Insane four cassette set in art edition packaging with a ‘collaboration’ between John Olson’s amazing Spykes persona and Eating People, given one channel each to grind metal, gobble electronics and destroy notions of form and fidelity: “Whoa! FOUR cassettes collab, one channel (left-right) from this synth and terrible sound units. Recorded LATE at night at the Marigold Maniacs Studio 4-Track style. In classic hard plastic case, color covers with handmade art, edition of 40.” – John Olson. 

Brief reappearance for this great archival live Beefheart album, originally a Record Store Day only release: a deluxe 180g vinyl presentation of a wild show from Beefheart from the UK 1968 tour at Frank Freeman’s Dance Club in Kidderminster recorded straight to tape by the late John Peel. This is Strictly Personal-era Beefheart in a moment of profound transition, playing radically punked RnB w/a flashing third eye. Peel only caught the last four tracks of the show so this release is bundled with a buncha obscurities and out-takes. The fidelity is beautifully crude, with a broadcasting over time feel, and the track listing is choice. Live tracks are “Rollin’ & Tumblin’”, “Electricity”, an amazing version of “Kandy Korn”, and “Yer Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond”. Out-takes feature radical versions of “Well Well Well”, “Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish”, “Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do” and “Moody Liz”. Always room for more Beefheart on the shelf. 

Latest limited edition broadcast from big VT faves, Duncan Blachford’s Australian avant/underground imprint Endless Melt: Drunk Hands is another nome-de-doof of Blachford (who also plays out in Exhaustion, Psychic Baggage, Actual Holes and Rubbish Throwers) and Suite For Piano was realised on a ‘public access’ piano situated in Preston Market, next to Preston Train Station. For an hour round about midnight Blachford accompanied the nocturnal scene around him, playing slow, stately piano parts in the vein of Richard Young’s Advent or even Jandek’s The Cell while the city hums in the distance behind him, with variously unidentifiable episodes of industrial activity, movements in the dark, pedestrians passing by, freezer fans switching on and off, trains passing, lone horns sounding, all the automata of the late hours combining to give the feel of a minimalist melancholy-tinged elegy to “deep suburbia asleep”. The piece runs through three ‘movements’, all with different attacks and with different degrees of invasive environmental ghosting, all of which feature overdubbed percussion by Blachford done the night after. A uniquely atmospheric and mesmerising work and a magical minimalist set. Highly recommended. 

New nine-track album from the UK underground duo of Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club/Vibracathedral Orchestra et al) and Paul Walsh (Foldhead/Smell & Quim) on this new UK imprint: Early Hominids, as the name suggests, work to re-direct the more dancefloor-orientated euphorics of Astral Social Club back to a more Cro-magnon approach to electro-grunt, with a teenage scientific appeal and a crude hands-on approach that comes out of the whole Snatch Tapes/I Hate The Pop Group ethos. Nod-out machine rhythms lead to ticker-tape breakdowns and there’s a gluey/Airfix modelling high to much of this that speaks to duffle coats as much as it does to death disco, unmistakable as a ‘product’ of the scene that brought us The Strolling Ones/A Band/ESP-Kinetic et al but with a eye to a teenage crush on Kraftwerk, Moroder-styled Kraut and noise noise noise. 

More ridiculously great new Japanese hardcore from La Vida Es Un Mus: eleven years on from their ‘genre-defining’ Under The Ashes, Osaka’s Framtid deliver another OTT blast of everything-in-the-red crust/core/crud with throat shredding vocals that come over like Zeni Geva do Corrupted (complete with ridiculously ‘keen’ backing vocal interruptions that give the apocalyptic stylings an inexplicable – though totally invigorating -  teenage garage band edge) and the kind of walls of non-stop string wail that would reconcile Discharge, Lucifer Over London, Slayer, psychotic Italian/Swedish hardcore and Mainliner. As with the recent Isterismo side, this is an amazing sounding recording, with a ball-busting bottom end married to lightning strikes of fuzz and electricity. Indeed, the degree of thick overtone-heavy speed/sludge here means that Defeat Of Civilisation is one of the most psychedelic dystopian visions of musical refusal to cross these ears in an age, with a buzzing gridlocked style that will appeal to fans of Blue Cheer, Catherine Christer Hennix and Maryanne Amacher as much as the Wretched/Indigesti 7”. Someone told me Keiji Haino was listening to nothing but Italian hardcore records recently. In that case he needs to play lead guitar with these guys. Highly recommended. 

Beautiful new set of slow-phasing psychedelic electronics and empty bell sounds from the UK underground duo of Phil Todd and Mel Delaney (Ashtray Navigations et al): two sides to this set, with the first building delicious tonal ascensions from lapping waves of gentle synth that come over in the classic reverse-working tradition of Coil circa “A White Rainbow” with tonal wormholes and sudden form gobbling blats of fuzz and hysteria. The second side is more ancient sounding, with dark psychedelic ritual soundings that come over like Pauline Oliveros re-floats Atlantis. 

Great archival collection of recordings from one of the pioneers of early ‘new age’ psychedelic synthesizer music: Iasos worked out of a bohemian boat-slip home office, experimenting on some of the first commercially available synthesizers in order to mint a profound form of modern devotional music. Celestial Soul Portrait gathers a selection of his most reality-transcending recordings, his ‘Paradise Music’, from 1975-1983 where he experiments with tone-dowsing the sound of the human nervous system by attempting to vision the kind of sounds human beings might hear at the very precipice of life and death. This is a gorgeous and strangely moving set, with endless cosmo settings of electro-biologic bliss that match the fantasias of Alice Coltrane in terms of the feel of stasis-in-movement of human consciousness with a feel of longing and memorial and majesty that matches the gothic neverlands of Klaus Schulze and The Cosmic Couriers. 

Great archival collection of recordings from one of the pioneers of early ‘new age’ psychedelic synthesizer music: Iasos worked out of a bohemian boat-slip home office, experimenting on some of the first commercially available synthesizers in order to mint a profound form of modern devotional music. Celestial Soul Portrait gathers a selection of his most reality-transcending recordings, his ‘Paradise Music’, from 1975-1983 where he experiments with tone-dowsing the sound of the human nervous system by attempting to vision the kind of sounds human beings might hear at the very precipice of life and death. This is a gorgeous and strangely moving set, with endless cosmo settings of electro-biologic bliss that match the fantasias of Alice Coltrane in terms of the feel of stasis-in-movement of human consciousness with a feel of longing and memorial and majesty that matches the gothic neverlands of Klaus Schulze and The Cosmic Couriers.

Second edition of this stunning LP that was on many 2012 best of lists with variant sleeve colouring: first new recordings in an age from the current quartet line-up of the ‘Hillbilly Theatre Of Eternal Music’: Pelt were one of the first groups to intuit the connection between acoustic folk song and ecstatic electronic drone, giving birth to a form of rural psychedelia that was eventually dubbed free folk. The late Jack Rose’s protean guitar conceptions were central to their sound, progressing from a massed electro-convulsive feel to an all-acoustic ritual realm that traded primitive musical mastery for vertical access. The first thing that strikes you about this beautifully packaged set, recorded in a 19^th century opera house turned yoga studio and a Jewish temple called The Gates Of Heaven in Madison, Wisconsin, a city that is still haunted by the uncanny presence of ancient Native American ‘effigy mounds’ that give the album it’s name, is the aggressive, transcendent violence of the sound. If your notion of Pelt is of a bunch of back country twig pickers then prepare to have your brain re-arranged as they kick off with a massive body-swarming drone that parallels the aggressively stated holy music of prime Ayler or Pharaoh Sanders complete with sheet metal sonorities and time-bending total rhythms. The album basically takes off from there, with four sides of vinyl giving the group plenty of space to stretch out, with the mesmerically beautiful “Ashes Of A Photograph” recalling their ritual immolation of a picture of Jack Rose. All acoustic instruments, no overdubs, this is celebratory, aggressive, melancholy, brain massaging and profoundly human music and represents a new apex of high for this consistently stratospheric group. Very highly recommended!

Necessary CD edition of this all-time classic New Zealand underground side, originally released in 1990 on Bruce Russell’s legendary Xpressway label: Jefferies was a member of This Kind Of Punishment and this is one of the all-time great weirdo singer-songwriter albums, with a backing band that includes all three members of The Dead C – Bruce Russell, Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats – as well as Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull, Robbie Muir , David Mitchell and Nigel Taylor. Jefferies channels the revenant forms of Syd Barrett and Kevin Ayers, all filtered through that amazing subterranean/basement distance that defines the best of the Xpressway sides. His song-writing is just heartrendingly beautiful, power crying over lilting repeat-piano minimalism and disembodied backing vocals, singing unaccompanied acapella tracks that have all of the alien power of Jandek and playing amazing damaged downer guitar dirges that marry the brokedown form of The Dead C to classic psychedelic songforms. Truly, an all-time desert island discs and one of the most magical moments in the Xpressway back catalogue finally available again on vinyl. Comes with a download code. No one does the sound of lonesome like Jefferies. Can’t recommend this masterpiece enough!

LIMITED VT-ONLY EDITION SIGNED BY RICHARD YOUNGS!

Massively anticipated brand new album from Richard Youngs in an edition of only 250 copies, with all VT copies coming with a lyric sheet individually signed by Richard while stocks last: this one has been gestating for a while. Youngs was a big d-beat fan back in the day and has been working towards a vision of an ultra streamlined hardcore record that would combine the protesting/apocalyptic aesthetic of Discharge/Rude Kids et al with the heavenly song-stylings/‘Church of England’ edge that defines the best of his back catalogue. Well this is it. And it’s a monster. The Rotten Masters EP that he cut with Andrew Paine and that was the debut Sonic Oyster Vinyl release points the way but oddly enough the style is less aggressive than on there while still shadowing the whole early-Public Image Limited ‘feel’, especially in Richard’s vocals, which come over like a home counties take on Lydon circa Metal Box. Drum machines kick in with the classic d-beat rhythm and Richard shreds on lead guitar, playing in a fast amphetamine-metal style that trades technique for tectonics. The lyrics are genre-perfect with classic tracks like “More Fucking Stuff” coming over like a typically textually convoluted yet two-fingers pithy assault on consumerism – “more fucking stuff/high rise wilderness/more fucking stuff/these briars of prefabrication/more fucking stuff/random dystopias of regeneration/more fucking stuff” – and classic choruses like “feeling no feeling/feeling no feeling/feeling no feeling/feeling no feeling/feeling no feeling” that marry the hypnotic, bardic style of tracks like “Summer’s Edge” from Summer Wanderer to urban street-fighting aesthetics. Yet despite the potentially generic trappings this is a classic Richard Youngs album with beautifully rendered songs and some truly stirring vocal performances, with his voice given a new sense of urgent delivery, somehow linking his own particular English DIY tradition to parallel currents like Public Image, Crass, A Flux Of Pink Indians and Rudimentary Peni. With perfect scrabbly/messy DIY cover art and an atmosphere that is a confounding mix of strident avant rock radicalism, hardcore refusal, high energy free metal and nostalgic teenage memorial this is at once a defining Richard Youngs side and a massive step outside. Another amazing instalment in one of the most fascinating and unpredictable trips in underground music. Very highly recommended, you need to hear this one...

Limited cassette release on American Tapes w/Xeroxed hand-painted sleeves and cases from the world-beating duo of John Olson and Nate Young (Wolf Eyes): if Stare Case have been primarily defined by their sense of space and timing, their focus on slow-motion snake-charming reeds and spacious electric bass improvisations, then this set presents a whole other side to the duo. This is brass, electronics, vocals and guitar in full-on face-shredding style. The duo trade walls of ferociously mangled metal, twisting them into the kind of avant Industrial summits that would reconcile the alien free-improvised form of AMM’s The Crypt and MEV’s Leave The City with nods to classic avant/basement rock like Chrome and Jim Shepard’s V-3 as well as wildcards like Joe McPhee’s early Survival Unit work and his duo with John Snyder or even UK freak sides like Lol Coxhill’s Digswell Duets, which is testimony to just how far this group are capable of casting the net. But it’s all tied up with that classic post-Noise Michigan practice room gravity and in many ways this is the perfect Stare Case set, with some great off the cuff between-song banter and the kind of overwhelming tape fidelity that takes you right there. A phenomenal new album from one of the premier purveyors of the form. Highly recommended.

Third full-length album from Nikki Never of Vancouver aka Terror Bird in an edition of 500 copies with screen-printed sleeves and a download: All This Time sees Never stepping away from the live band feel of previous releases and re-discovering the solo home recording process, resulting in a more kind of raw, opened-up aspect w/goofy personal touches that lend it an awkward grace while still connecting to classic singer-songwriter traditions like Patti Smith and Kate Bush. Indeed, Never somehow manages to walk the line between epic/moody female synth pop, DIY song-craft ala Circuit Des Yeux et al and weird Eno-esque experimentation and usurpation of form. The songs are great, forlorn, broody, melancholy, with a nostalgic 80s/new wave feel that trades irony for genuine affection and the whole heartfelt/real feel of the album is one of its principal charms, as well as the generally unarmoured quality of the arrangements and production. I dunno, I still get Patti Smith quite heavily but imagine a Patti Smith album cut with a bunch of cheap keyboards and produced by Brian Eno for, say, Union Pole, well, then you’re getting even closer. But I still can’t put my finger on it, there’s  just something inexplicably great about this. Comes with a download.

Third full-length album from Nikki Never of Vancouver aka Terror Bird in an edition of 1000 copies in a card wallet: All This Time sees Never stepping away from the live band feel of previous releases and re-discovering the solo home recording process, resulting in a more kind of raw, opened-up aspect w/goofy personal touches that lend it an awkward grace while still connecting to classic singer-songwriter traditions like Patti Smith and Kate Bush. Indeed, Never somehow manages to walk the line between epic/moody female synth pop, DIY song-craft ala Circuit Des Yeux et al and weird Eno-esque experimentation and usurpation of form. The songs are great, forlorn, broody, melancholy, with a nostalgic 80s/new wave feel that trades irony for genuine affection and the whole heartfelt/real feel of the album is one of its principal charms, as well as the generally unarmoured quality of the arrangements and production. I dunno, I still get Patti Smith quite heavily but imagine a Patti Smith album cut with a bunch of cheap keyboards and produced by Brian Eno for, say, Union Pole, well, then you’re getting even closer. But I still can’t put my finger on it, there’s  just something inexplicably great about this.

Killer new project rising from the ashes of groups like Atentado and Glam coming out of Barcelona’s amazing hardcore scene: Un Bestia Incontrolable combine Catalan vocals with heady excessive psychedelic/bombastic guitar that could almost be a more classically streamlined Skullflower-plays-Morricone-plays-South Of Heaven but with the kind of weight that makes you think of Abe ‘Voco’ Kesh more than Rick Rubin. Indeed, they have much the same relationship to hardcore as, say, Kousokuya did to Black Sabbath and Crazy Horse, simultaneously exaggerating and eviscerating the form. Rhythmically the focus is on a blur of momentum and steam-rolling/horse-pounding metal but it is all cut up with some truly deformed lead guitar that comes over like an amphetamine punk take on the twin string crescendos of The Savage Resurrection or even the Far Out. It has been a blast to track the insane velocity of the Barcelona hardcore moment and this is one of the headiest psychedelic variants to crawl out of the scene. Recommended. 

Jaw-dropping collection of ‘outsider’ old time rural jams curated by Frank Fairfield: painstakingly re-mastered from original 78s this is an ass-whooping collection of alien and otherworldly fiddling, singing and haunting with a focus on Anglo-American down-home music. The focus on this particular point of transmission in the hands of outsiders who were receiving it in a bunch of different tongues means that you can hear the way that original English folk styles were warped by the very landscape they were transported to, opening out into endless speedy drones and high eerie string works, fusing the melancholy and celebratory aspects of English folk into a uniquely driving hybrid that feels like its lighting out, in faith and fear, into the promised scale of America itself. The music is epic and personal, mythic and hands-on crude and with an atmosphere that feels like a goddamn time machine. Amazing rarely heard tracks from Bob Skiles Four Old Timers, Willard Hodgin, Fred Shriver, Mustard and Gravy, Tweedy Brothers, Happy Hayseeds, Lemuel Turner, John Batzell, Homer Davenport, Lewis Brothers, Ernest Rogers, McLaughlin’s Old Time Melody Makers, Alphus McFadyen and South Georgia Highballers. Highly recommended.

Jaw-dropping collection of ‘outsider’ old time rural jams curated by Frank Fairfield: painstakingly re-mastered from original 78s this is an ass-whooping collection of alien and otherworldly fiddling, singing and haunting with a focus on Anglo-American down-home music. The focus on this particular point of transmission in the hands of outsiders who were receiving it in a bunch of different tongues means that you can hear the way that original English folk styles were warped by the very landscape they were transported to, opening out into endless speedy drones and high eerie string works, fusing the melancholy and celebratory aspects of English folk into a uniquely driving hybrid that feels like its lighting out, in faith and fear, into the promised scale of America itself. The music is epic and personal, mythic and hands-on crude and with an atmosphere that feels like a goddamn time machine. Amazing rarely heard tracks from Bob Skiles Four Old Timers, Willard Hodgin, Fred Shriver, Mustard and Gravy, Tweedy Brothers, Happy Hayseeds, Lemuel Turner, John Batzell, Homer Davenport, Lewis Brothers, Ernest Rogers, McLaughlin’s Old Time Melody Makers, Alphus McFadyen and South Georgia Highballers. Highly recommended.

Great set of “inept hardcore” from this all-female group from Halifax, Canada: Vixens come over like The Runaways play The Germs but w/a taste for crude no-chops approximations of extreme metal posture. Speedy chord runs that drool all over themselves are cut up with some of the most sense-destroying solo guitar bursts since Lydia Lunch hung up her slide. Vocals are barked, puked, spat out while the drum kit is thrown down the same set of stairs again and again. Something about this makes me think of Pink Kross circa Punk Or Die, one of the great lost all-girl Glasgow punk/glam groups but with a newly-junked jones for metal, death and confusion. 

Hand-numbered edition of only 200 copies privately-pressed 7” on John Olson’s own American Tapes imprint from the new Crazy/Young/Zone Wolf Eyes trio: two sides of tense, elongated electronic hypnosis with the A side a version of the amazing opening track from the Wolf Eyes’ No Answer: Lower Floors album that crosses “Hamburger Lady” style electronics with subtle drum machine pugilism and Nate’s amazing doubled vocals coming over like an even blacker Minimal Man. Over on the flip there’s a massively eerie atonal levitation that combines blurs of pure-electricity with sustained drones and an atmosphere that could almost be the Michigan Beer Bust Theatre Of Eternal Music. Highly recommended!

Massive double-header set that pairs new jams from the current phase of two of the most regularly killing units birthed in Midwest basements, the new Wolf Eyes trio and the Stare Case duo of John Olson and Nate Young: these are super-intimate/implosive rehearsal room recordings complete with great between song shit and discussions on precise tuning (!) and chord progressions that are as gripping as Ravi Shankar’s pre-gig Concert For Bangladesh wind-up. The Stare Case set is fascinating, like listening on the creative process as it unravels in real time, with a stripped down sound that sees Olson on reeds channelling a weird, bendy almost-Steve Lacy style while Young plays these obsessively repeating single note electric bass refrains. Some of the jams even come across like the early Can Schloss Norvenich/Inner Space out-takes, that same feel of looped/grooving psychoactive minimalism with detourned free jazz moves but there’s a spectral, haunted quality to the sonics that has the classic basement Simply Saucer/Vertical Slit early-American feel. A world away from the Stare Case 3 Live Frying side, this one marries sparse/delicate/hypnotic bass with the kind of sad lyricism of Anthony Ortega’s New Dance to stunning effect. The Wolf Eyes side is just as amazing and weird, at points sounding like a musique concrete re-imagining of James Brown Live At The Apollo, at others a post-Heathen Earth Globe Unity Orchestra, with the trio’s new streamlined style devoured by ectoplasmic electronics and extended brass testifying before breaking out into classic vectors of psychedelic avant garage. A stunning pairing from two of the most unclassifiable bands on the planet. Xeroxed sleeves with stickered and hand-painted art and cases. Very highly recommended. 

Necessary vinyl edition of this all-time classic New Zealand underground side, originally released in 1990 on Bruce Russell’s legendary Xpressway label: Jefferies was a member of This Kind Of Punishment and this is one of the all-time great weirdo singer-songwriter albums, with a backing band that includes all three members of The Dead C – Bruce Russell, Michael Morley and Robbie Yeats – as well as Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull, Robbie Muir , David Mitchell and Nigel Taylor. Jefferies channels the revenant forms of Syd Barrett and Kevin Ayers, all filtered through that amazing subterranean/basement distance that defines the best of the Xpressway sides. His song-writing is just heartrendingly beautiful, power crying over lilting repeat-piano minimalism and disembodied backing vocals, singing unaccompanied acapella tracks that have all of the alien power of Jandek and playing amazing damaged downer guitar dirges that marry the brokedown form of The Dead C to classic psychedelic songforms. Truly, an all-time desert island discs and one of the most magical moments in the Xpressway back catalogue finally available again on vinyl. Comes with a download code. No one does the sound of lonesome like Jefferies. Can’t recommend this masterpiece enough!

Edition of 100 copies cassette from the duo of Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance: Dylan and Karen have been on a creative high of late and this is another lovely, restrained set of late-night atmospherics, tape hypnotics and diaristic assemblages of non-corporeal domestic activity. As with recent instalments, the drone aspect is pushed a little more to the fore here, with sounds smeared and rubbered to the point of easy head immersion, forsaking the chattering small instrument excess of earlier work in favour of a deep, mysterious noise that is supremely beguiling. 

Much-anticipated private press duo set from guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano: Corsano has made no secret of his total fucking awe at the kinda jaw-dropping breakthroughs in the logistics of time and space made by drummer Adris Hoyos in the few short years that she ruled the planet in Harry Pussy so it was pretty much a given that when Orcutt got back to string wrestling that Corsano was gonna be shooting for the drum stool. And what a hook-up. This is the closest to the full-bore Harry Pussy sound that Orcutt has come since reactivating, with that wild hiccupping style where it feels like the pair are just riding waves of buckling electricity. Corsano’s playing isn’t quite as, uh, blunt as Hoyos and there’s a fluidity to his pugilism that allows Orcutt to get a little slippy, exchanging well-oiled power chord blats with fast zig-zagging runs. And it’s not all breakneck speed-of-thought exchange either, there are long sections of tactile low level tension and some blues moaning from Orcutt that would spook Guitar Roberts. Edition of 500 copies in a cool gatefold sleeve with a snap of our heroes in full flight, immediately sold out at source, very highly recommended!

Out-of-nowhere return for legendary Tokyo underground psychedelic speed freak guitarist Munehiro Narita with a group that to all intents and purposes is a re-fitted High Rise: Munehiro co-formed High Rise along with bassist Nanjo Asahito (Mainliner/Musica Transonic/Toho Sara et al) and helped launch PSF Records, which was founded to bring the works of High Rise and Fushitsusha to more prominence, with the label taking its name from the High Rise motto, Psychedelic Speed Freaks. Munehiro was one of the key guitarists of the era, perfecting a squealing fast-soloing style that pushed wah-wah excess into new realms of total sonic refusal. Here he is joined by original High Rise drummer Yuro Ujiie with Nanjo Asahito replaced by bassist/vocalist Tabata Mitsuru of Zeni Geva/Loud Machine 5000/Acid Mothers Temple et al.
The basic High Rise formula remains intact, thug-punk riffs hammered to infinity cut with whirlwind wah-wah solos but Tabata’s vocals give the whole deal a weird/sneering under-the-counter-culture appeal that sounds like it comes straight outta Ohio. Indeed, the rhythm section sound fantastic, playing doomy sludge-punk one minute and breaking out swampy Diddley-beats the next, with plenty of room for Narita to bleed in his insane excessive trademark style all over the top. High Rise vinyl is now hideously rare so this is a unique opportunity to grip some heavy duty speed freak wax from one of the defining guitarists of the era. Very highly recommended!

Amazing edition of only 300 hand-numbered copies w/spray-painted sleeves of one of the most legendary ‘bootleg’ recordings of all time, The Velvet Underground’s Sweet Sister Ray: four live versions of “Sister Ray” including the legendary 1968 ‘amplifier recording’ with the microphone right in front of Lou Reed’s guitar as he makes with the kinda overdriven string violence that has little parallel outside of Les Rallizes Denudes’ France Demo Tapes LP. Seriously has to be heard to be believed. Three more versions of “Sister Ray” from the later Doug Yule incarnation of the band pretty much seals the deal, running the gamut of endlessly stoned Third album-style jams to bulldozing riff monster ala Kousokuya. One black vinyl, one brown vinyl. One of the greatest albums of all time and a mandatory VT purchase. Already sold out at source, very limited supply, highest possible recommendation!

Edition of 100 copies cassette from Mike Collino’s fantastic Dog Lady Island project: moving away from the weird post-Galbraith scrabbly violin textures of the Folk Of The Old Flood... LP, 1938 comes over like a Cro-Magnon AMM. It’s a supremely eerie and evocative recording, with spare drums, bells, singing bowls and vocals orbiting garbled shortwave radio broadcasts and fuzzy, indistinct speech that makes it feel like a recording from an abandoned underground facility with no one at the controls cut with the kind of cold Kraut atmosphere that would give Steven Stapleton the willies. Another fantastic side from this enigmatic operative. Already sold out at source. Recommended. 

Sunning solo/duo high energy free rock from Duncan Blachford of Australia’s Exhaustion/Endless Melt et al: the Endless Melt label came out of nowhere as ground zero for new free music trails coming out of Australia right now and Blachford is the central cog. Here he comes over like a one man Daily Dance, playing drums, percussion, guitars, trumpet and keys with contributions from Alison Bolger (Actual Holes et al) on vocals and saxophone. Some of the drums/guitar violence has the same savage form-destroying feel of Stefan Jaworzyn’s Ascension or early Skullflower while the heady drone quotient and singing amplifier hypnotics point to This Heat’s more occult free rock workings, with a free jazz ‘edge’ that is uniquely seat-of-the-pants. Indeed, this one seems to balance precariously on the tipping point between classic improvised high energy ramalama and gorgeous slo-mo amplified tectonics like nothing else this side of Doug Synder and Bob Thompson. Sold out at source. Highly recommended!

OTT deluxe package that bundles a buncha formats documenting Clayton Noone’s phenomenal NZ solo/group project: Noone is a member of Armpit, Claypipe, Wolfskull and The Futurians, to pluck a buncha names outta the hat, and he is no stranger to the sound of lonesome. The weirdo, super-fragile songs on the lathe tip the hat to the more blasted Jandek or Keijo sides as well as the whole Xpressway singer-songwriter ‘division’, singing forlorn fragmentary melodies to himself through a soup of static while his guitar gently expires. The set ups are pretty diverse across the package, with more recent power-crying wares that sound like the ghost of electricity itself cut with full-on group staggers through collapsing rock form, strange diaristic interludes, moments of Dead C-style interference... in fact the bonus ‘Wizards’ 7” EP features some of the most supremely crude out-of-focus DIY to have reached these ears in years and those who know the levels of crude DIY they are regularly subjected to might wanna choke on their sandwich, with tape shit from 1991-93 that name-checks the goddamn Scrotum Poles while dudes like Stefan Neville (Pumice) and Jon Paul natter and clatter like the fucking Shadow Ring in the fog. Throw in another CD-R of heady archival blats and a great scrappy pro-printed comic book and you’ll never get out of these blues alive. Comes with a download too. Edition of only 50 copies, very highly recommended!

Amazing archival unearthing of previously unreleased No Wave/free jazz live blats from this wild free rock group featuring saxophonist Daniel Carter: Dissipated Face was the trio of guitarist Kurt Ralske (later in Ultra Vivid Scene et al), bassist Ben Munves and drummer Stephen Popkin and the music was a mutant strain of hardcore with fast, up-tight rhythms over the kinda free guitar crank that would reconcile Rudolph Grey, Arto Lindsay and Keith Levene. Indeed, there’s a weird American hardcore take on Metal Box to some of the music here, colliding with classic No Wave refusal to make for some amazing Demo Moe-style freak. Great songs, with titles like “Rock Is Dead, Shithead”, “Streets Of New York” and “Nazi With A New Name” and when Carter comes in on saxophone the effect is like the MC5 eviscerating Jon Landau’s goddamn corpse live on stage and straight to bootleg. Comes with cool Raymond Pettibon artwork and liners. Too much, totally great and highly recommended. 

Unbelievable set of spontaneous ‘songs’ and cracked outsider folk-brut from this legendary writer and artist: Steiger was born in Vienna in 1940. After dropping out of university he joined the foreign legion in 1959 only to be discharged a year later for psychiatric reasons. In 1961 he published his first poems and began to live the life of a true bohemian, wandering homeless across large swathes of Europe and Asia while publishing several books of prose and poetry. In 1972 his drawings were first published by Günther Brus in his periodical 'Schastrommel' while exhibitions of his amazing graphic works began to spring up from 1975 on.
Steiger was also an ‘ad hoc’ musician and he released his first LP of songs, Wiener Lieder und Gemischte Waisen in1979 via Dieter Roth's Verlag. Ad Hoc Music is a collection of songs recorded 1980-84 and it is a goddamn revelation. This is classic fractured, straight to tape outsider art home-recordings using voice, acoustic guitar, accordion and bontempi organ. Steiger sings in an ultra-forlorn/simple mountain folk style, with heartbreakingly beautiful melodies over stripped resonant organ chord drones, nagging repeating melodies and weird small instrument noises, so that the whole deal comes over like Cosmic Couriers Witthuser & Westrupp sing Daniel Johnson’s “Worried Shoes”. But truly there is little parallel for the degree of spontaneous folk-punk invention here, something so up-close and un-armoured about the delivery that could almost be a lysergic Bavarian Jandek but w/aspects of the spontaneous avant/folk stylings of Ghedalia Tazartes or even Anton Bruhin yet still with something sweeter and more, I dunno, ‘naive’ about the whole deal. In a way it kind of sits somewhere between DIY Euro avant thought, a more psych/out take on fringe aspects of UK underground players like Ivor Cutler or even This Heat and the classic real people ‘handmade records’ tradition. Throw in some weird field/environmental recordings with the sound of cats and you have a peerlessly weird and deeply affecting collection of heart-songs and squonked folk/drone miniatures squoze straight to tape that could’ve sat just as awkwardly on Shimmy Disc, ESP Disk or United Dairies. A boggling 29 tracks across two sides of vinyl, edition of only of 400 copies, very highly recommended!

Edition of 400 copies collection of early concrete phonetic poems from Franz Mon: Mon (b.1926) was a pioneer in the field of concrete, visual and phonetic poetry and this LP collects some of his early concrete phonetic poems recorded 1962-64 as well as the radio-play 'Ich bin der ich bin die' from 1971. Mon’s focus is on particular mutation of words and text, as well as sudden jump-cuts to parallel epiglottal realities and the results are frequently disturbing and reality-undermining, with aspects of Basil Kirchin’s slowed-down human speech and documentation of autism alongside almost NWW-style nightmare drones and modulated industrial space. His use of acoustic palindromes, run backwards and ‘mirror-symmetrically’ joined, is uniquely brain-rearranging while his radio play work transforms body sounds into eerie choral ascensions. A fascinating side from TA. 

Fantastic new set that sees French avant/vocalist and free folk spirit Ghedalia Tazartes hook-up with the mysterious French avant garde project Gol: this is a spectacular meeting, with Gol working to elaborate and expand Tazartes’ vision of a hybrid fourth world from of spontaneous concrete. Indeed, something about the logic of the way that the set is put together reminds of me of Jim O’Rourke’s amazing tape-splicing work on Faust’s Rien w/Keiji Haino and Michael Morley et al. There are explosive electronic drones, massed voices, weird world and gypsy music bleeding in from the sidelines, all of which drops out to reveal bass and backwards-tape driven environments that come over like Jac Berrocal’s Rock’n Roll Station haunted by the ghost of European torch song. Indeed, this features some of the most rockin’ – in a weirdo Euro garage band sense – music that Tazartes has ever put his name to, w/a ginchy off-kilter rhythmic edge and an epic field of play this is dazzlingly psychedelic. Edition of only 400 copies complete with Dennis Tyfus cover art, very highly recommended! 

New freak hook-up that sees Dave Nuss of The No-Neck Blues Band/Sabbath Assembly joined by Mik Quantius of Embryo and the French Gol project in an edition of 300 copies: the results are pretty great, with cracked Kraut logic and weird blues dirges led by itinerant bass and thrifty percussion that will have you guessing Samla Mammas Manna? Guru Guru? Archaia? Qauntius gets into almost Damo Suzuki realms of English vocal confusion and scattered vocal chants while the group lay out dilated Can-style rhythms but with weird vortices of non-progression that have an ESP/Godz profile that is pure “Permanent Green Light”. A massive side swerve from Embryonnck and a classic weirdo one-off.

New instalment in Fauni Gena’s reissuing of the entire works of French psych/prog/experimental composer Igor Wakhevitch. Wakhevitch studied under the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer before abandoning his homework after falling under the spell of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine. Eventually finding work as Terry Riley's assistant he became obsessed with Riley's endless all-night ragas and began to make music himself. Released in 1975, Les Fous D’Or is one of Wakhevitch’s most portentous OTT slabs of avant classical prog prophecy, with mountains of shrifty percussion that come straight out of the school of communal Euro head-nodding excess accompanied by subtle synth tones, space-dolphin bleeps and more of that classic voice-from-a-cloud booming automatic narration that gives way to some phenomenal almost-Meredith Monk style vocal gymnastics.  This is an absolute blast, another cracked side from one of the most idiosyncratic runs of vinyl ever to orbit the planet of prog. 

New instalment in Fauni Gena’s reissuing of the entire works of French psych/prog/experimental composer Igor Wakhevitch. Wakhevitch studied under the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer before abandoning his homework after falling under the spell of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine. Eventually finding work as Terry Riley's assistant he became obsessed with Riley's endless all-night ragas and began to make music himself. Let’s Start, from 1979, was perversely enough the final instalment in Wakhevitch’s phenomenal run of classic LPs and if it tones down the air of avant-progressive hysteria and all-out prophetic doof somewhat, the results are just as brain-razzing, with haunting echoes of electronic melody that come over like the ghost of Harmonia over beautiful distant reverb-soaked singing and chanting that come out of the same universe as the early Richard Youngs/Simon Wickham-Smith sides, making for a weirdo devotional sci-fi end to a jaw-dropping run. 

First ever remotely ‘available’ edition of what was originally a privately distributed triple cassette on the sound@one label in 1996 in an invisible edition of only 10 copies, presented here in a stunning box set edition in a run of only 145 copies: K-Salvatore is a NNCK offshoot that features Pat Murano (NNCK/Decimus/Raajmahal et al) and Jason Meagher (NNCK/Coach Fingers/D. Charles Speer et al). The Kermes Infestation predates their amazing Four Impossible Puns LP that came out on SIWA in 1997. During the summer of 1995, K-Salvatore purchased 10 copies of an instructional audio cassette package on remainder at a local Barnes and Noble. The duo then brain-stormed a strategy to replace the originally contained instruction with their own. Over the course of the remainder of that summer, Meagher and Murano met once a week to record six continuous improvisations, one for each side of the package. Once completed the 10 copies were distributed amongst friends and family for study. The group describe the resulting sonics as being akin to “a five+ hour kidnapping ordeal that culminates, not with freedom restored, but instead disembowelment in a sad man’s bathtub.” It’s a striking summation of the various powers of this amazing, hermetic cell, with what sounds like mis-fingered reeds stumbling through primitive dance works before cutting to extended sections of clunking percussion work that moves into territories previously conquered by The Godz and Amon Düül coming across like some kind of plugged in medieval freak-out curated by The Shadow Ring. The set is stunningly presented with individual silkscreened sleeves in a hand-coloured and silkscreened heavy box in a numbered edition of only 145 copies. Very limited supply, obviously, highly recommended!

Edition of only 90 copies triple hand-cut 8” lathe box set from this mysterious NNCK offshoot: K-Salvatore is the duo of Pat Murano (NNCK/Decimus et al) and Jason Meagher (NNCK/Coach Fingers/D. Charles Speer et al): the duo circumvent traditional modes of spontaneous interaction with simultaneous blats of electronics, cymbals, low-level crunch and soft, flapping tonsils. Parts of this stunning art edition set have that same illuminated 4am industrial space feel of much of the Vanity back catalogue, while others sound like a Folkways environmental recording documenting a laboratory full of autistic mini-moog obsessives working on slowly scrambling the melodic DNA of Sun Ra's "Love In Outer Space". As the harmonies start to vaguely cohere the effect is beautifully unsettling. Very limited supply, obviously, highly recommended!

Excellent debut collection of haunted tape and vocal work from German conceptual artist Michael Barthel: Barthel has been involved in musique concrete, noise and phonetic poetry since the mid-90s, first with his The Nautilus Deconstruction project and since the early 2000s under his own name. He has published a buncha self-released CD-Rs and tapes but this is his first major ‘overground’ collection. Using just his voice and a variety of old tape machines Barthel creates a totally beguiling and mysterious sound-world that somehow combines a vaguely uneasy claustrophobic element with an atmosphere of lonely poetry and haunted reverie.  There are aspects of covert numbers stations broadcasts as well as the forlorn nursery rhymes of Rita Ackermann or Inca Ore but given a slightly harsher and more degraded aspect. Indeed, imagine a super-grainy Xpressway-style take on the body soundings of Lanz and Eb.Er broadcast via shortwave and pressed up by Saturn and you’re at least close to the kind of alien beauty of this excellent side. 

Major historic unearthing of the most iconic of all Fluxus pieces, the legendary 1962 premier of Philip Corner’s “Piano Activity” performed by George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Ben Patterson, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles: compiled from recently discovered tapes of this historic event that took place at the International Festival of the Newest Music in Wiesbaden in 1962, previously only known through photographs and written accounts, this is a stunning, historically potent presentation. Corner’s original directions were for a more ‘organised’ attack on the piano but the pieces here go way beyond the blank into all-out piano destruction. The first piece sees Paik picking out some tentative melodies before the group start to interact with the piano with fists and tools while the second piece is just a total assault that results in the eventual destruction of the instrument, with a sound that comes over like a blunt Neubauten or a big-band New Blockaders, with hammering, twonking, sawing and banging to the point of total destructive epiphany. Corner was shocked when he heard about how far the players had pushed past his initial remit and it’s not hard to understand why. This is a remarkable document, beautifully presented for the first time by Alga Marghen in an edition of only 262 copies, highly recommended!

Previously unreleased 1977 concert recorded in Basel, Switzerland featuring these two soprano saxophone titans: taking its title from jazz critic Steve Loewy’s comment about the first solo Lacy half of the concert that originally came out on Hat Hut (the classic Lacy album Clinkers: “where is the other half?”, he asked), The Rest comes from a tape held by McPhee but never previously made available. Recorded early in McPhee’s career as the result of a spontaneous invitation from Lacy to join him ion stage for the second half of the concert, this is an absolute tour-de-force, with Lacy on stunning form, charging through ideas with a pin-point focus and a beautiful, romantic swooning tone that is unmistakable. McPhee’s soprano playing is a great counterpoint, chasing endlessly-repeating loops of fluid tone one minute, adding strange declamatory asides to Lacy’s sudden gasps of ballad form the next. Plus there are sections when the two get really out, sounding like some kind of post-Nonaah/AACM investigation into space rock. A major addition to the shelves of both players, with liners from McPhee and a free download. Recommended!

Unbelievable proto-Bonehead round up of primo punk/thug/oi no-count genius from the Aussie skinhead underground 1972-79: kind of a Killed By Death focussed on bootboys from down under, Sharpies were the teen outlaw concern of the 70s in Australia, hopped-up on a cocktail of ska/mod/skin fashions w/a penchant for shit-stomping glam ineptitude, kung fu movies, homemade tattoos and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. They ruled the beachfronts, discos and public transport of Australia with their boots and fists and their music was just as knucklehead, combining Slade circa Till Deaf Do Us Part with equal parts Alice Cooper, Afflicted Man, The Sweet and Thundertrain w/lyrics about kids going wild in the streets, heavy metal, being boys and street warrior fantasies. Grab yr braces for line-up w/even less braincells than Bonehead. Features supremely crude spite-filled joy-jags from notorious nobodies like Supernaut (complete with police sirens ‘on their tail’ and epic twin guitar solos), Fat Daddy (yow!), Coloured Balls (ow!), La Femme, the most inappropriately named Taste, Skyhooks, Hush (natch), John Paul Young, Ted Mulry, Johnny Dick (!), Jackie Christian & Target, Stevie Wright and Marcus Hook Roll Band. Get stomped ezy! Highly recommended. 

Mind-melting unearthing of previously unheard material from one of the great legendary ‘lost’ groups of the original west coast psychedelic explosion: Crystal Syphon existed between the years 1965 and 1974 though their heyday was 1967-’68 where they played with Canned Heat, Big Brother and The Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield and more. The sound is classic moody, organ-led extended guitar psych with peaking vocal harmonies and the kind of great, great songwriting of another classic ‘lost’ psych group, Beauregard Ajax while touching on aspects of Big Brother, The Savage Resurrection and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The lead guitar is particularly spectacular, played with a heavy tremolo/whammy bar style that comes straight out of the John Cippolina/Michio Kurihara school. Indeed, there are tracks here that it’s hard to believe You Ishihara of White Heaven hasn’t somehow clocked as they come over as the blueprint for much of what White Heaven achieved on their second album, Strange Bedfellow. The vocals get into some zoned, droning hypnotics, and the combination of the almost automatic thousand mile vocal harmonies and the arcing fuzz guitar gives it a dark, cultic edge, one that is underlined by titles like “Family Evil” and “Are You Dead Yet”. The album collects most of what exists from the group’s chequered history, bundling studio tracks cut at Victory Recording in Fresno, California with some heady rehearsal tapes and three gloriously dilated live tracks from the Fillmore West recorded in January of 1968 that get as far out as your favourite Dead jams. Hard to believe that this far into the game there are still undiscovered caches of first generation psychedelic music that are quite this revelatory but this is a major unearthing, complete with in-depth sleeve notes, tip-on sleeves and a free download in an edition of 500 copies – highly recommended!

The late Rodd Keith remains one of the greatest and most daring and inventive songwriters of the 20^th century. Primarily known as the most prodigious of song-poem stylists, he worked for some of the best known companies supplying customers with a service that would set their own lyrics to music. His discovery of psychedelics in the late 60s/early 70s succeeded in extending his vision even further, resulting in an unquantifiable corpus of work that is as goofy, surreal and quintessentially American as the lyrics he brought to life. Due to the nature of the business, Keith had to work fast and turn around his creations in no time at all and he developed a feel for speed-of-thought inspiration that is the equal of any great improviser. This is the second collection of work from Keith put together by Roaratorio and it is simply beautiful. All tracks are previously unreissued and they run the gamut of cracked real people vision, from the patriotism on pills of “Search Out Your Soul, American” through to low-rent gospel evangelising (“O Jesus My Saviour” – Keith has a brief parallel career as a musical evangelist), an inspired take on “Choo Choo Train”, beautiful 60s psych-pop (“Deep Velvet”), acid soul, weird suburban easy, hallucinatory folk rock... and that’s not to mention the uniformly bats lyrics, with Keith somehow squozing the clumsiest of couplets and oddest meters into impossibly concise shapes. Despite the cheap, commercial trappings of the biz Keith has a lot of soul and every performance feels valedictory. If you’re at all attuned to the very specific vibrations of the Real People genre and if you dig 20th century American culture at its most out-of-whack then you will swoon over this, another peerless collection of the works of one of the true American originals and a visionary musical talent. Can’t get enough of this. Comes with a free download and liner notes from song-poem vocalist Dick Kent. Highly recommended!

Single from this much-vaunted cold wave/minimal synth/Industrial electronics group from Philadelphia. The sound here combines the austere synth feel of the European Enfant Terrible label with an extreme approach to sonics that reflects on the endless feedback reveries of UK underground groups like Meat Whiplash, The Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine with three tracks that move from Kraut punk stabs and robotic rhythms through a totally euphoric B-side that brings to mind the eroticised electronics of Pita’s Get Out. Another great release from this group and another excellent sleeve.

Remarkable reading of solo text pieces by this legendary Austrian sound poet, writer and artist: recorded in 2011, Ruhm reads a selection of his major works, many of which rely on the incorporation of found or documentary texts otherwise spliced with moments of sleight of mouth. Ruhm has a sonorous, very musical voice, indeed he often breaks out in spontaneous song and odd folk fragments, seemingly hypnotised by the odd, lilting cadence of his own reports and the weird melancholy atmosphere that at points feels almost Sebald-ian. Indeed, he talks of a painterly approach to poetry and sound and the way he incorporates certain vocal textures and accruing rhythmic devices across time is uniquely captivating, moving from text based works through to spontaneous body soundings. A radical set of sound poetry that combines high concepts with a personal immediacy and an inexplicable musicality. Comes with a booklet with liners from Ruhm. 

Second duo album on Roaratorio from this inspired hook-up between veteran free jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee and drummer Chris Corsano: this is a major kick out the jams bomb, with a buncha titles dedicated to fellow heavy-hitters like Paul Flaherty, Kidd Jordan, Han Bennink, Muhammad Ali and Fred Anderson. McPhee moves between pocket trumpet, tenor and soprano saxophone throughout. The trumpet blats are particularly effective, pushing Corsano into a weird martial Don Ayler/Don Cherry vibe that he responds to by marching the whole damn deal to the edge of the precipice. But it’s McPhee’s tenor that really grounds the music, playing with a breadth of tone and the kind of interstellar logic of the late-Coltrane ensembles while making lightning strikes on the saxophone’s most phantom registers. A great, great side, one that could have sat as comfortably on Centre Of The World or ESP Disk back in the day while playing with the kinda fiery no-prisoners assault that is truly post-Noise. Comes with a download, highly recommended. 

Stunning double LP from the duo of Pat Murano (The No-Neck Blues Band/Decimus et al) and Mark Morgan (Sightings). This is wild a-formal low level Industrial/electronic minimalism that has all of the toxic appeal of Relay For Death with sidelong works that evolve from sputtering electronics and pugilistic drum machines into towering alien structures that touch on aspects as diverse as early Whitehouse, Faust and Conrad Schnitzler soundtracking a Hermann Nitsch aktion. Given full sides of vinyl to spread out on, the duo build the tension by the subtle addition of all sorts of subliminal laminal detail until the whole thing is suspended on screaming metal drones, arcs of flamethrower melody and scrambled alien vocal broadcasts that sound like modulated EVP. This makes a great companion to the recent run of killer Decimus sides and it’s a classic slice of austere death drone from a pair of heads with an instinctive feel for the blackest of psychedelics. Edition of 270 copies. A massive set: highly recommended. 

Much-anticipated return for one of the most legendary of Japanese underground power trios: it’s an indisputable fact that Mainliner’s OTT debut, 1996’ Mellow Out, remains one of the most mind-blowing re-thinks of the potential of overloaded power trio dynamics and one of the all-time great Japanese underground monsters. Mainliner were the brainchild of the notorious bassist/vocalist Nanjo Asahito, who also fronted High Rise, Musica Transonic, Holy Angels, Toho Sara and a host of other one-off satellites. With Nanjo having basically ‘gone underground’ it has been left to original guitarist Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple et al) to resurrect the group, now dubbed Makoto Kawabata’s Mainliner in deference to Nanjo. Here he returns with original drummer Koji Shimura and with the addition of bassist/vocalist Kawabe Taigen of Bo Ningen. It was the levels of fuzz on Kawabata’s guitar that really defined the Mainliner sound, as well as their propensity for endless incessant two chord boogie riffs, and both are present to the max here, with Kawabata tearing a-formal shapes from a guitar that is literally cracking up with noise while the rhythm section play dunting time-staggered grooves. Kawabe is a good substitute for Nanjo and his languorous reverb-soaked vocals work as a slow-motion foil for the insane levels amphetamine riffage. CD includes a bonus track. Highly recommended!

Much-anticipated return for one of the most legendary of Japanese underground power trios: it’s an indisputable fact that Mainliner’s OTT debut, 1996’ Mellow Out, remains one of the most mind-blowing re-thinks of the potential of overloaded power trio dynamics and one of the all-time great Japanese underground monsters. Mainliner were the brainchild of notorious bassist/vocalist Nanjo Asahito, who also fronted High Rise, Musica Transonic, Holy Angels, Toho Sara and a host of other one-off satellites. With Nanjo having basically ‘gone underground’ it has been left to original guitarist Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple et al) to resurrect the group, now dubbed Makoto Kawabata’s Mainliner in deference to Nanjo. Here he returns with original drummer Koji Shimura and with the addition of bassist/vocalist Kawabe Taigen of Bo Ningen. It was the levels of fuzz on Kawabata’s guitar that really defined the Mainliner sound, as well as their propensity for endless incessant two chord boogie riffs, and both are present to the max here, with Kawabata tearing a-formal shapes from a guitar that is literally cracking up with noise while the rhythm section play dunting time-staggered grooves. Kawabe is a good substitute for Nanjo and his languorous reverb-soaked vocals work as a slow-motion foil for the insane levels amphetamine riffage. A massively welcome return to form for these Tokyo underground monsters, vinyl edition ultra-limited and immediately sold out at source, so make your move!

“A new set of studio recordings from the latter day version of the A Band. As noted in previous musings (check out David Keenan's article on The Wire site) on this collective, the A Band follows in the tradition of the People Band, Scratch Orchestra, and Portsmouth Sinfonia (and oddly enough, Calgary's own Street of Crocodiles), ditching traditional notions of instrumentation and ability for a more disparate and unique flow of ideas and sounds. Standard instruments (piano, clarinet, electric guitar) sit alongside makeshift/found percussion, weird electronics, and vocal utterances, the elements shifting in and out of focus, often seeming as if players are walking in and out of the studio at their leisure, adding something then moving along. The first track is largely acoustic, featuring a swirling marriage of its rag-tag odd and ends, while the second main track (actually the third) features a much different feel and heavier usage of electric sounds. Totally bizarre, singular, and unlike anything else on Bug Incision. Treated white card sleeves with colour & b&w stick-on art, edition of 119.” – BI. 

Much-anticipated fourth volume of this mind-numbingly amazing collection of “fuzzed-up boot-stomping continental low-life heaviness 1969-1975” in an edition of only 300 copies: this one is focussed on European levels of caveman ugh, pre-metal, pluke-popping glam and proto-punk brain donation with a choice run of ridiculously OTT hysterics. Silence are to Led Zeppelin what Blue Cheer were to The Jimi Hendrix Experience, favouring volume over technique across two amazing power-grunting sides. Germany’s Propeller sing the praises of an “Apache Woman” while Belgium’s Angie make for one of the most confusing wimpy power ballads in the form of “Streetlight Fight”. Mothers Of Track drop the classic “Motorcycle Rock” while Good Time Joe turn up the Stones/Dolls swagger with “Slipstream”. Also killer tracks from no counts like Mushroom, Corporation, After Shave (!), Blackbirds 2000, Tiger, Tykes, Maternal Joy and the mind-blowing closing track from Germany’s Cindy & Bert that immortalises the Hound Of The Baskervilles to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. Too fucking much! Another amazing, life-affirming volume from one of the most insanely enjoyable of modern underground compilations. Immediately sold out at source, highly recommended!

Edition of only 50 copies hand-cut lathe with insert and download documenting some insane pipe and drum music recorded live in the field by Anthony Milton: incredible degree of out of body hyperventilating going on here, with crude pipe stylings huffing all the way to unconsciousness while drums batter our ritual tattoos and wild get-down stylings. A side was recorded at a 36 hour non-stop street fiesta in the village of Sorata in the High Andes while the flip was at an overnight bacchal in a bamboo hut in the village of San Miguel del Bala in the Amazon basin. Line this one up to next to an Albert Ayler boot and your favourite Vibracathedral Orchestra CD-R for maximal brain rearrangement. 

Stunning archival unearthing of late-60s/early-70s electronic works from minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine in an edition of 380 copies: recorded as experiments towards his ‘lost’ masterpiece L’Avventura, inspired by the Antonioni film of the same name, these pieces feature dense, overlapping settings for filtered sine tone generators and variously manipulated tape-works. The first side features a 1970 composition that is one of the wildest and heaviest recordings of Palestine’s career, with Industrial strength monoliths consisting of constantly shifting and elementally powerful steel tone drones pitched against each other in great hurricanes of sound. Commissioned as a dance piece for Gus Soloman, it’s one of Palestine’s most radically organic electronic environments. The second side features more love-level electro-drone works, with overlapping oscillators generating time-killing fluctuations. A massively heavy side from Palestine, with a set of recordings that create a spectacular vision of the future. 

Released on a new sub-division of the great Italian avant garde label Alga Marghen, this is an excellent experimental summit between the French Gol orchestra of Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Sharda and Samon Takahashi (a group dedicated to a “lost rural tradition within a post-Dada spirit” and who use flute, horns, guitar, violin, toys, self-manufactured instruments, tapes, turntables, voices, various percussion instruments and electronics) and minimalist composer, pianist and artist Charlemagne Palestine. Here Palestine plays a church organ in the St. Eustache church in Paris while Gol use electronics, bass, guitar and flutes to create a “pagan ritual”. This is a wild set, peaking in plateau after plateau of explosive organ sonorities, waves of electronic drones and clusters of overtone activity that bears comparison to the soundtrack actions of Hermann Nitsch as much as the ecstatic noise of Richard Youngs and Vibracathedral Orchestra. A fantastic side, limited to only 300 copies. Recommended.

Third instalment in this thrilling on-going series from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band/K-Salvatore/Malkuth with each LP associated with an astrological attribution taken from Decimus Magnus Ausonius (310-395). 2 feels like an extension of the ancient/future ritual appeal of 1, with swathes of electronics moving in mysterious whorls that flatline into dense beams of light before phantom melodies that are somewhere between arcs of classic al strings and devotional kosmische start to rise to the surface. Imagine a heady gothic ritual ala Hermann Nitsch or The Cosmic Couriers but with a deranged High Mass appeal and a cracked post-Whitehouse/Buchenwald atmosphere. Edition of 250 copies in silkscreened sleeves. Massively heavy and highly recommended: can’t get enough of these Decimus sides.

Fascinating engagement with the work of the late Luc Ferrari, specifically his electro-acoustic “Presque Rien No.2”, a minimal soundwork where Ferrari occasionally talks to himself while moving through a sonic field that includes a repeating bird cry. eRikm combines a real-time playback of the piece with the movement of a microphone in and outside of his house while another bird sings in his garden. The live interaction across time between the two pieces creates a third space/time element that is fairly disorientating and that generates such a deep listening field that it almost succeeds in bending time while creating an odd mood of nostalgia. “Visitation, created on April 1st, 2011 is a very unique kind of collaboration between two French sonic artists, master Luc Ferrari and eRikm. Here is eRikm direct testimony about this new work: “When the sun set on April 1st, 2011 I heard through the windows of my house the repetitive song of a night bird. ‘Madeleine’ brought me immediately back to Luc Ferrari¹s electroacoustic piece ‘Presque Rien N° 2’. I became curious about comparing the bird that was officiating in the garden of Cap15 (in the North area of Marseille) with the bird of ‘Presque Rien’. My curiosity triggered the desire to play Luc¹s piece in the acoustic space of my house. With my rudimentary recorder I moved inside and outside the house moving back and forth between both spaces. I played with the depth of field, the beat between these two birds separated by 34 years and immersed myself in these acoustic events. This Ursprung or temporal Klein bottle was recorded and edited in one single sequence shot”.
Very hard to confront with one of the all-time masterpieces of modern creation as Luc Ferrari’s “Presque Rien N° 2”… but listening to this piece you immediately get the impression of a perfectly accomplished work, published now on LP on your favorite label. So here is the first ever LP by eRikm, elegantly released with “Presque Rien” iconic mouth picture on the sleeve; dedicated to Brunhild Ferrari and to Natacha Muslera.” – AM.

“On Christmas Eve, 2004, John Duncan received a mysterious email from an archaeologist working at the site of the Nazca Lines in Peru. He claimed to have discovered, and over time recorded, a variety of sounds actually generated by the enigmatic lines themselves. Familiar with Duncan’s “Infrasound-Tidal”, composed from source recordings taken from tides, seismic activity and barometric data from the Australian coastline, he suggested to Duncan the composition of a piece with these sources. All of the sources were modified in the studio of John Duncan, some radically, to bring out an unsettling, haunting quality. In mid-June 2005, the glorious 5-track piece was finally ready. John Duncan sent several messages to the archaeologist, none of them ever answered or returned. A hard disk crash effectively destroyed all of the email correspondence between them. What remains are the notes he sent that ostensibly describe the details of sites and times for the source recordings. Those notes have been reproduced on the insert included in this edition, also presenting John Duncan liner notes. First pressing limited to 380 copies, with embossed total-black cover, insert and full-color inner sleeve with wonderful space images of the Nazca Lines.” – AM. 

Amazing collection of floating Smegma member and hermetic avantist Lee Rockey’s original incarnation as a jazz drummer, courtesy of the newly reactivated Pigface Records: jazz drummer Lee Rockey is an unlikely floating member of the Smegma cult and one who has served to connect the group to a parallel jazz stream. Rockey first cut his teeth with jazz flautist Herbie Mann in the 1950s before dedicating himself to free improvisation and multi-disciplinary avant garde sweat. His scattered appearances across a bunch of Smegma records - most noticeably on 1996's The Mad Excitement, The Barbaric Pulsations, The Incomparable Rhythms Of Smegma - have helped contribute to his critical rehabilitation, although he remains relatively unknown outside his native Portland. "Lee Rockey remains my biggest inspiration and one of the most mindblowing people I've ever met," Smegma's Ju Suk Reet Meate insists. "He was a guy who had been a jazz musician starting in, like, 1945, moved to New York and lived on 52nd Street in 1955, is on the first Herbie Mann record, just a true jazz musician, unbelievable. In the 1960s, kind of inspired by Ornette Coleman, he didn't want to play bebop any more, and by the time we met him he was one of the best jazz drummers you ever heard, in the kinda Gene Krupa style, a free, open swing drummer, but he refused to play any jazz or anything normal. When you played with him he would just drag you along on this journey, playing things on three different layers at once, all the time, and you could just pick how you wanted to interact with it, fast, slow, medium, whatever. He was somebody who made us realise that Portland had something that was real. When we arrived in Portland, the city was just dying, but we made that connection with Lee Rockey and that just changed our life. Rockey has never had a real job in his life. He was just a musician. Totally inspirational. For our first show in Portland we had him and his friend do a piece that we kind of played along with - this was back in 1977. He was the kind of guy that you'd think would see us as just a bunch of dumb hippies, but no, he heard something in us and he was right on it. That was some kind of validation. He knew what was what." This tape is a revelation, documenting a buncha live dates that Rockey played on from 1952-1961. The A side culls recordings from 1952-1955 including dates with Herbie Mann, Neil Hefty and Ed Beech as well as weird/inexplicable experimental tape works that sound pretty boggling side-by-side with his hyper-kinetic jazz playing. The B side is drawn from recordings on May 16^th 1961 with the house band at The Way Out club and once again demonstrate the width of Rockey’s musical vision. A necessary archival release, hopefully the first of many, highly recommended.

Edition of 270 copies LP from artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel, using brushes and sticks on a series of prepared gongs and self-built instruments to create a tone field with a Zen clarity somewhat akin to some of Harry Bertoia’s singing sculptures or even the more minimal/percussive Mirror sides: "PLANAM proudly presents the second LP by the artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel. Born in 1941 in Strasbourg, France, Michel Vogel artistic activities start in 1960 when, as a painter under the materic influences of Antoni Tapies and Jean Dubuffet, his mineral and sound experimentations built a universe influenced by free jazz, extra-European music and Olivier Messiaen. His researches develop with new sculptures and the creation of his own resonating metal instruments. His friends of the minimalist group, and specially the Fluxus artists, supported and pushed him to carry on his acoustics explorations while his sonic creations get closer to the music of John Cage, Philip Corner, Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. After the deep cosmo night music of “Une petite music de nuit” (Vogel first LP) PLANAM decided to issue two more early-morning oriented realizations, or “Ronde mattinale à Amillis” and “Berenice”. These alfa-wave improvisations for ‘prepared’ gongs and self-built metal instruments, selected in direct collaboration with the artist, will make you enter into luminous sonic dimensions." - AM

Edition of 300 copies LP from artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel, using brushes and sticks on a series of gongs to create a kosmiche tone field somewhat akin to some of Harry Bertoia’s singing sculptures: "… the first LP by the artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel. Born in 1941 in Strasbourg, France, Michel Vogel’s artistic activities start in 1960 when, as a painter under the materic influences of Antoni Tapies and Jean Dubuffet, his mineral and sound experimentations built a universe influenced by free jazz, extra-European music and Olivier Messiaen. His researches develop with new sculptures and the creation of his own resonating metal instruments. his friends of the minimalist group, and specially the fluxus artists, support and push him to carry on his acoustics explorations while his sonic creations get closer to the music of John Cage, Philip Corner, Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. For this first project Planam selected, in direct collaboration with the artist, an improvisation for large size gongs "prepared" with metal rods, little gong, Chinese cymbal, Caoutchouc ball, titled "une petite musique de nuit". Recorded live with no over-dubbing the night of January 18th, 2002. a very deep and alfa-wave oriented listening that will make you discover very intimate as well as stellar new sonic dimensions.” – AM.

Another fascinating environmental transport from composer and Fluxus member Philip Corner: Coldwater Basin presents “a home recording of water running from a faucet into a sink” that was made on the Lower East Side of New York City “sometime in the 60s”.  Much more than how it reads on paper, it’s more about the sound of a room, the specifics of time and space, and the sound of their collision and unfolding. The recording is hissy and seems to slowly pan towards the delicate sound of the water that increases in volume throughout, with lots of background street noise and the hum of the city somewhere in the distance. The effect is curiously hypnotic as Corner points out in his notes: “... and I had always dreamed of passing an entire night bathed in this. It was never long enough.” Mesmerising, historically potent slice of minimalism, edition of only 180 copies with calligraphic design by Corner himself. 

Necessary reissue of this killer private press free jazz blow-out, originally issued by Ali’s own Survival imprint in 1973: Ali’s Quartet gathered a buncha survivors from the late Coltrane orchestra, including the great Carlos Ward on alto saxophone and flute, as well as pianist Fred Simmons and bass violinist Stafford L. James. Ali is on super-complex from here, juggling time with that fast, electric sound that defined monsters like Interstellar Space while Ward reaches way the hell out, pulling screaming tones and fast smeary runs from out of the air. Pianist Fred Simmons has a speedy, non-intrusive style that comes out of the Alice Coltrane school of post-bop cosmo visions, giving the group the feel of a independent think-tank dedicated to further exploring and extrapolating on Coltrane’s curtailed quest for the speed of the sound of now. Survival was one of the major free jazz privates, releasing classics like Frank Lowe and Rashied Ali’s Duo Exchange, and this is a very welcome return to vinyl. Recommended. 

New duo work from Mr Lloyd Wyatt (who cut an excellent 3" for Feed & Seed a while back) and Sparrow Durham using guitar, Fender Rhodes and organ. The feel is of a murky late-night railway yard with deep fog bisected by blurry beams of light, thick night-time drones, half-heard voices and feedback loops of steel on steel while someone plays The Dead C's "The Sun Stabbed" over a tannoy system. Another good one from Wyatt and co. Comes packaged in an envelope with a fold-out insert and the disc housed in a screened, hand-sewn slip.

Another great release from Smegma’s reactivated Pigface Records: Delusional presents two sides of material from an inspired hook-up that sees the duo of Ju Suk Reet Meate and Rock and Roll Jackie collaborating with Giggles aka Madelyn Villano and Alieta Herrera-Train. The first side presents studio recordings from their first meeting in Portland at Smegma’s studio and it is extremely psychedelic and woozy, with heady loops and backwards vinyl wonked into hallucinatory vocal choirs that come over like a Portsmouth Sinfonia play GRM. On the flip there’s an excellent live studio session from East Village Radio from 2011 that is more hands-on and has that classic brainy/stoopid garage band appeal of Smegma/LAFMS et al. Recommended. 

Another killer release from the newly reactivated Smegma private imprint, Pigface Records: this one sees two sides of collaborative studio work from The Tenses (aka Ju Suk Reet Meate and Rock and Roll Jackie of Smegma) and MSHR aka Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Aspects of Throbbing Gristle circa Heathen Earth give this a particularly evocative and eerie atmosphere, with disobedient brass slowly bent double over tape drones, snatches of epiglottal freak and hand-cranked electro-acoustic constructs. Classic American hobbyist composition with one foot in the garage and the other in the laboratory. 

Subtitled ‘Big Boobs Boogie and 13 other deviant slices of fuzzed-out proto-punk madness from the UK 1970-1975', Volume 3 of this amazing series turns the spotlight on the UK ‘bonehead’ scene, with some ludicrously super-charged/mono-braincell thug rock w/a heady glam/metal charge played with half-bricks for plectrums and with plenty of songs about bad-assed babes with skin tight denims doing bikers wrong: the vibe here is early-Slade-meets-punked-up-Thin Lizzy-via-Blue Cheer and if that doesn’t give you instantly painful gonads then you ain’t packin’ em. Band names and song titles are so completely stupe that if the sonics weren’t so, uh, authentic, you’d swear someone was making the whole deal up. We got tracks from Stud Leather (!), Alan Lee Shaw (“She Moans”), Streak, Slowload (“Big Boobs Boogie”), an alternate take on Mississippi’s godlike “Mr Union Railway Man”, Barry Rolfe, Sweeny Bean (!), Agnes Strange (!), Castle Farm (“Hot Rod Queen”), Incredible Hog, an unknown acetate, another one from Streak, Sleaz Band’s “Midnight Man” and Clutch’s “Black Angel”. Almost too much! Best volume of the series, hands down, best cover too, edition of only 300 copies, instantly sold out at source. Highly recommended! 

New limited one-sided LP from this modern composer presents an elegy to Fluxus by encoding the names of various key players (including John Lennon. LaMonte Young, Yoshi Wada, Yasunao Tone, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, Joe Jones, Philip Corner, Takehisa Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Henry Flynt, Joseph Beuys, Henning Christiansen et al) in the form of International Morse dots and dashes which were 'performed' on a keyboard with a voice-pattern setting going through a loop unit and a mixer and straight to cassette. Front cover reproduces the original score. Edition limited to 345 copies.

Limited edition of 500 copies LP from legendary minimalist composer, pianist and artists Charlemagne Palestine. Less than 200 copies of this LP were ever put on sale, with 350 of them offered to the audience who attended a Palestine performance. Sound 1 represents the apex of Palestine’s experiments with oscillators as universal drone generators and features 16 machines played at full volume and subtly tweaked to generate gorgeous, complex blooms of clashing tone, ghost patterns, hypnagogic shadows and subtle orchestral movements. Palestine talks of the piece as a 3-dimensional sculptural canvas in mid-air, likening the sound to the humming of gargantuan Tibetan bees. It’s a mesmerising piece, one that fully occupies and takes over whatever space it’s played in, a classic slice of minimal electronic psychedelia in the tradition of LaMonte Young, Coil’s Time Machines and the recent Eleh LPs. Recommended.

Another instalment in the Decimus series of astrologically-themed electro-meditations from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band/K-Salvatore/Malkuth et al. This one comes in a run of only 250 copies with silkscreened sleeves. Minimalist, circling electronics and percussive tone patterns dominate 4, with an atmosphere that is somewhere between the stylings of Richard Youngs’ Festival recording, the more weighty of the Kraut-influenced Industrial music (Nurse With Wound/Maurizio Bianchi) and the phased tape/electronics experiments of Charlemagne Palestine. Recommended, as is everything in the series to date.

Excellent experimental summit between the French Gol orchestra of Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Sharda and Samon Takahashi (a group dedicated to a “lost rural tradition within a post-Dada spirit” and who use flute, horns, guitar, violin, toys, self-manufactured instruments, tapes, turntables, voices, various percussion instruments and electronics) and Romanian ‘spectralist’ composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram. Dumitrescu is best known for his incredible string settings but here he plays violin, cello and prepared piano frame as well as conducting, while Avram uses electronics and tapes. The sound is complex, sparse and intensely ritualistic, recalling the more improvised modes of MEV circa Friday alongside some classic Euro surrealism. Edition of 300 copies complete with graphic score insert.

Very excited to see the return of Smegma’s legendary private press imprint Pigface Records and this is a particular doozy: Solo 78 & 79 presents some amazing home recordings from the Smegma leader all played live to tape. Using vocals, synth, trumpet, bowed sheet metal, pump organ, record player, guitar and loops he generates an incredible avant rock/weirdo compositional atmosphere that would somehow reconcile post-Beefheart freak, garage band aesthetics, proto-TNB style industrial noise and wheezing one-man band avant blues, all with a weirdo real people plays Nurse With Wound vibe. The great thing about Smegma and Ju Suk’s work is that it gets all the way out into free music modes while somehow retaining that classic hobbyist/American garage band edge and this is another fantastic addition to the shelf. Highly recommended!

Two LPs of staggering a-musical disobedience, strangulated free vocal freak, feedback threnodies and the most primitive nod-out free/metal/garage/skronk this side of the Breakdance The Dawn crew from Oren Ambarchi, Nick Kamvissis and Brendan Walls (who plays alongside Andrew Chalk in Marsfield) with contributions from Lisa and Naomi Tocatly. By far the best thing this wild group have ever done, Puppet Island seems them take on the lumbering metal-dirge style of Kousokuya but w/an obsessive, destructive streak that is almost autistic. The drumming is amazing, with a Bill Ward plays The Shaggs feel over repeating thunder-struck riffs that sound as if they are being played by electrified rubber bands. Throw in vocals alternately sung by small retarded children or macabre puppets and you have alla the ingredients for some of the most deranged free rock of this group’s ‘career’. Pretty amazing, edition of 280 copies in a full-colour gatefold sleeve. Highly recommended. 

Necessary reissue of this all-time classic American underground side: spoken of in the same breath as early Pere Ubu, Debris and Destroy All Monsters, MX-80’s stunning 1977 debut was a complete anomaly for the times and still sounds singular. Originally released by Island (how the fuck did that happen?) in the UK and Netherlands, Hard Attack bridges a buncha different styles with considerable aplomb, with a daffy post-Velvets appeal cut up with wild proto-metal guitar stylings courtesy of the amazing Bruce Anderson and the kinda avant garage muscle that would marry Industrial strength to weirdo geek moves that means they end up somewhere between early Half Japanese and the LAFMS of Airway. Which is the place to be. This new edition has been completely re-mastered and it has to be said it has never sounded better, finally capturing the vision of the group in all its avant-metaloid glory. I mean there isn’t a single duff track on the album and I personally could listen to Rich Stim reciting the contents of my goddamn fridge and remain ‘gripped’. His vocals combine strange observations with a kinda deadpan wit and a dark gravity that is totally unique. Throw in a download and an insert featuring all-new liner notes from Byron Coley and you got one of the reissues of the year. If you’re missing this one from you’re collection you’re sitting on a doughnut. Highly recommended!

Pretty much everyone who hear the swanky double cassette release from the NZ duo of Anthony Milton (lap steel guitar/banjo/electronics) and Bill Wood (lap steel guitar/electronics) was floored and the response has been so great that Anthony has gone back and reissued their debut double CD-R set in an exclusive art edition run in oversize folders with stapled-in art book: Birdcatcher take off on a kind of post-Charalambides/Scorces sanctified steel trip, factoring in great fogs of reverb, hovering psychedelic ghost tones, endlessly sustained single-note violence and at atmosphere that is somewhat akin to Reverend Louis Overstreet plays the Hermann Nitsch outer space songbook. Using nothing but a buncha modified electric strings and some cracked electronics Birdcatcher usurp blues form to hymn dead planets, playing in a slow-motion railroad style that trades crossroads for spaceways. Spectacularly great, tiny run, highly recommended. 

Second edition of a great LP from this weirdo French outfit with connections to Ghedalia Tazartes with guest appearances from Bill Kouligas (Pan) and Jan Anderzen (Kemialliset Ystavat/Tomutonttu): El-G make supremely bent studio creations that somehow channel the alchemical automating of Steve Stapleton via Scott Walker’s Tilt and your favourite Thierry Mueller jam to birth something that’s equally at home in the garage, the electronics lab and the Euro chante bin. I dunno, this one is really head scratching, I’m getting Billy Mackenzie as produced by Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson circa The Ape Of Naples, Jac Berrocal as much as Jacques Brel, Rock N Roll Station-style beat breakdowns... El-G really feel like the only true heirs to the French Futura/Red Records scene, Red Noise, Fille Qui Mousse, Mahogany Brain et al, making music that bears a profound disconnect from any kind of received history of rock modes and somehow connecting to traditions of freak from a left-field avant classical/electronic/torch song angle that is uniquely disquieting. Another great, unclassifiable side from El-G, highly recommended.

Massively anticipated new album from the UK underground duo of Tim Goss (ex-Shadow Ring) and Chloe Mutter on sea-green foam vinyl in an edition of 400 copies: continuing the macabre narrative thrust of previous releases like Incidents Of Travel and The Rising, The Marianne charts the haunted journey of the eponymous ship across the “sour ocean” and though various supernatural encounters towards an uncertain end. This is darker album than even The Rising, with an atmosphere of haunted radiophonica cut with a drizzly suburban DIY edge. The instrumentals cross nagging slow-motion repeat melodies with distant hovering drones that come out of the whole Two Daughter/early Coil axis, with a feel that comes over like “Lost Rivers Of London” extrapolated all the way to the Folkestone coast. There are more vocals from Goss on this one, which is a treat, with his slightly oiky English delivery making it come across like the DIY synth album The Afflicted Man never cut with Storm Bugs. Overall the atmosphere is totally non-contemporary, with an atmosphere that is part dread and part longing nostalgia, like all of the best ghost stories. Some of the more abstruse passages come over like crude keyboard re-soundings of the territory of Nurse With Wound’s A Salt Marie Celeste or Mirror’s Sarban tribute Ringstones while the ‘characters’ that Goss plays, taking on the role of various passengers, often in wildly modulated voices, with lines like “could you rub some more of this sun tan lotion onto my back” make it sound closer to “Brian’s Magic Car” by the Television Personalities but with a weirdo Sapphire & Steel edge.

This is an absolute tour-de-force, walking the line between a classic 1970s British telefantasy radio play, a weirdo austere Industrial/DIY synth side and a series of macabre pop art environmental ‘soundings’. Absolutely singular, immediately sold out at source, very highly recommended!

Vinyl only studio album with baritone saxophonist Mats Gustafsson paired with ‘assaultive’ piano trio Correction: Correction are pianist Sebastian Bergstrom, bassist Joacim Nyberg and drummer Emil Astrand-Melin and they take the format and extrapolate wildly, playing a form of taught trio-thought that bridges continuous flowing sound-forms with moments of pure blat. Gustafsson takes the opportunity to really get inside the music, playing with a rude, abrasive tone here and sliding sensuous body sounds and sex calls there. At points he sounds like he’s turning the music inside out, so lascivious is his focus and intent. There’s a Brotzmann-esque appeal to the music in the way that it marries furious discourse and scalding tonal improvisation with an umbilical that runs deep into the tradition and it’s nothing short of blast to hear the way the players keep pushing and pulling, forwards and backwards, straining at the form while sounding out its possibilities. Edition of 500 copies. Recommended.

Beautiful set of classic free jazz from this world-beating trio: recorded live in Switzerland in September 2011, Parker plays soprano and tenor saxophone with Guy on bass and Lytton on percussion. Dunno if it’s just the quality of the recording but there is something particularly big and spacious about the group interplay here, all married to some insanely tactile bottom end courtesy of Guy that almost drills the group right through the floor. Parker is on inspired form, playing with a fat, questing tone that comes out of Coltrane more than ‘improvised music’ but the speed of thought interactions and the groups feel for knotty textural weight and the dynamics of the flesh come elsewhere entirely. I always thought the Schlippenbach/Parker/Lovens trio were the classic contemporary European small jazz group but this amazing side certainly tips the scales. Fantastic, fresh, eternally questing free jazz played by thinkers with a vision that goes both ways. Edition of 500 LPs, highly recommended.

Beautiful set of classic free jazz from this world-beating trio: recorded live in Switzerland in September 2011, Parker plays soprano and tenor saxophone with Guy on bass and Lytton on percussion. Dunno if it’s just the quality of the recording but there is something particularly big and spacious about the group interplay here, all married to some insanely tactile bottom end courtesy of Guy that almost drills the group right through the floor. Parker is on inspired form, playing with a fat, questing tone that comes out of Coltrane more than ‘improvised music’ but the speed of thought interactions and the groups feel for knotty textural weight and the dynamics of the flesh come elsewhere entirely. I always thought the Schlippenbach/Parker/Lovens trio were the classic contemporary European small jazz group but this amazing side certainly tips the scales. Fantastic, fresh, eternally questing free jazz played by thinkers with a vision that goes both ways. Edition of 500 LPs, highly recommended.

Very limited repress of the stunning debut album from this psychedelic power trio from Melbourne, Australia featuring Duncan Blachford of Actual Holes/Psychic Baggage/Goodgrief Commune/Endless Melt et al and Jensen Tjhung of Lower Plenty: guitar/bass/drums moves that splinter the kinda nightmare USA sound of Simply Saucer/Chrome et al, with loping bass moves that are somewhere between Can’s Hoger Czukay and Jowe Head circa Swell Maps “Helicopter Spies/Full Moon In My Pocket” and driving motorik rhythms beneath raging phased/FX saturated guitar that is as out of focus and flamethrower-perfect as Rallizes w/classic delayed vocals that give the deal a kinda prole threat (Swell Maps/Fall) feel but w/downer ballads that come over like Ohkami No Jikan play The Gun Club and Spacemen 3. Very limited availability on this one, so make your move. Comes with a download. Highly recommended!

Stunning document of Parisian cellist Gaspar Claus’s visit to Japan across a series of collaborations with key Japanese underground and traditional players: aiming to join the dots between traditional Japanese music practice and contemporary experimental modes, Claus brings together an amazing line-up of players for a series of songs and improvisations including mind-blowing ensemble pieces and stunning duo jams with Keiji Haino (on vocals), Kazuki Tomokawa (on vocals and guitar), Otomo Yoshihide (turntables), Sachiko M (sine wave), Eiko Ishibashi (voice, piano, drums), Kakushin Nishihara (voice, satsuma biwa), Ryuichi Sakamoto (piano), Hirochimi Sakamoto (electric cello), Leonard Eto (wadaiko) and Kazutoki Umezu aka Doctor Umezu (tenor saxophone). A necessary instalment for serious Japanese underground heads, combining folk/punk ferocity with dark, classical stylings.

New instalment in Fauni Gena’s reissuing of the entire works of French psych/prog/experimental composer Igor Wakhevitch. Wakhevitch studied under the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer before abandoning his homework after falling under the spell of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine. Eventually finding work as Terry Riley's assistant he became obsessed with Riley's endless all-night ragas and began to make music himself. 1971’s Docteur Faust is Wakhevitch’s second album and it’s a bit more rock-based than the first, with blasts of modulated voices through overloaded megaphones, long sections of almost Aktionist-style ritual flailing and a black, nightmare psych sound that comes over like an inverted Cosmic Couriers with Conrad Schnitzler’s corpse-painted son on bass. I can think of no higher musical fantasy being realised any time soon. 

New instalment in Fauni Gena’s reissuing of the entire works of French psych/prog/experimental composer Igor Wakhevitch. Wakhevitch studied under the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer before abandoning his homework after falling under the spell of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine. Eventually finding work as Terry Riley's assistant he became obsessed with Riley's endless all-night ragas and began to make music himself. 1973’s Hathor comes over like an occult/progressive epic complete with running narration and massively overwhelming walls of synthesized gothic portent, all nailed to the sky with some suitably epic and doomy chords. If you're in the mood this could scratch a particularly obscure and inexplicably satisfying itch. 

New instalment in Fauni Gena’s reissuing of the entire works of French psych/prog/experimental composer Igor Wakhevitch. Wakhevitch studied under the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer before abandoning his homework after falling under the spell of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine. Eventually finding work as Terry Riley's assistant he became obsessed with Riley's endless all-night ragas and began to make music himself. Logos was his debut 1970 album and it’s a monster, a sprawling soundtrack to apocalypse that combines full-bore electronic bombastic with earthquaking bottom end, Klaus Schultz-styled spaceways synth and creepy massed communal chant. Somewhere between the excessive visions of Penderecki, the high gothic music of Tangerine Dream and Richard Youngs’ and Andrew Paine’s Ilk. Too fucking much. 

New instalment in Fauni Gena’s reissuing of the entire works of French psych/prog/experimental composer Igor Wakhevitch. Wakhevitch studied under the likes of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer before abandoning his homework after falling under the spell of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine. Eventually finding work as Terry Riley's assistant he became obsessed with Riley's endless all-night ragas and began to make music himself. 1977’s classic Nagual ignores the advent of punk entirely in favour of one of Wakhevitch’s most bafflingly uncompromising and jaw-dropping works, with austere bleeping and flashing electronics, an addled dark sci-fi atmosphere and extended sections featuring Wakhevitch muttering insanely to himself at the bottom of a long tunnel. Cracked avant/prog/electronics with a hypnotically deranged third eye appeal doesn’t get much better than this.

Stunning edition of 400 copies LP from the Australian duo of James Rushford and Joe Talia: a two-part suite scored for electronics, primitive drum machine, mutated vocal fragments and tectonic drone, Manhunter comes across like Homotopy To Marie as disintegrated by William Basinski. Hovering keyboard drones generate muzzy images of actionist rituals set deep in fields of tactile, buzzing static while vocals break the surface like tone-dialling through backwards number stations. Saw these two in action recently with Oren Ambarchi at the Tectonics festival in Glasgow but nothing really prepared me for this stunning album that somehow manage to reconcile extreme drone/environmental soundings, the organisational logic and arcing intent of an avant classical piece and the muzzy lo-fi appeal of straight-to-tape 80s/90s underground classics. Fans of Nurse With Wound, Siltbreeze, Hermann Nitsch, Robert Haigh, United Dairies, Broken Flag et al need to check this out. Last copies, now sold out at source. Highly recommended. 

CD edition of the second album from this UK underground group from Southend-On-Sea, originally released on the Pheromoans’ Savoury Days label in an edition of only 100 copies: this is a weird, sprawling side of audio-verite and occult sound treatments w/a heady sense of place. Haunted child like vocals are obscured by layers of tape hiss and feedback, snippets of melodious drone are cut to shreds by aggressive tape edits, laminal constructs of voice, noise, electronics and F/X build to squalling peaks... some of the creaky piano/rhythm loops come over like Nurse With Wound remixing AC Marias while the more ‘evacuated’ tracks recall aspects of Christoph Heemann’s works, specifically The Rings Of Saturn, with a similar feel for the lonely psychogeography of the south coast of England. A major evolution from their first LP and one of the most beguilingly weird and hermetically personal records to come out of the UK underground in a while. Highly recommended. 

Another incredible archival free jazz unearthing from NoBusiness, this time with a previously unheard recording from WKCR in New York in 1974 from a group that features Charles Brackeen on saxophone and flute, Ahmed Abdullah on trumpet, William Parker on bass, Roger Blank on drums and Tony Waters on percussion. Blank and Brackeen put the group together in the early 70s with a vision “to embrace communication among the good angels of humanity” that they derived from the music of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Ed Blackwell and the Sound Scientists Of Dixieland. Blank had drummed for Sun Ra in the 1960s and appeared on Pharaoh Sanders’ classic Tauhid recording on Impulse while Brackeen had just cut the classic Rhythm X for Strata-East. Ronnie Boykins of the Sun Ra Arkestra was the original bassist but he was replaced by William Parker in 1974 in time for this historic recording. It has to be said, Brackeen has never sounded better than he does here, with a raw outlaw tone and an amazing feel for alchemical folk figures and roaring marching band tunes that is the match of Albert Ayler. Abdullah is the perfect foil and together they play the kind of raggedy folk-spirituals that lit up underground classics like Norman Howard & Joe Phillips’ Burn, Baby, Burn. Abdullah talks of Brackeen’s music as being really free and having a heady sense of ritual and he remembers first meeting Brackeen when he was dressed in a Zorro cape and a long conical black hat. What a cat. And with a group of this calibre – Parker is on hypnotic form here, sawing and droning like Kali – and a recording this perfectly realised, the effect is irresistible. File alongside Evan Parker’s Vaincu.Va! 1978 LP as free jazz reissue of the year. Comes with great liner notes, classic gig poster/flier reproductions and period snaps. Can’t recommend this amazing side enough!

Another incredible archival free jazz unearthing from NoBusiness, this time with a previously unheard recording from WKCR in New York in 1974 from a group that features Charles Brackeen on saxophone and flute, Ahmed Abdullah on trumpet, William Parker on bass, Roger Blank on drums and Tony Waters on percussion. Blank and Brackeen put the group together in the early 70s with a vision “to embrace communication among the good angels of humanity” that they derived from the music of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Ed Blackwell and the Sound Scientists Of Dixieland. Blank had drummed for Sun Ra in the 1960s and appeared on Pharaoh Sanders’ classic Tauhid recording on Impulse while Brackeen had just cut the classic Rhythm X for Strata-East. Ronnie Boykins of the Sun Ra Arkestra was the original bassist but he was replaced by William Parker in 1974 in time for this historic recording. It has to be said, Brackeen has never sounded better than he does here, with a raw outlaw tone and an amazing feel for alchemical folk figures and roaring marching band tunes that is the match of Albert Ayler. Abdullah is the perfect foil and together they play the kind of raggedy folk-spirituals that lit up underground classics like Norman Howard & Joe Phillips’ Burn, Baby, Burn. Abdullah talks of Brackeen’s music as being really free and having a heady sense of ritual and he remembers first meeting Brackeen when he was dressed in a Zorro cape and a long conical black hat. What a cat. And with a group of this calibre – Parker is on hypnotic form here, sawing and droning like Kali – and a recording this perfectly realised, the effect is irresistible. File alongside Evan Parker’s Vaincu.Va! 1978 LP as free jazz reissue of the year. Comes with great liner notes, classic gig poster/flier reproductions and period snaps. Edition of only 400 copies gatefold LP. Can’t recommend this amazing side enough! 

Staggering deluxe 3x180-g vinyl box set, mastered at 45rpm for maximum disruption, documenting Peter Kolovos’s massively a-formal solo guitar innovations: Kolovos was a member of Open City and his last outing, New Bodies, pretty much took the ears off everyone that heard it. Bruce Russell of The Dead C has been a major booster and indeed last time I saw him ‘at home’ he was clutching this massive set to his breast and beaming like he had just got an autographed single from Toerag. Kolovos plays the guitar with virtually nada in terms of pre-established technique. He slashes into awkward chords, he tears at the guts of the guitar, he unwinds sheets of metal feedback from it, all the while emphasising its primary identity as a conductor of electricity. There are aspects of previous string-thinkers – Ray Russell’s devastating attack, Sonny Sharrock, Keiji Haino, Donald Miller, even Robert Quine circa “Waves Of Fear” – but it’s hard to think of anyone who has so convincingly disassembled the entire goddamn instrument with this kind of bloody-minded intent. Think Keiji Haino plays Love Cry Want as re-edited by Bruce Russell or the run-out jam from Blue Cheer’s Second Time Around endlessly dissected over six sides of goddamn vinyl and you have the kinda deal that VT dreams are made of. Absolutely barbaric electrified free rock with little parallel or comparison. Stunningly presented in a deluxe heavy duty/glossy tip-on box with three LPs with their own glossy sleeves. Live through this! Very highly recommended. 

Warehouse find of this amazing compilation of sonic disobedience and puke-popping tape brut from Lisa Carver aka Lisa Suckdog and friends, with all VT copies signed by Lisa herself: this is a massively addictive listen, somehow a little more ‘musical’ than Drugs Are Nice though still with plenty of wild field recordings, phone pranks, dog savaging, goofing, crying and screaming. Bill Callahan is on here, as is Costes, Rachel Suckpuppy, Dame Darcy... some of the music comes over like a hormonally overloaded teenage take on the Balinese Monkey Chant and this would make a great Nonesuch Explorer volume were they to dedicate a buncha sides to documenting druggy suburban teens with art jags and problem relationships. The song writing is pretty spectacular, combining moody downer ballads with haunting exotica and crude DIY strategies like no one else. Don’t know how many times we have played this disc in VT this week. Another classic side from Suckdog, last copies around, highly recommended!

Previously unreleased 1986 recording from this free jazz powerhouse featuring Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins, Andrew Cyrille and Ahmed Abdullah: The Group came out of the tumult of the 1970s loft scene looking for new models for expanding free jazz vocabularies and with a commitment to grassroots DIY presentation and models of community survival. Due to logistics – not to say the conservative atmosphere of the times – they gigged rarely and were never recorded, although most of the players cut albums for the new Silkheart label at some point. So this is a real find, a previously unreleased live set from 1986, beautifully recorded at the Jazz Centre Of New York, 380 Lafayette Street NYC. Brown remains one of the great altoists and his beautiful high, keening style sets the tone, with Abdullah’s slightly smudged, hazy trumpet work providing a lazily stoned foil. The strings are particularly brain-razzing, with two bassists, Sirone and Fred Hopkins, alongside violinist Billy Bang creating complex vortices and shots of heady chamber drone that function as dense centres of gravity. This is beautiful, soulful big band free jazz from a buncha players who knew how to turn the form inside out. As Sirone says in the liners “If Brown is down, that would be it!” And believe me, Brown is down. If you’re a fan of Brown and Cyrille’s work on masterpieces like Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun then prepare to swoon all over again. A major unearthing in an edition of 1000 copies, with great sleeve notes and snaps, very highly recommended!

Previously unreleased 1986 recording from this free jazz powerhouse featuring Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins, Andrew Cyrille and Ahmed Abdullah: The Group came out of the tumult of the 1970s loft scene looking for new models for expanding free jazz vocabularies and with a commitment to grassroots DIY presentation and models of community survival. Due to logistics – not to say the conservative atmosphere of the times – they gigged rarely and were never recorded, although most of the players cut albums for the new Silkheart label at some point. So this is a real find, a previously unreleased live set from 1986, beautifully recorded at the Jazz Centre Of New York, 380 Lafayette Street NYC. Brown remains one of the great altoists and his beautiful high, keening style sets the tone, with Abdullah’s slightly smudged, hazy trumpet work providing a lazily stoned foil. The strings are particularly brain-razzing, with two bassists, Sirone and Fred Hopkins, alongside violinist Billy Bang creating complex vortices and shots of heady chamber drone that function as dense centres of gravity. This is beautiful, soulful big band free jazz from a buncha players who knew how to turn the form inside out. As Sirone says in the liners “If Brown is down, that would be it!” And believe me, Brown is down. If you’re a fan of Brown and Cyrille’s work on masterpieces like Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun then prepare to swoon all over again. A major unearthing, with great sleeve notes and snaps, very highly recommended!

Amazing compilation of real people, biker psych, psycho lounge, sainted garage, rural boogie, cosmo jazz and deranged rock/roll preaching that culls the weirdest and best private press legends from the handmade records underground: intended as a companion piece to the Enjoy The Experience book put together by record collectors Paul Major and Johan Kugelberg the set comes with a massive 20-page booklet with extensive liner notes. This is a mind-blower, a collection of some of the most revered ‘private press’ sides ever whispered about all collected in one place, some of which will be long-familiar to serious VT heads and a buncha which will nail your third eye to the ceiling for the first time. Beautifully assembled and lovingly presented, this is a valentine to some of the bravest visionaries to populate the margins of the 20^th Century, with monster tracks from Circuit Rider, Gary Wilson, Jade, Heitkotter, The Invaders, The Muzzy Band, Carol-Leigh & Hank Mindlin, Gary Schneider, Joe E., Medico Doktor Vibes, Ray Harlowe & Gyp Fox, Arcesia, Boa, Michael Farneti, 33 1/3, Silk & Silver, Russ Saul, Dennis The Fox, Bob Harrison and Vinny Roma. Can’t recommend this enough!

Welcome return as a leader for free drummer William Hooker, who has worked with Glenn Spearman, Sabir Mateen, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and William Parker. Channels Of Consciousness documents a show recorded live at Roulette, NYC on 27^th March 2010, featuring Adam Lane on bass, Dave Ross on guitar, Chris DiMeglio on trumpet, ‘Sanga’ on percussion and Hooker on drums. The group play through a series of blazing compositions, with Hooker’s tense, polyrhythmic style further bolstered by Sanga’s hand percussion, pushing Ross into some broiling electric guitar-isms while DiMeglio rides the waves of pure electricity. No one can power through genre conventions conventions with the single-mindedness of Hooker and it’s a pleasure to have him back.

Edition of 350 copies LP on Graham Lambkin’s Kye imprint that presents the first readily-available material from Australia’s Astor: coming from Ferntree Gully, Victoria, Astor’s music has previously only been available via a series of barely-distributed CD-Rs, the best of which are compiled here. Astor make subtle use of processed field recordings, sounds of distant thunder, the crackle of handheld microphones, combined with spectral instrumentation, piano, electronics, so that it feels like a series of scored environments, blurring the lines between ‘playing’ and ‘sounding’ as beautifully as Alan Lamb’s work with the Faraway Wires. Also a weirdo ‘diaristic’ appeal to the way the sonics unfold that finds its best comparison in Christoph Heemann’s solo work like Days Of The Eclipse, Aftersolstice et al.

Latest volume documenting Neil Campbell of Vibracathedral Orchestra's investigations into the more tranced regions of free electronic drone bundles a clutch of monolithic cloud formations that seem to just hover in mid-air, vibrating with subtle white-light energies. There are drones and there are DRONES and here Campbell works his way through a few of the more elementally powerful static wave forms recently formulated by humans. Limited to 100 copies and highly recommended.

Limited edition of 500 copies on blue vinyl featuring alchemically re-worked live and studio jams from Neil Campbell (A-Band/Vibracathedral Orchestra et al). Lucid electronic minimalism combines with a feel for elaborate technicolour architectures, illuminated circuitry and the application of ritualised trance moves to punk primitive drones for a series of gorgeous psychedelic constructs. The sister album to the Neon Pibroch CD, also on Important.

Unbelievable deluxe reissue of a completely unknown and bafflingly beautiful French acid folk private from 1976: more of a one-off ‘happening’ than a band per se, Celebration is the result of an all-night champagne-fuelled session where someone thought to roll the tape. The atmosphere is incredible, the perfect ‘private’ feel of a broadcast from a stoned neverland with a great fuzzy/distant/hallucinogenic feel that is pure cotton candy. The music is something else, recalling the sad UK psych/folk reveries of Stone Angel, Tony, Caro & John et al with a batty third eye-sqouzing Tom Rapp/Pearls Before Swine basement troubadour feel. The instrumentals provide swooning, drifting waves of acoustic guitar, dulcimer, autoharp , banjo and flute that come over like a Gallic cousin to Witthuser & Westrupp’s inspired acid-re-think of Bavarian folk tropes, while the original songs are truly amazing, with soaring male/female vocals that feel like they’re blowing in from Venus and gorgeous string levitations that have alla the muzz of a dream recitation, especially on the mind-blowing title track which could almost pass for a Rob Jo Star Band out-take. Throw in some of the weirdest most caveman-exuberant versions of ‘traditionals’ – stuff like “”What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor?” and even “We Shall Not Be Moved” – and the whole deal is just somehow idiotically moving, capturing a magical moment of inspired real people beauty and acid folk grandeur that really has little parallel. This one just came right out of nowhere and knocked me for six and I defy anyone not to fall completely in love with this amazing one-off side. Originally issued in a run of only a few hundred copies with crude screen-printed sleeves and various ‘variant’ editions, this stunning edition is hand-screenprinted just like the original with a paste-on back cover reproduction of the original mimeograph, all on a heavy weight vintage style cover. Pressed on 180gm virgin vinyl, with exact reproduction labels. Edition of 350 copies, simply cannot recommend this magical side enough!

Deluxe reissue of this totally unknown New England teenage folk private press LP from 1971: originally released by the artist herself as a demo-only blank cover edition of only 100 copies when she was just out of high school, this is a stunning recording, a classic loner female folk side with an extremely intimate and dreamy atmosphere. Daniels’ self-taught guitar style is harp-like in its simplicity and its ability to trip up your heart and her vocals come out of the whole Ladies From The Canyon tradition but with a melancholy/questioning wide-eyed teenage appeal that is just totally beguiling. In the liners that relate the discovery of Ellie Daniels’ music by Nemo from Time-Lag (she was his wife’s midwife!) Ellie recalls practicing her songs while smothered under a blanket on the couch for confidence and she describes the era of their creation as being “a kitten life of vulnerability and innocence, a time on the edge of depression and emancipation” and that perfectly sums up the magical atmosphere of this recording. Nemo has really gone all-out with this presentation, with each heavyweight vintage style cover individually hand-bound in leather textured art paper, with the only graphics being a mounted 5x7 inch black & white photo print portrait of Ellie from 1970. Pressed on 180gm virgin vinyl, with exact reproduction labels & a thick insert with new liner notes by Ellie, plus more vintage photos. Edition of 300 copies, in two cover colour / texture variations, black and burgundy. Highly recommended.

Vinyl issue – a co-release between Graham Lambkin’s Kye imprint and Penultimate Press – of what was originally a very obscure cassette release from Fluxus artist/musician/conceptualist Henning Christiansen in 1990. Kreuzmusik Fluxid Behandlung Op 189 is a highly ritualised sound/performance involving a turntable that plays stones, violently treated and F/X damaged vocals, hypnotic/zoned percussion and moments of odd low-level noise. It was originally commissioned by the Bonner Kunstverein Gallery, Kunstfond, Germany in August 1989, for inclusion in their Taking Fluxus Around for a Drive happening, an action that also featured performances by Dieter Daniels, George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen and Joe Jones. Great to have this dazzling performance on wax: “In 1967 Joseph Beuys and I travelled to Darmstadt for a performance of HAUPTSTROM FLUXUS from 1:00 -11:00pm (10 hours) on the 20th March. HAUPTSTROM was basically a new ritual, which is how a lot of people saw it at the time, and later on too. Beuys used his own body as a deeply primal human language, and I made 10 hours of ritual music using a number of tape recorders. And obviously we wanted to make a completely new space for HAUPTSTROM. The space at Franz Dahlem's at 7 AHA street was small and there was even less space for the rather large audience because Beuys made a roughly 7cm high rampart of margarine around his own performance space; and my main motif was a knocking sound, like the sound of a heart beating, which I used to create peace in the space, separate from the other more energetic sound-music passages. When I got the invitation for Taking Fluxus Around for a Drive I immediately remembered that Darmstadt exhibition in 1967. It's not all that far from Denmark, 150 km to Bonn-Darmstadt, but a timespan of 22 years. I thought of Jörg Immendorf's LIDL-Bundestag, which you could say landed in the roses outside the real Bundestag. This poetic, political act impressed me at the time, because it showed that our world could basically be quite different. I decided straight away that I wanted to make Kreuzmusik, and I was also sure that no other Fluxus people would come up with the same idea. Most of my Fluxus friends go for Homo Ludens and that's fine, but I wanted to feel the intimacy again in a small space, I wanted to make a Scandinavian ritual in FLUXID BEHANDLUNG. I took my Stone Age Gramophone (which really does play stones) called my friend Ernst Ludwig Kretzer from Hamburg and arranged with him that he would operate a time delay on my tapes and voice so that I could ritualise freely. In Kunstfond I didn't make a mound of margarine - of course not - instead I made one from flour (bread), in the middle of this was the Stone Age Gramophone and hanging on the wall there were strange crosses, made out of socks and clothes hangers; as well as this there was a headless figure of Christ and a toy Cessna plane in a little canary cage. I began with my piece Io Am En Vogel as a 'starter' (about 20 minutes), then I performed Zum Preis des Fluxus, which had been my contribution to the Wiesbaden Fluxus 82 catalogue, then I threw green stones into a bucket of water, then to the accompaniment of the EURASIENSTAB -fluxorum organum music I played a green cutting sheet that was hanging on my chest, then to EUROPEAN ZEN I played 3 glass bowls with red sticks, the bells and knocking für Das alte Russland (for Old Russia). Then everything went dark and I lit candles while my deep GROUNDNOTE played. After 5 minutes played the lights came on again and my GROUNDNOTE led into the sheep composition (sheep instead of fiddles); I used my green fat-fiddle to make little twittering sounds; for me, sheep mean peace and insight. This soundworld then lead into the composition with 180 hammer blows against war monkeys. I hammered very sharply and powerfully. Beuys once wrote a piece with the title: Der dumme Hammer tritt auf (The Stupid Hammer Performs), that's how it should be - against the war monkeys, logical. This sequence then finally lead into peaceful bird twitterings in a piece that I call Die Freiheit ist um die Ecke (Freedom is Around the Corner). During this I slowly immersed the Cesna plane inside the canary cage in a tub of water , after I had flown around in my own space for a while. And that was the end of the whole seance. It lasted over an hour." - Henning Christiansen. Edition of 500 copies with full-colour reproductive score. Highly recommended!

Edition of 700 copies LP reissue of one of Connors’ most beautiful sets, originally released in 2002 as a CD: intended as the first part of a trilogy inspired by Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly”, The Departing Of A Dream sees Connors starting to incorporate all kinds of percussion sources into his guitar sketches in a way that makes them seem more like spiritual brothers to the visionary environments of American meta-musician Harry Partch.  As is so often the case with Connors’s work, the overriding atmosphere is one of intense melancholy, with little moments of rapturous abandon weighted down with fuzzy guitar chords that fall like sleet.  It’s quite a fractured performance from Connors who holds back on the blues logic that often underpins his work, favouring a more textural approach that allows heavy single notes to tumble to the ground under their own gravity.  Although earlier passages are dominated by the extensive use of a wah-wah peddle, as the dust starts to clear Connors begins to re-introduce those clear-eyed, sighing notes that he can break your heart with every time.  The last two tracks, “The Silence” and “The Sorrow” are dedicated “For NY 9/11/01”.  Comes with a download code. 

Atmospheric new collection of field recordings, installations and area sonorities from Moniek Darge, all captured on the island of Crete and released by Graham Lambkin: "Kye is pleased to announce the release of Crete Soundies, the major new work by Moniek Darge, and the follow-up to last years Soundies (1980-2001) CD. Crete Soundies presents three new pieces -- Magnesia (2006), Anemos (2007) and East Crete (2008-2009). These works were born from two years of Levka Ori sound research, and an additional year in east Crete in collaboration with fellow sound artist Francoise Vanhecke. Moniek Darge was born in Bruges, 1952 and studied music theory and violin at the Music Conservatory of Bruges, painting at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts; Art History, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Ghent, Belgium. She is active as composer, violinist, performer and audio artist and has built light and soundsculptures, installations, musical instruments and for many years has been constructing a series of alternative music boxes, with which she also performs. Darge has specialised in both soundscapes and live-art performances in which visual and musical aspects are combined and in interactional improvisation on violin. Since 1970 she has performed around the world and has been active on stage, first with the Logos Ensemble, then with Logos Duo (together with Godfired-Willem Raes), and more recently with the M&M robot ensemble. She also founded Logos Women, a small group specialised in intermedia improvisations performing their own compositions for various instruments, voices and music boxes. Crete Soundies comes housed in 6-panel digipak, in an edition of 500, and is released with the support of the Flemish Government." - KYE.

First brain-bending blat of avant tongue from this killing LA-based group who channel heavily drugged Interstellar Space-styled brain exchanges into a black hole zone where the constraints of received form dissolve like so much candyfloss. Duo guitar-amp destruction just like you need it, dumpling. Comes in a swank full-colour gatefold sleeve.

More open heart electro-surgery from this thrilling LA-based trio who navigate fucked-up atonal rock squall with screwdrivers, lab-coats and a deep pocket full of advanced avant theory, meaning this is the rock band equivalent of what Anthony Braxton might've birthed if he'd followed up his recent Wolf Eyes purchases with a stab at post-Evol No Wave thought. Something to drool over for sure.

Warehouse score of one of the greatest albums ever made, Suckdog’s legendary 1989 album Drugs Are Nice: this remains one of the wildest, most exuberant, crude, energetic and perfectly poised examples of spontaneous teenage theatre, aural porn, great DIY songs, sound art, noise, diaristic asides and disobedient audio ever put to wax and these are the last CD copies anywhere all of which have been individually signed for VT by Lisa Carver herself. Suffice to say, you’ve never heard anything remotely like it. Can’t recommend this enough but please bear in mind we have a very limited supply!

Stunning multi-region documentary on the phenomena that was Suckdog 1988-2005: Lisa Carver aka Lisa Suckdog aka the founder of Rollerderby remains one of the great performance artists/actresses/sub-cultural documentarians, musicians and activists to come out of the American underground and Suckumentary is a winning mix of original performance footage with collaborators like Costes, Bill Callahan (Smog), Rachel Suckpuppy and Dame Darcy and contemporary recollection. The performances are incredible, spontaneous theatre that involves song, dance, nudity, avant garde tactics, spontaneous/playful teenage madness, audience confrontation and public displays of dysfunction and there are some very funny and touching recollections in comparative tranquillity as the various players recall the madness and inspiration of the early performance years. An incredible document of an extremely accelerated period of creative madness and inspiration that walked extremely close to the edge while always somehow remaining exuberant and affirmative even on the point of complete chaos. Can’t imagine anyone not being affected by this incredible document. Highly recommended!

Last copies of the massively anticipated double LP retrospective from this legendary UK underground group featuring Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris and Tim Goss: Remains Unchanged presents all completely unreleased material from the two - almost mutually unrecognisable - phases of this group’s unlikely non-career. Originally hailing from Folkestone, their early records – City Lights, Put The Music In Its Coffin – are unique in the history of UK DIY in the way that they combined obsessive diaristic monotony and resolutely no-chops instrumentalism w/a particularly English brand of surrealism in order to create a totally compulsive and uniquely expressive soundworld. Vocalist Darren Harris could read the goddamn phone book and he would make it sound oddly gripping and slightly unnerving and the first two sides of this collection present some great Harris moments, mining out-takes from the City Lights, Put The Music In Its Coffin, Some Of Us 7”, Wax Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. sessions recorded 1993-1996. The music sounds startlingly original, with acoustic guitars played percussively, bowing and squeaking melodies and those vocals providing some of the most unlikely reportage from the fringes of nowhere England outside of The Fall. The second LP focuses more on the band’s later less-vocally obsessed electronic incarnation, where the loneliness and surreal/inane domesticity that they pushed to the fore in the early records gives way to a more overtly lonely and alienated soundworld, with grey washes of synth and deconstructed song-forms that go well beyond the long blank, moving from the bedsit setting of the early records out to the bleak coast of England, where the water and the waves fade into the same dismal hues of England in the rain and for a little while at least Folkestone became the DIY equivalent of Warszawa. This set works as both the perfect introduction to their hermetic soundworld and as the ultimate bookending collection for anyone who has ever enjoyed a deep personal relationship to this amazing group over the years. Like Harry Pussy and The Dead C, The Shadow Ring created their own universe through restriction, necessity and intuitive inspiration and although they sound nothing like the aforementioned bands their legacy is every bit as important. Still one of the most inexplicably great groups to come out of the modern underground, nothing else sounds remotely like them. The set comes with a great gatefold sleeve featuring classic snaps of our heroes sitting round in depressing living rooms or in suburban back gardens, drinking cheap beer and looking downtrodden. Also comes with a great, huge full-colour poster of the group ‘in action’ in the bedsit of your dreams. We’ll be framing ours. Highest possible recommendation! Sold out at source.

Edition of only 50 copies exclusive to VT private press ‘artist edition’ of the new Thought Broadcast LP, also released in a standard edition by Olde English Spelling Bee: this much-anticipated full-length from Ravi Binning’s amazing Industrial/avant rock/crude techno project comes with hand-stamped labels and sleeves, with paste-on art and an enigmatic b&w insert. Binning takes off on the kind of minimal post-TG electronics associated with imprints like Japan’s Vanity label and acts like Tolerance, Vita Noctis et al. Cold wave keyboards are hi-jacked by watery beats and deformed automatic vocal transmissions, with keyboard solos that come straight out of the Conrad Schnitzler school of a-formal/a-musical rock twonk. The recording fidelity adds to the atmosphere of threatening late-night urban psychosis, with a hazy, drugged appeal that is Berlin via NZ. Imagine the second Suicide album as received by a fucked-up shortwave transmitter somewhere in the Middle East, then tone-dialling through a buncha non-corporeal pirates that are broadcasting number stations, fourth world instrumental drones, test signals and coded Cold War propaganda. There are tracks that consist of little more than a distant beats over skittering low-wave fuzz that re-write Basic Channel’s sounding of the grid as a sounding of the airwaves, the kind of lightning rod to elsewhere as practiced by Coil during the ELpH workings but with a more brutal Industrial edge. Throw in aspects of early Reverse workings by Pure, Total, Fistfuck, Come/Whitehouse, Club Moral et al and you have one of the most radical and blunt re-thinkings of the potential for minimal electronics and degraded circuitry to re-arrange the goddamn atoms of the air. A stunning full-length that demands to be heard and a singular new voice in crude post-Industrial garage band hypnotics. Forthcoming LP on Editions Mego. Highly recommended!

New edition from Graham Lambkin’s consistently fantastic Kye imprint, this time documenting the work of a contemporary Austin based composer and recordist. Rossetto creates hallucinatory landscapes that confuse composition and mise-en-scene using indeterminate environmental recordings, drones, small sounds, sampled speech, concrete tape work and occasional swells of strings to generate an invigoratingly alien sense of space. Touches on a similarly personal/diaristic approach to sound art as Christoph Heemann’s Aftersolstice/Days Of The Eclipse set but with a particular emphasis on spatial/audio illogic. Exotic Exit bundles three pieces that have a deep, hallucinatory appeal. The title track creates a strange sound vortex from distant drones and unidentifiable field recordings, creating a kind of ghostly headspace that is somehow simultaneously wide open and claustrophobic, with Rossetto treating the recordings to the point of slow psychoactive climaxes. “348315” works a similar magic, somehow treating ‘ordinary’ sound in a heightened compositional style that allows slight fluctuations in tone and pace to send out seismic ripples across the piece. The side long “De Trop” is more immediately meditative, with tiny percussive melodies and distant rising drones creating the kind of devotional atmosphere of Popol Vuh’s Aguirre soundtrack using almost entirely ‘non-musical’ sources along with ghostly after-images of stringed instruments. Pretty fantastic, beautiful ‘library’ style sleeve too. Edition of 400 copies, already sold out at source. 

New album from the Danish electronic duo of Christian Stadsgaard (Sarah’s Charity) and Loke Rahbek (Sexdrome, Var, Lust For Youth), co-founders of the Copenhagen based record label Posh Isolation: First Burning is the third LP from the duo and it “draws explicitly from DIY minimal synth traditions and the canon of European Industrial music”. Six tracks power through the kind of dense walls of constantly peaking rainbow electronics of Matthew Bower’s recent work while some of the more ‘distressed’ vocal electronics pieces have the eerie/disturbing quality of early Ramleh. Indeed, the use of eviscerated electronics, sad arcing drones and modulated vocals give it a weird cold war/Industrial feel that is partway between Come Org/Broken Flag, weirdo minimal synth noise, 20^th century classical music and something like The Conet Project. A unique recording from these two.

Best Graveyards ever - limited to only 125 copies, one-sided LP in beautiful textured/screened/art paper sleeves that catches the trio of John Olson (Wolf Eyes) on reeds, Hans Buetow on cello and Ben Hall on drums scoring knots of beautifully abstruse free jazz logic into black church bell skies with all of the refined higher-minded logic of tone scientists like Braxton, Lacy and Jarman. Post-AACM thought caught tight in the kinda warm leather gloves that you'd sooner associate with parking truckloads of Marshalls in yr basement than loosing wormholes of craftily carved sound art via the slightest of allusive textural logic. Post-six pack jazz hermeneutics never sounded so good. Unbelievably great, highly recommended and never to be seen again

Edition of 500 copies UK tour 7”. Tomutonttu aka Jan Anderzen of Kemialliset Ystavat presents a side of small instrument psychedelia, with day-glo ticker-tape melodies and fast, chattering drones. The Oneohtrix Point Never side is just gorgeous, a slow float through Zones Without People-style ambience and spiralling clouds of synthesized strings. Very beautiful. Recommended.

Drummer William Hooker has been a massive presence on the fringes of the New York free jazz scene for several decades, announcing himself via a monster private press side, 1977’s Is Eternal Life that featured both David Murray and David S. Ware, and since then going on to forge links with the downtown avant rock scene through releases on Ecstatic Peace and collaborations with Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, Jim O’Rourke et al. This is his first release in a while and it’s a monster, a series of live duets with the late saxophonist Thomas Chapin recorded in NYC in 1992. Hooker has a tough, no-frills style and his obsessive hypnotic/ritual style approach pushes Chapin to the limits, with the two of them caught up in hurricane dynamics and ululating polyrhythmic/polyphonic exchanges where the personalities blur into one tremendous vibrating love cry, with Chapin generating impossibly dense note constructs that Hooker juggles between time signatures. Chapin passed away in 1998 at the age of only 40 from Leukemia but this is a startling memorial for a great free spirit and a short-lived but insanely dynamic creative duo. Edition of 500 copies with gatefold sleeve and liners from Hooker and Bruce Gallanter. 

One of the most unforgiving blasts of pure noise/current from this killer west coast cabal to date. Drowned starts off with all sorts of murky swamp tones before moving out into huge breaths of sick silver static. Two tracks, 100% uncut mind-fuck, numbered edition of 160 copies.

Debut LP from this UK group on Luke Younger of Birds Of Delay’s Alter imprint: Liberez are a quartet featuring Tom James Scott, who made some recordings for Bo’Weavil, and that come out of free rock and improvisation but who have redirected their sound into the kind of phantom studio environs of early Nurse With Wound/United Dairies with macabre distressed/modulated vocals over spare ritual/organic percussion and the kind of aggressively primitive electronics of Michel Waisvisz or John Olson: “The Letter is the first album by Liberez, a group formed by recording engineer John Hannon and Pete Wilkins in Southend. The project began life exploring a deconstruction of the traditional “band” form before expanding to a quartet with the addition of vocalist Nina Bosnic, and multi-instrumentalist Tom James Scott (Bo Weavil Recordings). Musically rooted in improvisation, the band sought a progression from the loosely described "noise rock" sound at their inception into wider areas of sonic exploration. The tracks were recorded as a mixture of sessions at Hannon’s studio and external locations where fleeting incidents were captured on crude equipment such as mobile phones, and portable cassette recorders. It was a piece of text written by Bosnic that gave birth to the initial concepts that formed the backbone of The Letter, and new ideas with regards to incorporating her voice were then created within the group. Bosnic's vocals on this record bear little resemblance to traditional singing or melody but instead use the inflection and cadence of speech to play with syntax. The repeated phrases and deconstructed sentences give the record an unusual and disconcerting atmosphere, acting as a sinister bedfellow to the sharp and broken sound of the guitar and heavily treated drums. Whilst these instruments may represent rock’n’roll, Liberez are content to take influence from the likes of Robert Ashley rather than Chuck Berry. The Letter is a bold first statement from a group who are taking full advantage of what they have at their disposal, and proudly displays the vast frequency bandwidth that they now work within.” – LY. Edition of 300 copies.