Alessandro Cortini is best known as the lead electronics performer in Nine Inch Nails’ live unit.

His recordings under his own name have gained prominence in recent years and he has become known as one of the pre-eminent Buchla masters in North America. Cortini makes a surprising departure into the 202 on his debut album for Hospital Productions - Sonno.

Sonno was recorded in hotel rooms, using a Roland MC 202 through a delay pedal, recorded direct, sometimes into a small portable speaker system.

"I liked to walk around the room with a handheld recorder to hear where the sequence would sound better, turn on faucets, open doors or windows to see how the ambient sounds would interact with the MC 202/delay/speaker sound. It was very relaxing and liberating to make music this way..."

The result is a beautifully restrained yet oddly emotive album that's quite distinct from the overly academic approach so often undertaken by hardware driven devotees.

More information can be found here.

Tashi Dorji grew up in Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas. Access to any music created outside the country is limited, as are most cultural options, given the geologically isolation of the country. How Dorji went from a life so remote to developing his innovative and revelatory guitar style is mind-boggling.

Yearning for access to the world outside, Dorji pursued and obtained a fully-paid scholarship to a liberal arts school in Asheville, NC, in his early twenties. He’s since settled in there (save a short stint in Maine), soaking up a vast array of music, most notably the works of Derek Bailey and John Zorn. Along the way, Dorji developed a playing style unbound by tradition, yet with a direct line to intuitive artistry. His recordings feature improvisations that spasmodically grow along tangential, surprising paths. All references break loose during a composition, as Dorji keys into his own inner world.

After a handful of cassettes on various labels, Dorji presents his first proper album on Hermit Hut, the label created by Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and inspired by spreading word of Dorji’s talents. The six compositions here are hand-picked by Dorji and Chasny as the most representative and far-reaching of his recordings. Taken together, they announce a new guitar music unlike anything being made today.

More information can be found here.

OOIOO has always created a musical language all its own. Under the leadership of Yoshimi, also a founding member of Boredoms, the group has recorded six albums that have subverted expectations and warped perceptions of what constitutes pop and experimental music. Four years of work went into making Gamel, their bold new album inspired by the Javanese style of gamelan and the first new music from Yoshimi in over five years. Gamelan is an ancient form that has inspired a great many composers and musicians over the past century, from Erik Satie and Claude Debussy to Mouse on Mars and Sun City Girls. The introduction of this traditional form transformed the group into a super tribe, side-stepping the road between the past and the future. Their focus is not to replicate these ancient styles, but to incorporate them into their consistently inventive, constantly shifting musical frameworks. They take their love of indigenous music into an entirely new dimension by freely weaving organic and electric tones into a vivid tapestry, employing their keen sense of color and texture.

While previous OOIOO albums have been largely studio creations, Gamel is the most accurate portrayal of the band's overwhelming, forceful live presence they have released yet. Yoshimi leads her minimalistic rhythm ensemble by making quick, impulsive shifts in tone and attack, the group acting as one mind under her expert instruction. While the gamelan elements will be brand new to many listeners, the band offsets the bizarre with familiar, at times even nostalgic and childlike, melodies. Gamel is euphoric, bursting at the seams with an exhilarating frenzy that is universal yet uniquely their own. OOIOO’s music is reflected in the ear of the beholder, with each listener taking away something different.

Yoshimi began her music career in 1986 playing drums in UFO or Die with vocalist Eye, and later joined him in the revolutionary noise-pop group Boredoms. Her explosive drum performances captivated audiences and even inspired Wayne Coyne to name a now-famous Flaming Lips album in her honor. While the band’s tours of the United States are infrequent, they are as The New York Times has stated, transcendent.

More information can be found here.

For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michał Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe's long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next. A push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout. Ambient music is rarely so sonically challenging. Jacaszek has recorded for Ghostly International, Miasmah, Gusstaff Records and Experimedia and other labels. This is his first release for Touch.

Michał Jacaszek writes:

"When poets and writers declare their enchantment for the forms of nature, they often use musical terms as metaphors. Visual artists' creations often resemble graphic partitas, when recapturing the rhythms of landscapes.  Confirming, in a way, these musical intuitions, composers write great music deeply inspired by birdsongs, wind rustlings, waves repetitions etc."

More information can be found here.

This album is about resonance: on Saman, which means "Together," Hildur melts her voice with her cello, connecting the two instruments together. The result is a highly involving and moving album, recorded, mixed and mastered in Berlin. Hildur's sylph-like vocals contrast beautifully with rich cello tones, resolving the tension between light and dark to produce a unique listening experience.

More information can be found here.

Reveries is the first collaborative effort of Noveller & TQA, two critically acclaimed lonesome composers welcoming us to an expanded guitar-based journey. Noveller is the solo project of Brooklyn-based composer Sarah Lipstate while Thisquietarmy is Eric Quach, unstoppable globetrotting musician from Montreal. Both use the guitar as their main instrument, creating some of the most impressive, hypnotic and rich-textured electric guitar works from the past years.

Empty architecture, luminosity, rocks and deserted zones. Somewhere between Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Tarkovski's Stalker, there is a walk, a wait and an epiphany.

It happened. You were not there. You just read it. Or maybe it's the synopsis of it. It's written on the back cover of a dog-eared paperback that girl with the golden cap lost in the train you were just in. She was in a hurry. You'll never know its end, you just have to stick to the rocks and to the music.

Tomorrow is another day and tonight might be the night.

Recorded in January 2013 at Electric Blue Studios in Brooklyn, this new long player finds Sarah & Eric at their most luminous and aerial state, writing together layers of blissful drones resulting of a highly meditative and emotional four-parts piece.

More information here.

Brand new double LP from the duo of Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, who also play in Cerberus Shoal and Fire On Fire. The duo also performed on Michael Gira's Swans LP, The Seer in 2012. Based out of Portland, Maine, Big Blood has dropped a ton of stunning self-released CDs and cassettes since 2006 as well as some fantastic vinyl releases for Time-Lag, Feeding Tube, Phase and Immune.

Big Blood's sound is rooted in folk and prime '60s / '70s garage psych. This new double LP sees them focus more on the electric side of things than on some previous releases with the addition of drummer, Shon. The record was recorded after Colleen spent a lot of time listening to Sabbath, Zepp and Dead Moon, so it definitely has a heavier vibe than some of their past releases.

The gatefold sleeve features artwork by Colleen, Unlikely Mothers refers to Colleen's mother (pictured on the inside) and Colleen's aunt (pictured on the outside), both were nuns. Her aunt stayed a nun and colleen's mom left (obviously) during Vatican II. The two images for the sleeve are from an ongoing series about women who buck common notions of who are the mothers in our lives.

More information can be found here.

First new material since 2001.  Six new songs plus two dub versions.

More information can be found here.

The reissue of ARISPEJAL ASTISARÓ+ on vinyl for the first time!, in expanded version (Double LP) with the four outstanding tracks "Noising in the Rain I - IV," included in the legendary Bruitiste compilation (1987) by RRRrecords.   Recorded between 1987 and 1989 and firstly published only in CD (1992) by Línea Alternativa,  an especially interesting period where the unique and characteristic  rhythmic-industrial Esplendor Geométrico style, developed along the eighties, turns more minimalistic, schematic, cold and rough.

Remastered in 2014 with a vastly improved sound, ARISPEJAL ASTISARÓ+ includes the 10 original tracks of the CD plus the 4 of Bruitiste, that constitutes the perfection of the eighties E.G. sound in all its aspects, included the voice of Arturo Lanz.  Aggressive siderurgical hammering ("Jari", "Arispejal astisaro"), mechanized tribalism ("Felacion", "Bi bajin"), and hypnotic spirals ("Catare").

Geometrik presents the reissue, on vinyl for the first time and remastered in 2014 from the original reel to reel tapes!, of SHEIKH ALJAMA, originally published only in CD (1991) by Daft Records (Dirk Ivens label).  Recorded  between 1987 and 1989, an especially interesting period where the unique and characteristic  rhythmic-industrial E.G. style, developed along the eighties, turns more minimalistic, schematic, cold and rough, with sporadic influences of Arabic musics and rhythms. SHEIKH ALJAMA is an Esplendor Geométrico classic and one of the best albums of their whole career, including their hit "Sinaya."  Sheikh Aljama stands out for the incorporation of sonorities, voices and percussions of Arabic influence.

More information can be found here.

Blackest Ever Black presents to you Dead Unique, an album by Officer! recorded in 1995 but - outrageously, inexplicably - never before released into the public domain. This then is not a reissue or a revival; it's a new record that just happens to have been maturing in the cask for, oh, a little shy of 20 years. It also happens to be a lost classic of English art-rock, and the crowning achievement in the career of its mercurial creator, Mick Hobbs, who was closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio.

A complex but thrillingly immediate avant-pop song cycle that charms and confounds at every turn, Dead Unique will give immense pleasure not only to Officer!’s existing cult following, but to anyone with an appreciation of piquant, idiosyncratic songcraft – fans of Kevin Ayers, Flaming Tunes, Art Bears, Woo, Dislocation Dance, R. Stevie Moore, Robert Wyatt, Cleaners From Venus, Lol Coxhill or The Monochrome Set should especially pay attention. It touches upon ragged-raw rock ‘n roll, sumptuous chamber music, pastoral folk, blowsy prog-jazz and paranoid dub-space, effortlessly shifting from skronking abstraction to rousing harmonic refrain and back again.

Blurring the roles of storyteller, poet and prankster, Hobbs turns memorable line after memorable line, booby-trapping them with mischievous puns, fleet-footed literary allusions, sudden digressions and shifts of register, nonsense rhymes and other wordplay. But his acute wit and flair for the absurd is moored by a deep romantic sensibility, and though it delights in the minutiae of the human comedy, Dead Unique ultimately addresses its biggest themes: love, loss, commitment, independence, the mutability and inconstancy of all things. "You lose, you learn, you advance…but you always go back."

More information can be found here.

Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. It is two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A Baker’s novel, The Peregrine. It is English’s most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation.

The phrase, wilderness of mirrors, draws its root from T.S Eliot’s elegant poem "Gerontion." During the cold war, the phrase became associated with campaigns of miscommunication carried out by opposing state intelligence agencies. Within the context of the record, the phrase acted as a metaphor for a process of iteration that sat at the compositional core of the LP. Buried in each final piece, like an unheard whisper, is a singularity that was slowly reflected back upon itself in a flood of compositional feedback. Erasure through auditory burial.

Wilderness Of Mirrors also reflects English’s interests in extreme dynamics and densities, something evidenced in his live performances of the past half decade. The album’s overriding aesthetic of harmonic distortion reveals his ongoing explorations into the potentials of dense sonics.

“During the course of this record,” English explains, “I was fortunate enough to experience live performances by artists I deeply respect for their use of volume as an affecting quality, specifically Earth, Swans and My Bloody Valentine. I had the chance to experience each of these groups at various stages in the making this record and each of them reinforced my interest in emulating that inner ear and bodily sensation that extreme densities of vibration in air brings about.”

The album is moreover a reflection on the current exploitation of the ideals of the wilderness of mirrors, retuned and refocused from the politics of the state, to the politics of the modern multiplex. The amorphous and entangled nature of the modern world is one where thoughtless information prevails in an environment starved of applied wisdom. Wilderness Of Mirrors is a stab at those living spectres (human and otherwise) that haunt our seemingly frail commitments to being humane.

“We face constant and unsettled change,” English notes, “It's not merely an issue of the changes taking place around us, but the speed at which these changes are occurring. We bare witness to the retraction of a great many social conditions and contracts that have previously assisted us in being more humane than the generations that precede us. We are seeing this ideal of betterment eroded here in Australia and abroad too. This record is me yelling into what seems to be an ever-growing black abyss. I wonder if my voice will reflect off something?”

Wilderness Of Mirrors is reflection upon reflection, a pure white out of absolute aurality.

Out July 21, 2014.  More information here.

Melt Into Nothing is ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE's most lucid seance to date. The prolific Humboldt County musician has stripped layers off of his trademark haze but retained the beautiful desolation that’s earned him a rabid fanbase. The solo project of former Starving Weirdos member Brian Pyle, Ensemble Economique has crossed a land bridge from apocryphal world music and dusty soundtracks to gauzy 4AD-style atmospherics. Trellises of guitar embolden Pyle’s whispered, threadbare lyrics. On "Hey Baby," the itinerant tone feels like an update on Neil Young's stark and beautiful soundtrack for Jarmusch's "Dead Man." "Melt Into Nothing," like that beautiful film music, evokes the great American expanse.

Field recordings slip in and out of the mix. On "Fade for Miles," Pyle's adroit effects and backwards tape manipulation make the long trail on his vocals fade into waves on a rocky beach. Pyle combines minor-key organ and spacious string synths on "Never Gonna Die," recalling the grey grace of the releases on Factory's gothic cousin, Benelux. Thunder accentuates the dubbed-out machine drum programming as Pyle's dulcet tenor floats in storm clouds. The full-length also features contributions from Toronto artist DenMother and Parisian artist Sophia Hamadi, also of dark-wave Opale. This music is not excessively dark or severe. Rather, the record explores the internal dialogue of solitary walks. "Melt Into Nothing" is for making sense of humanity in nature’s unforgiving face. Ensemble Economique has made his most accessible record yet, but the complex emotion behind these tracks remains resonant and ultimately mysterious.

Out June 27th, 2014.  More info can eventually be found here.

Side A - "The Temple Bell Stops"

Side B - "But The Sound Keeps Coming" and "Out Of The Flowers."

Recorded at SOMA studios on April 21st, 2013 by The Norman Conquest. One take performances recorded without overdubs with the exception of an ARP 2600 Analog Synthesizer track by The Norman Conquest on "But The Sound Keeps Coming."

"Out Of The Flowers" was an improvisation with The Norman Conquest on the ARP.

Source material for "The Temple Bell Stops" and "But The Sound Keeps Coming" recorded by me at home in Chicago and in the field. Chanting on "The Temple Bell Stops" by an unknown monk at Jogyesa Buddhist Temple in Seoul, South Korea.

Additional contributions on "But The Sound Keeps Coming" by anonymous Cardinals, Nuthatches, Tufted Titmice, Woodpeckers and Blue-Jays in Hobart, Indiana; also Tree Frogs and Crickets at Hussy Lake, Michigan and Grasshoppers and Gold Finches at Clark and Pine Dune and Swale preserve in Gary, Indiana.

“There is all the time in the world for studying music, but for living there is scarcely any time at all. For living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one’s ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one’s thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract, or symbolical. Sounds are sounds and men are men, but now our feet are a little off the ground.” -John Cage, from Juilliard Lectureenople

More information will eventually appear here.

Mind-shattering double LP of dysphoric space-rock minimalism from two luminaries of the Swedish punk underground.

Second Launch follows Bremen’s self-titled debut of 2013 and comprises 11 controlled improvisations, reinforced with overdubs, that take clear inspiration from the dark side of kraut and progressive rock, early electronic and drone music, whilst also owing something to the fathomlessly bleak interior landscapes conjured by Nico/Cale on The Marble Index and Desertshore.

The complex dialogue between Lanchy Orre’s guitar and Jonas Tiljander’s organ, by turns pensive and combative, bound up with their mastery of reverb and feedback, is the focal point of the record; supplemented with drums and sparingly deployed analogue synthesizer tones to evoke nothing less than the vast emptiness of outer space and the obliteration of all meaning and identity in the face of it.

From the full-throttle motorik and bonehead repetitions of "Sweepers" and "Entering Phase Two" (echoes of Tiljander and Orre's alma mater, Brainbombs) to the deep astral psychedelia of "Static Interferences," via the mournful Northern European ambience of "Walking The Skies," the rolling thunder of "They Were Drifting" and the poignant, stargazing blues of "Hollow Wave," Second Launch charts impossible gradients in its search for answers to the oldest questions of all.

More information here.

A three-pronged advance through the heart of physical sunshine playing on the floor of the jungle. Epic, insistent collabasitions played out over four sides making a whole.

(Slightly) more information here.

“The idea for The Death Of Rave was conceived in early 2006 after a visit to the Berghain Club in Berlin. At the time Berghain was about to explode on the international club scene as a temple. The feeling was in the air that something special was happening. I went and saw a pale shadow of the past. Grim and boring beats, endlessly pounding to an audience who felt they were part of an experience but who lacked cohesion and energy. For me personally something had died. Be it a spirit, be it an ideal, be it an adventure in sound. Rave and techno felt dead to me.

The story went like this…….

"There are 10 people who run the World. They are exclusively male, and presidents, magnates, and high priests all do their bidding. The 10 live in villas in the remotest part of the Himalayas—a place that absolutely NO-ONE would ever stumble upon. Although the 10 live in such close proximity to each other, they choose to have meetings in the back room of a small office in London. That's where the  decisions are made. That's where the wars begin, that's where the dice are tossed across the table to establish who wins, who loses, who lives, who dies."

A year on from their Public Information debut, Chicago duo Jeremy Lemos and Brian Case return to the fold with five new pieces of exquisitely produced wave-funk-techno-noise-electronics.

It takes great skill to pull off a three-minute electronic drone-grumble to kickstart your new record. Lemos and Case have it in droves. The tension is jet-black, loaded with friction. Modular energy pulses in and out, in and out. Then suddenly Case takes to the microphone, snarls and spits “Hey Bullfighter, read about you in a book...”

I W I finds Acteurs in a more assured, confident, angry mood than their debut. The signifiers are there – claustrophobic Ike Yard glare, Factory Floor throb, Diagonal abstractions – but we now have a bold swagger, stomping triumphantly into frightening new space. The crushing late-song collapse of "Honey Bear" is a breathtaking wall of clatter and noise that Tim Hecker would blush at. The loopy saw-tooth menace of "River Card" is as strange as anything they've done and the pummeling title track could easily shatter those murky dancefloors of strip-lit basements where people from the future dance in amongst the normals; machine drums puncturing the smoke, ear damaging feedback rattles the walls, torn Moog shapes cutting chatter to zero...end of night.

Out June 2nd.  More information is available here.

Editions Mego is proud to present the first recordings by Edvard Graham Lewis released this century.  Having made his name in legendary punk/experimental outfits Wire, Dome and He Said, Lewis has developed an exceptional voice with ceaseless exploration of a wide variety of musical forms.

All Over is a song-based album that resides amongst the cracks between narrative and song, sound and music.  Cloaked in an atmosphere of beauty and paranoia, All Over conjures the spirit of Wire's experimental pop trajectory whilst simultaneously exploring a multitude of sonic possibilities.  Gritty mechanical operations support Lewis' wry human observations in a uniquely disturbing melange of punk, industrial, techno and pop.  A dream logic plays throughout All Over courtesy of Lewis' odd lyrical content being set with all manner of disorientating sound and rhythm.

All Under, the companion release to All Over compiles soundtracks to films, installations and a self-penned short story. This is familiar terrain for Lewis who, along with Bruce Gilbert, produced the early interactive audio-visual installation 'MZUI' at London’s Waterloo Gallery in 1981.

Since this period, Lewis as been involved in countless soundtracks to all manner of cultural artefacts. The haunting score to Gunilla Leander's 2003 short film "All Under" was improvised in real-time with a sampler and FX processing and recorded onto mini disc. The results are a viscous ambience of swirls, feedback and distortion.  This material was then adapted for an immersive 3 screen installation of the same visual material which features combinations of 6 nude bodies (4 men, 2 women) fighting and wrestling, filmed underwater.  The soundtrack here crawls further in the depths as electronic phrases swim amongst a foreboding ambience.  Both of these works encapsulate the same disembodied effect of the visual material as hovering, uncanny sound worlds seep into the listeners subconscious.

"The Eel Wheeled" features Lewis' reading one of his own bizarre stories underscored with a suitably disorientating soundtrack sourced from sound effects of the Prime Sounds SFX Library. This version was re-mixed by Thomas Öberg (member of Bob Hund and 27#11).

"No Show Godot" concludes the set.  A soundtrack to a "sky movie" (road movies be warned) completed in 2013. Coming out of the initial sub-aquatic environments of the opening works, "No Show Godot" takes us on a spiralling high before folding into a gritty godly industrial mantra which comes along as a perfect means of tying up these two concurrent releases as a symmetrical whole.

Both albums will be out June 16th.  More information can be found here.

Sublime Frequencies is thrilled to present a second volume of classic tracks from Algeria's popular music history. Where volume 1 focused on the early to mid-1970s Rai scene in western Algeria, this album features a variety of pop and folk styles from that same period. From the heavier rock and psychedelic sounds of Rachid & Fethi, Les Djinns and Les Abranis, to the haunting folk music of Kri Kri and Djamel Allem and the film soundtrack moods of Ahmed Malek, 1970s Algerian Folk & Pop documents a key period in the modern musical renaissance of a nation in transition.

Most of these tracks are from 45 rpm singles, the key format during the early 1970s before the cassette took over as the medium of choice. Western musical influences can be heard throughout this extremely diverse record, yet there is an undeniable Algerian sense of sadness contained here within a more tolerant space in time between two of the country's most significant historical periods; National Independence from France and the darker times of a brutal civil war yet to come. Compiled by Hicham Chadly, this limited edition LP comes in a full-color gatefold jacket with lovely images from the period and extensive liner-notes by Omar Zelig, Algeria's most legendary radio DJ.

More information will soon be found here.