Kali Malone's sophomore LP Cast of Mind investigates the use of harmony as a force of psychological impact through the exclusive use of the Buchla 200 synthesizer in combination with acoustic woodwind and brass instruments.

The record begins as a cascade of battle calls from the wind instruments that shift ephemerally between triumphant and anguished howls upon each exhale. While the other pieces pull from the septimal harmonic framework of the title track, they extract a more confined palate to depict their sonic identities indicated by the song titles. "Bondage To Formula" weaves synthesis, trombone and bass clarinet in a delicate pattern, conjuring an ambiguous assimilation of the acoustic and synthetic. Dominated by columns of sawtooth waveforms, "Arched In Hysteria" unravels as a sharp and sober harmony perched on the border of violence, ringing in paranoia amongst a foundation of low beating oscillators. The record concludes in the rapture of "Empty The Belief," swollen with undulating bassoon striving to intonate to the towering stability of machine-generated harmony.

Using justly tuned synthetic and acoustic instrumentation, Cast of Mind's rich harmonic textures emit a distinct emotive hue serving to generate a static and captivating depth of focus.

Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in Stockholm, Sweden since 2012. Her solo works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation - such as pipe organ, string and wind instruments, lute and gong. Malone's 2017 debut LP Velocity of Sleep was released on her own label XKatedral following tape releases put out by Ascetic House, Bleak Environment and Total Black. She is active in the groups Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies and Upper Glossa with Caterina Barbieri. She has performed most notably at Berlin Atonal, Moogfest and Norberg Festival.

More information can be found here.

Time Exercises is a complex study in amorphous polymetric rhythms by Cam Deas for The Death of Rave. His first album composed solely for modular synths and computer, Cam's follow-up to the acclaimed String Studies for Luke Younger's Alter label marks a headlong tilt from acoustic to electronic spheres with a staggering effect resulting from meticulous research and process. It sounds as advanced as Xenakis or Roland Kayn superstructures, with the rhythmic displacement of FIS or Autechre, and with a grasp of slippery, mind-bending timbral dissonance comparable to Coil and Rashad Becker records.

Cam's six "Time Exercises" form both a bold break with - and an extension of - the avant, folk, blues and outernational traditions that he's worked to deconstruct and fluidly syncretise over the past decade. In the past four years he's stepped away from the guitar as a compositional tool, turning to electronic hardware in a focussed effort to consolidate myriad tunings and meters with a precision that had previously eluded him in the acoustic sphere.

Severed from the tactility and sentimentality of instrumental inflection, Cam's disembodied music plays out a thrilling dramaturgy and syntax of alien dissonance and disorienting rhythmic resolution. Harmonic shapes as densely widescreen as those in Roland Kayn's Cybernetic Music roil in unfathomable fever dream space, where massed batteries of synthetic percussion swarm like an orchestra of Cut Hands in viscous formation, and where polychromatic mentasm figures converge like cenobites laying siege to Rashad Becker’s utopia.

On Time Exercises, Cam articulates a synthetic musical language that speaks to the listener in myriad, quantum tongues awaiting to be deciphered by keen ears everywhere. It's an outstanding record for lovers of forward-looking but deeply rooted electronic music.

More information can be found here.

The fifth LP by English guitarist Jon Collin is also his first U.S. release. Jon first came to our attention when he started the Winebox Press label. This fairly nuts project involved choosing a wooden object (like a wine box or door) from which to create cases (some of them quite complex) for cassettes he released. The size of the edition was determined by the number of the packages he was able to create from the original object, and the label's creations were pretty amazing.

Some of his early bands, like Whole Voyald Infinite Light and the Serfs were documented, along with artists like the Hunter Graccus, Chora and Taming Power. Eventually he began to issue solo recordings, and they sounded as brilliant as they looked. This led to occasional U.S. tours, interest from other labels and a worldwide explosion of all things JON COLLIN. Well, that’s not all really true. But the basics are.

Collin is a wonderful player, incorporating the distentions of Loren Connors alongside the blues figures of Jack Rose and the lyrical melodicism of Robbie Basho. He can also throw in blurts that are pure Derek Bailey to throw the punters off, but that's his business.

This new album (which will be followed in a few months by Volume 2) is a lovely example of his most evolved beauty-moves, riven with hairs and rivers of discord, but generally dedicated to expanding (rather than collapsing) the head of anyone who will take the time to listen.

Make time for it. You will be copiously rewarded.

More information can be found here.

Our last Big Blood release was the idiosyncratic Ant Farm (FTR 241), Colleen and Caleb's collaboration with the late composer Elliott Schwartz, which presented music designed for a museum installation. With Operate Spaceship Earth Properly, Big Blood return to the vast universe of strangeness they explore inside their own skin. Now fully incorporating the vocals and guitar of their daughter Quinnisa (previously a "secret weapon" unveiled mostly at live shows, as the Dictators once did with Handsome Dick Manitoba), Big Blood sound nutsier and wilder than ever.

Spaceship Earth is a massively psychedelic investigation of science fiction, science fact and the mythic spot where they reconcile. Specifically referring to the work of writers such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin and Buckminster Fuller, the music mixes the thunder of riff-thuggery with vocals beamed in from planet Comus and beat-slaps equally indebted to the Purple Revolutionary and the Neue Deutsche Welle. The combination is headspinning and gloriously original, but will be immediately identifiable as Big Blood by anyone who knows the band's music.

I mean, it's so freaking Strange and so freaking Maine, who else could it be?

-Byron Coley, 2018

More information can be found here.

Aaron Martin’s album A Room Now Empty sees him returning to the memory-based recordings of previous albums such as Almond, River Water and Chautauqua, where layered meanings in the music and titles don’t allow a single clear-cut reading of the music.

"A Room Now Empty is similar to the concept of Day Has Ended where Christoph Berg and I created music to encompass the passing of a day, but stretched out for the passing of a lifetime or at least a portion of a lifetime," says Aaron.

Using cello, electric guitar, bass, roll-up piano, banjo, concertina, acoustic guitar, voice, ukulele, singing bowls and lap steel, A Room Now Empty keeps the same intimacy and directness of Aaron’s previous albums, with a slightly more processed sound creating distance within the music.

More information can be found here.

Collects the Universal Tongue and Small Doses Ostara 3"CDr tracks that have never been re-released. Newly mastered, the LP/CS downloads include 2 out-of-print cassette-only releases from Gold Soundz, Woolgather Visions and Mechanical Elements. Mother Universe features Matt Hill from Umberto on analog drum machine, synth and bass alongside Justin Wright's tripped-out guitar ambiance. The session was hugely inspired by Manuel Göttsching's legendary recording E2E4.

More information can be found here.

"Fluxion's Ripple Effect is the film score for a non-existing motion picture. This nine-track album is the result of experimentation and the combination of the producer's two most cherished art forms: electronic music and score music. Ironically the two worlds rarely seem to meet, despite the fact that score music has adopted a looser form in order to better adapt to film accompaniment, bringing it closer to electronic music which attempts to contradict form or shed it altogether. Fluxion felt the need to bring these two musical forms into dialogue with each other, lending structure to electronic and deconstructing score music to create a malleable and expressive hybrid. The album's production took two years from its original conception for the subliminal story to unfold into the completed product. Fluxion wanted to say as much as possible through the music, leaving the visuals as a blank canvas for the listener to create their own story. In the end, the goal is to give each member of the audience a unique audiovisual experience based on their own perception and interpretation."

-via Forced Exposure

More information can be found here.

For over 10 years, Bart De Paepe has sated the appetites of psychedelic searchers with his label Sloow Tapes. A peerless curator, De Paepe has unleashed crucial underground transmissions ranging from paint-peeling Japanese rock to bedroom American Primitivism in microscopic editions. Those fortunate enough to have heard five or six of Sloow Tapes' releases may be prepared for what Pagus Wasiae- De Paepe's latest solo offering - has in store. The Stekene, Belgium-based artist's Beyond Beyond Is Beyond debut, Pagus Wasiae trades in lysergic texture. Like Tangerine Dream's early work, Pagus Wasiae casts off a ragged rock shore into a bubbling sea of electronics and navigates by dark starlight, leaving in its wake shadows and smoke. De Paepe charges waves of synth ambience, swirls clouds of electric guitar and summons subtle beats of the earth to make Pagus Wasiae a fully enveloping and dynamic listening experience-astral traveling without moving.

"Cluster, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Pink Floyd's deepest space excursions may be waypoints to Pagus Wasiae, but ultimately the destination is the journey and Bart De Paepe has drawn a new map and laid it to tape for us to discover." - Jeff Conklin (WFMU)

More information can be found here.

The NY-based producer returns to Umor Rex with a new album, in which the musical discourse and the physical form of the release have an equal, crucial importance. Sirimiri is made of four long and mid-length pieces, each composed of different perspectives, processes and identities. However, Rafael seeks to blend subjective time with the listening experience. A sort of loop and repetition, sub-sequence-based sound. Following Eno, nothing happens in the same way twice, perception is constantly shifting, nothing stays in one place for long.

The sum of the four pieces is 36 minutes; the cassette edition lasts 72 minutes in total, since both sides have the same four songs joined together. Physically, the format allows us at least two automatic repetitions. In the digital version the songs are independent, but we also include a bonus track made of the 36-minute loop.

The desolation and despair (in a sort of positive way) that we got to hear in The Shameless Years (Umor Rex 2017) is present in Sirimiri, but the impression is concrete, with cruder, less rhetorical landscapes. If The Shameless Years was located between beauty and active tragedy, Sirimiri travels inside the beauty and melancholy of an observing eye, a quiet rebel insurrection. Another substantial difference is the distance from general and globalized concepts; in these unfortunate times, Sirimiri looks for personal sorrows, and places its focus on the particular. Even the names of the songs evoke this in small ways, like in "Sonder", the feeling of realizing that everyone, even a complete stranger, has a life as complex as one's own.

Rafael has two guests in this album; Taylor Jordan in "Mountain Stream", and Rafael's hero Carl Hultgren (from Windy & Carl) in "Sonder."

Sirimiri means 'drizzle' in Basque, and we cannot find a better word to describe its content.

More information can be found here.

High quality reissue of the monumental work August 1974 by Japanese experimental music ensemble Taj Mahal Travellers. Pressed on 180gr. vinyl with extensive liner notes by Julian Cowley.

In April 1972, a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the changing scene and to differing ways of life. Midway through May they reached their destination, the iconic Taj Mahal on the bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, India. The Taj Mahal Travellers had fulfilled physically the promise of the name they adopted when they formed in 1969. But their music had always been a journey, a sonic adventure designed to lead any listener's imagination into unfamiliar territory.

The double album August 1974 was their second official release. The first, July 15, 1972, is a live concert recording, but on 19th August 1974, the Taj Mahal Travellers entered the Tokyo studios of Nippon Columbia and produced what is arguably their definitive statement. The electronic dimension of their collective improvising was coordinated, as usual, by Kinji Hayashi. Guest percussionist Hirokazu Sato joined long-term group members Ryo Koike, Seiji Nagai, Yukio Tsuchiya, Michihiro Kimura, Tokio Hasegawa and Takehisa Kosugi.

The enigmatic Takehisa Kosugi, whose soaring electric violin was such a vital element in their music, had been a pioneer of free improvisation and intermedia performance art with Group Ongaku at the start of the '60s. Later in that decade, before launching the Taj Mahal Travellers, he had become known internationally through his association with the Fluxus art movement. During the mid-70s the Travellers disbanded and while his colleagues more or less stopped performing as musicians, Kosugi continued to reach new audiences across the course of several decades as a composer, regular performer and musical director for the acclaimed Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

August 1974 captures vividly the characteristic sound of the Taj Mahal Travellers, haunting tones from an unusual combination of instruments, filtered through multiple layers of reverb and delay. Their music has strong stylistic affinities with the trippy ambience of cosmic and psychedelic rock, but the Taj Mahal Travellers were tuning in to other vibrations, drawing inspiration from the energies and rhythms of the world around them rather than projecting some alternative reality. Films of rolling ocean waves often provided a highly appropriate backdrop for their lengthy improvised concerts. This is truly electric music for the mind and body.

More information can be found here.

Félicia Atkinson is a composer, sculptor, painter, poet, and publisher from Rennes, France. Atkinson has led a fruitfully fantastic run of eerily blissful, serenely euphoric sounds. Whether under her own name or via her defunct recording pseudonym Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Atkinson has released work on Umor Rex, Digitalis Limited, Aguirre, and Shelter Press, an imprint co-run with Bartolomé Sanson.

Coyotes is an EP inspired by Atkinson's last voyage to New Mexico in February 2017, when she visited and took in the geographic landscapes from Taos to Ghost Ranch. The same vistas also inspired much of Agnes Martin's and Georgia O’Keefe's painting, as well as Jerome Rothenberg's poetry and translation’s works.

Atkinson describes a Coyotes as a "Carnet de Voyage," a tape you could directly play in your car while traveling somewhere, a kind of imaginary map to a sentimental journey. A spontaneous gesture, close to the notion of gift or offering. Or, simply, a postcard to a friend.  But it's also a praise to the conservation of national and state parks and its human and non-human souls, menaced as we know now by drilling and violent economic speculations.

Here, coyotes act as a kind of metaphor of ambiguity and doubt, a state of mind that Atkinson find interesting to transcribe musically; the ambiguity furthered by Atkinson as a literal "foreigner" in New Mexico. She conveys a sense of visiting these native sacred lands and wondering what you are doing there.

Musically, Coyotes is composed of two long tracks, "Abiqiu" and "Lighter Than Aluminium." Each track features an effervescent froth of piano, MIDI sounds evokes marimbas, Fender Rhodes, bells, sub-basses, and spoken-word poetry written by the musician to display a melancholic landscape made of transparent but deep layers of pale colors and blurry lines.

More information can be found here.

Recital is joyed to publish the newest record by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi. Currently working on her PhD in Musicology at UCLA, her trajectory has been unorthodox. Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, which, if you’ve never been there, doesn’t really scream “Avant-Garde” (Calgary is the rodeo capital of the world).  From a young age, Sarah was a driven pianist (and figure-skater, although that's a story for a different time). It is important and interesting that she chose to study esoteric music; as Sarah could have easily been a cowgirl or a concert pianist had her ingrained love of synthesis and sonic phenomenology not taken the wheel.

Sarah is a considered person. I find few people that have the diligence and resolve to take their time with music… especially in a live context.  I respect that about her.  The first time I saw Sarah perform, I presumptuously told her that her music reminded me of my favorite Mirror albums (the exceptional project of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann).  Sarah was not familiar with Mirror, so the compliment was initially lost on her.  Years back I was in the same situation when a review compared my music to Andrew Chalk, who was unknown to me at the time.  So I felt a kinship in our magnetic drift towards unspoken and clustered beauty.

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day follows the release of her "sound-wheel" LP All My Circles Run, which examines the isolation of different instruments.  Let Night Come On…, recorded mainly with a Mellotron and electronic organ, feels like a return to the nest.  Burrowed in the studio, Davachi was the only performer on this album.  She both splays her compositional architecture and re-contextualizes the essence of her early output.  She chiseled careful and shadowed hymns; anchors of emotion.

Two pillars of this album are "Mordents," which to my ears drops hints of her love for Progressive rock music – and "Buhrstone," comparable to a sombre funeral march of piano and flutes. These two examine punctuations of early music, gently plucking melodies and movements.  The three other compositions are tonal works, blowing slow jets of lapping harmonics.

Writing this description now, I find it hard to separate "At Hand" from filmmaker Paul Clipson, who made a melancholic film for this piece of Sarah’s.  A fitting title for Sarah and Paul’s relationship – frequently working in orbit of each other, meticulous and tactile.  I cherish this track as a memory of Paul.

This is a lovely album to fill an evening living room with. A blanket, a cup of wine, a dim bulb, a wide window.

More information can be found here.

The Art of Magic presents a deck of 31 Oracle mantic cards adapted from the original Cecil Williamson divination index archive found within the library at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle.

The accompanying cassette is intended to aid practice and was recorded on location at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic using ritual instruments and objects from the storeroom archive collection.

This collection of cards has been created with the purpose of providing instruction, insight and inspiration for anyone interested in exploring the natural phenomena of ‘the mantic arts’. They are intended to be used however one wishes to aid practice and gain further insight.

It is all a question of moving the self into a deeper consciousness, a totality of awareness....’

"The history of divination can be traced back at least as far as the classical period (though no doubt reaches further) in which ‘Augury’ (a sign of what will happen in the future) was employed to discern the will of the odd; this usually took the form of the observation and subsequent interpretation of natural phenomena. One could say this is cognate with the modern Jungian concept of Synchronicity. Various re nements and elaborations to this principle have developed through the ages, though generally speaking they all employ the same principle, that is to say, the observation of some kind of random form which may be contemplated in such a way as to bypass the conscious mind, and thus access our inner world which in turn has access to the information required. The method by which this is achieved is entirely determined by the culture, the environment, the resources available and the nature of the prevailing belief system in which the system of divination operates."

-Steve Patterson, Cecil Williamson’s Book of Witchcraft, Troy Books, 2014

More information can be found here.

Flesh soon yields, but stone is greater; the works of man survive the maker,

Yet, given time, new flesh brings breath; and fastens song to stone’s unrest.

Stone ruins prick the Devon map like starlight in the night sky. Each one reaches us as a distorted image of a bygone age: a past-pulse, rippling out through time to meet us in the present, beaten and ragged from a long journey.

Devon Folklore Tapes marks its seventh iteration with sound-investigations into two such time-travellers: Frithelstock Priory and Okehampton Castle. The former was once the home of an Augustinian fraternity, but since its dissolution in 1536 has continued to shelter monks of the spectral kind in its slow decay. The latter is a Norman motte and bailey castle, situated in a leafy valley on the edge of Dartmoor, where a revenant spirit wanders the byways in her carriage of bones.

The movements featured on this cassette tune in to these tales and others, informed by fieldwork and automatic improvisations conducted on location in 2017. The cassette comes housed in a hand-stamped and numbered presentation box including an inlay booklet detailing the folklore of each site.

The works were executed by R.D. Kirdiv and S.V. Skirling – two longstanding members of the Folklore Tapes ensemble who, with this release, are finally stepping out from the shadows and into the ferric.

More information can be found here.

Kyle Bobby Dunn's first physical release since 2014's And the Infinite Sadness is a warm, albeit compressed, sequel to that universally acclaimed 3xLP. In "The Searchers", the Canadian composer's sidelong composition is still set adrift in a sea of infinite nostalgia and reflections of past selves but with an ascending lightness that gleams at the contours of Dunn's most personal and affecting work. "The Searchers," named after the John Ford film, meditates on the way in which the imposing expansiveness of the American West worked upon the minds of its inhabitants who fought, lost and did terrible things to each other in their attempt to claim it. The West, like the slipstream of the course of events in a life, offers no resolution and shakes off any narrative that attempts to define it.

Wayne Robert Thomas is an Indianapolis based musician who composes drones like sculpting in wet cement, each movement turning slowly upwards while simultaneously being locked into time and space. His first appearance on vinyl, Wayne Robert Thomas's deeply felt composition "Voyevoda" utilizes processed electric guitar to fill all available space with lofty and spacious tones that lose nothing of their clarity as the float up to the rafters before settling back down to the nave. A stirring counterpoint Dunn's composition, "Voyevoda" keenly examines one's fidelity to unconquerable nostalgia.

Out May 1st.  More information can be found here.

"It was the most beautiful summer of my life."

Memories — places, vacancies, allusions — are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. The Los Angeles-based harpist recorded her breakout 2016 album, At The Dam, during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented Collected Pieces, a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station — a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — emanates Hundreds of Days, her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world.

Chapel Perilous exists whereby the supernatural converges with the everyday - whatever one's definition of reality, this psychological realm serves to prove it endlessly subjective and changeable. Robert Anton Wilson may have laid claim to the modern use of this phrase - as in his 1977 tome Cosmic Trigger - yet there can be few musical outfits in the here and now more worthy of carrying on its tradition than Gnod. In more than a decade on the planet, this singular Salford-birthed entity have married intrepid musical exploration with psychic fearlessness - not to mention a tendency to leave any tag or bracket one attempts to place on them utterly redundant.

In a sense, the latest adventure bearing this title evolved both from the lengthy European tour that the band embarked upon in the wake of their stripped-down and paint-stripping 2017 opus Just Say No The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine. Yet recording in Supernova studio in Eindhoven under the auspices of Bob De Wit, the band found themselves free not only to lay down two tumultuous tracks that they had been honing and hammering into shape on the road - the pulverizing fifteen-minute opener "Donovan’s Daughters" and the bracingly brutal "Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down" - but to sculpt more abstract material, utilizing dubbed-out repetition, furious riff-driven rancour, bleak soundscapes and off-the-map experimentation to create an intimidating and invigorating tableau of dystopian dread and unflinching intensity.

Always working purely on their own instincts and co-ordinates, Gnod's pathway into unchartered territory continues to move firmly on with nary a care for the sanity of anyone in their surroundings. Chapel Perilous is a still more indomitable chapter in a transcendental travelogue from an iconoclastic institution that only gathers momentum with the passing of time. Wherever Gnod go in 2018 and beyond, expect reality to be reinvented anew, whatever the consequences.

Out May 4, 2018.  More information can be found here.

Rendered guitar musings from a Lyttelton room. Outside inside out.

Recordings by Peter Wright.

Lyttelton, Aotearoa, April 2010-October 2017.

More information can be found here.

Inexplicable Hours is the sequel of the successful six-CD boxed set Elapsed Time, also released by Sonoris in 2017. The first LP documents a new direction in his music, with some of his last electroacoustic experimentations with audio generators, field recordings, and various electronic devices. The second one explores the same ambient/drone territories as the boxset, with tracks less static and more complex than it appears on the first listen. And as always with recent Kevin Drumm's music there's a sense of majesty, of mystery and a melancholic beauty that is uniquely his own.

More information can be found here.

from kranky:

Not long after recording her 10th album, Ruins, Liz Harris traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by "the idea that something is missing or cold," the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as "small texts hanging in space," impressions of mortality, melody, and the unseen – fleeting beauty, interrupted. Grid Of Points stands as a concise and potently poetic addition to the Grouper catalog.

from Liz Harris:

Grid Of Points is a set of songs for piano and voice. I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.

Out April 27th.  More information can be found here.