The first ever release from the Hototogisu duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards) that even approaches being ‘generally available', Green is a real CD - not a CD-R - pressed up for the group by the sainted Ed Hardy of Eclipse records and available in an edition of 1000 copies complete with a suave full-colour booklet reproducing a bunch of the duo's art. Anyone whose mind was blown by the vision of this pair powering their way through one of the most magical/unforgiving sets of Subcurrent 2005 will find plenty to drown in here. Tracks are shorter than on previous releases, though even more obsessively detailed. There are points where the cacophony is so insanely oversaturated that the noise starts to sound as if it's spontaneously giving birth to language: you start hallucinating words and sentences, almost as if the film protecting you from a constant bombardment of information-heavy environmental radiation has been blown apart. Green also features some of Hototogisu's most straight-ahead death/doom metal moves. Although they're not quite Skullflower, the first track features snatches of classic death metal riffs alongside the stomach-punch of a cheap drum machine and on their theme song, the beautifully ferocious “Heavy Blossom”, Mick Flower of Vibracathedral Orchestra plays drums. Alongside all the iron first action, there are some beautiful moments where Marcia and Matthew's voices melt into ribbons of pure white light and the whole thing floats to the ceiling. A modern classic, and possibly the best Hototogisu album to date. Highest recommendation.

Brand new limited, self-released album from the Hototogisu duo of Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett presents four new super-ragged feedback-hoovering vertical accelerations that combine shot-to-hell metal blankets with webs of white noise, strangulated berserker leads and sustained vocal tones. Totally barbaric and highly recommended. Comes with printed discs and full colour artwork.

Edition of 100 copies art book presenting colour reproductions of six of Marcia Bassett’s (GHQ/Zaimph/Hototogisu) psychedelic paint/collage works, running from Rorschach forests peopled by huge kittens through weird crystal geometries and distressed anatomy. Stapled card booklet.

Limited edition of 100 copies documenting a live solo show from Marcia Bassett that took place 6/6/06 in Hasselt. 28 minutes of thick, frozen air, slow brain-bloating highs, and thunderous ecstasy peaks. One of the darkest/densest blats from Marcia to date and highly recommended. Comes in wraparound colour pro-printed sleeves.

Beautiful looking edition of 500 copies that gathers re-worked, re-edited versions of material that previously snuck out on CD-Rs from Drone Disco and Heavy Blossom: "Hototogisu - the duo of UK experimentalist Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Sunroof et al) and New York-based-guitarist Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph/GHQ) - are all about impact, about taking the physical aspect of sound and hallucinating it to the point of abstraction, so much so that for all of the complexity of their music it often sounds like it's standing still, simply hanging in the air and vibrating without anything approaching a 'plot' to bring it to a point. By contrast, Burning Star Core, the trio of drummer Trevor Tremaine, Robert Beatty on electronics (both of whom also play in Hair Police alongside Mike Connelly of Wolf Eyes) and C.Spencer Yeh on violin and electronics, are more overtly propulsive, usurping 'classic' rock form via electronics and drums but still focused on momentum, on the jam as a form of structural gravity, on the unfolding of action via development over time. This all-improvised studio meeting is the perfect reconciliation of both tendencies, of Hototogisu’s obsessive layering of strata after strata of violently conceived noise and of Burning Star Core’s epic, post-Kraut thunder-punk style. Bower has long been on record about his opposition to anything approaching 'dialogue' in improvised music, favouring a senses-devouring simultaneity over anything that might pass for actual exchange, so it's no surprise that there is little on this new record that sounds even close to conventionally improvised music. Instead, it feels more focused towards the zone where energy begins to spontaneously birth form, where the monomaniacal pursuit of the nowhere zone bears fruit in the shape of a music that transcends its constituent parts while being totally based around – and rooted in - the individual response to the moment. BXC play it ginchy and garage-pop right from the start, simultaneously inverting and amplifying Bower and Bassett's vertical constructs with drums that sound like they might have been lifted straight from the most flower-power parts of the Silver Apples' back catalogue and bass patterns that are as tactile and rock-anchored as Can's Holger Czukay. To hear Hototogisu's music given this kind of injection of dynamic energy makes them seem more obviously sourced in 'classic' rock music than you might otherwise have guessed, with a dense, implosive sound that feels like a hyper-distilled take on all of rock's most outlaw aspects, the feedback that makes you feel like you could explode in a ball of electricity, the anti-gravity effect of heavy fuzz, the seductive, alien tongues. It's certainly the most 'garage band' side that either of the groups have cut to date, albeit in the form of a Gnostic, post-acid re-think where the vibration is more important than the outer forms, where energized enthusiasm makes for a more fundamental guiding principle than verse/chorus/verse and where the only direction left is out. Which is another way of saying it feels genuinely bad-ass. In an era where even the best groups seem polite, pro, participatory, democratic, this is music that is disregarding in its overwhelming power, exhilarating in it irresponsible spontaneity. And in an underground scene where self-conscious notions of avant-garde and 'free improvisation' have long displaced any concept of an intuitive rocks off-style, well, it feels like a re-connection to the source. So file this one closer to Kill City or Sticky Fingers than Persian Surgery Dervishes or The Black Album and feel the gravity of your whole record collection shift." – David Keenan.

Brand new full-length recording from the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof et al) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph/GHQ) features a more rock-reverent take on the kind of vertical screens of impossibly detailed overtone that defined their earlier albums, with Marcia's viola slow-burning fluttering afterimages of neon spirals deep into the air while Bower's guitar/microphone worship generates repeat-ascensions of overloaded ecstasy tone. Something grittier, more immediately tactile, that makes this their most dramatically meat-based orbit of hallucinated space/time vectors to date. Highly recommended.

Excellent new re-mastered/savagely edited (by Bower himself) collection of early tracks from the duo of Matthew Bower and Marcia Bassett, bundling pulsing metal constructs from the long out-of-print Swoon Scream (2004) and Awful Symmetry (2005). Highly recommended.

Major new album from Campbell Kneale’s power-blues orchestra, with additional six-string muscle provided by Matthew Bower (Hototogisu/Sunroof/Skullflower et al). The sound here crosses the kind of endlessly accruing fuzz majesty of Chi Vampires with the lightning strike adrenaline tone of Skullflower’s Orange Canyon Mind to birth a gargantuan new take on heavy metal satori. Recommended.

Heavy collaborative album in an edition of 300 copies from Marcia Bassett (GHQ/Zaimph/Hototogisu et al) and Carlos Giffoni. Bassett feels like the dominant voice here, rolling out wave after wave of crushing tonal feedback and huge rushes of iron-clad chords while Giffoni stacks perilous accumulations of rotor tones, analog drones and monolithic electricity.

Taj Mahal Travellers were a name that was regularly associated with Marcia Bassett’s Double Leopards, a group that formulated a specifically US-underground take on Takehisa Kosugi’s deep-space drone environments. Yet her solo work has seen her move away from the more organic/psychedelic aspects of the Double Leopards experiment, focussed more on metal sonorities and vertical ascensions of tone than pools of dilated reverb. But this new limited cassette featuring Bassett on guitar alongside cellist Helena Espvall (Ghost/Espers et al) is the closest her solo work has come to the narcotic appeal of Taj Mahal Travellers. There’s an orchestral feel to the music that is a little more ornate than Bassett’s normal style, with the feel of two people interacting more directly than the normal fug of F/X would allow. Still, there’s still a huge amount of depth to the recording, with bowed and vibrated strings combining in vortices of magical anti-gravity tone to conjure ghosts of drone. With full colour covers. Recommended.

Limited self-released cassette from the duo of Marcia Bassett (GHQ/Hototogisu/Double Leopards) and Taylor Richardson (who played alongside Daniel Lopatin in Infinity Window). Delayed drum machine settings, heavenly synth and transparent choral vocals, somewhere between the more slow-burning Zola Jesus settings and the Gothic euphoria of Harmonia’s Deluxe. Recommended.

New set of solo electric guitar recordings from Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/GHQ/Hototogisu et al). Tectonic string work that has the weight of planets, with high, eerie melodies threaded through massive baseline drones. Aspects of Keiji Haino, Charalambides and Electronic Meditation-era Tangerine Dream make this a particularly explosive set. On Brother Raven’s label, hand-numbered edition of 200 copies. 

Much anticipated hook-up between these three trans-Atlantic monsters. One-side each and then a third monster inter-band jam. Leopards side is a classic haunt, with wraiths of hovering drone peaking in eye-rolling vocal confusion, while the Mouthus track is a fabulous punk trouncing of fuzz-impacted guitar and clattering electrified skin. Sunroof! jams are the real highlight though, especially the doofily-named “Cortez Tha Killa” that features Matthew Bower on repeat-riff nirvana while Mick Flower of Vibracathedral Orchestra lets his wrist fly with some of the most insane and righteously piloted post-Young acid delirium of anyone’s career. Too fucking much. Final big-band side presents a beautiful void of spooked eternity, with shadow forms moving in and out of earshot like so much hallucinatory cumulus. Comes in a full-colour gatefold sleeve, already sold-out at source, so move it.

Thick, murky drone work from the duo of Marcia Bassett and Steve Gunn, with a smog of almost Double Leopards-proportions topped off with arid single note guitar lines. Hand-numbered edition of 300 copies in black art paper sleeves with gold ink offset printing on the back and paste-on on the front.

Self-released album from this Mouthus/Double Leopards supergroup featuring botha Mouthus and Mike and Maya from Leopards. Sound is as beautifully Euro-fixated as the recent Religious Knives stuff, with soft oceans of glazed 1970s synth patterns washing across the backs of yr eyelids like the Cosmic Couriers play the brain scores of Terry Riley and Klaus Schulze. A beautifully pink stone and highly recommended for fans of soft dopey muzz.

New solo album (first ever 'real' CD release after a bunch of limited CD-Rs) from Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards/Hototogisu/GHQ et al, released on Domink Fernow of Prurient's label. A real departure from her last few releases, Sexual Infinity has a darker, almost documentary-style atmosphere, with the low malevolent hum of late night, neon-illuminated streets (a hint of William Bennett's Bradford Red Light District in some of the more nocturnal 'field' style passages) cut up with the roar of jet engines, seedy, auraless orbits of cracked drone-tone, lurching blown-out synth violence that could almost be a field-recording of the aftermath of a Suicide riot and the most evocatively placed globes of murky drone. All held together with almost Haino-esque stabs of epic repeat chord runs. Highly recommended.

“When spinning this dark velvet cloak a door opens to clouds of smoke shooting out the windows sills of the shell of old library like ink plumes while smokes leaps like black cats between the curtains. Stone and concrete crumble and fill the air with gray gas showering the maze of shrubs in the courtyard with a dark veil of soot. Marcia Bassett has tread the waters of noise psych drone and continues to defy the categories. A dark psychedelic guitar wash peaks its head out of the smoldering coals that could have been released on the mighty slaughter productions death industrial temple from Italy. Further morbidity croaks from the slicing vocals of a distraught entity being ripped from one dimension to the other... and rather enjoying her ordeal. Light the candles and burn the incense....Limited to 300 copies.” – NFP. Already sold out at source.