ANAL SADIST - 'Ugly, Still' CD (Impulsy Stetoskopu)
A solo act by William Christman, a US performance / noise artist and owner of Turbine Cassettes. "Ugly, Still" reissues two tapes ("Austere" and "Chaw / Shotgun Head") and unreleased live tracks, spanning the years 1987-1997. Inspired by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Var�se, Morton Subotnick, Fre Firth, Merzbow and other Japanese noise artists, Anal Sadist has managed to come up with his own style of industrial. Ltd x 250 copies in black sandpaper envelopes.
UK 11£
Europe 12£
World 13£
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JARL - 'Vertigo Emission' CD (Autarkeia)
"Vertigo Emission" is the twelfth album of Swedish genius Erik Jarl. The composer remains loyal to the style he propagates. Slow, very heavy and dismal sound waves grip the listeners and take them into the colourless, uncanny and morbid world. Like the previous ones, this album reminds a person who could earlier see the colours but became colour blind and in order to adapt to the new situation has to understand familiar yet irreversibly changed signs anew. The aesthetics of Erik Jarl's sonic decoration is like always very austere and merciless, however, it is marked by endless charm resulting from especially sensitive and subtle construction. Ltd x 200 copies in an embossed glossy digipak.
NOISEGATE - 'Suspended Animation Ambient Vol. I' CD (Tumult)
For their second full length album, this East Bay ambient act abandon the violent, corrosive noise that peppered their first full length and instead have created a dark and barren dronescape of ominous, almost imperceptibly shifting, deep, resonant rumbles. Shimmering luminescent shards of low end flow effortlessly through the glistening darkness while hazy tonal reverberations reflect microscopic textures, grey and austere. Breath-taking arrangements of hum and buzz, chime and soothe. Reminiscent of the isolationist experiments and drone investigations of Lustmord, Organum, Zoviet France, Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough.
PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT - 'Austere' CD (Monorail Trespassing)
Five years in the making, and the first duo recordings, created between 2004-9. Moving past the harsh noise cutups but not eschewing them entirely; rather, moving forward to areas of sound collage, music-concrete, field recording and electroacoustic. A calculated and controlled effort. Every sound strategically placed in the narrative. At the core of each track rests layers of cold, minimal electronic drones, which form the skeleton of the album. The progression continues. Ltd x 1000 copies.
THOMAS NOLA ET SON ORCHESTRE feat. DOUGLAS P. (DEATH IN JUNE) - 'The Doctor O.S.T.' CD (Caciocavallo)
The soundtrack to 2005's underground cult hit "The Doctor", a film described by the All Movie Guide as "a surreal landscape of paranoia and despair", is now available on CD and LP. With music by director Thomas Nola and his orchestra (including Radioactive Prostitute on trumpet!), and narration by DEATH IN JUNE's Douglas P, the album stands as a rare treat sure to tickle and pervert the senses. An array of genres, from the pseudo-ragtime of 'Drawn & Quartered' to the gothic kindermusik of 'Miss Marilla Huxley', create a strange mix unlike any you've ever heard. Douglas P's voice, appearing in numerous places throughout the record, lends a suitably austere and dark atmosphere to the proceedings. A must-have for all fans of Death in June.
UK 10£
Europe 11£
World 12£
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TOMAS KORBER / KAZUYA ISHIGAMI - 'Mistakes' CD (Neus-318)
Swiss improviser and composer Tomas Korber works with sounds created by Japanese laptop artist Kazuya Ishigami and vice versa. Utilizing Korber’s guitar sounds Ishigami crafts an intriguing electronic world over two pieces - austere electrics, frenzied digitalia, high pitches, bass drones, melodic waves of feedback and rhythmic pulses. Korber meanwhile begins his piece with a static piercing tone that dissipates suddenly into silence. A strategy he continues throughout the piece, building towards crescendos and the then dropping in a block of silence, only to startle with a single resonating tone.
UK 5£
Europe 6£
World 7£
QUANTITY
TREES - 'Freed Of This Flesh' CD (Crucial Blast)
The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees return with their second offering - two new fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Black glacial riffs suspended in space, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment, deep guttural demon throat singing, and endless sheets of glistening metallic feedback that spill and drift to the far edges of their time-stretched ambient doom, a crumbling, blighted majesty, noxious ambient blackdoom adrift on putrescent tides. Austere slabs of crushing heaviness arranged into ghoulish constructs of atmospheric dread, moving so slow that the music seems to lose all sense of propulsion at times... the guitars stretched into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of incredibly slow and ponderous drums. "Freed Of This Flesh" inhabits the same depths as Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate, and Bunkur. Digipak.
Visions is the Dark Ambient project of Frédéric Arbour (Cyclic Law boss). Following in the footsteps of "Lapse" (2005), "Summoning The Void" offers a deeper and more refined rendering of previously explored themes. This is unmistakably VISIONS, but a notch above in terms of spaciousness, musicality and profound spirituality. Passages that are more solemn and austere give way to ritualised motifs where voices from the void whisper words beyond words. Calm drifts bearing a more aerial and streamlined quality emerge, from which shards of light cut through the massive pitch-black backdrop where a bulging red sun awaits in the distance, endlessly and slowly consuming itself. Beyond that, nothingness. Void. A world and non-world of infinite proportions, a macrocosmic voyage through the hidden and intangible vastness of all... for we are stardust. Ltd x 1000 copies in an outsize embossed sleeve.
Swiss improviser and composer Tomas Korber works with sounds created by Japanese laptop artist Kazuya Ishigami and vice versa. Utilizing Korber’s guitar sounds Ishigami crafts an intriguing electronic world over two pieces - austere electrics, frenzied digitalia, high pitches, bass drones, melodic waves of feedback and rhythmic pulses. Korber meanwhile begins his piece with a static piercing tone that dissipates suddenly into silence. A strategy he continues throughout the piece, building towards crescendos and the then dropping in a block of silence, only to startle with a single resonating tone.
