TECHNOLOGY & TEAMWORK - 'WE USED TO BE FRIENDS'

Formats

• GWR01LP - LP (COLOURED)

  5060446128213

Details

*MILKY CLEAR VINYL - 300 COPIES ONLY FOR WORLD!!* Technology + Teamwork’s fizzling synths, interweaving textures and punchy rhythms are beguiling on their long-awaited debut album We Used To Be Friends. However, at the heart of it all it’s the connection between the group’s two members, Anthony Silvester and Sarah Jones, the friendship the much-travelled duo have managed to maintain for nearly 15 years and a showcase of the slow-burning construction of the electronic world that they’ve surrounded themselves with. We Used To Be Friends is ultimately the tale of two storied artists in their own right, holding onto each other through personal and career twists and turns, relocations and broader movements through respective phases of their lives. Silvester and Jones first met and then collaborated as part of biting post-punk five-piece XX Teens in 2008, eventually breaking off to forge their own path together even as the latter’s demand as a drummer grew. Performing with everyone from Hot Chip, Harry Styles and Bloc Party among many others, Jones has been a constant percussive presence across the sphere of alternative UK pop music – she’s also found time for her own solo project Pillow Person and played on records by the likes of Puscifer and Kurt Vile. Silvester meanwhile has performed in art galleries across Europe including: Fridericianum in Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, and Vleeshal in Middelburg, as well as providing sound design and composing work for several art films. Technology + Teamwork is the constant throughout all of that though. “Technology + Teamwork's name perfectly describes how we work” Silvester explains. “Sometimes the teamwork is between each other and sometimes it’s between us and the technology.” Although going by the name Technology + Teamwork as far back as 2014, two events conspired that pulled the project into focus for the pair of them: firstly, Silvester spent a year constructing a soundproof studio shed on the border of London and Essex where he lives. Secondly, inevitably, the pandemic brought the globe-trotting Jones back home to just seven miles away from her long-time collaborator and friend. “We probably hung out more than we had for a few years” says Silvester. “Also, after all her Pillow Person releases Sarah had gotten really good with recording vocals and knowing what did and didn’t work and had a really good home studio set up. We still worked separately though, exchanging ideas via email and WhatsApp.” As with many artists through 2020 and early 2021, working separately was a new necessity that they were forced to adapt to. However, it became clear that there were creative benefits to it. “It really changed our sound and our sounds became a lot more focused as a result” Jones says. “I wanted to use the same ideas of improvisation that I might use while playing the drums for myself and apply that to melodies and lyrics.” The album bristles with hyperpop modernity. You can hear it in the manipulated vocals most prominently on Big Blue’s disco strut and on Moving Too’s heady mix of pitched up voice and burrowing sub bass. However, the pair also looked to San Francisco and the West Coast synthesis movement of the 60s, Silvester inspired by the likes of Suzanne Ciani and Don Buchla. The plaintive lo-fi and melancholy of Amsterdam incorporates Mutable Instrument’s Marbles by Émilie Gillet which – inspired by Buchla’s own synthesis work – outputs random voltages to give the track an air of unpredictability. It’s something that occurs throughout the album, the duo revelling in the happy accidents that disrupt the flow of their hook-laden pop. “The ‘Buchlian’ ideas of music having randomness and uncertainty, completely freed us up” Silvester explains. “It felt a bit like having more members in the band, machines that didn't do what you expected or intended.” Perhaps more subtly, is the influence of 17th and 18th century Baroque music, with Silvester drawing a line between it and the 90’s R’n’B he and Jones both love – exemplified perhaps best on K+B’s percussive claps and sultry grooves. The portentous juddering synthpop of the title track, meanwhile, alludes specifically to Handel’s Sarabande. It’s typical of an album that only needs a scratch of its seemingly glossy surface to unearth a myriad of contorted touchstones and reference points that’ve fermented beneath it. Thematically there’s an anxious sense to the record, with tracks often balancing above a quiet sense of unerring tension even at their most bombastic. Moving Too is the result of an existential doubt that hit Silvester while out cycling, with the outro refrain "it's not enough to die you also have to be forgotten" a take on something Samuel Beckett once said. These worries are echoed on the album’s closing track What A Year, which borrows a lot of lines from the late drag performer and fashion designer Dorian Corey including the grimly defiant "you're gonna leave your mark somewhere in this world just by getting through it”. Those clouds offer a counter point to We Used To Be Friends, but then isn’t that what great pop albums do? Technology + Teamwork undoubtedly love the craft of the hook and the song, but they always position themselves left of centre, prepared to scuff things up, pull something out of shape or manipulate something to leave it sounding warped. Much like their friendship, nothing here is particularly linear – and it’s all the better for it. Bio: Anthony Silvester & Sarah Jones first collaborated as part of biting post-punk five piece XX Teens in 2008, eventually breaking off to forge their own path together even as the latter's demand as a drummer grew. Performing with everyone from Hot Chip, Bat for Lashes, Harry Styles and Bloc Party (among many others), Jones has been a constant percussive presence across the sphere of alternative UK pop music - she's also found time for her own solo project Pillow Person and played on records by the likes of Puscifer and Kurt Vile. Silvester meanwhile has performed in art galleries across Europe including Fridericianum in Kassel, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, and Wleeshal in Middelburg, as well as providing sound design and composing work for several art films. Technology & Teamwork is the constant throughout all of that though. "We Used To Be Friends" proves that Technology & Teamwork undoubtedly love the craft of the hook and the song, but they always position themselves left of centre, prepared to scuff things up, pull something out of shape or manipulate something to leave it sounding warped. Much like their friendship, nothing hear is particularly linear - and it's all the better for it. 

Tracks

Press

Full UK Press and Radio campaign underway via Engache. Olays from BBC6 Marc Riley and session forthcoming. Plays from Afrodeutsche BBC6. Feat. BBC6 New Music Fix

Audio & Video

SBT (SARABETH TUCEK) - 'THE GIFT / 13TH ST #2'

Formats

• OCOM01 - 7"

  5060446128206

Details

American singer-songwriter Sarabeth Tucek re-emerges in 2023 after a decade-long hibernation with the new moniker SBT and a brand new double A-side 7” “The Gift / 13th St. #2” in advance of her long-awaited third album next spring, details to be announced in the new year. “The Gift” has already received heavy rotations on BBC Radio 6 Music courtesy of Marc Riley. An extensive UK tour is lined up to support the impending album release that will be issued world-wide on SBT's own freshly-minted imprint Ocean Omen. The lead track “The Gift” is a magnificent and swoonsome pop song awash with its modern take on classic Americana. It is indeed, a timely reminder of how great songs can be, evoking the classic chiming guitar pop of the likes of Game Theory, or Australia’s The Church and melding with the contemporary choogle of the likes of Jeff Tweedy / Wilco, whereas the second side has and almost updated that seminal Velvets drone-pop chug that flows like it should be released on Creation or indeed Homestead / Sub Pop in the late 80s. Yes, both tracks are that good.. trust us. 400 only pressing, in 4 different wraparound sleeves, 100 of each randomly distributed.

Tracks

A: THE GIFT
A: 13TH ST. # 2

Press

400 only pressing, in 4 different wraparound sleeves, 100 of each randomly distributed.

Audio & Video

DOUG MCKECHNIE - 'SAN FRANCISCO MOOG: 1968-72 VOL: 2'

Formats

• VG006 - LP (COLOURED)

  795154138913

Details

** FIRST PRESSING ON FUSCHIA COLOURED VINYL* The first volume of San Francisco Moog: 1968-72 introduced the world to a trove of recordings from a little-known hinge point in electronic-music history. Vol. 2 brings to light the rest of tapes—and the rest of the story. In 1968, Bay Area native Doug McKechnie got hold of one the very first modular Moog synthesizers ever made and began finding his own way to play it. Soon, he was hauling the finicky instrument around to perform improvised concerts at colleges and psychedelic ballrooms, as well as an ill-fated appearance on the bill at Altamont. Some of the performances were recorded, and the surviving tapes—never before released—capture a free-flowing, transportive sound that fills in the gap between the austere mid-century academic avant garde and the expansive cosmic suites of Tangerine Dream and the rest of the Berlin School in the ’70s. Vol. 2 captures a wider range of sounds and moods, encompassing austere sonic experiments, early sequenced pulses, and melodic etudes. “These pieces represent amazingly fully formed early approaches to the very idea of musical synthesis...arresting even to modern ears.” —Goldmine “Presages both Tangerine Dream’s soundtracks and, in its most grimy moments, Acid Tracks.” —The Wire

Tracks

1. Search For An Honest Man
2. Meditation Moog 2
3. Glide
4. Live At The Family Dog
5. Gyre & Gimble
6. Moving
7. Mr. Toad?s Wild Ride
8. Rumble, Ramp, Explosion

Press

Second volume of never-before-released
recordings that rewrite the early history of
electronic music
Printed inner sleeve with liner notes from
pioneering synth artist Suzanne Ciani

Audio & Video

THE DARK - 'DRESSING THE CORPSE'

Formats

• SCAT80X - LP (COLOURED)

  753417008014

• SCAT80 - LP

  753417008014

Details

The Dark were a Cleveland hardcore / deathrock hybrid that in many ways was ground zero for The Guns, Spike in Vain, Knifedance, and several more beyond. For The Dark’s first ever vinyl album Dressing The Corpse, Scat has collected highlights from sessions recorded between 1981 and 1984 that range from savage post-punk (imagine Venom covering Warsaw), to raging exacto-knife thrashers, deathrock, and proto-black metal —there’s even the requisite creepy, atmospheric instrumental to open the album (“Beyond The Ice”)—which is naturally followed by “Fire In The Church.” Then things go other places, the group covered a lot of ground in its two and a half years and were always ahead of the curve. Although the band’s median age ranges from fifteen to seventeen across these recordings, the rhythm section is second to none. The guitar playing is way further afield than most hardcore bands of the era. Namesake vocalist Tom Dark howls like a wolf, and could command a stage like few others. To be fair, the band’s youth does make itself known in some of the lyrics, but otherwise you’d never guess this was just a bunch of kids—it needn’t be graded on a curve. The Dark had auspicious beginnings. They cut their teeth as The Decapitators in 1979, learning to play at the feet of the electric eels, Pagans, Dead Boys, and Cramps. After a year off, the four reformed to play only originals as The Dark, and almost immediately Mike Hudson of the Pagans wanted to manage the band. Included here is a demo Hudson recorded just three weeks after the band’s first practice. Hudson only lasted a year, but it was a hell of a start. The majority of the recordings on Dressing The Corpse are culled from the band’s 1984 album Scream Until We Die, which was not released until 2006 when Grand Theft Audio did a comprehensive double CD version of it. Included here are a few of the best non-album tracks from that release as well. Previously unreleased tracks include the aforementioned Hudson demo, as well as a previously unknown second demo from early 1982, ably representing the pre-thrash version of the band.

Tracks

1. Beyond The Ice
2. Fire In The Church
3. No Eyes 4. Resurrection
5. Last Day 6. The Voice Is Dead
7. Shattered Trust
8. I Can Wait
9. Screeching Metal
10. Put Your Hand Through The Plastic
11. You Got What You Wanted
12. Get Out 13. Ex-Girl
14. The Passage 15. Hate Song
16. Dancing With The Dead
17. Hit Squad
18. Six And Change

Press

First-time vinyl release of early ?80s
Cleveland hardcore / deathrock hybrid

Audio & Video

FELT - 'GOLD MINE TRASH'

Formats

• 197201 - LP

  852545003813

• 197201B - LP (COLOURED)

Details

COL VINYL RESTOCK Lawrence Hayward knew that he wanted to be a pop star as a teen, and he devised a plan to release ten albums and ten singles over ten years to make that dream come true. A particular and determined individual, he would only be known as Lawrence from that day forward. His hopes for stardom would be pinned on his newly formed band, the succinctly named Felt. Soon signed to Cherry Red Records, Lawrence’s achingly cool vocals and the group’s way with walking melodies were evident on their debut for the label, “Something Sends Me To Sleep.” This compilation collects material from Felt’s Cherry Red period of 1981 to 1985, kicking off with that confident start, assembling numerous high points, and closing with their biggest hit, “Primitive Painters.” This phase of the band is defined by the songwriting partnership and unique interplay of Lawrence and guitarist Maurice Deebank, with Deebank’s stylish and confident playing the envy of many of their counterparts. He delivers a constant string of shimmering hooks that wrap themselves around and over top of Lawrence’s more traditional beat combo song structures, as if trying to fit four songs worth of ideas into a pre-set radio friendly cutoff time. It works wonderfully as Lawrence always counters with a solid bedrock. In one of many brushes with the brass ring, in 1984 Felt recorded versions of “Dismantled King Is Off The Throne” and “Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow,” for the newly formed and Warners-backed label Blanco y Negro, in hopes that the band would follow their A+R man Mike Alway to the executive suite. Despite putting forward two of their finest songs, it was not to be. While major label dreams had to remain on the shelf, fans were delighted to be able to hear these beautifully stripped down and more direct versions when this compilation was released a few years later. By 1985 the Felt roller coaster was something Maurice Deebank was constantly getting on and off of. As Gary Ainge always kept the beat, and Lawrence never lost focus, they were joined by local teen prodigy Martin Duffy on keyboards, filling out the arrangements, and following Deebank’s racing six-string cascades in “The Day The Rain Came Down” you can even hear a tiny hint of the next phase of the band in Duffy’s organ before Maurice swoops to the finish. The newly expanded Felt would then put everything they had into making one of the defining releases of the 80s: “Primitive Painters.”

Tracks

1. Something Sends Me To Sleep
2. Trails Of Colour Dissolve
3. Dismantled King Is Off The Throne
4. Penelope Tree
5. Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow
6. Crystal Ball
7. The Day The Rain Came Down
8. Fortune
9. Vasco Da Gama
10. Primitive Painters

Press

Originally released on Cherry Red Records
in 1987
Includes the hit single 'Primitive
Painters' produced by Robin Guthrie and
featuring vocals from Elizabeth Fraser of
Cocteau Twins
Audio and artwork personally overseen by
Lawrence

Audio & Video

FELT - 'BUBBLEGUM PERFUME'

Formats

• 197202 - LP

  852545003820

• 197202P - LP (COLOURED)

Details

COL VINYL RESTOCK Following a run with Cherry Red Records that featured a potential major label jump, guitarist Maurice Deebank quitting and rejoining multiple times, several pop stardom carrots just out of reach, mixing battles with Robin Guthrie, and a shocking entry into the record charts, Lawrence (just “Lawrence”, like “Cher” or “Madonna” thank you very much) knew he would be making a change with his band Felt. He would be seeing out his plan of ten albums and ten singles in ten years alongside a new partner in Creation Records. This compilation beautifully captures those years. Creation was beginning a rapid ascent at the time, with Alan McGee serving as its hyperactive mouthpiece and focal point. McGee was all in on the band. “Lawrence achieved pop perfection, a breathless rush of sensitivity and intelligence. It was too understated to be commercial, too art to go pop, too pop to go art—in other words it was a perfect combination of all the music I loved at the time.” McGee was thrilled to have what he considered a real star on the label, and Lawrence was equally thrilled to have such an enthusiastic cheerleader. He funneled that enthusiasm into some of the most focused songwriting of his career, as well as some of his wildest experiments, all of which are on display here. 

Tracks

1. I Will Die With My Head In Flames
2. Stained-Glass Windows In The Sky
3. I Didn?t Mean To Hurt You
4. Space Blues
5. Autumn
6. Be Still
7. There?s No Such Thing As Victory
8. Magellan
9. The Final Resting Of The Ark
10. Sandman?s On The Rise Again
11. Don?t Die On My Doorstep
12. Tuesday?s Secret
13. Book Of Swords
14. Female Star
15. Fire Circle
16. The Darkest Ending
17. Bitter End
18. Rain Of Crystal Spires
19. Voyage To Illumination
20. Ballad Of The Band

Press

'An excellent Felt primer for the uninitiated.'
Melody Maker.
Originally released on Cherry Red Records
in 1990
Audio and artwork personally overseen by
Lawrence

Audio & Video

DECAPITATED LOVERS - '3 SONG 12'

Formats

• LG3 - 12"

  731199495345

Details

Decapitated Lovers was a short lived Washington D.C. side project from the late 1990’s that featured Myra Power (Slant 6) on guitar and shirtless local she-thug Speck Brown on drums, along with Aaron Montaigne (Heroin, Antioch Arrow), Andy Coronado (Monorchid), and the elusive North Carolina prop-comic Paul Swanson aka “Carrot-Bottom” (In/Humanity) who each took turns filling various duties within the group. The band never practiced all together at the same time and played only once at a not-so-legendary birthday party for Allison Wolfe in her urine soaked living room sometime in 1998. Recorded under forgotten circumstances, the demo has been fermenting patiently for 25 years on a dubbed-over copy of Fidelity Jones’s 1989 masterpiece “Piltdown Lad”. Unearthed by the band after a quarter century, LG Records is proud as can be to present this lost “gem” on a 200 gram one-sided 45 RPM 12” vinyl pressing housed in a sturdy tip-on style cardboard jacket and printed inner sleeve. The rediscovery of the Decapitated Lovers’ hard-core demonic cranium-crushing yet easy going sound will finally legitimize the historically overlooked and underrepresented DC punk scene on the grand musical chessboard and put the city on the map once and for all. Perchance.

Tracks

Press

Audio & Video

DON BRADSHAW-LEATHER - 'DISTANCE BETWEEN US'

Formats

• DIST101 - 2xLPs

  2090505280241

Details

Don Bradshaw-Leather is a mysterious cult artist active on the London scene in the early 1970s, releasing just the one ambitious double LP on his own label in 1972. There has been speculation as to who this guy was. Some saying he looks like Robert John Goddfrey of The Enid, and also because of similarity in the title and some of the music, it was touted that it could have been Adrian Wagner’s prequel to his “Distances Between Us” – both not true. Don Bradshaw-Leather was, in fact, his name, born as just Donald Bradshaw I believe, and (according to Jay who was a regular in the basement of Honest Johns, Rhythm Records in Camden Town) was seen around a lot in the area in the early 1970’s busking and at small gatherings and concerts. He would hock his records around the local stores just to cover his expenses, and never sought any proper distribution. At least two versions exist of this, one with a laminated cover, the other standard matt card. In the late 1970’s it was still possible to find copies of this, in fact, Honest Johns in Goldhawk Road still had new ones in 1979. I and my brother Steve used to buy every copy we could find in Record & Tape Exchange’s various bargain basements in London, copies from as little as 10p, and we had dozens – but we never ever found a good pressing, even ones that were supposedly new! It’s a magical record really, if you can stand the usual record noise (a real annoyance when some parts are so spacious and close to silence), with just 4 tracks, each a slightly different mood, involving drums, percussion, piano, Mellotron, and voice, amongst sundry other things, lots of big reverb, clever layering / multi-tracking. Almost Krautrock in its attitude, it’s wanton abandon, and for the heck of it, experimentation makes it one that peels off the delights layer by layer, drawing the listener into the ritual.

Tracks

Press

Reissue of this cult 1972 album which featured on the infamous Nurse With Wound List.

Audio & Video

MUSLIMGAUZE - 'LO-FI INDIA ABUSE'

Formats

• AKT07LP - LP

  710473186629

• AKT07LPPIC - LP (PICTURE DISC)

  0710473185486

Details

*BLACK VINYL & PIC DISC AVAILABLE* India Lo-Fi Abuse was recorded in 1998, some tracks are "pure" Muslimgauze and some are re-mixs of tracks from Systemwide's "Sirius" CD (see also Systemwide meets Muslimgauze "at the City of the Dead" 12"). Nearly all of the tracks have hand percussion in varying tempos and intensities and at least 1/2 make use of electronic noise surges. The sound is very crisp and clean, extremely well produced, recorded and nicely varied throughout the length of the disc. Some track by track comments: "Antalya" is obviously from the same sessions as "Fakir Sind" seeing as it shares the same hand percussion sound, whistles, vocal wailing, cut-ups and delays. "Valencia Flames" sounds like a Systemwide remix. A dub bass line, hi-hat and background vocal of some sort are all obliterated by numerous delays, starts, stops and re-starts with an unpredictable nature in these cut-up tracks. "Al Souk Dub" injects background voices, market sounds and drones into the cut-up mix of slow hand percussion playing. "Catacomb Dub" and the final two tracks make use of twinkling synth waves, presumably a Systemwide sound source. "Dust of Saqqara" has a heavy pulsating electronic sound wave over an old beat box rhythm. "Android Cleaver" is brutal (as is "Nommos' Afterburn") hand percussion, jabs of noise and an oft repeated, unintelligible vocal sample. Yes, India Lo-Fi Abuse is yet another great Muslimgauze release, grab it! - Brainwashed.com

Tracks

Press

Audio & Video

LISEL - 'PATTERNS FOR AUTO-TUNED VOICES & DELAY'

Formats

• BING178 - LP

  600197017814

• BING178CD - CD

  600197017821

Details

Eliza Bagg leads a complex musical life: working as a classical opera singer, she has soloed with the New York Philharmonic, performed in Meredith Monk’s opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and toured Europe with the legendary John Zorn. While making her own music under the guise of art-pop solo act Lisel, she’s also collaborated as a vocalist with some of the most renowned experimental artists, including Ben Frost, Julianna Barwick, Daniel Wohl, and many others, all while playing indie rock venues and lovably dingy basements. One day, it’s Lincoln Center or The Kitchen, the next it’s an outdoor LA ambient series. She was always torn between her two worlds, and it wasn’t until she began work on Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay that she discovered a way to merge them together. Patterns comes out of Bagg’s experience as a vocalist singing Renaissance and Baroque music along with the work of modern-day minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. “I developed a vocal processing system that allowed me to change the idea of what my instrument is,” Bagg says of the album’s genesis, a system that combines her virtuosic singing with autotune and delay effects to create a melding of human and machine. Sure, she’ll admit it. “I’m a sci-fi nerd,” she says, with a laugh. “I’m a Blade Runner and Battlestar person. I love things that explore how society interacts with machines.” While making Patterns, she dove first into Renaissance polyphony and chant. The music of Hildegard von Bingen, Thomas Tallis, and Carlo Gesualdo is a familiar world to her. Starting with Renaissance and Medieval singing styles and idioms, she added processing and electronic world-building to bring out new, expressive qualities of those styles. From there, she improvised in these styles, fed the performances into Ableton, and incorporated modern day hyperpop (like SOPHIE) and ambient electric sounds and aesthetics. From Philip Glass to Charli XCX, Carl Stone to Grimes, Patterns makes radical connections. Yet, it was important for Bagg to maintain the spiritual origins of these vocal techniques. Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay stands within those traditions, using voices to transcend the cerebral and overwhelm the listener, all while evoking a unique set of references that span five hundred years.

Tracks

1. INTRO: Liturgy
2. One At A Time
3. Stalactite
4. Wingspan
5. Immature
6. Blades Of Grass
7. Plainsong
8. Polyphony For Voices
9. At The Fair
10. Rising Mist
11. Whirlpool

Press

The Guardian - Contemporary Album of the Month

Audio & Video

K.LEIMER - 'LUYU'

Formats

• POL01.2023 - LP

  700261490953

Details

**AVAILABLE ON CLEAR VINYL**“These things happen,” says K. Leimer of LUYU. Listen Until You Understand is a test drive through an obstacle course designed for new instruments, arrangements, juxtapositions, and real-time experiments dedicated to leaving the original impulses untouched and unadorned. Joined at times by digital percussionist Dolphie Stein, the music throws itself against itself without loyalty to genre or form, mashing granular particles into a tremulous spectrum of soundwalls, transitions, noise, distortions, and the occasional clearing. As close to live improvisation as one can get in a multitrack studio setting, LUYU takes generative techniques and drops them into short-form events by building its soundstage in thickets of shifting elements, collapsing phrases, broken signatures, and implied patterns. An outlier in Leimer’s catalog of general stillness and subtle detail, LUYU revels in the bare sound of things usually hidden in the mix. Kerry Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Abstrakce, Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His work is included in the Cherry Red Noise Floor compilation series and his early cassette work is featured in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes twenty solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant, Marc Barreca, and Three Point Circle. Recent soundtracks include work for video artists Cristiane Bouger and Fred Birchman, HBO’s How To With John Wilson and the Netflix documentary John Was Trying to Contact Aliens. His work is included in the collection of The British Library

Tracks

1. Insistence (The Missing Singer)
2. Seaming
3. Listen Until You Understand
4. Speech Pattern
5. Debris Field
6. Undisturbed
7. Strewn
8. Without Ever
9. Slowly In Low Light
10. Numbering Of Laws

Press

Audio & Video

INFINITE RIVER - 'PREQUEL'

Formats

• BMR129 - LP

  607287012919

Details

“Finally, we get some of the finest artistic results of the awful, forced hibernation zones we all were forced to bubble ourselves into during the COVID era. It [Infinite River’s Prequel] sounds like the soundtrack to a space desert film you can’t wait to watch. There are so many of the sounds you already like that might come from guitars and drone elements, but it’s subtly put together here in ways that remove all sense of ego. These are sort of slowed-down post-rock songs, but it’s not overly interested in math, and it is way too cosmic to be post-rock. Sorry we even said ‘post-rock.’ “These perfect, first instrumental recordings here were made in a home studio in Birmingham, Michigan by three longtime friends and compatriots who were slowly starting to go nuts as lockdown started. Later, another friend shuttering in place in the U.P. added percussion elements. ‘All our friends were doing yoga, so we made this yoga music for them,’ Gretchen Davidson explains half-seriously. But this music contains multitudes. It exists in a curious space between improvised music and subtle songs that fall apart the closer you get to them. There is a lot of space in between these notes. “No one will call this a ‘Detroit supergroup,’ and we implore you to follow suit. However, the group curiously brings together disparate yet friendly threads of the fertile Detroit underground: garage, weirdo indie, and the noise scene—from its very top practitioners, no less. Gretchen Davidson (Slumber Party, Terror At The Opera, Universal Indians), Warren Defever (ESP Beetles, His Name is Alive), special guest drummer Steve Nistor (Sparks, Ural Thomas, Seedsmen To The World), and Joey Mazzola (Detroit Cobras, Sponge, Sugarcoats)—this combination is deeply unfuckwithable. “We are so excited to release these recordings. This might be music that exists to bring back the chillout room at serious raves. Whatever its use, we all know that ex-hippies made the best postpunk; do ex-postpunks make the best neo-hippie music? That’s a question perhaps only you can answer.” —Mike McGonigal

Tracks

Press

Audio & Video

COIL - 'APE OF NAPLES'

Formats

• IF-111CDAPE - 2xCDs

  8016670153610

• IF-111LPCLEAR - 3xLP

Details

"The Ape of Naples" is a deeply emotional and uniquely rewarding album. In its immediate accessibility it is somewhat reminiscent of Coil's mid-1980s classic "Horse Rotorvator" sharing that album's wild variety of sounds and styles as well as its overriding sombre mood. Originally released in 2005 and in many ways the band's ultimate swan song, it is now considered one of the go-to albums for introducing new listeners to the unparalleled magick of Coil. Compiled and released by Peter Christopherson one year after Jhonn Balance's tragic deadly fall, it includes reworkings of the live favourite "Amethyst Deceivers" and "Love Secret's Domain"'s "Teenage Lightning" as well as several songs originally intended for the ill-fated "Backwards" album like the haunting and preminiscent "Fire of the Mind" and the superb "Amber Rain". Other tracks were created using unfinished song ideas from around "Backwards", sampling tiny bits of Balance's live vocals from songs only ever performed in concert once like "Triple Sun". Using the lyrics of the theme tune for the 1970s BBC sit com series "Are you being served?" for the unbelievably haunting "Going up", this album's final track and the last song Coil ever performed live, is maybe the most poignant example of Balance's and Christopherson's method of turning base matter into pure sound gold, and like the title of the album, derived from an imaginary adult video an equally fine example of the often underappreciated humour of the boys. Christopherson with the help of long-term sound wizard Danny Hyde and using some of the talent of Coil touring members managed to craft an album which feels and flows like a true Coil classic. The Infinite Fog version is the third Coil record receiving the fully remastered and enhanced 3LP/2CD treatment supervised by Danny Hyde. All of the original material has again been carefully and sympathetically remastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Jessica Thompson who has been previously lauded for her splendid job on its sister release "The New Backwards". Coil fans old and new will be thrilled over the inclusion of more than an hour's worth of 9 rare and largely unheard bonus tracks from Danny's vaults completing the set. The astounding design of the original box-set release is restored for the gatefold 3LP sleeve using the fully-licensed artwork by Ian Johnstone (making it easy to differentiate this new vinyl version from previous un-sanctioned LP releases using poor reproductions of the original CD art for the front cover), the CD will be available in two versions with the original and well-loved original CD cover art and for the first time using the former vinyl-only cover art. If you do not yet own a physical copy of the "Ape of Naples", or if you always wanted an enhanced version of this masterpiece, there has never been a better time to make that wish come true. 

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