DER BLAUE REITER - 'Le Paradise Funèbre - L'Envers Du Tristesse' CD (Caustic Records)
A side-project of Sathorys Elenorth (Narsilion, Ordo Funebris). Inspired by warlike ambience, where powerful percussion, solemn piano pieces, majestic martial and neoclassical passages are the central characters of this work. More than an hour of melancholic music replete of feelings and deep pain. "Feel how the crying of a cold war, legacy of the past, stir itself in the tops of destruction of our last days, where the dreams are just a legend and the death is a dark reality." For fans of Predella Avant, Raison d'êtré, Les Joyaux De La Princesse etc. Presented in a 6-panel digifile.
UK 10.50£
Europe 11.50£
World 12.50£
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FRAKMUNDT - 'Heiwehland' CD (Steinklang)
Sixteen unique, expressive and headstrong songs grant the listener a passionate glimpse of the Alpine areas of inner Switzerland. On “Heiwehland”, accordion, guitars, hurdy-gurdy, bass, flutes, and the percussion contributed by Merlin (Eluveitie) blend together to form the unique and unconventional Swiss Ur-Folk. The varied songs in Swiss Alemannic dialect take you to a more than one hour long journey into the heart of the alps. They speak of historic events, tragic tales, frightening creatures, strange events, mysterious beings and the melancholic longing for a beautiful homeland that is disappearing in its original form but also about its outlasting beauty. As on the previous album “Urbärglieder”, traditional songs are reinterpreted and of course the comical and humorous elements have their place. The extensive digipak contains a 20-page booklet full of breathtaking Alpine photography and includes all the lyrics in Swiss Alemannic dialect as well as their description in English.
UK 11£
Europe 12£
World 13£
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FRANCISCO LOPEZ & RICHARD FRANCIS - 'BromBron 14: In De Blaauwe Hand' CD (Korm Plastics)
Francisco López (Spain) and Richard Francis (New Zealand) have created "in de blaauwe hand" upon invitation from Extrapool for a brief working residency in Nijmegen, to develop a collaboration piece for the Brombron CD series. Working with very small seed source sound samples that were exchanged between them, two intermingling compositional paths unfolded in two parallel small studios. In a short (but very intense) period of time a whole world of very delicate and subtle materials arose. The hour-long track merges without mix a dreamy geography of subtleties and complex organicities that is more the result of aesthetic affinities than pre-structured plan. In that sense, this is a composition born from the sound themselves, following the paths indicated by them. Presented in a card-slip-sleeve.
Two years of hard work have been employed using sounds and processed field recordings. It’s a unequalled conceptual soundscape in this artist’s huge discography and it perfectly joins to Glacial Movements aesthetics. After a few seconds from the track beginning we are dip into an arctic trip which lasts more than an hour and in which tangled weavings in a masterly fashion handled by the Spanish artist appear, develop and dissolve. Gusts of arctic wind, the Amarok’s wheezing breath (Amarok is the name of a gigantic wolf in Inuit mythology) and the sense of loss in the polar night are only some of the sensations that this cryogenic hallucinatory acoustic is able to evoke. Digipak.
GEISHA - 'Die Verbrechen Der Liebe' CD (Crucial Blast)
This hour-long, six track monolith follows Geisha into a psychedelic black storm, covered in a thick sheen of white noise and gritty distortion. Seminal noise rock / sludge combined with violent, chaotic noise, drone-noise and corrosive skree, percussive pummel, and deranged singing. Includes the monstrous 30:35 "Theme From Diana" - a re-working of a "metal percussion" set that Geisha originally performed live. A slowly building fog of voices and effects and shimmering metal that blooms into an expanse of droning, fx-heavy guitar, looping samples, cosmic effects, and improv percussion. It's a kind of rumbling industrial dronescape that stretches out forever, until it suddenly explodes into speaker-annihilating noise-metal dirge. Ltd x 1000 copies in a gatefold jacket.
UK 10.50£
Europe 11.50£
World 12.50£
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JENNIFER GENTLE - 'Concentric' CD (A Silent Place)
Better known as purveyors of quirky, semi-sleazy avant pop gems on their Sub Pop albums, Jennifer Gentle have also issued through the years a series of weirder releases, running the gamut from out-there psychedelic rock to “crunching and hefty slab of tripped out musique concrète worthy of Joji Yuasa, Kunihara Akayima or one of their equivalent early ‘60s greats” (Julian Cope). Concentric is the last and also their bleakest, most uncompromising and probably best experimental album to date. This time Fasolo took his and into his own studio, recorded them and then spent hours painstakingly editing the material, adding here and there the odd effect and generally directing what sounds like a nightmarish Surrealist movie perversely shot in lush Cinemascope, or a hellish version of Lumpy Gravy as played by a freaked-out jazz combo. Digipak.
UK 8£
Europe 9£
World 10£
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K. MEIZTER - 'Tetraphobia' CD (Old Europa Cafe)
After channeling all his musical energy into Beyond Sensory Experience for the past two years, K. Meizter finally returns with a new solo exertion. Spawned during the sinister last months of a northern year, Tetraphobia scans through the kafkaesque layers of human anxiety, and continues K. Meizter’s distinctive manipulation of sound, melody and pulse. Following 2 previous solo albums K. Meizter’s new release develops even more unsettling atmospheres of reflection and alteration. With 10 tracks and over an hour of foreboding avant-garde, "Tetraphobia" is K. Meizter’s most convincing work thus far. Dark and solemn.
"Babel" is an extremely dynamic and dense work that could generally be classified as experimental dark ambient. The theme here is the Tower of Babel and each disc takes a somewhat different yet complimentary approach: the first ("Red Babylon") is generally a rather heavy and intense recording, while the second ("Citadel of the Nevermind") is more droney and dream-like. A profound and monumental journey lasting well over two hours. Ltd x 500 copies in a special printed gatefold wallet.
UK 13.50£
Europe 14.50£
World 15.50£
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MAEROR TRI - 'The A.V.E. - Tapes / Live In Nevers' CD (Zhelezobeton)
Maeror Tri existed from 1988-1996 (members now recording as Troum and 1000schoen). Over those nine years they made a serious contribution to the development of the European post-industrial scene, focusing on the transcendental quality of sound, its ability to expand consciousness and to awaken timeless and non-personal spiritual experiences. They recorded their industrial drone ambient music with the use of guitars, percussion, tape loops, various objects and effects, turning everything in a coherent flux of unconscious drones. This CD contains the last unreleased recordings by Maeror Tri. Four tracks are fragments of the band's 12-hour concert at the Audio-Visual-Experimental festival in Arnhem, Netherlands in November 1995; the fifth track is a part of their performance at the Musique Ultimes festival in Nevers, France in May 1995. The material was remastered from the original DAT tapes by Sergey Uak-Kib (Kshatriy). Ltd x 500 hand-numbered copies in a digifile with artwork by Vresnit.
MICHAEL MANTRA - 'Amanita Lake' 2 x CD & DVD (Silentes)
Two hours and a half of music collected on a double CD set that also contains a DVD entitled "Amanita Furniture". Two long tracks of sublime and evocative pseudo-abstract and multicoloured ambient textures, built with “discreet” and repetitive background microstructures layered with continuous and infinite variations worked out from “clusters” of sounds and “sketches” of melodic sequences made of light sonorities, “delicate” and “quiet” as well, but also hypnotic and warm… Fragile harmonies and mild dissonances in a timeless sonic continuum that enwraps and “rocks” the listener, among infinite spirals and floating waves in an everlasting movement… Another new, mind-boggling masterpiece, absolutely unmissable for all the lovers of Michael Mantra’s music. Presented in a stunning 6-panel digisleeve.
UK 18£ Europe 20£
World 22£
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SICKNESS - 'I Have Become The Disease That Made Me' CD (Ground Fault Recordings)
One of the most brutal CDs to exist in the last decade. Sickness (aka Chris Goudreau of Omei, V.D.) has been around for about 10 years. The sounds on this CD tear through your speaker cones and then drill into your brain. These sounds are constantly moving, panning, jumping and changing at a rapid pace. There is very little “down time” for the duration of the hour long CD. Fans of brutal harsh noise will not be disappointed. Series III ('loud') in the Ground Fault series.
UK 10.50£
Europe 11.50£
World 12.50£
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THE HAFLER TRIO - 'Seven Hours Sleep' CD (Korm Plastics)
The sixth in the Hafler Trio reissue series. Allegedly based on dream research, this is non-academic electroacoustic / musique concrete at it's finest. Chris Watson and Edward Moolenbeek were still part of the group - Watson bringing a strong interest in field recordings to the studio and Moolenbeek signalling an overt dealing with perceptual issues. The album's progression from the early disorientation to the closing drones succeeds in putting the listener in another state, making this one of the Hafler Trio's more effective collections. Originally released on LP by Laylah (1985) and reissued "wrongly" on CD by Mute (1996). "Now really available as should have been." Heavy package with booklet and mini-poster.
UK 12.00£
Europe 13.50£
World 15.00£
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WHOURKR - 'Concrete' CD (Crucial Blast)
The 2nd album from French deathtronix duo Whourkr is a whirlwind of electronically processed and treated avant-death/grind that is as violent and brutal as it is complex and obsessively constructed, relying as much on samplers and software as it does on bonecrushing riffs, screaming and hyperspeed blastbeats. Following a similar strategy as James Plotkin's post-production grind experiments on the first Phantomsmasher album, all of the guitars, drums, and vocals are arranged and recorded by Whourkr and then run through a gauntlet of hardcore editing and remixing. Total chaos deathgrind filtered through a futuristic cuisinart of ultra-aggressive electronica, like a freaked-out epileptic mashup of Atari Teenage Riot, Dying Fetus, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Venetian Snares, Blut Aus Nord, and John Zorn. Akin to Drumcorps, Bong-Ra, Dataclast, Noism, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Reptiljan, Mulk and DHR. Digipak.
