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.

Fifty years after his debut release, Bill Fay – one of Britain's most enigmatic and celebrated singer-songwriters – returns with a new album, Countless Branches. Countless Branches will be released January 17th on CD, LP and Deluxe 2xLP, featuring artwork by Benjamin A Vierling.

Sounding more sparse and succinct than his previous records, Countless Branches collects compositions drawn from the trove of material Fay has amassed over 40 years. Unfinished songs emerge with newly written words and melodies on Fay's recurring themes – nature, the family of man, the cycle of life and the ineffable vastness of it all – as if they had been lying in wait to find their place in our current zeitgeist. The resulting ten songs are as pointed and poignant as anything he has ever recorded.

His third release for the label, alike previous acclaimed recordings Life Is People (2012) and Who Is The Sender? (2015), was produced by Joshua Henry – with the cast list slimmed down from previous sessions. Guitarist Matt Deighton remains as Fay's trusted MD and the musicians have mostly all played on Fay's albums in the past. But both Henry and Fay thought that, this time, there should be more of Bill on his own at the piano, or with minimal accompaniment.

It's at the piano, alongside some rudimentary home recording equipment, where Bill has been composing music in the intervening decades between his first and most-recent album at every chance he could get. His newest material retains the awestruck, inquisitive feel of those early songs. They often evoke landscapes, ancient and sacred places, as their author traverses the outdoors to marvel at it all. And he is doing it all from that corner of his room at the piano, while the word about his work continues to grow and spread like so many branches. For decades now, Bill Fay's songs have been his ambassadors.
While still reluctant to play live or make public appearances, Fay's resolve and his purity shine through the work and make him a special artist, finding his wider world from that corner of the room – and long may he continue to do so.

More information can be found here.

"Mechanosphere is Cam Deas' abstract yet poignant second album exploring ideas of rhythmic dissonance and head-spinning proprioceptions for The Death of Rave. Following directly from his cultishly-acclaimed mini-LP Time Exercises, which was surprisingly deployed in Richie Hawtin's recent "CLOSE COMBINED - LIVE" mix and hailed as "Holy F#ck-What is This?!?" by Brainwashed, his new album applies rich polychromatic colour to his signature rhythmic constructions with a greatly heightened emotive traction and broader appeal while only going deeper on his radical ideas about the fundamentals of sound and composition. Big recommendation if you're into Autechre, Xenakis, Ligeti, Rashad Becker.

Using a computer-controlled modular synth, Cam takes the simple idea of layering pitches in multiple tempi to Nth degrees, resulting in a sensational and warped sense of temporality and gravity-defying physics. Effectively placing pitch on a scale in a similar way to Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano programming or even Ligeti's famous metronome experiment, Cam explores solutions to the problem of grid-locked linearity, or at least perceptions of it, by effectively ripping the rug from under electronic music convention to make his music appear as though in perpetual freefall, or a process of omnidirectional contraction/expansion that never quite resolves - always the same, ever different.

In Mechanosphere listeners effectively navigate through the music by a loose means of pattern recognition, picking out accentuated kicks and hits that pierce thru Cam's incredibly dense swells of endless metallic tone. But where his Time Exercises LP was unreservedly abstract and emotive in an alien sense, his follow-up practically sounds as though aliens have developed a form of 3D midi folk-jazz or court music for bacchanals and spiritual reasons.

From the vertiginous scale of "Ascension," thru the the jaw-dropping hyper stepper "Slip," to the controlled chaos of "Reflect, Deflect," and ultimately the deeply solemn yet discordantly lush finale of shearing metallic pitches in "Solitude," Cam offers an often shocking and ever fascinating grasp of electronic music’s potential to relate hard-to-communicate but intuitively felt ideas to the body and emotions.  It's a sober but incredibly wondrous sound, and only confirms that Cam's seismic stylistic transition this decade from preeminent, post-Takoma 12-string guitar player to visionary synthesist was certainly worthwhile."

-via Boomkat

Out now on The Death of Rave.

"Andy Stott's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded this year and following on from a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By and We Stay Together early this decade.

Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these 9 tracks (8 on the vinyl) harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged abandon. It is all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners.

There will be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one’s for dancing."

-via Boomkat

Out now on Modern Love.

Netlabel Vulpiano Records is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a cassette tape compilation as a benefit for nonprofit digital library Internet Archive (archive.org).  Limited to 100 copies and featuring exclusive and favorite tracks from the label's international roster of artists from Australia, England, France, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the USA.  Each cassette is hand-numbered and comes with either a holographic tarot card (78 copies) or an Artist Trading Card collage on a playing card (22 copies), selected randomly.  The genre-spanning release celebrates the musically diverse and collaborative spirit of the long-running label with selections in drone, folk, electronic, and more.

For a label founded on a Creative Commons ethos, Internet Archive has long been an indispensable host for Vulpiano: a place for our artists' work to be free to download, share, copy and redistribute.

The tape features drone / folk duo Natural Snow Buildings' first track since the 2016 release of Aldebaran: "Charles Thomas Tester". (Cassette exclusive)

Vulpiano Records logo art by Solange Gularte of Natural Snow Buildings.

Album layout and logo edit by Marilyn Roxie.

Playing card collages by Dan Shea and Marilyn Roxie.

More information can be found here.

As you lay on your back in the deep grass on a shadowy late-summer afternoon…tracing the outlines of patterns on the inside of your eyelids illuminated in translucense beneath the sun….ruminating, drifting in and out of sleep. Your dreams flirt with the irrational fears of the dark, of being left alone, of infinity…of being lost in corn fields reaching taller than the sky, of the comfort of feet dangling in a cold lake and splinters from running on a sun-dried summer dock. The world once felt new and alive…now through a haze, lost from the opacity of time.

Ohio is a new project from of 12k founder Taylor Deupree and long-time label-mate and collaborator Corey Fuller. The genesis of Ohio, besides the desire to work on a full album together, was them realizing they were both born in the US state of Ohio, not far from each other, and spent their earlier years crafting young memories there before moving away. This ended up being a simple, but interesting point of departure for the project because these early, hazy memories provided compelling conceptual roadmaps for the album as well as become inspiration for the song titles.

With no lack of irony the project started with a playful cover of singer/songwriter Damien Jurado's "Ohio." Deeply loved by both Deupree and Fuller, covering this song liberated them from working in their traditional "ambient" comfort-zone, challenging them with new structures and new directions. Their version of "Ohio" slowed the song down and explored acoustic and electric guitars, vocals, harmonies, pop-centric song structure, field recordings and a plethora of subtle studio fun (the looped clicking motor of a Roland RE-201 Space Echo being used as a "hi-hat" of sorts) and layers.

The project expanded from there and moved gradually as they very much felt working in the same physical space was important to its core. Writing, overdubbing, mixing and editing continued as the two found time to make the journeys between Tokyo and New York to share a studio. Each visit the songs would become more refined and be pushed into new and unexpected directions. A cathartic intensity found its way into the music echoing the intensity of life but at the same time remaining grounded.

The four years spent creating Upward, Broken, Always resulted in an album that engages the dichotomy between ambience and intensity. The hazy reworking of Jurado's "Ohio," or the duet for acoustic guitars recorded in the woods outside of Deupree's studio contrasts with the surprising, beautifully intense swells of overdriven guitar. Faraway drums and Fuller's ghostly vocals further expand the sonic image.

During one of their final editing sessions, with the accidental muting of musical tracks, the interludes at the end of each LP side were born. Fragments of preceding songs, stripped to a ghostly minimum like those distant Ohio memories.

Upward, Broken, Always is released in online formats and as a limited edition of 125 double 12” LPs. The LP art features an aerial photograph of the state of Ohio as well as the barn from Deupree's childhood home inside the gatefold jacket. There are 3 sides of audio on the release with Side D of the 2nd record being a full-side graphical etching of a topographical map.

More information can be found here.

A 10-cassette anthology housed in a handcrafted wooden box and featuring:

Kleistwahr
Neutral
Pinkcourtesyphone
Alice Kemp
She Spread Sorrow
G*Park
Relay For Death
Francisco Meirino
Fossil Aerosol Mining Project
Himukalt

The collection stands as the 50th release for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, plunging through the depths of post-industrial research, recombinant noise, surrealist demolition, and existential vacancy.

Curation and fabrication by Jim Haynes
Audio mastering by James Plotkin
Liner notes by Drew Daniel, Emily Pothast, Jim Haynes, and Donna Stonecipher

Release date: November 22, 2019

More information can be found here.

Over the past decade, the visionary musician Arthur Russell has entered something close to the mainstream.

Sampled and referenced by contemporary musicians, his papers now open to visitors at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York, and his name synonymous with a certain strain of tenderness, Russell is as widely known as he's ever been. Thanks to Russell's partner Tom Lee and to Steve Knutson of Audika Records, who have forged several records from Russell's vast archive of unfinished and unreleased work, the world now hears many versions of Arthur Russell.  There's the Iowa boy, the disco mystic, the singer-songwriter and composer, and the fierce perfectionist deep in a world of echo. While all of these elements of Russell are individually true, none alone define him.

Now, after ten years of work inside the Russell library, Lee and Knutson bring us Iowa Dream, yet another bright star in Russell's dazzling constellation.  Blazing with trademark feeling, these nineteen songs are a staggering collection of Russell's utterly distinct songwriting. And although Russell could be inscrutably single-minded, he was never totally solitary. Collaborating here is a stacked roster of downtown New York musicians, including Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Henry Flynt, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon, Steven Hall, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Saltzman, and David Van Tieghem.  Musician Peter Broderick makes a contemporary addition to this list: more than forty years after Russell recorded several nearly finished songs, Broderick worked diligently with Audika to complete them, and performed audio restoration and additional mixing.

Several tracks on Iowa Dream were originally recorded as demos, in two early examples of Russell's repeated brushes with potential popular success—first in 1974, with Paul Nelson of Mercury Records, and then in 1975, with the legendary John Hammond of Columbia Records.  For different reasons, neither session amounted to a record deal.  Russell kept working nearly up until his death in 1992 from complications of HIV-AIDS.

At once kaleidoscopic and intimate, Iowa Dream bears some of Russell's most personal work, including several recently discovered folk songs he wrote during his time in Northern California in the early 1970s.  For Russell, Iowa was never very far away. "I see, I see it all," sings Russell on the title track: red houses, fields, the town mayor (his father) streaming by as he dream-bicycles through his hometown.  Russell's childhood home and family echo, too, through "Just Regular People," "I Wish I Had a Brother," "Wonder Boy," "The Dogs Outside are Barking," "Sharper Eyes," and "I Felt."  Meanwhile, songs like "I Kissed the Girl From Outer Space," "I Still Love You," "List of Boys," and "Barefoot in New York" fizz with pop and dance grooves, gesturing at Russell's devotion to New York's avant-garde and disco scenes.  Finally, the long-awaited "You Did it Yourself," until now heard only in a brief heart-stopping black-and-white clip in Matt Wolf's documentary Wild Combination, awards us a new take with a driving funk rhythm and Russell's extraordinary voice soaring at the height of its powers.  On Iowa Dream, you can hear a country kid meeting the rest of the world—and with this record, the world continues to meet a totally singular artist.

More information can be found here.

"Circaea, the latest collaborative project involving prolific British musician Andrew Chalk (Ora, Mirror, Isolde...) debuts with The Bridge of Dreams.  Alongside Chalk in this new adventure, we find young cellist Ecka Rose Mordecai and classically trained guitarist Tom James Scott, also founder of the Skire label.  The twelve delicate miniatures that make up this album find protection in the caring arms of Faraway Press - Chalk's own label - and are a work of pure beauty."

-via SoundOhm

More information can be found here.

"Marsfield is a collaborative project that involves British musicians Andrew Chalk (Ora, Mirror, Isolde...), Robin Barnes and Vikki Jackman along with Australian ambient practitioner Brendan Walls.  Following Three Sunsets Over Marsfield and The Towering Sky - both released on Faraway Press in 2010, The Innocents is the group's third full-length release and includes two long mesmerizing compositions."

-via SoundOhm

More information can be found here.

The Heavy Steps Of Dreaming is the brilliant debut album from Vancouver-based Minor Pieces, a new songwriting partnership comprising acclaimed singer/composer Ian William Craig and newcomer Missy Donaldson, a singer and multi-instrumentalist. Retaining some of the textural play and experimentation of Ian's solo material whilst channeling it squarely within the domain of tangible songwriting, the pair utilize guitar, modified tape decks, bass and synths to fashion deeply-felt songs with their beautifully matched male/ female vocals standing resolutely center stage.  Taking influence and inspiration from the likes of Low, Grouper, Mazzy Star, Portishead, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk and Cat Power, The Heavy Steps Of Dreaming sounds at once familiar whilst forging something new, unique and beyond the sum of its influences.

More information can be found here.

With over two decades of formal exploration and exhilarating abstraction Get On is, somewhat surprisingly, only the fourth solo Pita full length. Peter Rehberg has always been vouched for pushing the very limits of the technology du jour, be it software or in recent years a complex modular set.  Rehberg's motives are one of unbridled exploration often resulting in extreme and exhilarating audio works.

Having spearheaded the contemporary electronic sound with his uncompromising explorations of noise, rhythm and extreme computer music, he has also worked with numerous experimental musicians in collaboration.  Rehberg stands in the wake of a sonic revolution, once fringe, which transformed over time into the sound of a generation of experimental geeks and club freaks worldwide.

Get On follows on from the 2016 release Get In. As with other titles in his "Get" series, we have an unwieldy blend of noise, abstraction, gnarled rhythm and blurred melody.  Both analogue and digital tools are deployed as a means of expressing something outside of everyday electronics. "AMFM" launches proceedings with some delightfully disorientating ricocheting electronics setting off a subversive sonic spectrum. "Frozen Jumper" presents some ugly skittering electronics which rotate into exquisitely mangled forms before launching into an unsettling euphoria.  The last piece "Motivation" is a towering sensitive work, simultaneously haunted and emotionally moving.  Get On marks another monumental work in the ongoing evolution from one of the ground zero pioneers of contemporary radical electronic music.  As uncompromising as ever this is Pita in his prime. Emotion rung from the most twisted of frames.

More information can be found here.