Voice recordings from a small performance in Italy, early in 2020 -- Homages to/from George Maciunas (1931-1978).  Philip Corner's piano meditative playthroughs of Couperin's The Mysterious Barricades (1717), from 1989 and 1992. These two elements (voice and piano) superimposed by Sean McCann, edited during the first month of the pandemic. Manic exaltation, distorted harmony things. Album cover is a few PC scores soaked in olive oil and held in-front of the sun through my kitchen window. Booklet features passionate writings on the Couperin piece and its meaning by Corner. Philip wrote a new reflection for this LP edition, "The Mesure of the Mystery". This album is built from the finest ingredients: beautiful piano with stomach-clenching voice stretches. Edition of 250; 12-page pamphlet of scores and an essay by Corner

Culled from live performances in Los Angeles in 1980, Towards A Total Poetry holds radioplays and sound poems by Julien Blaine, Adriano Spatola, F. Tiziano, and Paul Vangelisti. Two concerts were organized by poet and professor Vangelisti and broadcast on his KPFK radio show. A rare gathering of extreme French and Italian sound poets in California, flown out on with an arts funding grant (my, how things have changed!). A jarred specimen on a golden platter of a time passed. The electricity of the performances is unparalleled. Sadistically funny, dizzy with confusion: a map lies dissected on the table. Adriano Spatola (1941-1988) is the most beautiful Italian post-war poet, also publisher of Baobab, Tam Tam, Geiger editions. His stage presence is that of a drunken wolverine, thrashing his words and letters, madly chuckling and whispering secrets to himself. Spatola interprets a disfigured rendition of “Buddenbrooks,” a traumatic and shocking radioplay, held alongside his infamous “Aviation / Aviateur” and “Al Capone Poem,” read with explosive tension. His younger brother, F. Tiziano, is a more mysterious figure. His radioplay, “Los Angeles Bridge,” has four characters: North, South, East, and West. Quibbling through a fever dream over a card game. Professional voice actors were hired for all of the radioplays, translated from Italian by Vangelisti (as with all of Spatola’s English publications). French artist and sound poet Julien Blaine (1942) composed the play “Passe / Futur” – utilizing his actors as verbal instruments: buzzing and howling as carefully as dots on sheet-music. His sound poems are intensely hilarious, “Amputation” mimics the sound of four severing surgeries, and “Mots d’enfants” still confuses me as to what exactly is going on… Paul Vangelisti’s works open and close Towards A Total Poetry. The Los Angeles poet and publisher of Red Hill Press organized the affair and was able to hold his own against such powerful artists. Paul’s pieces are conceptual, opening with a fitting typewriter hymn, “Radio,” and concluding with “Auld Lang Syne,” the Ms of the phone book sung by chorus.

Klaus Roeder is a guitar virtuoso and electronic music artist who studied with Kelemen and joined Kraftwerk for their famous "Autobahn" LP. He often works with very small sound particles, whose sound comes from different sources like tearing paper, the voice, a musical instrument, synthesizer or computer sounds. Sound structures are built by joining together those sound particles and by mixing those structures Roeder forms chords. Then the process of crystallization begins. Usually crystallization means that small parts are deposited around a germ and form a growing crystall. The shape of the complete crystall is a consequence of outer influences. A series of sound crystals forms then the complete musical composition.  Side 1 presents two electronic music works: "10: 11: 12" (1980) for self-built Impulse Generator is an obscure, very minimal and abstract pulsating piece, while "Kristallisation 4 (1991) for Computer Sounds and Yamaha DX 802 might be considered one of the peaks of Klaus Roeder "Kristallisation" series. Side 2 introduces us to a different formal result of Roeder crystallisation process: the short "Haenschen Blues" (1993) for children singing and crying, Yamaha TX 802 controlled by selfmade programs for Atari TT is a both playful and sinister electronic assemblage anticipating the peak of this record, "Potpourri" (1985) a Collage of short sound particles from German Pop Hits of the 1970s and 1980s. In the perspective on sound collages (from Battiato "Ethika Fon Ethica" to Bladder Flask first LP, from NWW most surrealistic works to John Oswald classic plunderphonics) "Potpourri" might be more close to the brut masterpiece "InOut" by Anton Bruhin, only constructed in a more advanced and scientific way.

Space Afrika follow last year's heartbreaking x perception-bending mixtape "hybtwibt?" with an anxious patchwork of drill bass, reflective musique concrete and after-hours surrealism >> singular deep headspace exploration to file alongside Mark Leckey, Perila, Burial or Klein.  Assembled to accompany a short film from Manchester-born visual artist, poet and filmmaker Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle’s newest is a cinematic audit of identity and ancestry. In the film, Sanoh works hard to visually illustrate an honest and vulnerable picture of her soul. Inyang and Tarelle respond by doing the same with sound, collaging disparate elements together in a way that should be familiar to anyone who heard "hybtwibt?" or their jawdropping RA mix from earlier this year. Warped field recordings, overdriven rhythmic pressure, syrupy pads and disorienting vocals are cut and pasted over each other, generating a living, breathing study of the duo's Northern working class Black British reality. Unlike the duo's acclaimed "Somewhere Decent To Live" full-length, elements mutate and transform: mushy noise bends into street sounds, haunted vocals into echoing drill melancholia and muffled howls into shattered digital remnants. The main event is the full 10-minute soundtrack, that's layered with Sanoh's disorienting and deeply personal poetry and echoes Mark Leckey's recent "In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle". Then the EP is bumped up with three sketches from the same sessions, two of which never made it to the final mixdown. 'Version 3' is a particular highlight, pasting heartbreaking piano and blowtorched vocal loops over winding drill bass > sounds like Burial remixing Unknown T into pure syrup. --- Sferic, 2021

split LP by tongue depressor and gateway Tongue Depressor - “never saw’m” And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Mark 16:17–18 Gateway - “why should not my spirit be troubled” But Job answered and said, Hear diligently my speech, and let this be your consolations. Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on. As for me, is my complaint to man? and if it were so, why should not my spirit be troubled? Mark me, and be astonished, and lay your hand upon your mouth. Job 21:4 I’ve just heard some of our neighbors think we have injected the mark of the beast as soon as we set foot into a CVS. Poison ivy grows someplace new every day in America. The sun is red. Most days our house is covered in flies. The question is: What dark lord here tests Gateway and Tongue Depressor? As Job wept among the ashes of Uz, the duos Filer & Gick + Birdsey & Rowden scrape the strings and freak the saxophones of late capital, making scrap-metal occult music both into & out of something sacred. If there is chanting, it feels like a recovery or recovering, as if voices that once held serpents had emerged from graves still green. Gateway’s side I imagined howled through a megaphone at a tent revival outside an abandoned Circuit City; Tongue Depressor grows down by the river leaking from a dishwasher, a rattlesnake-ivy covered by nematodes, growing in the shape of a satellite dish. They worry & they worship the sounds these places make. - Jacob Sunderlin

£20 Less, You Absolute Bastards is an extended adventure in turntablist noise, harsh and continually dynamic in pitch, power and propulsion Mariam Rezaei is a composer, turntablist, performer and curator. Edition: 30 copies. one sided 10 inch

Astrid Sonne grew up on the island of Bornholm, out in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Her connection to the outside world is tangible and textured, informing her experiential electronic designs, the latest of which achieves an apex synergy of sublime synthetic humanism: outside of your lifetime. Comprised of 10 concise tracks, the album moves with a precision elegance that belies its improvisational origins. Keys and strings, software and hardware, drones and choral harmonies are deployed with fluency and mystery, both hinting at and hiding elusive narratives within their waveforms. For "outside of your lifetime", Sonne brings in even more acoustic instruments, providing space for electric guitar (played by ML Buch), organ (featuring Minais B) and vocals (Sonne, Buch and Tobias Kropp) to naturally breathe in unison with the refined electronic sculptures and with Sonne own instrument: the viola. The pieces variously evoke sequencers tethered to esoteric algorithms, fugues in flux, veiled devotionals, and fiercely propulsive free jazz. Whether this record is about the natural world or human relationships, the lessons are similar: experience accumulates, both as memories and ghosts in the machine. There is no forecasting the future; technology will not bring us closer to tomorrow. Feel something real, make something new, then send it on its way: “To have and not to hold.""

“Scrape meets sigh, jagged fish-hook pluck meets sparse wire-damped drizzle, instinct meets intuition, and when the disc is done, it’ll seem quite sensible to dive back in and swim the whole length in reverse. - Bill Meyer, Dusted” Even though both Kaja Draksler and Terrie Ex are experienced improvisers, their methods and characters are so different that a sensible merger of their considerable forces seems out of the question. But then you realize that entire scenes and band catalogs were built on nonsensical premises. Don’t they say that opposites attract? Extremes can also cancel each other out and lead to something entirely new and thrilling. That’s exactly what happens here. Far from a trip full of explosive power, this performance is a celebration of textural possibilities. Sounds flail around, are thrown around to be disregarded, dismantled and reassembled again, turned into a shower of musical drops, with a minimalist sparseness that can switch to quick runs and jumpy intervals in the blink of an eye. Everything becomes malleable. There’s an unmistakable alchemy at work here - spiky and subversive - that is as refreshing as a piano sonata, as thrilling as the repetitive punk that Ex started playing before Draksler was even born. In the hands of born improvisers like these two, concepts such as age, nationality and background become irrelevant. Above all, it is about connection and its amazing, intoxicating potential. The Swim has a story to tell.

'UK-based purveyors of noise Sly & The Family Drone and Dutch/British free jazz unit Dead Neanderthals form the ultimate tag team of the murky European underground. After releasing a split on the God Unknown label last year, they are now gearing up for the release of their collaborative album 'Molar Wrench' on Hominid Sounds. Expect disgusting noise rock of titanic proportions ready to pound the muck out of your ears and the pus out of your eyes'

Mark Vernon presents the second volume of his Sonograph Sound Effects Series – the follow up to the unexpectedly popular ‘Sounds of the Modern Hospital’ LP. This time the focus is on sounds of plumbing and sanitation: drainpipes, plugholes, leaks, squeaky taps and cisterns. Vernon has recorded many of the sounds from unusual perspectives, in extreme close-up scenarios, using contact mics or small binaural microphones to get into tiny inaccessible spaces. There is also a particular focus on plumbing on-board vehicles and vessels in motion. The intention here is to reveal the marvellous within the most mundane and every day of sounds. The record masquerades as a collection of generic archetypal sounds whilst in actuality it revels in the specific and unique – some of the most idiosyncratic and characterful instances of such sounds. No two gurgles are alike. As an avid collector of sound effects records these obsolete discs have gradually taken on new meaning for Vernon as unintended audio time capsules. As their use value has decreased their value as historical audio documents has grown. To produce a sound effects LP in the age of digital audio libraries is an anachronistic gesture intended to elevate what purports to be a generic collection of recordings intended for functional use to the level of an artwork. The album is in part a homage to classic ranges of sound effects albums such as the BBC Sound Effects Library - even down to the utilitarian design and functional descriptions of the sounds (a key aspect of this release). Such generic collections of sounds were intended to fulfil the needs of professional and amateur broadcasters, filmmakers and theatre producers. However, through careful selection and sequencing it is also intended that this record works as a linear sound composition. >>> Utilitarian unsounds for undisclosed purposes <<< --- All Recordings made by Mark Vernon Sleeve Design and Artwork by Marc Baines --- Calling Cards Publishing, 2021

London’s kings of noise Sly & The Family Drone follow up their 2019 Love Love LP ‘Gentle Persuaders’ with ‘Walk It Dry’, an 8 track LP collaboratively released by Love Love Records in the UK and Feeding Tube Records across the pond in the USA. ‘Walk It Dry’ utilises the familiar sound palette of scronked electronics, bulging noise blasts, wailing sax & Kalashnikov drums that was found on ‘Gentle Persuaders’ but is a very a different beast. The tracks here are shorter and punchier as the band digs deeper than ever to find increasingly potent sonic pockets. Bolstered with a directional force rare in this strain of noise the album begins at the deep end with ‘A Black Uniformed Strutting Animal’, a raucous cacophony backed by a thick groove, before the bleeps and bloops of ‘Dead Cat Chaos Magician’ kick in, sounding like a haunting in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. ‘Swearing On The Horns’ is a folk-sludge ditty scraping through a psychic wormhole that exits at the feet of ‘Bulgarian Steel’ - a grimacing march punctuated with metallic screams where the sax becomes an overstressed alarm siren. ‘Shrieking Grief’, with its rapid fire drum rolls and megaton payloads of pummelling noise, concludes the A side loudly. Side B opens with stretched-out droning layers and winding loops on ‘Sunken Disorderly’, providing a gloomy refuge for some cosmic meditation. The album at this point converges into the morbidly fascinating black and white horror of ‘My Torso Is A Shotgun’, perhaps the most widescreen and immediate example of the band’s progression, before playing out with the deathly lament of ‘Tsukiji’. A suitable soundtrack to the end-times.

For our money the weirdest and most satisfying Regis record in a while, featuring stripped, slow, highly atmospheric & muscular productions that were recorded as part of that mad 'Let The Night Return’ feature film (Regis, performing more or less alone in a 2000-year-old, empty greek amphitheater) here rendered in brilliant monochrome including contributions from Justin Broadrick, Ann Margaret Hogan and the music school chorus of Corfu. There’s something brutally bare and demented about this one, opening with the simmering choral drone ‘Epidaurus’ fizzing with whirring industrial components and rumbling subs, before 'Calling Down a Curse’ extends to terrifying dimensions with an intoxicating Ugandan Methods style percussive backbone and a slowed down voiceover by filmmaker Vasileios Trigkas, to our ears sounding like Burial as if rendered by Conny Plank as a kind of alternate version to his still entirely unclassifiable ‘Biomutanten’. 'The Blind Departing’ is a slow headmelter, all industrial synths and exposed percussion, every hi-hat and kickdrum separated and pristine, like the toughest, most angular sort of bare-boned warehouse chugger slowed to a crawl. If you shut your eyes you can almost imagine Alan Wilder and Martin Gore hitting sheets of metal with a mallet on that crazy old Depeche Mode footage that’s knocking about - played at half speed. Perhaps best of all is the closing 'Temporary Thing’, featuring Regis, Anni Hogan, and Justin Broadrick taking on a cover version of the Lou Reed classic, here extended to HD. --- Downwards Records, 2021

A classically trained dancer, Gabriel Roth was involved with the early ’60’s counterculture movement as a dance instructor for therapeutic workshops at the legendary Esalen Institute in San Francisco and Arica School in New York. These facilities and groups played key roles in the Human Potential Movement in psychology which later led to Transpersonal Psychology and the New Age Movement. Through direct encounters and training from the era’s noted psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and spiritual gurus, she single-handedly rediscovered and redefined the ancient shamanic technique of ecstatic dance, establishing a method she named 5Rhythms in the late 70’s. The practice of 5Rhythms consists of five movements: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. Through this dance sequence difficulties and obstructions in life can be identified and ultimately overcome. The sequence of the rhythms helps create waves that allow the dancer to reach a point of inner stillness. It is a globally recognised movement meditation practice with over 400 qualified teachers in more than 50 countries. Though Gabrielle Roth passed away in 2012, her spirit and legacy have been passed down through her family and extensive followers. It is still being practiced today. Music plays a key role in these workshops. Following the shamanic tradition of using live percussion as a driving force, the music is necessarily rhythmic in nature and repetitive enough to focus on self-movement without invasive melodies or lyrics to distract one’s mind. It must be fairly lengthy in duration, with the journey defined by the pulsing waves of emotional flow that guide the body’s movement. The music was not intended to be consumed while socialising, but as an aid to the internal journey into one’s soul. It is minimal, abstract, and atmospheric. As a result of these characteristics (or rather functionalities), their albums didn’t fit into any conventional styles at the time of their release in the early 80s. Theirs is a pure form of dance music that also shares many commonalities with ambient music in the modern context. Yet ambient music had yet to establish itself as a genre at the time despite the early efforts of Brian Eno while underground dance - the genre with which it shares many of its stylistic qualities - was yet to be born. Their releases were rarely appreciated outside of workshops. Endless Wave: Vol 1 was originally released on their own private label in 1996 on CD. Comprised of a selection of their past recordings, the first part acts as a seductive entry point into their rhythmic sound world, with Roth’s voice intoning gentle instructions over each track. The opener Body Parts commences with a series of rolling polyrhythmic beats to prepare the body for meditation. From there the music shifts through a series of ambient moods that evoke each of the ‘5Rhythm’ states of being. Atmospheric synths and stately violins combine to help ease into movement on Flowing. Didgeridoos and funky bass lines evoke masculine energy on Staccato before the tumbling rhythms of Chaos encourage the uninhibited release of one’s mind and body. The soft vocal harmonies of Lyrical help the listener towards a lighter, more fluid, and creative state of being creating a becalming state that continues with the deep ritualistic chants and languid drums of Stillness. --- Curated by Pol Valls Remastered by Claudio Passavanti, Doctor Mix studios, London, UK Original artwork by Greg Wittrock --- Timecapsule, 2020

Limited edition of 500 units pressed on black wax. The LP contains original compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pascal Comelade, Laurie Spiegel, Lyra Pramuk, Chassol, Nicolas Godin and Pierre Rousseau, Pedro Vian and Pierre Bastien, Visible Cloaks, Kelman Duran, Raul Refree, Lucrecia Dalt, and Lafawndah.incl. writings by contemporary thinkers like Shumon Bazar and François J. Bonnet, and images from, Wolfgang Tillmans, Joel Meyerowitz, Juergen Teller, Araki, Jack Davison, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Dani Pujalte, Elizaveta Porodina, Adrià Cañameras, Larissa Zaidan, Zhong Lin and Javier Tles among others

Killer Sun Ra Classic from 1978! Recorded overnight at Bob Bank’s Blank Tapes on 17th July 1978 after the Arkestra had appeared on Saturday Night Live, the album is unique in the Ra catalogue. “Most critics felt that it was more of a fusion-inspired record,” explains Michael Ray. “As the name suggests, the album is liquid and languid.” Bob Blank continues, “Musically, it was very ad hoc and freeform. There were horn charts but most tracks came out of improvised jams. Sun Ra just did his thing.” Comprising five effortlessly fluid pieces, the album eases in with Lanquidity. Danny Ray Thompson remembers, “This was one of Sun Ra’s on-the-spot compositions. It is almost like an Ancient Egyptian Stargazing Ceremony, mapping out the stars and the planets.” Where Pathways Meet is “Sun Ra’s funky version of an Egyptian march. Pharaoh is sending his troops off to fight and this is his pep-talk!” continues Thompson. “The music seems to take different pathways but still converges.” The loping groove of That’s How I Feel, features the reflective trumpet lines of Eddie Gale with solos by John Gilmore and Marshall Allen: “Marshall comes in with that snake charming oboe.” Says Thompson. The funky Twin Stars Of Thence weaves around Richard Williams celebrated elastic bassline while the haunting closer, There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of), is pure “space music.” The poet Mama Nzinga described it as ‘The essence of light. Spirit takes a ride inside the deep dark space of just being.”

Fisherman’s.com was released originally on CD, Japan-only, by Starlets Records in 2001 – now for the first time on vinyl. Fisherman’s.com is Sakata’s ode to folksongs of the sea - an intense personal statement on the fluidity of tradition. --- Akira Sakata / alto saxophone, vocals, synthBill Laswell / electric bass & synth bassHamid Drake / drums & congaPete Cosey / guitar---Fisherman’s.com is a great piece of trivia but not an album that’s heard much. A reissue on Trost Records makes clear it’s one of the great dark funk records.- Daniel Bromfield, Spectrum Culture Blog 2018 --- Recording: Robert Musso Mix: Robert Musso Mastering: Michael Fossenkemper Artwork: Shinro Ohtake

Over the past several years, the recorded output of Carl Stone has been turned on its head. In previous decades, Stone perennially toured new work but kept a harboring gulf of time between the live performances and their recorded release. This not only reflected the careful consideration of the pieces and technical innovations that went into the music but also the largely academic-minded audience that was themselves invested in the history and context of the work. The time span of Stone's recorded output in both sheer musical duration and year range was generously expansive. Following multiple historical overviews of Stone's work on Unseen Worlds and a re-connection with a wider audience, the time between Stone's new work in concert and on record has grown shorter and shorter until there is now almost no distance at all. Stone's work has often at its core explored new potential within popular cultural musics, simultaneously unspooling and satisfying a pop craving. On Stolen Car, the forms of Carl Stone's pieces have also become more compact, making for a progressive new stage in Stone's career where he is not only creating out of pop forms but challenging them.  Stolen Car is the gleeful, heart racing sound of hijack, hotwire, and escape. Stone carries the easy smirk and confidence of a car thief just out of the can, a magician in a new town setting up a game of balls and cups. With each track he reaches under the steering wheel and yanks a fistful of wires. Boom, the engine roars to life, the car speeds off into the sunset, the cups are tipped over, the balls, like the car, are gone.  "These tracks were all made in late 2019 and 2020, much of when I was in pandemic isolation about 5000 miles from my home base of Tokyo. All are made using my favorite programming language MAX. However distinct these two groupings might be they share some common and long-held musical concerns. I seek to explore the inner workings of the music we listen to using techniques of magnification, dissection, granulation,, anagramization, and others. I like to hijack the surface values of commercial music and re-purpose them offer a newer, different meaning, via irony and subversion." - Carl Stone, Los Angeles, September 2020  --- Unseen Worlds, 2021

First ever reissue of highly sought after french jazz funk fusion nugget from Alain Bellaïche featuring, Jerry Goodman (Mahavishnu Orchestra), John Hicks (Strata-East) & Fabiano (Fabiano Orchestra). Remastered from the master tapes. Restored artwork + 12 page booklet & Obi Strip A Frenchman who is returning (but who we seem to discover!) from the USA is something unusual. Everything seemed to start out well for Alain Bellaïche: Born in Tunis, childhood in Cannes, studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his first folk concerts folk in youngsters’ houses and clubs where everyone was well behaved … Then, in 1973, he left for the States. Bellaïche would settled for around ten years, with, as a soundtrack, the two albums that he would record there. Metropolitain, which was the fruit of his collaboration with the Heldon guitarist Alain Renaud, and Sea Fluorescent. In the catalogue of Asylum, David Geffen’s first label, Bellaïche’s music was listed alongside that of the Byrds, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan. In a Rock & Folk interview, Bellaïche expressed his regrets as to the prudence of French musicians: “I never had a group… perhaps the guys here are not motivated to play this kind of music”. We should note that the influences of our expatriate were, for example, Led Zeppelin, John McLaughlin, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, The Spencer Davis Group… Bellaïche, a multi-faceted and iconoclastic musician, composed Sea Fluorescent just following his desires: from a cosmic ballad (St Andrea), to West Coast funk (California), dreamlike Spanish influences (Spanish Roots), optimistic blues (Foolin’ Myself), a solar track (I’m Angry, Sun Blues) … And the Frenchman was in good company: Jean-François Fabiano (from Fabiano Orchestra) on drums and percussions, Jerry Mahavishnu Goodman on violin on Got My Place In That Country, Wornell Jones on bass or John Hicks whose cascades of notes bring Reggae & Western closer to the ‘reassembled’ jazz that the pianist was playing at the time… --- Released: October 2020, souffle continu records