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Second volume in a trilogy exploring the teenage tape experimentation of Warren Defever aka His Name Is Alive. Echo-drenched guitar instrumentals, field recordings and gorgeous ambient tones pulsate through the analogue murk, also taking in dalliances with greyscale industrial drone, musique concrète and even a burst of 4-track noise pop reminiscent of the early work of The Jesus And Mary Chain.
More information can be found here.
TJ and I recorded these songs in her backyard studio in February of 2018. We've been friends and occasional collaborators for years, crossing paths and sharing stages and the timing was right to capture a certain moment. I was on my way back from Mexico, not quite ready to return to the grey skies of the Pacific Northwest, and to me these songs capture a bit of lazy California winter, crossing paths with a trusted friend, playing guitars and singing old songs. – Marisa Anderson
Cole Porter and Gene Clark are among my favorite songsmiths and rendering their music during that warm midwinter of wildfires and aftermaths was perfect. Marisa and i have had an adventurous collaborative friendship, playing sonics and playing standards. The songs on this 7 inch are a cool continuation of our shared journey. – tjo
More information can be found here.
A Typical Night in the Pit is a collection of new music by Los Angeles' Nick Malkin. It is an album that finds the artist absorbed in the density and chaos of the urban complex. It is unquestionably an "LA album," but not the LA of hi-fi listening bars and twinkling, Instagram-ready New Age. Rather, Malkin navigates something more akin to the LA found in the films of Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph— overheated, tense, hazy, frayed— with blue-lit, nocturnal compositions that at times recall Mark Isham's noirish scores for those subversive (anti-)Hollywood pictures. Enlisting a revolving cast of LA experimentalists, Malkin has assembled a record that is as chameleonic as it is cohesive, offering up vignettes ranging from the skewed MIDI-jazz of "Sixth Street Conversation" to the skulking menace of "Estacionamiento Privado," before giving way to the wide-eyed, cloudy closer "View From Two Perspectives."
C’mon, let’s go in here and get outta this heat.
More information can be found here.
As Midwife, Denver based multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston plays what she describes as "Heaven Metal," or emotive music about devastation. Johnston began developing the experimental pop project in 2015 while a resident of beloved Denver DIY space Rhinoceropolis. The venue/co-op started in the early aughts and nurtured local artists until 2016, when its doors were shuttered due to high tensions surrounding the safety of DIY spaces (not coincidentally following the horrific Ghost Ship fire in Oakland). Residents were displaced around Denver and artists like Midwife were forced to start over.
However, it was at Rhinoceropolis that Madeline became close with Colin Ward, an artistic confidant and friend to whom her new album, Forever, is dedicated. Madeline comments, "He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place [Rhinoceropolis] in a lot of ways. We became really close friends there. I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me." When Ward passed away unexpectedly in 2018, she turned towards sound to express the indescribable feelings that partnered with her grief.
These mournful sounds ultimately developed into her new album, Forever. The 6-song LP is a latticework of soft-focus guitars and precise melodies– anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone. On the track "C.R.F.W.," we hear Colin Ward reading a poem that speaks of a leaf falling from a tree in autumn: "imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body while you finally don't have to hold on anymore." Johnston responds with slowly radiating tones, branches stretching out to hold the leaf one last time. "I wanted to write him a letter. I wanted to make something for him in his memory," Madeline says of Forever.
On Forever, Midwife combines ambient and dream pop into nuanced, reverb-soaked music that is equally haunting and moving.
More information can be found here.
Matt Jencik is back on Hands in the Dark with his new album, Dream Character, the follow up to his first solo record Weird Times back in 2017.
Whilst all the songs on his debut album were created using the same sampling method on the same instrument, this time the Chicago artist's approach is slightly different. Using a combination of 4-track cassette, digital recording & sampling, he added live improvisations and a wider selection of instruments including guitar, bass, organ and string synth to his work.
What Matt Jencik achieves on Dream Character this time is, like a powerful dose of psychedelic drugs, not to be taken lightly. There are layers, and if you're prepared to dig you will find yourself drawn into a maze of pathways that can take you in multiple directions, via feelings of escape and release alongside suffocating claustrophobia, or soaring, triumphant beauty paired with cold, lonely despair. These eight titles can both tuck you in and make you feel like you’ve got to fight your way out. Either way there is great value in the experience. There is a purity and a clarity to Jencik's sound, but one that can only truly be accessed by listening with your own intention.
More information can be found here.
WHO IS DAVID TIBET?: A FILM BY TONY REYES
Filmed and created by the wonderful Tony Reyes, WHO IS DAVID TIBET? documents the installation of my work, and the preview OpeningNight itself, at my ArtShow INVOCATION OF ALMOST, lovingly and perfectly installed and curated by that inspired couple Jacqueline Bunge and Shaun Richards at the Begovich Gallery on March 5, 2019. It includes interviews with David, Jacqueline, Shaun, and many other friends and felines.
The film can be streamed for free here.
Date : 28.12.17
Map point : eilean 100
Color : white / grey
Season : winter
Edition : limited to 175 copies
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This is the final Eilean rec. release which closes both the map and the project with all the artists involved since the beginning, during these last 5 years.
109 artists / 82 tracks / 6 hours of sounds.
61 unreleased and new tracks / 21 tracks from back catalogs (16 from Eilean rec. + 6 from some other labels)
More information can be found here.
Welcome to the second album we’ve done with string maestro, Joseph Allred. Unlike O Meadowlark (FTR 451), this one features a smattering of Joseph's vocals, although his main thrust is still glistening instrumentals.
The title song is a goddamn sad one, sung with reedy elegance, dealing with a kidnapped dog that serves as a stand-in for all earthly beings, full of both frailty and resilience. Another vocal track, "The Crown" (which inspired the cover art), stems from a long conversation Joseph had with Max Ochs. It squeezes the inherently surreal aspects of dream-walking into semi-conventional blues tautology, and the fit is just right. The third and last vocal, "O Columbia," is a particular favorite, based as it is upon the some of the same melodies Fahey swiped for "In Christ There Is No East or West," although Allred takes things in all new directions. I had been a tad leery when I heard Joseph would be singing on this new session — being so enamored of his unadorned instrumental technique — but these tunes won me over in the course of a few plays. Maybe there'll be more verbal-content in his future? We would not say "no."
But the meat of this album remains Joseph’s splendid inventions for guitar and banjo. His piece for Glenn Jones, "The Giant Who Shrank Himself," is a beautiful suite, worthy of its concept (that Jones is a behemoth who has to shrink himself in order to deal with us normals). It flows like the sweetest stream of wine you, I or anyone might imagine. "Single Me a Stranger" is another literal killer, with sliding chords evoking the 1872 lynching and curse-fulfillment of an unlucky newcomer in the small Tennessee town where Allred grew up. It's spell-binding. As is "Mark’s Overture," a banjo piece inspired by by a homeless music critic in Cambridge, Mass.
Another top-notch album by this great player. If you don’t know Allred already, you will soon.
-Byron Coley, 2019
More information can be found here.
Super Natural is a spell spun by the inner guides: sometimes they have your best interests in mind but other times....you're wanting it to go this way...
Jonnine's songs swim in part-spoken, part-sung suspension, sophisticated wordplay amid languorous instruments and devotional invocations with allegorical weight. Written and produced by Jonnine and co-produced by Nathan Corbin (Excepter, Blazer Sound System, Psychic 9-5 Club), Super Natural was conceived as a soundtrack to the surreal Venice-set feature film the two are destined to one day make together, a testament to eight years of friendship and musical / visual collaboration. Super Natural has a chimeric quality – fleeting and, like any good thriller, pulsing with potential but paced with restraint (as Jonnine says, "it's what you don’t see that keeps you imagining").
Jonnine's first solitary offering carries the refinement of her work in the Australian band HTRK. With this EP, a creative block was overcome after years of being urged by her therapist to forge a solo musical identity. It began with a first attempt to play her brother's broken stringed guitar, unused since 2001, and became these four songs.
Starless and clandestine, the spoken-word delivery of "You're Wanting It To Go This Way" is streaked with discordant guitar, tripped rhythm and sanguine, fluttering melodic ornament. A rapt rendering of self-sabotage, but patient and alluring, this introduction is reminiscent of Leslie Winer's Witch.
"I Don't Seem Myself Tonight" confesses ethereal harmonies with waveless vocals, earthy strums and keyboard sceneries (in Sceneries Not Songs likeness). A tribute to love at first sight as a little death. Subconscious gong in whale tones from Mona Ruijs (Sound Interventions).
The penultimate "You Can Leave The Vampires" is fettered by guitar from HTRK bandmate Nigel Yang against a moody, cautionary libretto. This collaboration yields ritualistic results as the object of the spell is appealed to break with an addictive game of chance by the overlapping mantras "If I can leave you / you can leave too" and "Please, you can be free"
The playful "Scorpio Rises Again" simmers with Audrey Horne cheek; bass guitar, finger clicks and a whistle from Conrad Standish (CS + Kreme) in beguiling denouement.
With stories unlocked by the interior dreaming of Super Natural, Jonnine and Nigel's collaboration as HTRK opened up and new material (their 2019 album, Venus in Leo) sprang forth immediately after. The inner guides may delude when kept quiet: their expression is a way towards healing, even their most haunted song.
More information can be found here.
After being blown away by a few tunes – probably just as you will be after listening to this - Samy Ben Redjeb traveled to the infamous capital city of Somalia in November of 2016, making Analog Africa the first music label to set foot in Mogadishu.
On his arrival in Somalia, Samy began rifling through piles of cassettes and listening to reel-to-reel tapes in the dusty archives of Radio Mogadishu, looking for music that "swam against the current."
The stars were aligned: an uncovered and unmarked pile of discarded recordings was discovered in a cluttered corner of the building. Colonel Abshir - the senior employee and protector of Radio Mogadishu's archives - clarified that the pile consisted mostly of music nobody had manage to identify, or music he described as being "mainly instrumental and strange music." At the words "strange music," Samy was hooked, the return flight to Tunisia was cancelled.
The pile turned out to be a cornucopia of different sounds: radio jingles, background music, interludes for radio programs, television shows and theater plays. There were also a good number of disco tunes, some had been stripped of their lyrics, the interesting parts had been recorded multiple times then cut, taped together and spliced into a long groovy instrumental loop. Over the next three weeks, often in watermelon, grapefruit juice and shisha-fuelled night-time sessions behind the fortified walls of Radio Mogadishu, Samy and the archive staff put together Mogadisco: Dancing Mogadishu, 1974–1991.
Like everywhere in Africa during the 1970s, both men and women sported huge afros, bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes. James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and The Temptations' funk were the talk of the town.
In 1977, Iftin Band were invited to perform at the Festac festival in Lagos where they represented Somalia at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Not only did they come back with an award but they also returned with Afrobeat. While Fela Kuti's "Shakara" had taken over the continent and was spreading like wildfire throughout Latin America, it was the track "Lady" that would become the hit in Mogadishu.
At the same time, Bob Marley was busy kick-starting reggae-mania in Somalia, which became such a phenomenon that even the police and military bands began playing it. Some say that it was adopted so quickly because of the strong similarities with the traditional beat from the western region of Somalia, called Dhaanto.
But then suddenly the trousers got tighter as the disco tsunami hit the country. Michael Jackson appeared with a new sound that would revolutionize Somalia's live music scene. You couldn't walk the streets of Mogadishu without seeing kids trying to moonwalk.
"Somalia had several nightclubs and although most use DJs to play records, some hotels like Jubba, Al-Uruba and Al Jazeera showcased live bands such as Iftin and Shareero" - so ran a quote from a 1981 article about the explosion of Mogadishu's live music scene. The venues mentioned in that article were the luxury hotels that had been built to cover the growing demands of the tourist industry. The state-of-the-art hotel Al-Uruba, with its oriental ornaments and white plastered walls, was a wonder of modern architecture. All of Mogadishu's top bands performed there at some point or another, and many of the songs presented in this compilation were created in such venues.
Mogadisco was not Analog Africa's easiest project. Tracking down the musicians - often in exile in the diaspora - to interview them and gather anecdotes of golden-era Mogadishu has been an undertaking that took three years. Tales of Dur-Dur Band's kidnapping, movie soundtracks recorded in the basements of hotels, musicians getting electrocuted on stage, others jumping from one band to another under dramatic circumstances, and soul singers competing against each other, are all stories included in the massive booklet that accompanies the compilation - adorned with no less then 18 pictures from the '70s and '80s.
As Colonel Abshir Hashi Ali, chief don at the Radio Mogadishu archive - someone who once wrestled a bomber wielding an unpinned hand-grenade to the floor - put it: "I have dedicated my life to this place. I'm doing this so it can get to the next generation; so that the culture, the heritage and the songs of Somalia don't disappear."
More information can be found here.
For Patrick Flegel, Cindy Lee is more than just a recording music project. It is the culmination of a lifelong exploration of art, the electric guitar, queer identity and gender expression. "Singers like Patsy Cline and The Supremes carried me through the hardest times of my life," explains Flegel, "and also provided the soundtrack to the best times."
Following the dissolution of Canadian experimental indie band Women, Flegel would delve deeper into songwriting that bends further toward high atmospherics and bracing melodies – a unique space where splendor naturally collides with experimentation. Delivering moments of sheer beauty through somber reflections on longing and loneliness, Cindy Lee is something to hold onto in a world of disorder.
What's Tonight To Eternity, Cindy Lee's fifth long-form offering, showcases the project's most entrancing strengths: ethereal snowdrift pop and sly nods toward classic girl-group motifs. Recorded at Flegel's Realistik Studios in Toronto and featuring younger brother Andrew Flegel on drums, the album travels hand in hand with a spectral guide.
Flegel found inspiration for Cindy Lee in the form of Karen Carpenter, drawing on the singer / drummer's early recordings as well as her look and style. "I found a deep interest and comfort in Karen's story, which is a cautionary tale about the monstrosity of show business, stardom at a young age and being a misfit looking for connection. The darkness and victimizing tabloid sensationalism she suffered is easily tempered and overwhelmed by her earnest output, her artistry, her tireless work ethic. Something utterly unique and magical takes shape in the negative space, out of exclusion. What I relate to in her has to do with what is hidden, what is unknown."
What's Tonight To Eternity remains a mix of pop culture indoctrination, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, fierce confrontations and wide-open confessional blurs. Closing with the song "Heavy Metal" (dedicated to the memory of former Women bandmate Chris Reimer) and adorned by Andrea Lukic's Journal of Smack artwork, the album continues the bold and rewarding path on which Cindy Lee has embarked.
More information can be found here.
The aural illustration of a year of bliss, sorrow, and stasis, NYC bedroom-ambient wanderer Viul follows last spring's Bright Decline (Disques d'Honoré, 2019) with thirteen new pieces weaving delicate hints of vocals, synthesizer, tape texture and field recording into his foundational guitar loops. On Outside the Dream World, his debut full-length for emerging ambient curator Past Inside the Present, Viul quickly coaxes unlikely melodies to the fore: "Sur Canadian TV" builds ominously from the residue of orchestral tune-up collage "Spring Mash," while the gauze of the title track momentarily disguises a sinewy pop arrangement before ceding to the frigid, expansive "Sewn." The record's second side hosts a study in contrasts embodied by the dense swirl of "Spacefuck Symmetry Endpoint" against the near-motionless finale "Shroud." Mastered at Black Knoll Studio by Rafael Anton Irisarri and featuring cover photography by Benoît Pioulard, Outside the Dream World is a vivid addition to PITP's growing catalogue of ambient serenity.
More information can be found here.
The prolific Kink Gong (aka Laurent Jeanneau) returns in a unique duet with one of the most prominent artists of the Chinese avantgardist scene Li Daiguo. Kink Gong and Li Daiguo first met in Chengdu (capital of Sichuan Province, China) while playing the same night at the Jahbar music venue.
A few months later, as they become neighbors in Cai Cun, a village near the old town of Dali (Yunnan), Kink Gong begins recording Daiguo playing Pipa, Cello and Zheng. He then proceeded to deconstruct these recordings while adding voices that he mainly recorded in Yunnan Province. This fantastic combination of field recordings, experimental folk melodies and electronic treatment leads us to a fourth underground universe reminiscent of Jon Hassell's finest hours.
More information can be found here.
Future Predictions is a set of ensemble pieces made with tape loops, from digital and acoustic instruments, field recordings and foley sounds. With a focus on introspection and imagination, each piece begins with all layers playing, with minimal additional long-term structural development in order to maintain a state. Each piece of music is accompanied by photos, and text written with a shifting tense.
As a follow-up to 2018's Memory Repetitions which was based on memory and the interpretation of it over time, Future Predictions is instead based on the idea of future situations, and should be seen as a meditation on future events.
All music was recorded with high-quality recycled reel-to-reel tape. It has been mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung, and designed by Rutger Zuydervelt.
Limited edition, custom-made clamshell box, 4xCDs in pocket sleeves, and 16-page booklet. Digital version includes PDF booklet.
More information can be found here.
The first LP from Scorn since 2010's Refuse; Start Fires, Cafe Mor is Mick Harris in his happy place. Which just happens to be in studio, demolishing all standards and rules for electronic bass music, and embodying the darkest, deepest sound in dub. Cafe Mor takes risks outside of the conventional Scorn apparatus and with these risks come substantial rewards.
The album is comprised of powerful dub excursions, from the deep dark dank of the front two tracks "Elephant" and "The Lower The Middle Our Bit," and gaining steam towards the ultraviolence of "Mugwump Tea Room" to "Never Let It Be Said" to the CRUSHING DEATH KICK of "Who Are They Which One." A quick drive under the lights with a lasered out snare on "Dulse," then we come across the appearance from Sleaford Mods frontman, Jason Williamson, on the standout track on the LP, "Talk Whiff."
Cafe Mor culminates in the all-in-one dub affair "SA70," letting rip all the new mixer and FX techniques of Harris' most recent incarnation of Scorn. The album is the official soundtrack for all smoked-out backroom deals, situations and arrangements, cancelling all small tours, and mongoose rhinocharging the bass to level 24.
More information can be found here.
"Raime strain at the harness in four cuttingly sharp mutations of Afrobeats, Footwork, and Jungle with scintillating results on the 2nd release on their RR imprint.
Where the London duo’s 2018 EP and RR debut We Can't Be That Far From The Beginning evoked a meditative mood from the info overload of their home city that left acres of space to the imagination, the Planted EP rejoins the dance with four tracks that icily acknowledge strong influence from Latin American and Chicago footwork styles in a classically skooled mutation of hardcore British dance music.
In four fleetingly ambiguous dancefloor workouts they carry on a conceptual theme exploring the digital subconscious with persistently invasive, alien ambient shrapnel - half-heard voices, aleatoric prangs, and tag-covered signposts - woven into and thru their tightly coiled and reflexive drum programming.
Uptown, "Num" flexes tendons and hips like a Leonce riddim that danced all the way from NOLA and ATL to the wintery dawn of a LDN warehouse, while the lip-biting tension of minimalist 160bpm jungle/footwork patterns and jibber-jawed vocals in "Ripli" suggests the Alien film's protagonist lost in a mazy rave space, chased by H.R. Giger-designed face huggers (or gurning energy vampires). Downtown "Kella" then catches them on a grimy dubtech bounce, cocked back and straining at the harness, before "Belly" shuts down the dance with invasive, demonic motifs exploding over dark blue chords and palpitating jungle subs with impeccable darkside style."
-via Boomkat
On September 12, 2018 Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo and guitarist extraordinaire Jean-Marc Montera joined Maurizio and Roberto Opalio in their hometown Torino, Italy, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the brothers' visionary project My Cat Is An Alien. That evening the stage of Alfa Teatro—a liberty-style, historical theater built in 1928—hosted the live world premiere of this quartet, whose members already collaborated live and on records with each other during the years, yet never all the four together. The quartet live performance followed MCIAA's radical aesthetic of "instantaneous composition," where nothing is defined nor drafted prior to the act of music creation, and every sound and action is shaped around a higher-order scheme dictated by the empathy and synergy of the actual moment of enlightenment. The show was also accompanied by the projection of a brand new cinematic poetry dual film created by Roberto Opalio and previewed on the occasion, whose Super-8 film's relentless flickering and ascending motion worked "ad hoc" to match the music and body gestures of the performance, thus enhancing its transcendental power.
That night Maurizio Opalio (self-made double-bodied wooden string instrument, pedal effects, bell), Roberto Opalio (wordless vocalizations, bodhran, Alientronics, electric guitar, space toys), Jean-Marc Montera (table top guitar, pedals, little gong), and Lee Ranaldo (vocals, electric guitar, bells) moved through still unexplored and unheard music territories.
This music is a pure ecstatic revelation, a unique, powerful and spiritual experience all of its own. Listening to this album we are offered a true epiphany just as uniquely gifted genius improvisers/composers of the past would grace our ears and souls.
More information can be found here.
Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler. Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.
Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.
More information can be found here.
"Steven Stapleton;s iconoclastic Nurse With Wound project now enters its fifth decade, marked with this lavish boxed set of all-new music titled Trippin' Musik. Consisting of three vinyls in dayglo orange, yellow and green, the collection comes with no tracklisting and no indication of what order in which the listener ought to listen to it."
-via Norman Records
Tentatively out November 29th on United Dirter.
A 4-hour work recorded at Steamroom (O'Rourke's studio) between 2017 and 2018.
Detailed and delicate electronic layers, processed instruments, and ambiguous field recordings come together in a slow-moving, fascinating kaleidoscope with multiple reflections and wrong turns, always in constant state of flux. The finely crafted art of subterfuge.
To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye: four CDs – a hypnotic, multi-faceted, labyrinthine piece which flows as slowly as a river while speeding back through memory, and shows all the talent of Jim O'Rourke.
More information can be found here.
