

Of The Sign…

Profound Lore

Almost three years spent sharpening orthodox weapons, Spirit Possession reveal their second full length Of The Sign…, six schizo spiraling, deranged hymns of black heavy metal from a lost time. While the s/t full length was a raw blistering torrent draped in first wave blood, Of The Sign… seems to be thoroughly drenched in its epic, strange and primitive ways. A violent cacophony of insanity laden cavern vocals, labyrinthian guitar trilling, scalding drum brutality, and analog harsh-noise eruptions—these are sinister yet adventurous black / heavy / death abominations from a forgotten age. Erratic musical madness with improbable entrances, and impossible exits. Featuring S. Peacock (Ulthar / Pandiscordian Necrogenesis / Mastery ) on strings and vocals, and A. Spungin (Vouna / Ormus / Taurus ) on drums and handmade synthesizers. Recorded in the depths of the S•P Dungeon / and studio mixed at Menegroth The Thousand Caves.

Veils, The

Nux Vomica [Nick Launay Mixes]

Ba Da Bing!

The rawness of The Veils’ Nux Vomica can be enjoyed to a degree never heard before, with Ba Da Bing’s limited edition pressing of the records with the original mixes by Nick Rainey left intact. Originally released in 2006, The Veils sophomore album Nux Vomica was praised for its “Herculean intensity” by The Guardian, and called “a heady blast of gothic psychodrama” by The Observer, while Pitchfork praised leader Finn Andrews’ “magnetic, outsized persona.” Long out of print, the vinyl version was resuscitated by Music On Vinyl in 2017 and quickly sold out. Now, The Veils present the definitive version of their most heralded album to date, which dusts off the original mixes by legendary producer Nick Launay (Public Image Limited, The Birthday Party, INXS and Midnight Oil) and offers them to fans here for the first time. Taken from the original two-inch analog tape reels, each song was carefully remastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios in London. Nux Vomica was the first of many creative reinventions for Andrews, who at 22 had already released an album on Rough Trade, moved from New Zealand to London to form a band, then back to New Zealand where he once again started the band anew. The creative progression is clear in Andrews’ incisive lyricism and knack for hell-fire dramatics. All intentions to release this dark and raw set of recordings were dashed upon submission to Rough Trade for approval, who didn’t like the results. They hired mixing engineer Bill...

Spitting Image

Full Sun

Slovenly

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

Psychic TV

Those Who Do Not

Cold Spring

***The sound of the classic period of Psychic TV—featuring Peter Christopherson and Geff Rushton (John Balance) of Coil, this full show is interspersed with recordings of the Pagan marriage between Genesis and Paula P-Orridge conducted by Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson Allsherjargodi. Psychic TV at their most esoteric, their most ritual, and often most extreme, a perfect accompaniment to the legendary Dreams Less Sweet album of the same year. These recordings of a live disconcert by Psychic TV in Reykjavik, Iceland that took place November 1983 organized by HÖH and GRAMM Records. Out of print for 23 years, this is the ultimate edition for Psychick Youth. Meticulously remastered, with the track order finally arranged into what was the original show. 180-gram black vinyl. Housed in gatefold jackets.

Young, La Monte / Marian Zazeela

31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta

Superior Viaduct

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With his collaborator since 1962, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day. Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela’s first full-length album is often referred to as “The Black Record” due to Zazeela’s stunning cover design, complete with the composer’s liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script. Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela’s voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young’s group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath....

Keithley, Joe

STAND

Sudden Death

After forty-five years of leading legendary punks D.O.A., the man they call Joey Shithead aka Joe Keithley, has a new solo album out on Sudden Death Records—don’t worry, D.O.A. is still touring! Stand has a rootsy, rebellious tone, as Keithley combines acoustic and electric guitar on this timely and politically charged album. Many have compared Keithley to a modern day Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger because he has spent a lifetime standing up for what’s right through his music and through his actions—Stand befits that ethic and long-held tradition. The songs cover a wide range of emotions. There’s timely political stuff like “The Warrior Lives Again,” “Fentanyl Blues,” “This Machine Kills Fascists,” and “Ginger Goodwin.” Poignant songs include “Lookin’,” “For A World,” “People Power,” and a cover of D.O.A.’s “2+2.” Keithley even digs into movies and TV with his spaghetti western-inspired “Man With No Name” and an ode to Star Trek called “Men For All Ages.” He really hits the mark, as he covers songs from his idols Johnny Cash, Leadbelly and Stompin’ Tom Conners. On Stand, one gets a wide array of Keithley’s talents: from his vocals that have never covered such a wide range, to his sterling guitar playing, to his powerful songwriting ability. To make sure the album had the right tone, Keithley got the right people to accompany him, which includes one of the best acoustic rhythm sections in Canada, Leon Power and Darren Parris, and also great keyboards from Chris Gestrin, with Jessie Zubot...

Pierre, Alain

Des Morts (Of The Dead)

Finders Keepers

***Expanded reissue of mega rare 1979 unknown vanity pressing LP that blends ethnological field recordings, musique concrète principles, and introspective synthesizer music from this cult European studio maverick and historic collaborator of COS, Philippe Druilet, Marc Moulin, and John Surman. Alain Pierre's Mondo movie soundtrack to the controversial Des Morts shares very few stylistic rivals, but fans of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain soundtrack and some of the more eldritch early sampling experiments of Jean-Pierre Massiera will certainly draw fragmented comparisons herein. Other listeners might file this album at the weirder end of your Smithsonian Folkways shelf, just before the Video Nasty soundtracks. Presented in remastered form comprising extra vintage studio outtakes (in accordance with the films morbid narrative), Des Morts serves as a would-be sequel to Finders Keepers' previous Ô Sidarta release witnessing Pierre balance his allegiance to the Belgian bandes dessinée scene and Thierry Zéno's shock cinema oeuvre from the heart of his uber-legendary Brussels based experimental recording studio through the 1970s. Presented in remastered form comprising extra previously unreleased vintage studio outtakes. Edition of 750.

Joy Division

Live at University of London Union February, the 8th 1980

Radio Loop Loop

***The University of London Union show took place on February 8, 1980, just a few months before Ian Curtis 's death. The 12-song set list was mostly based on songs that would end up on Closer (the band's second and final studio album) but also on classic singles such as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Digital". The band was in fine form with Curtis leading the charge into their own gloomy, psychotic, atmospheres. A quintessential live album and a real treat for any Joy Division fan.

Green, Al

Explores Your Mind

Fat Possum

***1974's Al Green Explores Your Mind (originally released on HI Records) continues the Mitchell and Green uptempo groovy hard soul alliance. Although more mellow than Green's previous releases, this album reflects only in part the changes WILLIE MITCHELL had begun to weave into his music, giving his productions a lighter feel. This is because Al Green is unique and his style can't be confused with anyone else, no matter what producers do to the arrangements. Contains the classic "Take Me To The River," later also recorded by the Talking Heads and the sentimental "School Days."

Kultur Shock

King / Country Mohammed

Alternative Tentacles

Yet another rockin’ new direction from the label that can’t stop expanding its….well,…Tentacles! Meet Kultur Shock—multinational ‘Gypsy Punk’ pioneers, led by irrepressible ball of energy and good cheer, Gino Yevdjevich.     Gino was quite the mainstream pop star in his native Bosnia (and the Balkans), when the shelling of Sarajevo began, trapping him in his family’s apartment for two years. He was finally able to flee, first to New York, then on to Seattle. Instead of reviving his pop career, Gino chose (a full plunge) to reinvent himself, reaching deeper into his heart and Balkan roots, and Kultur Shock was born! They began playing slightly electrified Traditional Folk, to a growing refugee audience, including many a dancing Serb. The fan base quickly widened to Krist Novaselic and Vic Bondi, among others, who then drew in Jello Biafra.  -  Then something happened -  A year or two later, they debuted in San Francisco to a sold-out audience at the Bottom of the Hill, packed with almost all refugees and migrants - and a much louder, heavier Kultur Shock. Lineups hail from all over Eastern Europe, Seattle, and even Japan; with a much wilder, more theatrical Gino as ringmaster of all he surveys. A more punked-out, direct version of their close friends and cousin, Gogol Bordello, Kultur Shock mixes Balkan folk melodies and bizarre meters with face-melting metal and blood-pumping punk rock in a pagan cauldron of lyrical, obnoxious, and politically irreverent music stew since 1996. The band released its first three studio...

Why Bother?

A City of Unsolved Miseries

Feel It

***Mason City, Iowa's WHY BOTHER? return with A City of Unsolved Miseries, their third album in as many years. Their patented basement recording setup has yet again captured something magical, thirteen originals in all. From the fringes of a small, landlocked Midwestern city—Why Bother? have honed in on a punk sound that is original, self-driven and shows no signs of slowing. Swirling in darker thematics, such as the still unsolved 1995 disappearance of Mason City TV anchor Jodi Huisentruit, the album speaks to every outcast living out their days underneath dark, grey skies. However the music strikes you—Why Bother? have defined yet another chapter of their enigmatic existence with the genius sounds captured on A City of Unsolved Miseries. First pressing limited to 300 copies.

Electric Chair

Act Of Aggression

Iron Lung

***There was a time when the fear of nuclear destruction was so thick you could feel it in the your lungs and walked the streets. Like at any moment some ICBM would rain fire on your town and the troops would be thrust into action. Only they wouldn’t be defending the town they would use the melee as an excuse to rid their little podunk heaven of the “punker plague”. Those freaky weirdos with pins in their ear and stains on their gear. The ones that spray paint “Ronald Reagan SUCKS a big one” on the hoods of cars. The ones that don’t fit and don’t wanna… Friends and enemies, introducing ELECTRIC CHAIR! 1,100 copies on black 150gram vinyl housed in a full color 24pt jacket with lyric insert included. Recorded by Detto. Mastered by Geza X. Art by Collin Buhr and Jesse Michaels.

Eteraz

Destined To Kill

Iron Lung

***Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the bomb shelter, Eteraz returns, crustier and more metallic than ever… Rabid with violence in their veins and the sonic arsenal to carry out full scale warfare on the senses. Starting in the ear and drilling its way to what’s left of your sorry excuse for a brain. There will be nothing left. Bombastic buzzsaw guitars, relentless pummeling bass, chaotically vicious drum battery and a wildly sinister vocals make for an unholy alchemy of evil fucking hardcore. Not to be taken lightly. 500 blood red 7” flexis housed in a reverse card 12pt four panel foldover sleeve. Recorded by Detto. Mastered by Sasha Stroud. Art by Rose.

Love Cry Want

Love Cry Want

Lion Productions

***Psychedelic improvisational spiritual avant-rock/jazz featuring the legendary Larry Young on organ and equally astounding Joe Gallivan on drums, steel guitar, Moog synth, and percussion; the mysterious Nicholas wailing on guitar synthesizer and ring modulator; and Jimmy Molneiri on drums and percussion—recorded live at an anti-war rally in Washington D.C., in June 1972. They aimed the speakers at the Nixon White House, and blasted away as an anti-war protest! (The music so completely freaked out President Nixon that he demanded his chief of staff H.R. “Watergate" Haldeman to shut off the band’s source of electricity.) "After establishing himself as a leader on Blue Note in the 1960s, Young played on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana’s Love Surrender Devotion, and the first three Tony Williams Lifetime albums. He emerged from those sessions at an exalted level of inspiration and with a formidable fire in his belly, and these traits helped shape Love Cry Want into a sui generis classic—a tone poem expressed with a flamethrower. Using a self-built guitar synthesizer, Nicholas stuns throughout the disc with brash flashes of Hendrix-ian extravagance. Gallivan displays both inventive exoticness and cyclonic power as he and Molneiri deftly guide the group through its furious paces.”—Dave Segal, Jazz Times

Pest Control

Don't Test The Pest

Quality Control HQ

***Started during lockdown by three friends from Leeds, UK who wanted to make some crossover thrash, having been fans of the music for years, Pest Control is the classic story of DIY music straight from a time of crisis. Jack (from Death Metal bruisers Mortuary Spawn) joined soon after the release of the Demo in 2020 and the line up was complete with Pest Control’s first show commencing in their home town the week lockdown ended. Influenced by classic thrash giants such as Metallica, Testament etc. but with a healthy spoonful of crossover like Crumbsuckers, Ludichrist and Municipal Waste, the members grew up with one foot in the Leeds metal and hardcore scenes, taking the best from both worlds. Topping it all off, Leah's powerful vocal reminds one of the great Dawn Crosby from Detente. For the recording of the LP they were joined by Luke on second guitar and now have a permanent second guitarist in the shape of Joe Williams (Big Cheese, Fate) and will be seen touring Europe with the almighty Foreseen, having already played across the UK with Municipal Waste, Eternal Champion and as well as appearances at Outbreak and Wrongside Fests. With this LP the band have truly shown their technical chops from the fast and furious title track to the almost operatic thrash style of The Great Deceiver. There is a fresh range of ideas and most importantly catchy songs for the Crossover Thrash fan to sink their teeth into. Mastered by Arthur Rizk,...

Illiterates

No Experts

Sorry State

***"Here at Sorry State we were huge fans of Illiterates’ debut LP, and when the Pittsburgh band offered to let us release the follow-up, we jumped at the chance to climb into bed with the self-described 'dumbest band in hardcore.' No Experts is a scorching follow-up to the self-titled debut, with even faster, shorter, and tougher songs, plus catchy gang vocals that, along with vocalist Lawson’s rabid cat delivery, recall Youth of Today at their most primal. While No Experts is about as straightforward as hardcore can get, Illiterates’ way with a tune makes tracks like 'Tricks of the Trade,' 'Nice Things,' and 'Weather Capital' hard to dismiss as anything like 'generic thrash.' Another track is called 'As Old As You Feel,' and No Experts makes me feel like a teenager, exploding hormones and a frustratingly short attention span ensuring that music this loud, fast, and action-packed is the only thing that makes sense in this world." Black vinyl, lyric insert, 24"x36" poster, and download card included.

Koro

s/t

Sorry State

***Sorry State is excited to bring you a repress of one of the best hardcore records ever, Koro's 1983 7" EP. Originally released in a small, self-released pressing, over the decades this monster's reputation has continued to grow, and collectors now have to fork over well over a grand for an original pressing. This one is too good for the scum to keep to themselves, though, a hyper-compact explosion of energy that can hold its own next to any landmark early 80s hardcore punk record you want to compare it to. Sorry State's 2023 pressing aims to replicate the original look and feel of the original as closely as possible, with an offset-printed sleeve on legal size paper. It's as close as you can get to the original without missing a mortgage payment.

Zorn

s/t

Sorry State

***Finally, the long-awaited debut album from Philadelphia’s Zorn. While Zorn’s theatrical, (literally) scorching live shows are the stuff of legend, it would be a grave mistake to think the chaos they summon is all about the flaming swords, makeup, and leather corsets. Like Alice Cooper and David Bowie before them, Zorn knows you gotta have the songs to back up the image. Zorn’s metal-punk draws on death rock melody, intricate thrash riffing, and the bulldozing power of Discharge-inspired hardcore bands, but the songs are as infectious as they are intense. As with early Metallica, tracks like “Already Dead” and “Delco Devil Mosh” are built on memorable melodies that, in another time and place, might have formed the backbone of a killer glam rock single. I’m happy with my current reality, though, where Zorn is the kind of band who puts a devil standing atop a pile of flaming skulls on the cover of their album. Each copy comes with a full-size poster, sticker, lyric insert, and download.

Tyler, William & The Impossible Truth

Secret Stratosphere

Merge

***Recorded live at Yellowhammer Brewing in Huntsville, Alabama, in May 2021, Secret Stratosphere finds William Tyler and fellow psychedelic dreamers The Impossible Truth refashioning prime cuts from the Nashville guitarist’s rich catalog, casting new light onto once-familiar songs. Featuring the crackling combo of Jack Lawrence (Raconteurs, Dead Weather), Brian Kotzur (Silver Jews, Country Westerns), and Luke Schneider (solo, Margo Price), the quartet stretch the dynamics of Tyler’s compositions to their fullest interdimensional potential, exposing a deep undercurrent of kosmische and post-rock influences (with the right amount of grit from the nitrous corner of the Dead Lot). In teasing these influences out on favorites and new songs alike—he cheekily calls closer “Area Code 601” a “Hawkwind meets Charlie Daniels Band number” before sending the crowd home on a previously unreleased stunner that lives somewhere between mind-expanding prog and beer commercial– backing Southern rock—Secret Stratosphere confirms William Tyler’s place as one of our most brilliant guitarists, bandleaders, and composers.

Hands Up Who Wants To Die

Nil All

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

***SGG are proud to present the staggering new album from Irish foursome Hands Up Who Wants to Die, featuring members of Shifting, No Spill Blood and Wild Rocket. Working again with long-time collaborators John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Black Midi, Lankum, Caroline) and Ian Chestnutt, Hands Up Who Wants To Die present their long awaited third long player, Nil All. The album expands upon the delicate, brutal spectrum found on Hands Up’s previous LP, Vega in the Lyre, pushing further into spacious light and claustrophobic void. The band has twisted minimal musical ideas in various directions, with Spud’s sonic orchestration harnessing the exploration of sinuous melodies, elastic time and delicate micropolyphony. The first release featuring Ten Past Seven’s Rory O’Brien on lyrical duties, themes include strange histories and characters enduring, often out of delusion. The anomalies and warped stories, barely believable. Life as a zero-sum game, brutal and absurd. Pressed in a limited edition run of 12" vinyl in two stunning color variations, housed in a beautiful package featuring the illustrations of Matt Hedigan.

Overcalc

Fruits of the Decision Tree

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

***Fruits of the Decision Tree is the second LP by the ever-prolific Overcalc(Nick Skrobisz of Multicult infamy) to be released by SGG. Recorded (what feels like a billion moments ago) at the outset of world's shutdown (followed by eerie "recovery period"), these basement tracks finally see the light of day on vinyl. Keeping an unconventional, less polished production value, warts and all, comports with the nature of these quasi-songs. As we further collapse the discrete into the continuous, or at least maintain that illusion through pathological infinitesimalization of information capture, we may bear in mind that our sensory baselines are forever changing.

Tyrant

Release The Animal

Tko

***After some unanticipated production delays, TKO is proud to bring you the debut 12" release from Danish HC/Oi! powerhouse TYRANT. Started in 2016 as a project between members of NIGHT FEVER and CESSPOOL, Tyrant delivers a skull-crunching brand of brutal HC/Punk with a heavy Oi! influence, topped off with ultra-negative, misanthropic lyrics. Serious bad vibes. Release The Animal collects all the material from the band's previous two European 7" releases, both of which sold out immediately and now fetch big bucks on the collectors market. So, you're welcome. First pressing of 400 copies on black vinyl.

Meercaz

Queen Mary Mill

Love Anthem

***Queen Mary Mill Alternatively dubbed the many moods of MEERCAZ! Eliminator styled hard rock on one side and twisted rap beat instrumentals on the other. Pick one or just enjoy the ride into the new excursions of Meercaz Beat maker, producer and rocker! "Out of the blue a Meercaz LP shows up & it's totally the kind of muzz that could light up those old Paul Major catalogs. DIY collage/exploitation vibes segues into sub atomic riffage recalling the grittier days of Urge Overkill. Pretty boss."—Tom Lax, Siltbreeze

Timmy's Organism

Lone Lizard

Sweet Time

***"Element 115 is a mysterious, superheavy element that has 115 protons in its nucleus. It is said in the UFO community to be the power source for dimension bending alien spacecraft. It is also found in the tone of Timmy Vulgar’s gravity defying riffs. To describe Timmy’s Organism as heavy, is as fundamental in concept to our human existence as the drone of blood pumping in beat to our hearts. Guitarist & singer Vulgar, bassist Jeff “Giant’ Fournier, and Scott Dunk on drums, plug into a tradition as hallowed as Ron Asheton’s fuzz pedal on The Stooges's first album or Lemmy’s low end hypnosis on Hawkwind's Doremi. But Timmy’s Organism is more. They are their own thing. The new LP Lone Lizard is as confounding, twisted, solid, and heavily out-of-this-world as any sonic offering in the last 300 years... as if all the previous Organism records, and those of Vulgar’s past groups Clone Defects, Human Eye, and Epileptix never existed… or have always existed. Timeless is the rhythm. The musicianship and sense of arrangement on Lone Lizard is jazz-esque in its double-commitment to loose precision. Lyrically, the record ranges from "Peyote Moments" surreal truths: "Like the ancient ways of the secyalapoid... bring me back to the desert where the serpents lie in the sun. Telling their fibs into my ears, I will not hear!" to the naked-to-the-bone vulnerability of "Tracy Trouble": "My heart melting continues, I just wanted a sober kiss. Like our young love days! But the dealer stole...

Brown Whornet

EP that is defintely not called 'Big Old Cup with Ice in it'

Resipiscent

***Music just moves on them, has its way with all seven of them simultaneously and they just let it. It's already out before anyone can do anything about it. Audiences aren't sure how to help, first horns then heavy synth then dangerous headbanging, laughing bravely as they help music do even more things to them. Mercifully for all, this album is a brief, 17-minute pants tingler. It bears witness to 30 years in the loving choke-hold of every genre that ever ogled Brown Whörnet's innocence, from 1993's legendary Emena Pestisode right up to their pandemic premonition Doctor Dickle, and now... this. Not only crazed synths, metal guitar, bass, and multi-percussion but also trumpet, trombone, sax, and organ because how else could you make the run from Zeuhl to Swamp Rock to Punk to Free Jazz to Noir R&B and Kosmiche Ambient in seventeen minutes? “Mangled free jazz, luv-me-baby R & B, parodically straight hardcore, and something that sounds like Yes on a boom box whose batteries are dying are all in their arsenal.” -Chicago Reader “Best gig I've been to was Brown Whornet, impossible to pigeonhole – the entire performance was mesmerising.” -Justin Hawkins (The Darkness) in The Irish Times

Death Ridge Boys

Boots On The Street

Black Water

***Originally recorded and released in the height of the pandemic as a cassette / bandcamp only release. The vinyl version of this comes back fully remixed and remastered making these powerful tunes sound better than ever! Side A finds four original numbers of anthemic Oi! with empowering staunchly anti-facist lyrics dealing with taking our boots to the streets, a nod to a bygone era of old Portland, and how it’s darkest before the dawn. The B-side holds three covers, very atypical of a band this style, though they nail each of them with a touch of what makes DEATHRIDGE BOYS stick out of the crowd in the first place. They chose Big Boys, 7 Seconds and most surprisingly, a fantastic jaw dropping version “Mannequin” by Wire. Not common for a band who’s obvious go to’s of inspiration are the standards (Blitz, Cock Sparrer, and some French oi! a la Camera Silens), but it shows how versatile this band can be. DRB’s have firmly planted their boots in the Portland punk scene over the years and seem to get better with each release as this one indicates, showing the diversity, maturity, raw catchiness, and heartfelt sing alongs of a band hitting their stride.

Genogeist

Technophobia

Black Water

***Hot off the heels from their epic full length from 2019, PDX crust mongers, GENOGEIST return with four brand new rippers. This EP is chalk full of killer riffs with relentless pacing, leaving little room to catch one's breath before the next brutal assault or mid tempo banger. Add low growl vocals, ripping solos, topped with bleak disturbing lyrics dealing with the cybernetic void our world has been plunged into, and we have the ingredients to a perfect seven inch slab of unabashed crust. The songs off this record carry on right where the LP left off, not straying away from the Japanese crust influences (such as SDS, Effigy, Age, et al.), but embracing it even more. The icing on the cake is the guest appearance of NATANYA from TERMINAL CONQUEST adding her distinct vocals on “Desolate Realm.” Essential listening for fans of the genre, who like their riffs catchy but NOT melodic, as well as the music and lyrics full of rage, grief, and despair.

Divorcer

Espionage

Domestic Departure

***Divorcer formed in late 2016 in a booth at Duffin's Donuts in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and that's perfect, because just like a donut, Divorcer is a treat. And after two cassettes—Debt Jubilee (2019) and Nutty Grotto (2022)—the band has made a delicious donut of its own with Espionage, their vinyl debut. Arty and aurally reminiscent of the Raincoats, Rose Mercie, Young Marble Giants, Marine Girls, and Dolly Mixture, Espionage’s four playful tracks swell with unanticipated changes that leave the listener wondering if this is still the same song, or even the same band. But the ingredients are there, they're just mixed up a little differently each time. There's call-and-response singing, whisper singing, singing in rounds. All four band members sing, and the straightforward instrumentation all works to serve the lyrics. Frank, funny, sharp, and skewering, the lyrics are a highlight, and Divorcer knows how to emphasize them. Layering lush melodies over "crying on the outside, crying on the inside" wryly increases the melodrama of the third track, "Crying." The final track, "Leech," is the most rocking of the bunch. "He's a leech, and he's sucking me dry, dry dry," goes the refrain, leading the listener to this expertly honed barb of a line: "You're so quick to point a finger (he's a leech) / Let me get you a mirror (he's a leech) / If you look a little closer (oh he's a leech) / the monster will appear (he's a leech)." Divorcer has a lot to say, some...

Mckechnie, Doug

San Francisco Moog: 1968-72

VG+ Records

***CD format contains both volumes!!! In 1968, Bay Area native Doug McKechnie got hold of one the very first modular Moog synthesizers ever made and began finding his own way to play it. Soon, he was hauling the finicky instrument around to perform improvised concerts at colleges and psychedelic ballrooms, as well as an ill-fated appearance on the bill at Altamont. Some of the performances were recorded, and the surviving tapes—never before released—capture a free-flowing, transportive sound that fills in the gap between the austere mid-century academic avant garde and the expansive cosmic suites of Tangerine Dream and the rest of the Berlin School in the ’70s. “These pieces represent amazingly fully formed early approaches to the very idea of musical synthesis...arresting even to modern ears.” —Goldmine “Presages both Tangerine Dream’s soundtracks and, in its most grimy moments, Acid Tracks.” —The Wire

Dj Panthr

Jade District

100% Silk

The inaugural vinyl debut by Hunter Thompson aka Akasha System’s shadow self, DJ Panthr, is an 8-track technoid night ride inspired by the fern-shrouded neon streets of South Tabor, Portland, where the album was conceived and created: enter the Jade District. Simmering and serpentine, the songs slipstream from lithe to liquid to narcotic, traced in acid, dub, and deep house fog. It’s dance music as both reverie and nocturne, overcast and underground, the perpetual motion of mossy neighborhoods passing in the dark, streetlights smeared by rain. Thompson speaks of the “desolate peace” of sleepless dawn walks through Southeast Portland, tall trees silhouetted against glowing strip malls. The synthetic and natural worlds fused in greenery and concrete. Jade District feels both immediate and introspective, club tracks for midnight minds, born of distance, dreams, and things unsaid.

Indopan

Yupana

100% Silk

Named for a banned 60’s psychoactive stimulant, Indopan is the splinter entity of Irish producer Andrew Morrison, aka “tape throb” godfather The Cyclist. Its sound runs distinct but parallel, a fusion of blasted house and ghosted soul, smeared with dub, breaks, and redline grit. Yupana collects nine new tracks for a 50-minute trip through outer limits and altered states, cutting keys at the doors of perception. Smoky horns, snaky bass, smeared organ, and deep torch laments spiral through kinetic, kaleidoscopic strains of dizzy swing, dusty jack, and jittery acid. Alternately weightless and weary, tense and unhinged, Morrison’s mastery of mood, rhythm, and restraint hits a supreme peak here. This is music of liquid nights, chemical bloodstreams, and ancient sorrows, ebbing and flowing from lost roots to fractured futures, unbowed and unknowable.

Edren, David

Relativiteit Van De Omgeving

Not Not Fun

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

Golden Hallway Music

Rules & Chance Vol. 3

Not Not Fun

Manhattan’s resident innerspace organist Zack Tornaben centers the third installment of his ongoing Rules & Chance series on breath, tone, and the ancient Qigong practice, “Eight Pieces of the Silk Brocade.” Working once again with the classic Golden Hallway Music palette of a pair of reel-to-reel tape machines, a 49-key Acetone combo organ, and an 80’s synth clone, he records everything live without overdubs in sprawling séance sessions, then digitally transfers them for distillation into choice excerpts. Swirling, shivering reveries of skylines and stained glass, Tornaben’s process prizes intuition, intimacy, and “feeling around in the dark,” inspired by a pantheon of greats from the grand tradition of harmonic divination – Young to McClellan, Brouk to Battiato. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 gently expands his evolving lexicon of daydream minimalism, levitational and limitless, born of passing thoughts and everyday joys, rippling in the mind like light on water.

Shizuka

Heavenly Persons

Black Editions

***REISSUED!!! Originally released in 1994. Few artists have left behind a legacy as enigmatic and captivating as Shizuka Miura. Amidst the Tokyo underground, she was a spectral figure, creating ghostly, childlike dolls and writing haunting, other-worldly songs. She formed Shizuka in 1992 with Maki Miura, known for his staggering guitar work in legendary groups Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Dénudés. Their music bloomed with a fragile, yet explosive mystical power; an atmospheric alchemy of psychedelic rock, folk and noise with Shizuka's ethereal vocals invoking loneliness, yearning and dark providence. Since her passing in 2010, the group has steadily gathered a cult following. Black Editions presents their sole studio album, 1994's Heavenly Persona, a monumental, transcendent work originally issued by P.S.F. Japan on CD in 1994; Now newly remastered and in its first ever vinyl edition on double-LP with a laser etched fourth side. Presented in a deluxe tip-on tri-fold jacket with ink pigment foil stamping, gloss film laminate finish and printed inner sleeves and mounted booklet. It includes her extensive, heart wrenching final interview, translated for the first time to English alongside high-resolution archival images.

Maiovvi, Antoni

The Dead of Winter

Redscroll

***Antoni Maiovvi's The Dead Of Winter is a semi-faux soundtrack album in the vein of the British composers more classically cinematic works. Sonically the album resembles a sort of Deathrock Danny Elfman locking horns with Howard Shore piloting Sunn O)))’s dopemobile... at night... in the fog. The Dead Of Winter is a collection of unused themes made for a very real movie that for various tax break reasons were unable to be used. Not wanting to waste the work already completed, the cues were finished without picture and arranged here as their own narrative, with the idea to transport the listener to a snowy, isolated, old building filled with secrets and demons.

North Americans

Long Cool World

Third Man

***North Americans—the project of Los Angeles guitarist Patrick McDermott and Portland’s Barry Walker on pedal steel—release their new album Long Cool World. As North Americans, McDermott has been experimenting with drone and noise and how it can take shape, and then jettison that shape, since 2013’s No_No, but it’s when he embraced his love of fingerpicked guitar and vintage country music on 2018’s Going Steady that he settled on a sound that felt like a genuine melding of his disparate musical interests. 2020’s Roped In was another creative milestone: with Walker and a host of other collaborators, including harpist Mary Lattimore, and guitarist William Tyler, among others, creating a communal, layered approach to each track that felt vital as the world dipped into isolation during a global pandemic. “I knew that for this one I wanted to dial up some of the textures and experimentation,” McDermott says. In order to do that, Long Cool World strips away most of the musical collaborators, allowing Walker and McDermott to settle on an approach that is at once intricate and simple, creating hypnotic music that loops and layers, with subtle shimmers of noise or quiet psychedelic freakouts hiding beneath McDermott’s unshowy but emotionally affecting guitarwork and Walker’s pedal steel hum. The duo refined their collaborative relationship as well, with McDermott sending isolated guitar tracks to Walker, who then listened to them while on drives and walks around Portland, before going into the studio with only a loose sense of what he wanted to...

Elkhorn

On The Whole Universe In All Directions

Centripetal Force / Cardinal Fuzz

***The first sound you hear on prolific duo Elkhorn’s latest album, On The Whole Universe In All Directions, is Jesse Sheppard’s 12-string guitar. This is followed almost immediately by a single reverberating note on the vibraphone courtesy of Elkhorn co-founder Drew Gardner, before the piece unfurls to include skittering cymbals and tumbling percussion, overdubbed by Gardner, who in Elkhorn previously provided much of the Fender Telecaster yin to Sheppard’s big and beguiling 12-string yang. The absence of Gardner’s electric guitar is the first of many surprises on this, the first album of Elkhorn material since 2018’s Lionfish to feature only the group’s two founding members, and the first to introduce both the vibraphone and Elkhorn as a single-guitar unit. The nominally back-to-basics duo approach is anything but a backward step, and one hopes, listening to the marvelous On The Whole Universe In All Directions, it is no outlier. While the band’s recent records thrillingly augmented the core duo with various players from the first- call directory of underground music A-listers, On The Whole Universe In All Directions, recorded at Gardner’s Harlem home studio of sixteen years, distills the Elkhorn sound into something as revelatory as it is unexpected. Despite the minimal set-up, the expansive album proves to be as enchanting as anything in the group’s discography. The album sleeve features a striking and eye-catching painting, by artist Yosuh Jones, of a Red-tailed hawk. The image of this, one of the largest North American birds, seems significant: Gardner’s studio, which overlooks...

Sarian, Michael / Matthew Putman

A Lifeboat (Part II)

577 Records

***Matthew Putman and Michael Sarian found a home in a makeshift studio, using a borrowed 20-year-old keyboard, a good microphone, and in cramped apartment acoustics, to improvise throughout the pandemic. What they called their “weekly pilgrimages” gave them a sense of much-needed sanity, grounding their friendship and keeping them afloat, as Sarian describes, “much like a lifeboat.” The resultant project was an exploration of cadences, rhythms, and full of searching and synchronicity. This album, A Lifeboat (Part II) follows the duo’s first release, and explores many of the same themes, balancing Putman’s velvety keyboard with Sarian’s character-driven trumpet and flugelhorn. Pressed on crystal clear vinyl.

Fella, James & Gabriella Isaac

Performances

Gilgongo

***A follow-up to the duo’s LP, CCTK Music (2021, Gilgongo Records), Performances features three sets from JAMES FELLA and GABRIELLA ISAAC, from Gilgongo Records’ 15th Year Anniversary celebration in Phoenix, AZ - December 2019. Like the event, the record starts with a recreation of the second side of CCTK Music, using six reference lacquers of CCTK’s A-side as source material to make a live collage. Following this are solo sets from Isaac (using her laptop as a feedback loop / sound source / physical device) and Fella (offering a slow moving electro-acoustic / tape-machine based piece). Includes a sketched layout for the CCTK installation and a reproduction of the event’s flier. Recorded and mastered by JOHN WIESE.

Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean

Obsession Destruction

Redscroll

***Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean is a blackened-doom heavy metal band based out of Western Massachusetts. Obsession Destruction is the band's first full-length coming on the heels of 5 sold out EP releases spotted over the last 5 years. Chained has found a fanbase by winning over crowds with unprecedented volume and uncompromising live sound. Obsession Destruction is an eight song double LP clocking in at over an hour in length, housed in a stunning gatefold LP with artwork created by the late Mariusz Lewandowski (Bell Witch, Obituary, Fuming Mouth...). This full length finds the band honing the songwriting and experimentation within their fundamental sound and elevating it to the highest caliber possible. Chained has toured up and down the East Coast and throughout the Midwest playing shows alongside: The Acacia Strain, Undeath, Thou, Hell, Black Tusk, Come to Grief... Recorded by Chris Teti at Silver Bullet Studios and mastered by Magnus Lingberg. Records pressed at Burlington Record Plant. For fans of: Amenra, Inter Arma, Neurosis, Rwake, Warning.

Frenzal Rhomb

The Cup of Pestilence

Fat Wreck Chords

***Back in the mire of the early nineties, from somewhere beneath a pile of wallet chains and cut-off army pants FRENZAL RHOMB emerged, their white suburban fingers clutching onto goon casks and bucket bongs and other appropriate paraphernalia. Before too long those fingers wrote riffs and those riffs became songs and their voices sung rhyming swear words in perfect three-part harmony. After countless world tours, sharing the stage with everyone from NOFX to Nickelback. Playing all around Australia, from Broome to Bunbury and Bundaberg to Brunswick, offending and entertaining people in equal measure along the way. Being welcomed into people's lives and banned from radio stations, often for the same reasons. The dubious honor of being the most hospitalized band in the world—everything from broken drumming arms and detached guitar-playing retinas to an actual pig-borne tapeworm in the lead singer's brain—it's amazing that Frenzal Rhomb are here at all. But Frenzal Rhomb are still here, and back with their 10th studio album! Recorded, mixed and mastered at The Blasting Room by BILL STEVENSON, JASON LIVERMORE, ANDREW BERLIN and CHRIS BEEBLE; The Cup of Pestilence is 19 songs full of the characters and slightly discomforting ideas that you’ve come to love from Frenzal Rhomb. The stories of good times, beloved friends and slightly less-friendly types, the tales of enlightenment through recreational substances, and some great budgetary ideas for a cash-strapped household. All of this under a serious number of hot riffs and licks, brilliant bass lines, and devastating drum bits sure...

XV

On The Creekbeds Or The Thrones

Ginkgo

***"On the Creekbeds On the Thrones is the second LP by XV, a limitless, fiery, deep-breath of a record. Where their 2019 debut had a startling, first-kiss energy, Creekbeds is reflective, momentous, poetic. Textures multiply, evoking both the endlessness of sky and the terror of a bottomless well. There’s a daring sort of faith in these songs, the way the three members trust in the resonance and persistence and joy built into each song and the way they trust in each other. This faith provides a tender, messy space for thoughts, feelings, outbursts, joys, and sadnesses. The observations made on this record—from petty irritations to existential crises—are articulated in a way that feels always like solidarity, never like whining. Paired with the tumbling snarl of the instruments, the songs project a kind of clumsy telepathy, a heartfelt exchange that is both confrontational and deeply welcoming."—Ethan Swan

Billett, Dominic

Two Peach Trees

Perpetual Doom

***Perpetual Doom is proud to present the debut album from Dominic Billett: Two Peach Trees. Based in Nashville but immersed in life on the road, Billett brings years of work as a professional touring musician to his first proper full-length record. It is a collection of vibrant, distinctly realized songs, drawing from an eclectic mix of sounds, styles, and studio effects and unified by Billett’s evocative lyrical insights. The result is a profound debut that speaks to the persistence of longing, artistic discovery, and the tumultuous search for peace. Two Peach Trees opens with rolling snare and breezy guitar as “Satisfied Heart” introduces its luminous, delay-laden take on classic No Depression. Stuck in some beach town, missing someone at home, Billett sings of love’s poor timing: “It’s when you least expect it that new love takes your mind and runs away.” The track’s building swell sets off what could be the album’s guiding sentiment: “I’ve learned to satisfy my heart.” The album pursues that satisfaction across eleven tracks that surge and settle—from the bouncing pop of “Merida” and the noise-soaked pulse of “Around You” to the stately pace of “The Image.” Billett soaks effortless melodies in layers of intriguing noise. The ambling “Stepping Stone” drips with feedback and guitarist Jerry Bernhardt pushes the restless ballad “Want/Need” from quiet to loud. On “Rose,” Billett paints scenes of his grandmother at prayer, reflecting on the quiet desperation in those memories—“Could I learn the love from you the way you always wanted to?”—until...

Planning For Burial

Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014 (Vol. 2)

Flenser

In 2017 The Flenser released a CD collection of material from Planning For Burial's early period entitled Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014. Named after the bands long-term home-base in Matawan New Jersey, the collection included many of Planning For Burial's beloved rare tracks that originally appeared on seven inches, cassettes, or online. Since 2017, the band's own Thom Wasluck has re-examined the material found on the Matawan collection with the intention of releasing a vinyl version. This vinyl version of the second volume of the Matawan collection includes much of the first disc of the CD version tirelessly remixed and edited, and the inclusion tracks not found on the original edition specially prepared for the vinyl format.

Barth, Lauren

Stormwaiting

Spiritual Pajamas

“Driving up the coast highway from LA, once you hit Santa Barbara you are struck with a noticeable change in landscape. It is the gateway to the Central Coast, where the contours of the land begin to take on more dramatic inclines and feelings burn like wildfires. This was the childhood home of Lauren Barth, ranch-living and horseriding amongst the golden and dusty open ranges that still expand through parts of California. It is at these gates of change that Lauren Barth explores on Stormwaiting, her second solo effort and first on the Spiritual Pajamas label. “Behind the musical landscape of Stormwaiting, Lauren drew from a backstory she created as inspiration. A young woman and spiritual leader of a commune, blind yet finds her way by a heightened sense of awareness, is caught between the physical world of ‘Rialto’ and the spiritual—‘Morian.’ ‘Stormwaiting’ is slang for living in Rialto and the storm is the tempest within Morian. The cult’s most important message is one of Awareness. Like her protagonist, Lauren steps through these contemplations of change coming, treading one step at a time between the physical and spiritual realms, in a bittersweet anticipation of something upon us. Each song is like a deep breath in, an exhale, a pondering of the past and a wonder about the future with an acute awareness of each passing moment. “Barth is a true seasoned folk music player, evoking the California folk movement of the late 1960s like David Crosby (who also hailed from...

Infinity Ring, The

Nemesis & Nativity

Profound Lore

In the summer of 2020, the seeds for what would become The Infinity Ring were planted by Cameron Moretti, drawing together many musicians long active in the Boston metal, punk, and electronic scenes. The initial endeavors of the band started as an experimental take on dark folk music with added elements of drone and noise. The band eventually grew to be an alchemical fusion of experimental rock with many disparate strains from the post-industrial continuum, all delivered with a spiritual and mystic bent. The band’s output sits at the crossroads of many different styles, such as ominous folk, no wave, industrial, and black metal, with elements of occult and ethereal antiquarian sonics laced throughout. The band spent most of 2020 and 2021 experimenting in various studios around New England, deeply immersed in open-ended musical R&D. These sessions would eventually lead to the collaborative Ohr EP with Jarboe. In early 2022, the band set out in earnest to record its debut album, Nemesis & Nativity, at God City Studios in Salem, Massachusetts with Kurt Ballou. The album built on much of what came before, but with a more pronounced sense of ritual, atmosphere, and heaviness. During the creation of the album, genre conventions fell by the wayside and extreme experimentation was channeled, resulting in a sonic palette that morphs from elegantly haunted atmospherics to mystic ritual drone, brutalist industrial rhythms to passages of hallowed melancholy. In the live setting, the band is dedicated to bringing the same experimental and spiritual energy,...

Cindy

Why Not Now?

Mt. St. Mtn.

***“Everyone’s hoping that nobody sees/all our little efforts at dignity” This last line of the title track from Cindy’s fourth LP Why Not Now? works as a slogan for Karina Gill's evolving musical vision. Her music is simple out of necessity and introverted in delivery, but the songs contain vivid worlds and are quietly ambitious. With this latest batch, Gill pulled the process of making Cindy music even more inward. “Some of these songs were first recorded as demos alone in my basement. I think that process set the tone for the record…Maybe it set up a kind of starkness,” she says. Moving on from the fixed quartet that performed the first three albums, Gill worked alongside original keyboardist Aaron Diko to develop the songs and they enlisted players from the ever-blossoming SF pop scene to realise her minimalist vision -- members of Flowertown, Telephone Numbers, April Magazine, Famous Mammals, and Sad Eyed Beatniks to name a few. The collective sounds fill out the record perfectly with John Cale-esque viola on ‘August’, lo-fi fairground organs, and a tasteful full-band sound that crops up throughout. ‘A Trumpet on a Hillside’ is the most triumphant Cindy has ever sounded, all ascending chords and a wedding march melody tumbling out of an old synth. Still, some of the best moments are Gill alone, as on ‘Playboy’, just naked guitar and voice, and when the forlorn whistling solo kicks in, it feels like the loneliest star is imploding in a distant galaxy. ...

Nashville Ambient Ensemble

Light And Space

Centripetal Force

***Centripetal Force is excited to release Light and Space, the second full length recording from the Nashville Ambient Ensemble. The Nashville Ambient Ensemble is led by Michael Hix, an electronic composer and keyboardist whose artistic vision focuses on the spirit of collaboration and the art of improvisation. The group plays a unique form of music that has become loosely defined as ambient country or ambient Americana. Light and Space is the group’s follow up to 2021’s Cerulean, an album that received a number of accolades from critics, fans, and fellow musicians. In early 2022 Michael Hix had just completed writing the material for the group’s sophomore release when the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee reached out and asked the Nashville Ambient Ensemble to record a series of compositions to be featured in the exhibition, Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Inspired by eight artworks from the exhibit, Hix composed eight completely new compositions and immediately headed into the studio to record. Intended as an alternative to a traditional guided tour, museum patrons were able to pair their journey through the exhibit with the ensemble’s sounds, a feature for which the Nashville Ambient Ensemble and the Frist received overwhelmingly positive feedback, so much so that it was decided the songs deserved a traditional release as the group’s new album. The exhibition ran from June to September and was highlighted by a live performance from the Nashville Ambient Ensemble in the main gallery of the...

Novoa / Kamaguchi / Cleaver Trio

Vol. 1

577 Records

***For pianist and composer Eva Novoa, music, improvisation and choosing the right players is her mission, her purpose and goal in life. Based in Brooklyn, New York since 2012, she explores each project or set up and musical occasion with deep curiosity, freedom, boldness and trust. For this project, she works the format of the piano trio experimenting in all its essence and sonorous profundity inspired by all the great masters and all time favorite trios in her own personal universe and musical references. Eva Novoa is joined by her longtime friend and collaborator Masa Kamaguchi on bass—with whom she has worked with since 2010—and extraordinaire drummer Gerald Cleaver, in the format of a perfect trio. She has performed live with this trio since 2017 in New York City. Novoa/ Kamaguchi/ Cleaver Vol.1 presents an album of melodic density, contrapuntal conversations, a free interplay of rich textures and great masterly improvisation presenting a unique piano trio. This album is the first volume of a two volume recording to follow and it is Eva Novoa’s sixth album as a leader, marking her first ‘debut’ on 577 Records. Pressed on crystal silver vinyl.

Jacobites, The

Howling Good Times

Bang

***For the first time on vinyl, JACOBITE's Howling Good Times (1993) is now being presented on deluxe version. This album exposes Jacobites at their purest essence with full band and high-quality studio recordings, with the band delivering a top performance. An absolute must for all NIKKI SUDDEN and DAVE KUSWORTH fans. The international critical acclaim received on Nikki Sudden's last two albums and with Dave Kusworth's career will certainly help provide new fans for this great long-lost album. The band: Nikki Sudden (acoustic and electric guitars, vocals), Dave Kusworth (acoustic and electric guitars, vocals), GLENN TRANTER (guitars, mandolin, dulcimer, backing vocals), CARL EUGENE PICOT (bass guitar, backing vocals), MARK WILLIAMS (drums, percussion), TERRY MILES (piano, Hammond, keyboards), MAX EDIE (vocals).

Paint Fumes

Real Romancer

Dig! Records

***PAINT FUMES have survived a decade of being in Paint Fumes. No small feat for a group that's released 3 albums for 2 distinct and luminary labels (Slovenly and Get Hip), swaying their way between opposite ends of a sonic spectrum (garage and punk; old and new) on a no-fucks-given wrecking ball pendulum. Evolution occurred steadily from their earliest primitivism to more tuneful rockers. Real Romancer, the band's fourth LP is a whole new world of glam stomping', dual-guitar-with-added-bass hammerin' sounds taken to anthemic new heights previously unexplored by this born too loose group. If leader of the pack ELIJAH VON CRAMON's description of the band as "panic attack punk and power pop nightmares" rings true, this is Paint Fumes' KBD-benzo treat-all for a 12-song long wet dream.

Voidceremony

Threads Of Unknowing

20 Buck Spin

Upon the release of the first full length album Entropic Reflections Continuum: Dimensional Unravel it was instantly revealed that VoidCeremony were treading a path few walk. The album proved that death metal can be performed with the gliding, controlled chaos and smooth fluidity of a jazz quartet, while still leaving the listener holed up in a dungeon, low on HP, out of spells, and surrounded by deadly demons. Threads Of Unknowing is a journey which resurrects concepts on earlier display and summons evermore progressive and technical compositions. Mastermind and guitarist / vocalist Garrett Johnson and guitar virtuoso Phil Tougas (Atramentus, Chthe’ilist, Worm, First Fragment) share both vocals and lead guitar duties here, while bass god Damon Good weaves both fretted and fretless bass mastery and drummer Charlie Koryn encompasses not only speed and brutality, but a fine mix of precision and improvisation from jazz fusion. The end result is VoidCeremony and their signature sound: time-melting death black fusion. With an apt cover painting representing the lyrical and philosophical vision of an ancient and forgotten future, VoidCeremony itself seems to be operating on an alternate death metal timeline that once made itself known, but only briefly, and was soon left behind for more commercial appeal. Yet the portal has been re-opened and the merging of these boundless possibilities and directions are now being brought forth directly once again.

Miesha And The Spanks

Unconditional Love In Hi-Fi

Mint

Uncompromising, witty, authentic, inspiring–Miesha & The Spanks have established themselves as a rock ‘n’ roll force of nature to be reckoned with. The Calgary-based duo are equal parts searing guitarist / heart-melting vocalist and all-stage / all-star percussionist personality. Vexatious frontwoman Miesha Louie sets the steamrollers of love a-rollin’, ploughing through obstacles and destroying assumptions, like a red-hot indie music machine. Her new record Unconditional Love In Hi-Fi is her Mint Records debut; the album was produced by The Buzzcocks' Danny Farrant. The record's themes touch on personal and political topics such as parenthood and stories related to Miesha's mixed Shuswap heritage. Miesha and the Spanks have extensive tour plans following the release of Unconditional Love in Hi-Fi including the UK, Europe, US and Canada. RIYL: Wet Leg, Alvvays, Fleshwater, Black Mountain, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Joan Jett

Creative Technology Consortium, The

Panoramic Coloursound

Dark Entries

The venerable Dark Entries celebrates it’s 300th release with Panoramic Coloursound, a triple LP from the Creative Technology Consortium. Traxx, Andrew Bisenius, and Jason Letkiewicz forged the CtC during the depths of pandemic isolation. Drawing from film and television music of the '80s/'90s and armed with a mighty array of vintage analog and digital synthesizers, they set out to explore heists, vices, and catastrophe. Panoramic Coloursound collapses sound and image into a neon blur throughout its 25 tracks. While retro scores were the starting point for the CtC, the project does more than pay dutiful homage—these notes are warped and skewed, devolving into decaying digital soundscapes. EBM-inflected basslines pop up on tracks like “Catastrophe” and “A Retro Vice,” menacing numbers that recall Traxx and Letkiewicz’s legendary work as Mutant Beat Dance (a project also featuring Beau Wanzer). “Follow Our Kode” pairs heroic synths with funky bass, striking cosmic chords akin to the material that Traxx and Bisenius have released as An Anomaly. Krautrock-esque guitars slide along anthemic pads on “Beautifully Polluted Sunset,” which comes across like an alien Miami Vice closing theme. The CtC channel corroded VHS vibes while making music for the future. Panoramic Coloursound was mastered by Frédéric Alstadt. The sleeve was designed by Eloise Leigh, and features a photograph by Jason Letkiewicz. Also included is a postcard featuring liner notes, a gear list, and a photograph by Maria Tzeka.

Fruit Bats

A River Running to Your Heart

Merge

***Eric D. Johnson rarely lingers at one location too long. As a kid growing up in the Midwest, Johnson’s family moved around a lot, but it wasn’t until he became a touring musician years later that motion became a central part of his identity. That transient lifestyle stoked an enduring reverence for the world he watched pass by through a van window. A sense of place is a unifying theme he’s revisited with Fruit Bats throughout its many lives. From the project’s origins in the late ’90s as a vehicle for Johnson’s lo-fi tinkering to the more sonically ambitious work of recent years, Fruit Bats has often showcased love songs where people and locations meld into one. It’s a loose song structure that navigates what he calls “the geography of the heart.” A River Running to Your Heart represents the fullest realization of that creative vision to date. It’s a sonically diverse effort that largely explores the importance of what it means to be home, both physically and spiritually. And while that might seem like a peculiar focus for an artist who’s constantly in motion, for Fruit Bats, home can take many forms—from the obvious to the obscure.

Xylouris White

The Forest In Me

Drag City

***More in tune now with the rhythm of the sun and moon, Xylouris White speak to each other across great distances with the intuition and fellowship that can only be found over years in each other’s company. With fewer distractions, appreciative of the freedom to play with new sounds and spaces, they carve The Forest In Me from unbelievably thin air. Produced by GUY PICCIOTTO.

Helena Celle

If You Can't Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don't Deserve Me At My Best

Night School

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date. Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If I Can’t Handle was lo-fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit reveling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern. Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Freestyle Fellowship

To Whom It May Concern

Key System Recordings

***30th anniversary definitive issue of legendary hip-hop crew The Freestyle Fellowship's landmark 1991 debut, To Whom It May Concern..., mixed from the original 4-track tapes by Cut Chemist. Grammy Nominated for Best Historical Album 2022/23! Mastered for vinyl by Daddy Kev; includes an insert with full credits, rare photos from the archives of Brian "B+" Cross and producer J. Sumbi, as well as copious liner notes by David Ma and Nate LeBlanc of DadBodRapPod "Freestyle Fellowship—the legendary rap crew from Los Angeles made up of Aceyalone, Myka 9, P.E.A.C.E., and Self Jupiter. The 'Best Historical Album' nomination is the first ever for any rap album in Grammy history, and comes a little over 30 years after the group released their solo project as a grassroots, independent effort. In a time and region underscored by gangsta rap, G-funk, and record sales, the Freestyle Fellowship was largely built on collaborative community, long term friendships, and artistic willpower. What most defined the group is not only their lyrical dexterity, but their commitment to an authentic, do-it-yourself spirit that can often elude the most commercially successful rappers. Highlighted by their free-flowing, jazz-inspired cadences and multi-rhythmic flows delivered in obtuse ways—whether rapping slightly off beat, meandering in and out of alternating patterns, or coming in at rapid fire bursts—the Freestyle Fellowship helped to build the West Coast's underground movement, drawing inspiration from East Coast boom bap, spoken word poetry, and the socially explosive world around them."—OkayPlayer

Hauras

Pervades

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Head to the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, and the city becomes a very quiet place after midnight. By 3am, one can almost hear the fog spilling past the sodium lights that illuminate a lonesome street corner at Judah and 15th. Whatever soundtracks that emerge from that time and that place inevitably embody that nocturnal atmosphere, a narcoleptic weariness, a waking dream of the insomniac. Such is the psychogeographical realm as channeled through sound for Hauras, the obliquely musical concern for San Franciscan Howard Ryan. In Pervades, Hauras returns to the fragments of guitar warbling through chains of echo and flange, his Basinski-esque loops of crushingly sad ambient melody, his EVP impressionistic vocals, and his curious interruptions from scanner radio. More than before, he expresses a confidence in his oblique craftsmanship that allows him to push the sounds to include a very compelling drum machine plus guitar noise track in "Stellaged." Richard Youngs, Gate, and Graham Lambkin all come to mind, as does the terminally obscure project Dial (Jacqui Ham's post-Ut band of similarly late nite expressionism). Pervades concludes a trilogy of recordings made during the pandemic era, that also includes In These Coming Days (2020) and The Glare of the Nave (2021). Inspired by Rinko Kawauchi and Audrey Szasz. Mastered by Brian Pyle

Vertonen

Einige Schadstoffe

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***In Einige Schadstoffe, we have quite the potent homage to the classic era of industrial noise. Think Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report, Come's I'm Jack, MB's Symphony For A Genocide, and even Nord's Ego Trip. The sentiment linking all of these records is a clinical detachment in the production and broadcast of scalding tone, sickly rhythm, and unclean readymades, emerging through the spectacle of the human conditions of alienation, paranoia, and cruelty. Ultimately, such works are intended as critiques by way of gonzo journalism, where the intent is not always what it seems. Vertonen, the longstanding project of veteran Chicago avant-noise technician Blake Edwards, masterfully recapitulates these strategies and affects, both aesthetically and materially. On Einige Schadstoffe, Edwards transmits feverish arppegiations cascading through nervous distortion, followed by plodding rhythms and dead-toned electronics that gird case studies on living monstrosities. There is also a rather clever, if oblique and almost Oulipian framework to the album. Plenty of breadcrumbs have been laid as to the nature of Edwards' puzzle, and we have already said too much about that.

Soft Kill

Savior

Cercle Social

***REISSUED!!! Portland, Oregon’s Soft Kill ripped through 2016 with Choke, the follow up to 2015’s Heresy. It became the band’s most acclaimed album to date and saw them on a constant touring cycle through North America and Europe. The band now returns with the triumphant follow-up Savior, released by Profound Lore Records, bringing a unique blend of gloom laced with pop charm and flawless songwriting that transcends the post-punk genre. The writing for this album was influenced by tragic events in frontman Tobias Grave’s life, including songs about losing his son, his battle with drug addiction, and the empty space suspended between mourning and celebration, life and death. Recorded and mixed in Kingsize Sudios in Los Angeles and produced by Benjamin Greenberg (Uniform, The Men, Algiers), this band has matured into a powerhouse, effortlessly combining genres, always with Grave’s powerful, raw emotional storytelling. From the pop perfection of “Trying Not to Die” to the swelling and crushing guitars on “Hard Candy” to the unrelenting dirge of “Bunny Room,” Savior is a creative tour de force.

JT IV

The Future

Drag City

***Outsider freekz, make with the haste! It’s time to get back to The Future—the one promised back when rock and roll was king, re- member? J.T. IV believed in the promise—and now, the mystery man behind barely-released private press 7" records of the ’80s like “Destructo Rock” and “Cosmic Lightning” and a film holding the Guinness record for worlds-longest—85 hours!—has been called back to our mortal coil, to live out his glittering, rapa- cious dreams once again. The 2009 comp LP Cosmic Lightning cast his tragic silhouette up on the big screen for all to see: the lost boy, alone in the world, standing before the mic and releasing his inner star with glee and vengeance, his antisocial visions flying high atop a raging funnel of distorted guitars and blunt rhythms. Or couched, childlike, within a heartbreaking billow of acoustic guitars—a schizophrenic split that only magnifies the display of his deep emotions. The Future goes even further, excavating fifteen recordings from a previously unheard-of cassette entitled, The Best Of Johnny Zhivago Retrospective 1979–1993, and adding four more uncollected tracks from his slim (and impossible to find anyway) discography. Of these nineteen tracks, eight are covers—and J.T. IV’s picks, from Velvets to Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, Lee Hazlewood, The Kinks, Eno and Stephen Sondheim, sharpen our image of the misfit adrift; on the outside looking in, but maybe just a few steps away from his goal. The Future unfolds like an epic, as both sides of J.T.’s persona—the street-smart, damaged...

Denny, Martin

Exotic Moog

Jackpot

***A reissue of the sought-after 1969 Exotic Moog album from Exotica / Cocktail music pioneer MARTIN DENNY. Great music for synth, exotica, experimental, 60s rock and psych hunters. Black vinyl pressing.

System Exclusive

Party All The Time EP

Mt. St. Mtn.

***"It’s 9:35 pm on a Saturday in Chico and it’s pouring rain. It’s three days into our NW tour and things keep going wrong. We forgot half the merch at home, we had to turn around an hour out of Sacramento after I tried to leave my lucky leather jacket behind, and sadly, the shows have been pretty slow thus far. Thankfully, the room at The Naked Lounge in Chico is filling up, and things are looking pretty good for once. Whilst happily chatting about our upcoming recording session in Portland on Monday, imagine our horror at discovering that in fact the session was booked for Sunday, a mere 15 hours away. Twin panic attacks and some frantic google searches later we hatched a plan to push through the deluge and drive as far as Yreka after the show, crash for a few hours, and make the remaining 6 hours of the drive as early as we can in the morning. 490 miles later we pulled up to Page Street Studios in Portland as shattered shells of humans, but Frankie and Leon greeted us with stellar vibes and poured us into their freshly finished and stunningly beautiful studio space. We gamely blasted through these three songs in four hours before their next session, including our cover of the Rick James and Eddy Murphy’s stone-cold electro-funk classic, 'Party All the Time.' For everything that went wrong preceding (and following) the session, those 4 hours went amazingly right, and this record is...

Oldham, Will & Lori Damiano

Shorty's Ark

Drag City

***Shorty’s Ark is a book for young readers, a collaborative effort between singer Will Oldham and graphic artist Lori Damiano, based on work by Oldham and musician Matt Sweeney. Drawing inspiration from the story of Noah, Shorty’s Ark names and pictures a wild variety of species to inform and engage an equal variety of young minds with the diversity that can be found around this great planet of ours. The flood stands as metaphor for current impending changes in our planet, and the story works as a springboard for understanding concepts of interdependency, diversity and extinction. Colorfully illustrating as many creatures and their places as possible, Shorty’s Ark is an earth-affirmative vision meant to stimulate the curiosity and passion of those who encounter it.

Cisneros, Al

Suicide of Judas

Sinai

***As AL CISNEROS (SLEEP, OM) continues to move through the dub zone, a journey over a decade in length, his music and production continue to evolve and deepen. The sinew of the bass strings sets the pocket with ever-focused raw and relentless drive, while the rhythm section lays out an elaborate series of movements to roll in perfect accord with its multi-segmented melody. As melodies of the ancient world emerge prayerfully from the mist above the fray, all is right in all of the worlds that we can hope to know. On the “Akeldama” version, the mixing desk becomes its own instrument

Milk Music

First Demo + 1

L.G. Records

Milk Music was conceived in the late aughts as brothers Alex Coxen (guitar, vocals) and Joe Rutter (drums) drove around the Northwest jamming on tunes in a shitty old Volvo. Inspired by music that their friends were making, the young brothers rented a space, enlisted first bass player Eric Yates, and wrote the songs on this record. Side A begins with the blistering “Nervous Wreck”—in and out of tune at the same time, fast but somehow feels slow—totally fucked. “Beluga” conjures a deranged image of a mystery whale, as the listener imagines the brothers as Ishmael and Queequeg leaving their hometown of Port Townsend, WA behind on their epic coming-of-age hunt for revenge and white blubber. “No Life” finds this newly hatched band laying down the mood and sonic foundation that would define them up to this present day. “Ripped” ends side A with racing, lysergic skate-rat rambling over a thumping mudslide of scuzz. Side B begins with “Pipeline,” an absolutely massive, almost unbearable eight minute bong-toke of a song. Bonus crucial early track “Violence Now” wraps it up with a brutal sonic speed-bag to the groin, leaving the listener reeling and dazed, coughing in a fog of their own crotch smoke. Recorded by Sam Stabler (Sex Vid) in the practice space in 2009 and mastered in 2022 by Randy Randall. On two hundred gram vinyl with a sturdy tip-on sleeve for one’s consideration. Includes a poster.

Wolfmanhattan Project

Summer Forever And Ever

In The Red

Summer Forever And Ever succeeds Blue Gene Stew, 2019’s debut by the Wolfmanhattan Project, a collective unit co-starring three musicians familiar to In The Red listeners: singer-guitarist Mick Collins, front man of the seminal Detroit-bred garage units the Dirtbombs and the Gories, singer-guitarist Kid Congo Powers who played in such legendary bands as the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and drummer-vocalist Bob Bert, whose skin work has distinguished albums by Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus, and Jon Spencer and the HITmakers. The group was founded as a studio project by three musicians who are kept busy by their primary bands. Blue Gene Stew was written and recorded quickly. Powers says, “I think that the new record was much more a group effort. I think there’s more of a group kind of sound, as eclectic as it is. I feel like we all played together, as opposed to playing on each other’s songs.” Bert notes that the band’s music is grounded in spontaneity: “Me and Mick went in and had a couple of rehearsals, and I would come up with a beat, he would come up with a riff. I still have a cassette Walkman, believe it or not, and we’d put it down on that. It wasn’t even a full song. We’d just put down a bunch of ideas. When it came to recording we’d lay down the basic tracks and work out different things, and a lot of it was made...

Technology & Teamwork

We Used To Be Friends

Good Way Records

Technology + Teamwork’s fizzling synths, interweaving textures and punchy rhythms are beguiling on their long-awaited debut album We Used To Be Friends. However, at the heart of it all it’s the connection between the group’s two members, Anthony Silvester and Sarah Jones, the friendship the much-traveled duo have managed to maintain for nearly 15 years and a showcase of the slow-burning construction of the electronic world that they’ve surrounded themselves with. We Used To Be Friends is ultimately the tale of two storied artists in their own right, holding onto each other through personal and career twists and turns, re-locations and broader movements through respective phases of their lives. Silvester and Jones first met and then collaborated as part of biting post-punk five-piece XX Teens in 2008, eventually breaking off to forge their own path together even as the latter’s demand as a drummer grew. Performing with everyone from Hot Chip, Harry Styles and Bloc Party among many others, Jones has been a constant percussive presence across the sphere of alternative UK pop music—she’s also found time for her own solo project Pillow Person and played on records by the likes of Puscifer and Kurt Vile. Silvester meanwhile has performed in art galleries across Europe including: Fridericianum in Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, and Vleeshal in Middelburg, as well as providing sound design and composing work for several art films. The album bristles with hyperpop modernity. You can hear it in the manipulated vocals most prominently on Big Blue’s...

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Love For The Underdog

Woodsist

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

Uboa

The Origin Of My Depression

Flenser

In an artistic landscape fueled by gamified promotional tactics, spasmodic virality, and manufactured controversy, the amount of noise that independent artists must cut through can seem overwhelming. Yet, it’s the most genuine statements—often those expecting no audience at all—that overcome. The Origin Of My Depression, the 2019 album from Australian experimentalist Uboa, proves just that; presenting such a deeply affecting mix of dark ambient, noise, and extreme metal, it all but demanded its unplanned but unsurprising cult following. With several tracks that began as live improvisations recorded in the living-room-turned-bedroom, and others recorded from live sets in venues, The Origin Of My Depression exhibits the spontaneity and ineffability of extreme emotions. Xandra Metcalfe, the mind behind Uboa, offers sonic representations of her anxieties, depressive thoughts, and lived experiences throughout the record’s seven songs, even if the origins of these feelings escape her. The result, intensely and authentically personal, undeniably resonates, as The Origin Of My Depression spread through online communities through sheer word of mouth upon its initial release. Now, four years later, the record stands as a defining statement of late 2010s underground music, and it takes just one listen to see why. Uboa has spent the better part of a decade dipping into every corner of heavy music. From harsh noise to dark ambient, glitch to doom metal, Metcalfe’s output, though sonically varied, remains consistent in her use of such styles to express her mental state at the time of writing. Whether it's her live performances (described as...

Orcutt, Bill

Jump On It

Palilalia

***"It's been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One, a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar—and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of 'a certain age' will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt's rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompson-ian/ Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It , with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts...

Tiny Ruins

Ceremony

Ba Da Bing!

Tiny Ruins, the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook, are back with their fourth album, Ceremony, out on Ba Da Bing Records. The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human—and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how one can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, surface into another new morning—another new chance. Ceremony washes in and takes one out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau’s (aka Auckland’s) Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity” says Hollie. The album’s songs took shape as she explored the turbulent landscape on foot with her two dogs. The things Fullbrook was struck by there are annotated across Ceremony (cover art by Christiane Shortal) as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook. After touring Olympic Girls both solo and with her long- term band line-up of Cass Basil (bass), Alex Freer (drums), and Tom Healy (electric guitar, producer) for eighteen months, Fullbrook returned home to the banks of Little Muddy Creek, exhausted...

O'Sullivan, Daniel

The Physic Garden

Vhf

Third in a trilogy of albums of library music miniatures from composer and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan (Æthenor, Ulver, This Is Not This Heat, etc) following 2020’s Electric Māyā and 2021’s Fourth Density. For heads, the term “library music” in 2021 might evoke dodgy Italian gray market LPs and crate-diggers hunting for “funky breaks”—but London’s venerable KPM Music is working with groundbreakers like O’Sullivan to open up new avenues for composers to experiment. The fifteen tracks on The Physic Garden are fully-formed and orchestrated compositions, which would be highlights on anyone’s release, never mind as incidental music. Of the music, O’Sullivan says: “The Physic Garden is an album of diverse instrumentals inspired by a swathe of verdant vistas from manicured gardens and follies to urban common land, overgrown and forgotten. Convalescent memories in the shape of psychedelic auditory botanics.” Key tracks include the droning acoustic folk of the title song; the Canterbury-esque rolling horn and woodwind melody of “Return The Heart” (with expert drum kit from Frank Byng); the prog-ish odd meter interlude “Buttercup Tea”; The quiet ambience and delicate melody of “Dusty Feather:”; and the Eno-like drift of “Vapourer Larvae.”

Sunburned Hand Of The Man

Hypnotape

Vhf

A genuinely sprawling collection of high-fidelity mutation music that suits the compact disc format perfectly, Hypnotape is the third consecutive Sunburned Hand Of The Man album of studio assemblages following 2019’s Headless and 2021’s Pick A Day To Die. Recorded throughout 2021 and 2022, it’s an album possessed with a peculiar runaway locomotion which jump cuts feverishly between unusual atmospheres yet maintains a beguiling consistency—throbbing, twisting, undulating rhythmic blast-offs suddenly kick the door down into serene realms of nuanced acoustic privacy which are unexpectedly plunged back, face first into a miasma of shirtless, raging thuggery, ad infinitum. The album is notable in the group’s monstrous catalog for a few reasons: first, it showcases founding member Conrad Capistran stepping out from behind the keyboards and electronics to spread his smooth, buttery baritone atop the majority of the tracks. From his velvet cooing above the pulsing whirlwind of opener “People Person” to his vivid and febrile musings as a trip reporter on the frontlines of the meltdown zone on “Roger” his honeyed vocals guide the listener Virgil-like through the inferno all the way to the album’s finale where he duets with Ron Schneiderman on the old Dino Valenti / Quicksilver chestnut “What About Me”. Secondly, it features the recorded debut of Sunburned’s longtime friend and collaborator Mark Perretta after years of touring with the group. Some may remember Perretta from his days stomping across the primordial Boston underground of the late ’80s / early ’90s with the mighty Subskin Cables or his...

DOA

War On 45 - 40th Anniversary Reissue

Sudden Death

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

Direct Hit / Decent Criminal

Split 7” + Beacon Comics #1

Dirtnap

Dirtnap Records will publish the first installment of Beacon Comics this Spring, packaged with a 7" record featuring a taste of Direct Hit's (Milwaukee, Fat Wreck Chords) dubiously-forthcoming album ("Wasteland"), and new Decent Criminal (Santa Rosa, Diised/Gunner Records) songs "Time" and "Dream" - each an alternate take, and a B-side off their forthcoming album, respectively. This lavishly packaged comic/7” combo is a one time only pressing of 500 and will only be available for a limited time. Get yours today! 

Fugitive

Maniac

20 Buck Spin

***ON LIMITED ULTRA CLEAR W/ BLACK & RED SPLATTER VINYL!!! Blake Ibanez of Power Trip returns with a new band, Fugitive, and the Maniac EP, four original tracks of the aggressive pit detonation thrash he’s known for in Power Trip, with an even rawer and looser ferocity. A cover of the legendary Bathory’s ‘Raise The Dead’ rounds out the succinctly serrated five track debut. Joined by Seth Gilmore (Skourge), Lincoln Mullins (Creeping Death), Victor Gutierrez and Andy Messer, Ibanez and co. cohere in intensely violent crossover fashion with Fugitive; a product of long earned experience in the studio and on the stage. A savage death metal vocal style, like Power Trip passed through an Obituary meatgrinder, solidifies Maniac with the heaviness of a head hitting concrete. A short sharp shock of an EP, Maniac is a fierce introduction across its seventeen minute runtime to a future that Fugitive is just beginning to write and a reminder that Texas heat remains a steadily potent force in underground metal and hardcore.

During

s/t

Chunklet

"During’s self-titled debut is a pipe bomb of originality, set to detonate and shake the foundation of the tired post-punk sounds of today when it hits via Chunklet on ______. And while some more obvious influences show across the ten track LP—like DEVO, Sonic Youth and Gang of Four—its strength lies in some of it’s wilder ideas and influences, creating a wholly new approach as yet unseen in the otherwise very tired genre of post-punk. 'I've always been super influenced by post punk stuff. The Fall is definitely up there, as well as WIRE and the Urinals, even the Gizmos,' says Fisher emphatically. 'The coolest thing about recording this LP was we didn't know what we were gonna end up with, it just sort of came out the way it came out. So while those influences are there because that's where we come from, none of it is totally clear because it’s jumbled up with so many of our other ideas.' Starting with a dizzying and frantic base, During's sound can best be classified using the hyper-cerebral approach of DEVO, garnished with touches of their more frenetic speedfreak acolytes Minneapolis’ Uranium Club. It’s from there that things drift into territories unseen, with a cold vocal delivery not unlike Mark E Smith, a quirky and free-spirited approach like the Cardiacs, atonal riffing that recalls Sonic Youth, and a mildly funk-focused bed to tether down the madness a la A Certain Ratio or the Contortions. All that comes baked in with the...

Lunar Chamber

Shambhallic Vibrations

20 Buck Spin

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

Cutler, Paul B.

Les Fleurs

In The Red

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

Om

Gebel Barkal

Drag City

***Limited pressing reissue of the 2008 Sub Pop single, the first OM recording featuring Emil Amos on drums. B-side features the band’s first dub version.

Segall, Ty & Emmett Kelly

Live at Worship

Drag City

***An impromptu live show at Worship vintage clothes store in Los Angeles, serving as a rehearsal for an acoustic set that would be part of a TY SEAGALL And FREEDOM BAND record release show. Ty along with EMMETT KELLY deliver five songs and show no rehearsal was necessary.

Akasha System

Ancient Path Complete

100% Silk

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

Akasha System

Phytopia

100% Silk

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

Wave Temples

Panama Shift

Not Not Fun

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

Wave Temples

Portals

Not Not Fun

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

Cport Cistema

Say It

100% Silk

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

Fratila, Stefana

I want to leave this Earth behind

Not Not Fun

Between December 2018 and 2019, Canadian composer Stefana Fratila went on a series of research trips throughout North America – including to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre – to meet with astronomers and scientists to answer a complex question: “If each planet in our solar system were a room, what would each room sound like?” Her findings culminated in Sononaut, a collection of open-source VST plug-ins for digital audio workstations emulating each astral body’s atmospheric conditions. (Artist Jen Kutler collaborated on the project as well, using calculations by NASA astronomer and planetary scientist Dr. Conor Nixon). During a residency at CMMAS (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras) in Morelia, Mexico, Fratila began writing the album on an octophonic sound system, then added additional synthesizer, finalized arrangements, and incorporated Sononaut at her home studio in Toronto. The results are surreal, expansive, multi-colored, and mesmerizing. I want to leave this Earth behind is an odyssey of cosmic voyaging and technological innovation, fusing science, sound design, and stargazer reverie into eight cosmic portraits of our vast galactic family.

Amba, Zoh + William Parker, Francisco Mela

O Life, O Light Vol. 2

577 Records

***New York-based Zoh Amba first cultivated her musical passion in the lush forests of the Appalachian mountains, playing to the woods around her home, before she studied at classical conservatories. Her music honors her roots, full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully-executed Free Jazz. Her sound is courageous and bold, soaring from muted hums to squeaky trebles, producing a confident sound imbued with an innate spirituality. On this project, Zoh Amba is joined by legendary artists William Parker (Bass, Gralla) and Francisco Mela (Drums), named the 2021 musician of the year by The New York City Jazz Record, who temper her daring saxophone with a lush percussive foundation and a steady bassline.

Chat Pile

Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack

Flenser

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller. While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones— including arena country music. The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.” “Chat Pile bring a sense of dirt and squalor to the table.” —The FADER “Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile are the perfect people to expose the dark, seedy underbelly of American life.” —Paste Magazine “Cleansingly punishing.” —Stereogum “Harrowing.” —Pitchfork

Wong, Ryan

The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong

Rocks In Your Head

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

Flame, The (Robert Mitchell, Neil Charles, Mark Sanders)

Towards The Flame Vol. 1

577 Records

***"A heartfelt thank you to the beautiful audience that came out on the 10th Feb 2022 to Cafe Oto (London) to make this such an enjoyable show. We came as a blank page, one that had been scrunched up for the years of this horrific pandemic. Upon it all we had written was ‘we must play!’. And so to finally seeing the light of day—as we tentatively unfolded this venture into life—in what we (I hope not prematurely) believe was a slow emergence into a new ‘normal’ (sadly to soon be overshadowed by warfare in Europe joining too many conflicts all around the world, and containing the same imbalances in society as the old normal). This was a pure performance circumstance. A debut performing together in this format, we have played in different projects over the years—but this particular trio is literally being born on this recording. Mark and Neil are internationally known as masters in multiple fields involving improvisation. Their creativity and interactivity here is both incendiary and inspirational. The album title ‘Towards The Flame’—came from my studies with Andy Wasserman. His mentioning a quote from McCoy Tyner—that playing with Coltrane was akin to ‘stepping into the flames’—every night. A place that is pure spirit, complete commitment to totally connect and the disappearance of the self. We love this and hold every wisdom as a vital guide in times that are ever more threatening to pull us apart. In honour of the incredible shoulders upon which we stand and...

Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya

Orbweaving

Flenser

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

Impetuous Ritual

Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis

Profound Lore

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

Suarasama

Timeline

Drag City

***2023 marks the twenty-eighth year of Suarasama; it is also the first year for this reissue of their 2013 masterpiece, Timeline. Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu, Ethnomusicology lecturers at University of Sumatera Utara, founded Suarasama in 1995 after graduating from the University of Washington Ethnomusicology program. Their music, as expressed on both Timeline and Fajar Di Atas Awan (first issued in 1998, reissued by Drag City in 2008) is hypnotic and joyful; progressing ancient North Sumatran music concepts while referencing the music of adjacent ethnic traditions. “Dukkha,” for example, was written combining Mandailing and Eastern European musical inspirations. Playing this song on African jembe, Indian sruti box and a European lute known as the mandolin, Suarasama instigate a musical synesthesia in the listener that may honestly earn and truly deserve the title of “world music.” Throughout Timeline, this is largely due to Irwansyah Harahap’s master playing on a variety of stringed instruments including acoustic guitars, Malaysian gambus, mandolin, and an invention of his own design, the saz-guitar. Suarasama’s spirit and intention is further elevated by Rithaony Hutajulu’s vocals, as well as the skilled rhythm playing of Muhammad Amin and Horas Panjaitan, with additional percussion and singing from several others. The sound of Suarasama is the sound of people engaged in a deeply spir- itual, constantly moving recital in open space.

Shraya, Vivek

Baby, You're Projecting

Mint

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

C.I.A. Debutante

Down, Willow

Siltbreeze

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

Mag Amplitude

Wizards Of Today

Zaius Tapes

"If you ever thought Debris was Oklahoma's only entry into the bloodstream of feral, batshit rock, guess again. Mag Amplitude's, Wizards Of Today appeared in a miniscule, self released edition of 100 in 1983 & was the brainchild of a blind, guitarist-vocalist by the name of Matt Muncil. On Wizards Of Today, Muncil-considered by the psychedelic mafia to be the 'Higney of Heavy Rock'—& drummer Scott Roher proceed to lay down over 7 tracks an incredible wall of wildly fuzzed & primitive bash that is a singular testament to loner, outsider brilliance. Heavy on double tracked guitar riffs & growling, incomprehensible vocals concerning outer space, rocket ships & rock, Mag Amplitude's Wizards Of Today is a half hour slab of muzzed disorder of the highest possible recommendation. This Zaius Tapes reissue is in a one time pressing of 292 copies. Our first foray into (re) introducing fans & collectors into the cimmerian forest of American real people/outsider psych rock."—Johan Klepp, for Zaius Tapes

Ascended Dead

Evenfall Of The Apocalypse

20 Buck Spin

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

Tanlines

The Big Mess

Merge

***Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen of Tanlines are indie-rock lifers turned reasonable, happy middle-aged fathers of two, figuring out their place in a chaotic culture and industry that can no longer command their full attention.They are emblematic of a particular time and place that doesn’t really exist anymore, yet here they are existing, and thriving, in 2023. The Big Mess came together when Emm and his family moved from Brooklyn to rural Connecticut, while Cohen launched a marketing career and a successful podcast and stayed in the city. Emm continued writing songs—hundreds of them—through all the weirdness of the past few years, but he wasn’t exactly sure who he was writing them for. “I spent years figuring out in my mind, ‘What is my musical life going to look like?’” he says. “I just kept writing.” Cohen gave Emm his blessing to continue Tanlines, even if his own contributions would be limited due to his own non-musical obligations. “I’m like, ‘Whatever you can do to keep this thing going, do it,’” Cohen says. And with that, Tanlines was reborn. By January 2022 Emm felt he had a body of work that made sense as a Tanlines album. Cohen spent ten days with Emm at his Connecticut studio, along with unofficial third Tanline Patrick Ford (!!!). This was tied together with a sleek final mix from Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) at his famed Tarquin Studios, resulting in a clear vision of what Emm’s musical life was going to look like:...

Coachwhips

Bangers Vs. Fuckers

Castle Face

Feeling listless? Falling asleep behind the wheel? Need a soundtrack for your backyard Fight Club (with the lucky possibility of a muddy mid-fight kiss)? We have just the thing: a fully re-spruced version of the Coachwhips’ classic LP, Bangers Vs. Fuckers.  If you’re unfamiliar, this record may be the loudest thing ever put to tape. Weasel Walter’s mastering job is more of an act of terrorism than anything else but it perfectly captures the intensity of seeing them live in, say, your bathroom. This record right here is Coachwhips at their bloody-nosed best, way past in the red, shoving white-hot heart-attack anthems like “You Gonna Get It,” “Evil Son” and “Thee Alarm” straight through your reptilian brain and into the sweaty crowd behind you. Essential listening for anyone with a pulse and a chip on their shoulder.  Remastered and recut at 45 RPM for maximum blunt force. We found the artwork all beat up but we nursed it back to health. It’s never been louder, clearer or more fun than this, and it’s out on Castle Face Records.

Black Sun Ensemble

s/t

Return To Analog International

***A reissue of the very first BLACK SUN ENSEMBLE record from 1985, and an incredible early document of the mescaline yet masculine, guitar-scape hypnotic playing of JESUS ACEDO. "ABSOLUTELY stunning psych LP, first released in limited edition in 1985 on Pyknotic label and reissued on CD in 2000 by Camera Obscura (instantly sold out). Stunning fuzzy guitar, Eastern tunes, chanting, some horns here and there.... absolutely spacey psychedelic music."—Mutant Sound. Limited vinyl pressing of 500 copies.

Drones, The

Wait Long By The River And Bodies Of Your Enemies

Bang

***Acclaimed second album by The Drones finally reissued by Bang! Records, originally released in 2005. Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By draws influence from the likes of Neil Young and The Birthday Party, though it has been described by lead singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard himself as a punk rock album. The lyrics, penned by Liddiard, deal with issues such as death, depression and alcoholism in its depiction of Australian working-class life. The album received critical acclaim upon release, regarded later on as the band's "break-out" and one of their most popular releases. The track "Shark Fin Blues," in particular, went on to become a concert staple and was voted by contemporary Australian songwriters as the greatest Australian song of all time in October 2009. The album itself was performed live in its entirety many times, even as a part of the acclaimed Don't Look Back concert series. In 2008, The Age ranked it the best Australian album of the 21st century. Three years later, the band's contemporaries and "industry experts" would vote it the 24th best Australian album of all time. Gatefold sleeve.

Water Damage

Repeater

12xu

***"There is something really special about music based on drones. Whether it's the vocals of Pandit Pran Nath, the ARP 2500 of Eliane Radigue, or the nearly-blown amps of Sunn O))), by changing the listeners's focus on details to one that favors flow, drones are uniquely capable of transporting our brains far far away. The debut LP, 'Repeater', by this loudly droning Austin septet is a goddamn splendid example of how the process works. Using the motto, “Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation,” Water Damage create glowing fields of post-rock lava that pretty much suck you right in and boil you alive. Water Damage, while technically a septet, actually operate in various configurations, with the proviso there should always be two drummers and two bass players on hand. They prefer if each of their sonic ideas takes up a whole reel of tape, and once they start they don't look back. Everything proceeds towards an imaginary end point that is only achieved when the tape starts flapping. What a way to run a railroad! But the folks in the band are all vets of various projects—Spray Paint, USA/Mexico, Marriage, Black Eyes, Thor & Friends, among others—so let's assume they know what they're doing. And why not? They sound fucking great. Their approach to the form is less front-loaded than most of their peers, and the surface of their sound is sometimes ruffled by aural events of an un-drone-like nature. But the main gush is usually a blend of harmonic tones and textures pointing towards...

Art Gray Noizz Quintet, The

The Art Gray Noizz Quintet

Bang

***Spearheaded by twisted Australian guitar legend Stu Spasm of Lubricated Goat, Crunt, and The Beasts Of Bourbon, The Art Gray Noizz Quintet were originally formed for an afterparty celebrating the New York City premiere of Amphetamine Reptile documentary The Color Of Noise. "It was obvious I must assemble a supergroup of the finest noise rockers New York City had to offer," says Stu Spasm. First choice was basher extraordinaire "Bloody" Rich Hutchins, veteran of such explosive musical exports as Live Skull, Of Cabbages And Kings, and Ruin. Next, Skeleton Boy of Woman was recruited. "Who, just as Leadbelly was the king of the twelve-string guitar, is himself the king of the two-string bass." Then came the twang, with the addition of suave slinger Andrea Sicco of Twin Guns. "When our guitars merge, it forms a most piquant aural mélange." In a nod to the latter half of his birth name, Stu Spasm now became Art Gray, and an entirely new mess was born. The Art Gray Noizz Quintet have recently been witnessed onstage opening for kindred spirits such as The Scientists and Mudhoney, and 2019 saw them survive a successful tour of the West Coast. Catching the eye of no wave queen Lydia Lunch led to teaming up for a collaborative musical effort, and sharing a few stages including bookending the pandemic, with one of the last shows of 2020 NYC before lockdown hit, and a triumphant return to the boards in July 2021.

Sex Messiah

Metal Del Chivo

Nuclear War Now

***Sex Messiah returns from the Satanic brothels of Japan to satiate our depraved appetites for morally-corrupt black metal with four new tracks and five live tracks. Although their overall sadistic formula remains consistent with prior atrocities, their language of choice has shifted to Spanish, providing a new vehicle to spread their gospel of fornication and degradation.

Carter, Daniel / Evan Strauss / 5-track / Sheridan Riley

The Uproar In Bursts Of Sound And Silence

577 Records

***The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence is a sort of emergent collage that came together over four years of composition, improvisation and production. The foundations for this album were initially recorded in 2018 by producer/engineer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Skinyard) at Soundhouse in Seattle, WA with myself (Evan Strauss, electric bass and upright bass), 5-Track (Guitar) and Sheridan Riley (Drums). The initial foundations of this music consisted of my long-form graphically notated conceptual compositions based on the calls of the Veery songbird (Catharus fuscescens), the astrological transits at the precise time of the recording session and some thematic elements from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed.   In 2019 the album was given the working title Bird Songs for the Stars and I commissioned the cover art, Night Fisher, from Jeane Cohen. Also around this time, Daniel Carter had emphatically told me, “I’m going to become a rapper by the time I turn 90.” So, a few weeks later Daniel and I were hanging out, recording music and eating stir fry in my Ditmas Park apartment and I convinced him to make some progress on his goals by recording his voice into a microphone. Daniel began by recording an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and continued by recording some of his own poetry.  The recordings of Daniel from that afternoon would eventually make their way onto this album alongside my own experimentations in production inspired by Lee Scratch Perry, J Dilla and Ingram...

Blatant Dissent

1985-1986

Alona's Dream

***BLATANT DISSENT's story is the story of evolution. They started in Dekalb, Illinois, in 1983 as a cover band. Over the next few years, Blatant Dissent developed and recorded their own distinct brand of midwestern indie-skate punk. By 1988, the evolution was complete and they had become Midwest noise-rock stalwarts TAR. Their music had the backbone and energy of hardcore punk but Blatant Dissent were too smart and well informed to play run-of-the-mill uniform hardcore. Their style was also illuminated by the innovations of contemporary bands including Naked Raygun, whose JEFF PEZZATI produced their first session. Also influential were Chicago punk pioneers Trial By Fire as well as innovative national acts like Husker Du, The Minutemen and The Replacements. After an initial demo, Blatant Dissent eventually recorded a total of 22 songs over two sessions between 1985 and 1986. Recorded by IAIN BURGESS and STEVE ALBINI respectively, these sessions offer insight into the development of the group as they tightened their song writing and laid the groundwork for later becoming Tar. During 2021 the original multi-tracks were remixed by the band with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago. The music was subsequently mastered by CARL SAFF and pressed into 160-gram color vinyl in Chicago at Smashed Plastic Record Pressing. 22 song limited edition blue / white swirl color vinyl LP. Comes in 20pt board jacket with full color, four page booklet.

Foil

Foil

Violent Pest

***Ripping full band demo from Kansas City's red hot FOIL makes it's way to vinyl in the form of a neat little flexi disc. Get em while they're hot. Don't wait.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Made In Timeland

ATO

***"Made In Timeland has been whispered about on fan message boards for almost 2 years. Like so many other things, it was delayed by the pandemic. It was finally released after the band's marathon 3-hour show in Melbourne."

White Lightning

Thunderbolts Of Fuzz

Riding Easy

Standout favorites of Riding Easy Records’ Brown Acid compilation series, White Lightning’s stellar discography of rare and under-appreciated heavy psych, proto-metal rock gets a vital revival for new generations to learn how swinging, swaggering and often blazingly fast rock’n’roll is done. White Lightning was formed in Minneapolis, MN in 1968 by guitarist Tom “Zippy” Caplan and bassist Woody Woodrich after leaving garage psych band The Litter (themselves popular standouts from the Nuggets and Pebbles series of garage rock rarities.) Originally a power trio, the band later expanded to a five-piece in 1969 while shortening its name to Lightning. The quintet’s brilliant and rare 1970 self-titled album on Pickwick International’s P.I.P. imprint provides six of the ten tracks on Thunderbolts Of Fuzz. The original White Lightning trio only released the one 45-rpm single “Of Paupers And Poets” during their existence (on local Hexagon label in 1968, later reissued by major label ATCO Records in 1969.) A long out-of-print posthumous album released in 1995 gathered unreleased recordings, three of which are found here. This rounds out this collection of recorded highlights from the band’s rocky history. Taking their name from a particularly potent type of LSD, White Lightning laid out from the start that it was not cute and cuddly ’70s rock. In fact, the band’s aggressive tempos are like punk rock way before punk. However, their dirty blues groove and musical prowess shows the band was more than unrefined ne’er-do-wells, they had true versatility.

Ruth, Rich

I Survived, It's Over

Third Man

***Recorded under a loft bed in the guest bedroom of his Nashville home, MICHAEL RUTH aka RICH RUTH's I Survived, It’s Over starts in a humble space. And while many contemporary music projects are produced in such an environment, I Survived, It’s Over sets itself apart in its transformative properties as well as its transparency. What we have here is honest sound exploration, session musician-level instrumentation, and a true love for nature run through the fingers of a dude who can channel some acute and undeniable magic. Underneath the swell of the strings and the shredding of the guitars, this record has hard working, rustbelt, drum-heavy roots all over it (which makes sense as Ruth hails from outside of Toledo, the album was mixed by JOHN MCENTIRE from Chicago band Tortoise). Many of the flutes, saxophones, pedal steel, and other instruments were recorded remotely because we live in the future, but this only adds to the collage of sampled and sample-able material that Rich Ruth has to offer. The organic relationships between the artist and other musicians on the album is evident even in the compilation style sampling that needs to occur in putting such a project together. I Survived, It’s Over is a record you should buy for your friend, your foe, and yourself. It’ll sit perfectly on your shelf between Alice Coltrane and Hiroshi Yoshimura.

Dead Void

Volatile Forms

Dark Descent

After some silence since their magnificent demo, Dead Void return from the depths to bestow a crushing debut album—Volatile Forms—upon the world. Drawing in on doomy, yet certainly not meek, atmospherics—the sheer monstrous tone of which will pin one to the wall—it is clear this is something unwieldy. Murmuring bass seeps through buzzing guitars in a manner that sounds profoundly unwelcoming, while the daunting vocals and crashing drums give no alleviation from the bludgeoning force. While the hostile and claustrophobic sounds of this record cannot be ignored, equally impactful are the grooves which hit like a hammer of pure malice when carefully spliced with the caverns of eerily contorting death metal. When the pounding drums break through the guitars, they have a real hard tone, while the seeping filth of the strings is not overshadowed. Clearly the three demos and spacing between them have allowed the band to develop into the best version of themselves, as on this debut album one hears a refined but unpolished and inhospitable cut of truly awesome music taking form. Moving forth, the hooks, the grooves, the expanses of doom and desolation, all conjure something inescapable and dread-tinged while the malignant hammering of pure old school violence is not lost or forgotten, as warped riffs and blast-beats meet gutturally-spewed vocals and occasional lead oddities. Contrasting often nuanced moments with an assault of bestial ferocity, there is no predictability or obvious pattern, rather a chaotic and honest approach to all of the songs. These tracks move...

Ares Kingdom

In Darkness At Last

Nuclear War Now

***Immediately after completing the recording of By the Light of Their Destruction, released in 2019, Chuck Keller, the brilliant guitarist and compositional mastermind behind Ares Kingdom, began writing material for another album. He spent the next year working on a body of songs that he intended as a companion to By the Light of Their Destruction, viewing the new material as an extension of the preceding work. Entitled In Darkness at Last, the band’s fifth full-length is inarguably their most aggressive recording to date. Still operating as a trio consisting of Keller, drummer Mike Miller (Order From Chaos), and bassist/vocalist Alex Blume (Nepenthe, Blasphemic Cruelty, Perdition Temple), Ares Kingdom continue to refine, polish, and sharpen their sound—a caustic assault of precision deathrash. Every track on In Darkness at Last evokes the majesty of violence and the entropic preeminence of decay as Keller’s guitar rides triumphant upon the chariot of Miller’s drumming, drawn by the furious power of Blume’s bass. Indeed, there are few bands in the underground whose degree of musicianship rivals that of Ares Kingdom. One can hear the intuitive chemistry between the band members, crystalized from decades of playing and performing together.

High Back Chairs

2 Songs

Dischord

***Two songs by the High Back Chairs, released in 1992. Peter Hayes (vocals & guitar) Jim Spellman (guitar) Charles Steck (bass & vocals) Jeff Nelson (drums & vocals)

Warmers

s/t

Dischord

***The Warmers' full-length record, released in 1996.

Juliff, Simon

Stars

Dog Meat Records

Much-loved Melbourne rock 'n' roll label Dog Meat Records returns with first solo release from former singer/guitarist/songwriter of The Roys and God / Hoss / Powder Monkeys associate, Simon Juliff The first new Dog Meat release in over a quarter of a century is the new single “Stars”, taken from the forthcoming album of the same name, from reticent Melbourne pop-rock singer/songwriter Simon Juliff. Juliff, who was singer/guitarist/songwriter for Melbourne band The Roys in the ‘00s, was a friend of many of the ‘90s Melbourne bands on Dog Meat and nearly a Dog Meat signing with his first band The Evil Dead. Produced by long-time friend Joel Silbersher (God, Hoss, Tendrils etc) and featuring backing from members of Hoss and Kim Salmon & the Surrealists, “Stars” – both the new single and the forthcoming album - combines brightly dappled glimmers of classic pop-rock melodicism with a darkened, frazzled vibe.

Doomsayer

Awake In Darkness

Nuclear War Now

***In celebration of the 30th anniversary of their sole demo from 1992, Awake in Darkness, NWN is proud to present Doomsayer’s legacy on LP for the very first time! This burning triumph- described as “Pestilential Death Metal” by the band back in the early ’90s when they were establishing themselves in the Italian extreme metal scene- combines all of the power of their varied influences, giving both a perfect snapshot of the heavy metal and occult tinged nascent scene in their country as well as an image of a power, creative band that managed to create a single work that still resonates now decades later. Though Doomsayer fits squarely in the saga of other cult Italian bands, it has plenty of its own voice to offer and fans of early extreme metal will be pleasantly surprised at the strength of this long-hidden obscurity. For fans of Varathron, Sadist, and Necrodeath.

Boyfriends, The

Wrapped Up In A Dream

Reminder

***Arising from the ashes of THE POPPEES, a four-piece Merseybeat/Brit Invasion “Pop Revival” band, the core of the BOYFRIENDS began to coalesce around the emerging Cavern Club of the Bowery: Hilly Krystal’s CBGB’s. Inspired by the heavier sounds of the Heartbreakers and Ramones, vocalist and rhythm guitarist PADDY LORENZO and lead guitarist BOBBY DEE WAXMAN ditched their mohair suits for a more austere look and a more stripped-down, street-level sound. Adding JAY NAP on bass and LEE CRYSTAL on drums, the original line-up of the Boyfriends was set. Thankfully, This criminally underrated group may now finally be getting the break that they’ve been waiting over forty years for as this compilation collects the band’s two singles as well as studio material and demos, remastered from the original tapes and available on vinyl for the very first time. With the talent, songwriting ability and pop craftmanship on display, The Boyfriends hopefully will finally now assume their rightful place in the New York City punk and new wave pantheon.

Dogs

The Melodies Massacre Years

Reminder

***It took Rouen, France over five-hundred-years to find an act as fiery as the execution of Joan of Arc, but they finally found one in the Year Of Our Lord 1977: DOGS. The absolute picks-of-the-litter and best-in-French-new-wave-rock-show, Dogs (no ‘the’), over the course of nine albums, two dozen singles and EP’s left behind an undeniable legacy, none fiercer than on their first recordings for the Melodies Massacre label. This collection compiles Dogs’ earliest releases: the ‘Charlie Was A Good Boy’ 45 and ‘Go Where You Want To Go’ 12 inch maxi-single. Fully and officially licensed from Melodies Massacre for the first time, including notes from Melodies Massacre founder LIONEL HERRMANI and featuring many never-before-seen photos from the band’s halcyon days, this compilation serves as the definitive portrait of the artists as young Dogs. A must for fans of all music, but especially Eddie & The Hot Rods, the early Scientists, the Flamin’ Groovies, and the Heartbreakers. Rouen, France got that Dog in ‘em—now you can as well!

Big Takeover

Issue # 91

Big Takeover

***Big Takeover returns with features THE BETHS, BUILT TO SPILL, BILLY BRAGG (part 2), ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER, ROBIN GUTHRIE (COCTEAU TWINS), THE HOUSE OF LOVE, ARCHERS OF LOVE, MOMMYHEADS, TITUS ANDRONICUS, FLOWERTOWN, and much more.

Owners, The

s/t

Dischord / Red Room Records

***THE OWNERS are a band from Washington DC, featuring DANTE and CATHERINE FERRANDO, ALEC BUDD and LAURA HARRIS. Over the years, they have played in bands ranging from IRON CROSS, GRAY MATTER, THE SHIRKS and EX HEX. Their first full-length is a split between Red Room Records and Dischord The vinyl is a limited edition pressing on splatter vinyl.

Doctor Explosion

Superioridad Moral

Slovenly

***The time has finally come: after eleven years of waiting, a new DOCTOR EXPLOSION album! The suggestive and incisive title of Moral Superiority is a superlative job. Would one call Superioridad Moral a mature record? That's a complicated term to associate with Doctor Explosion. Still, this album is sure that it shows JORGE and his band playing at a high caliber level. They keep their punk and garage attitude but unfold a thousand more nuances in this album: solid riffs, psychedelic atmospheres, anthological lyrics, and superb arrangements. You can't just label Superioridad Moral as simply "a garage album"; it was written and arranged without that intent. It is an encyclopedia of the best rock music in which huge songs follow one another. A brilliant record about maturity written by pathologically immature folks? Yeah, that sounds about right. Superioridad Moral was recorded and mixed in the legendary Circo Perrotti studios of Gijón and by the usual procedure: analogically, on tape, using all kinds of old-fashioned machines, but sounding real, direct, and, therefore, in your face.

Guided By Voices

La La Land

GBV Inc

La La Land doubles down on the intricate proggy-pop displayed on Guided By Voices’s last album Tremblers And Goggles By Rank. On a hot streak of critical acclaim, Robert Pollard continues expanding his songwriting towards extremes of prettiness, heaviness and poeticism. As always, unforgettable hooks are everywhere. But with thsi latest, it seems Pollard is playing with the extremes of his abilities as a songwriter, emboldened by the power of this lineup now on their fourteenth album together since 2017. The prettiest stuff is prettier than ever (“Queen Of Spaces”) and odder, more complex songs like “Slowly On The Wheel” combine minimalism, whimsy, and cinematic inclinations. There are the exquisite power pop bangers that fans come to expect like “Ballroom Etiquette” and “Pockets.” Tracks like “Instinct Dwelling” and “Caution Song” effortlessly display a cranked-up weight and complexity most bands could never muster. Celebrating forty years in 2023 with their thirty-eighth album, GBV has lately been garnering rave reviews from Rolling Stone, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, Uncut, MOJO, Shindig, Paste, Popmatters, The Quietus and many more.

Raffa, Ryan J

4 e and a

Group Tightener

***4 e and a is about the infinite spaces between. As a classically trained percussionist, RYAN J RAFFA has sat in front of a metronome for the majority of their life. In their mind, they would play with the spaces between those clicks. In especially challenging times, they would attempt to expand and stretch those spaces into forever. Just existing in the between. This record is about these moments (and places) living in those infinite spaces. The title "4 e and a" is a play on words, in reference to counting and subdividing rhythmic patterns. Ryan would need to play these patterns on a drum as a child. “4 e and a” is also a reference to a country or a place with a name. Like Argentina is a place, "4 e and a" (said run all together) sounds like a country. A place we all know about and sometimes go to because it's beautiful and full of spirit, but it also can be a bit unnerving, uneasy, and eerie when we explore new places there. In mathematics, we have Cantor's diagonal argument and the understanding that the infinity between each integer (such as between 1 and 2) is larger than the infinite space that every integer that exists can fill. Like, one infinity is larger than another infinity? Huh?! When you start subdividing time (like 1 e and a, 2 e and a, 3 e and a, 4 e and a), you start creating those ever-expanding spaces, one larger...

Paranoid

Destroy Future Less System

Paranoid Northern Discs

***PARANOID's Destroy Future Less System 7” EP is back in print on its original format for the first time since its original release in 2014 by Konton Crasher. A violent metal-punk storm with cascading sheets of noise punctuated by thunderclaps of d-beat and quick lightning strikes of lead guitar.

Paranoid

Heavy Mental Fuck-Up

Paranoid Northern Discs

***PARANOID's second album album channels the noisy sound of their debut into a heavier, more powerful attack. Part of the band's First Ten Years 2012-2022 vinyl reissue series. "Whether you’re the old guy at the bar with the Discharge tattoo, or the 14 year-old who just discovered punk, Paranoid will bring out your inner discontent. D-beat is an interesting genre, either you do it well, or you don’t. Paranoid, dare I say, have completely mastered the genre and everything from their tone to their album artwork embodies what it means to be in a d-beat band. There is no bullshit attached to this record"—CVLT Nation

Paranoid

Out Raising Hell

Paranoid Northern Discs

***PARANOID's third assault delivers some of their most nasty riffs and songs yet. 10 blackened punk anthems. Part of the band's First Ten Years 2012-2022 vinyl reissue series. "Whether you’re the old guy at the bar with the Discharge tattoo, or the 14 year-old who just discovered punk, Paranoid will bring out your inner discontent. D-beat is an interesting genre, either you do it well, or you don’t. Paranoid, dare I say, have completely mastered the genre and everything from their tone to their album artwork embodies what it means to be in a d-beat band. There is no bullshit attached to this record"—CVLT Nation

Paranoid

Satyagraha

Paranoid Northern Discs

***PARANOID's first album is a manic, noise-drenched d-beat assault. 10 tracks that capture us at our rawest and most aggressive period up to this date. Part of the band's First Ten Years 2012-2022 vinyl reissue series. "Whether you’re the old guy at the bar with the Discharge tattoo, or the 14 year-old who just discovered punk, Paranoid will bring out your inner discontent. D-beat is an interesting genre, either you do it well, or you don’t. Paranoid, dare I say, have completely mastered the genre and everything from their tone to their album artwork embodies what it means to be in a d-beat band. There is no bullshit attached to this record"—CVLT Nation

Gen Pop

Beat Sessions Vol. 9

Shout Recordings

***"In just half a decade Olympia’s Gen Pop have forged a singular style over the release of several EPs and the aptly titled, 2020 full length, PPM66. The group draws water from the disparate wells of early 80’s American hardcore and late 70’s UK post-punk, filtering it through the shitshow chaos of the early 21st century international cultural, political, and environmental climates. A sound fully realized and on display here in the ninth volume of the infamous Beat Sessions, presented by Shout Recordings. Precise, punchy, yet dynamic and fluid drumming underlie a cascade of tones, textures, styles, and voices to form a repertoire of songs where change is the only constant. The music cycles between uplifting, romantic, distressing, aggressive, and disjointed. Tempo and feeling will shift on a dime, and songs often exhibit romance, buoyancy, aggression, and anxiety simultaneously. This performance was captured by Shout’s Mike Kriebel in December 2021 at LA’s Golden Beat Studios. The line up was supplemented on this session by Anthony Gaviria, of the fellow Washingtonian oddball outfit Lysol, on bass guitar."

Laurel Canyon

Drop Out

Nuclear Banana

Punk rock band Laurel Canyon – Nicholas Gillespie, Serg Cereja, and Dylan Loccarini – formed in 2019 when Nick and Serg met through a mutual friend in their hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. After connecting over a shared interest in both Arthur Rimbaud and The Stooges, the two began to rehearse together in Serg’s garage. By October 2020, Serg and Nick began composing original songs together as Laurel Canyon, the first of which, “Two Times Emptiness,” was released on May 1, 2021. Following the release of “Two Times Emptiness” b/w “Enemy Lines,” Nick and Serg traded in their characteristic jangle for fuzz pedals and established a relationship with veteran producer Bryce Goggin (Pavement, The Lemonheads) at Trout Recording in Brooklyn. Between July and November of 2021 the group recorded a 5-track EP “Victim,” released on January 14, 2022, rounding out the line-up with bassist Dylan Loccarini. The artist Savage Pencil, who has created artwork for Big Black and Sonic Youth, drew the EP cover. Singles “Daddy’s Honey” and “Eczema” created a buzz online and were featured in Spotify playlists “All New Rock” and “Smells Like Stream Spirit.” Since the release of their debut EP, Laurel Canyon have recorded with Steve Albini and opened for Agent Orange at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. The Steve Albini produced tracks make up their next release “Drop Out” b/w “Tangiers,” which will be released on 7” vinyl this Halloween. The cover artwork for “Drop Out” was once again provided by Savage Pencil....

Vidro

Glod

Beach Impdiment

***And here we have it, the North American pressing of VIDRO's brilliant 2nd 12" titled GLÖD. Featuring an amalgamation of members that span the globe from Brazil to the USA to their sonic and geographical home of Stockholm, Sweden, Vidro have been churning out quality hardcore punk in recorded and live settings for five years now with no apparent signs of letting up anytime soon. Previously released on Germany's Kink Records near the outset of 2022, this North American pressing serves both as a means to alert the uninitiated of what they've been missing along with providing a taste of what is to come. Each record comes in a jacket with a large poster, featuring design work and art by Vidro guitarist LUCAS LIMA .

Indre Krig

Destroyer

Beach Impediment

***Released earlier in the year on the magnificent Adult Crash Records out of Copenhagen, Denmark, Beach Impediment is pleased to handle the North American pressing of an absolute, bonafide international hardcore punk ripper... the Destroyer EP from INDRE KRIG! Six tracks of razor sharp musicianship with truly memorable hooks and riffs to match it, this platter keeps up the reputation K-Town has garnered for generating quality punk music over the course of multiple decades now. Each record comes in a pocket sleeve embellished with particularly striking art by the living legend we call NICKY RAT.

Merzbow

Noise Matrix

Hospital Productions

***Noise Matrix unleashes material from the same sessions as Noisembryo and counterpart Hole and selected recordings from the time period. Originally released as a bonus disc on the definitive Noisembryo double-CD edition, Noise Matrix absolutely can't be missed for fans of this period of noise deity MERZBOW. When people ask where to start with Merzbow or the entire '90s noise movement in Japan—this is an answer! MASAMI AKITA's surrealism of the past stands prominently relevant to this day combining the expansive textures of electronics, effects, aluminum-soaked winds of the Tokyo metropolis and metals. Deluxe wide spine metallic reflective "mother of pearl" jacket. Includes digital download code. Pressed on clear vinyl.

Fossilization

He Whose Name Was Long Forgotten

Transylvanian Recordings

***Ritualistic, Primeval Death Metal from Brazil. Featuring members of Jupiterian. For fans of Dead Congregation & Portal.

Hecker, Tim

No Highs

Kranky

The latest by Canadian composer Tim Hecker serves as a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue. Whether taken as warning or promise, No Highs delivers—this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined. Morse code pulse programming flickers like distress signals while a gathering storm of strings, noise, and low-end looms in the distance. Processed electronics shiver and shudder against pitch-shifting assemblages of crackling voltage, mantric horns (including exquisite modal sax by Colin Stetson), and cathedral keys. Throughout, the pieces both accrue and avoid drama, more attuned to undertow than crescendo. Hecker mentions “negation” as a muse of sorts—the sense of tumult without bombast, tethered ecstasies, an escape from escapism. His is an antagonism both brusque and beguiling, devoid of resolution, beckoning the listener ever deeper into its greyscale alchemies of magisterial disquiet.