JESSICA PRATT - 'S/T'

Formats

• BRTH001 - LP

  655035021218

Details

WAREHOUSE FIND - LAST COPIES Surely one of the end of year 2012 hits and now available on CD, this debut album from Jessica Pratt got some rave blogosphere reviewage, Highly recommended!! "I never wanted to ever start a record label. Ever. But there is something about her voice I couldn't let go of. It's an actual voice. An actual beautiful voice. This ones a classic sounding voice. Not to mention her song writing, recording and guitar playing. JESSICA PRATT's music feels like I have found a lost LP of an old forgotten mystical folk singer, that feeling of discovering a record all by myself: Without the help of friends or the Internet. Like Stevie Nicks singing over David Crosby demos, with the intimacy of a Sibylle Baier. I am in love with it. So much, that I saved up and threw all my money to get it into this world. I actually care about it, no matter which way the winds blow."-Tim Presley, White Fence: FOR FANS OF Marissa Nadler / Linda Perhacs / first vinyl pressing of 500 now sold out? Second pressing now in Stock!! 8/10 in the latest Uncut. dont miss this ..

Tracks

1. Night Faces
2. Hollywood
3. Bushel Hyde
4. Mountain?r Lower
5. Half Twain the Jesse
6. Casper
7. Midnight Wheels
8. Mother Big River
9. Streets of Mine
10. Titles Under Pressure
11. Dreams

Press

RIYL: Karen Dalton, Espers & Joanna Newsom. 7.5 Pitchfork

Audio & Video

HATIS NOIT - 'AURA REWORKS'

Formats

• ERATP162LE - LP (COLOURED)

  3700551786527

Details

Enchanting Japanese vocal artist Hatis Noit has announced Aura Reworks to be released 26th September. The new release reimagines her 2022 debut album, Aura, by legendary artists and collaborators, including the godfather of ambience Laraaji, hip hop duo Armand Hammer, composers and electronic experimentalists Jlin, Alex Somers, William Basinski, Emel, Matthew Herbert and Yu Su. Aura Reworks opens with a transcendental reinterpretation of the title track “Aura” by laughter meditation practitioner, mystic, and “ambient godfather” Laraaji. Hatis’ haunting vocals whir and groan in conversation with Laraaji’s bouncing hums, over open-tuned zither, kalimba, and timbrels. The soft organic percussion is replaced by thumping, shamanic kick drum on “Thor”, reworked by DJ and producer Matthew Herbert. The track is a playful, primal devotion, evoking a bonfire-lit ritual in the centre of a dancefloor. Matthew Herbert describes the track as an “auditory hallucination where more modern techniques merged with ancient-sounding voices.”. Preservation’s rework of “Jomon” combines Hatis Noit’s powerful cries that evoke Japan’s prehistoric Jomon period with slow, considered vocals by cult New York rap duo Armand Hammer over a minimalist drum loop. The result is a bold call to arms, bridging thousands of years. Alex Somers’ haunting reimagination of “Angelus Novus” splinters Hatis’ heavy vocals, transforming them into glitchy ASMR-effect blips that bounce in intensity before a brutal, heartbreaking passage, forcing the listener to stop and breathe. As Somers’ track fades, Hatis’ long, soft hums continue into the most contemplative track, “Inori”, reworked by avant-garde composer William Basinski, introduces a delicate piano to the track. “Inori” features a field recording of the ocean only one kilometre away from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, destroyed by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Hatis Noit had been invited there for a memorial ceremony which marked the re-opening of the area for local people to return to their homes. The emotive and compassionate song is dedicated to the lives lost due to 2011’s tsunami, but equally to the memories people have of their hometown. Aura Reworks closes with “Sir Etok” a haunting track reworked by Emel, whose own voice enters into dialogue with Hatis’, mixing Arabic with her wordless sounds to create new dimensions. Hatis Noit is a Japanese vocal performer hailing from distant Shiretoko, Hokkaido, who now resides in London. The name Hatis Noit is taken from Japanese folklore, meaning the stem of the lotus flower, as the flower represents the living, while its root represents the afterlife. Therefore, Hatis Noit connects the two worlds, able to move between here and the other side; the past, memory, and subconscious.

Tracks

Tracklist: 1. Aura (Laraaji Rework) 2. Thor (Matthew Herbert Rework) 3. Himbrimi (Yu Su Rework) 4. A Caso (Jlin Rework) 5. Jomon (Preservation Rework feat. Armand Hammer) 6. Angelus Novus (Alex Somers Rework) 7. Inori (William Basinski Rework) 8. Sir Etok (Emel Rework)

Press

Reworks from: Laaraji, Matthew Herbert, Yu Su, Jlin, William Basinski and more...

Audio & Video

BILL ORCUTT - 'JUMP ON IT'

Formats

• PAL073 - LP

  843563161524

Details

RESTOCKED LAST REMAINING COPIES "It's been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One, a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar—and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of 'a certain age' will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt's rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompson-ian/ Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It , with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as 'The Life of Jesus' and 'In a Column of Air' that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt's trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brickwall short). While you won't mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not if taken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener. Strangely, some of the melted lockstep grooves found in Jump On It evoke nothing other than Music for Four Guitars. While many of the linear runs are clearly improvised, and the phrasing distinctly slurred, intuitive and non-mechanical, the strummed chords hint at a cellular construction similar to Jump On It 's electric predecessor. (Orcutt states that he prefers to keep his strategies obscure—but that implies there is in fact a strategy). Whatever the case, I also hear Satie in Music for Four Guitars, and I hear him here too, hidden within Jump On It 's lilting repetition, which I easily imagine stretching to an infinitely-distant horizon. Like each of Satie's three Gymnopedies, each facet of Jump On It is a tiny miniature bound in a slim volume, an earworm you might savor again and again upon awakening or before drifting off. Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we're all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn't jump on that?"—Tom Carter. Recorded Spring/Summer 2022 at the Living Room, San Francisco. Mixed and mastered by Chuck Johnson.

Tracks

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ALEX BAD BABY LUKASHEVSKY WITH COCOA CORNER - 'OOOOH!'

Formats

• TAR121 - LP (COLOURED)

  5061041821493

Details

**PLEASE NOTE THIS TITLE IS AVAILABLE ONLY ON COLOURED PURPLE VINYL** OOOOH! is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Made in the spirit of unity, humanity, and poetry — disobediently renouncing the glory of personal triumph for the generosity of an honest experiment. On the last track of the album you’ll hear “Or do you only ever never want to make a single enemy? / That’s not freedom or humility / It’s nothing, honestly.” Oooh, that's a bad baby! A celebrated Toronto songwriter and performer, Alex Lukashevsky has always been disobedient. Which simply means, nothing is off the table when he’s looking for his poetic voice; when trying to find the realest I of the teller. As he sings on the lead track “that musician that’s dead” The musician is radical/ it’s the world that’s demented/ listening with their eyes, the music looks dented/ they’re over-represented. OOOOH! was recorded in January 2024 at Sound Department in Toronto, engineered by Patrick Lefler (ROY), mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Matt Smith. All the songs were tracked live off the floor in two days, with one extra day for recording vocals, to keep the recording fully alive and breathing. As leader of Deep Dark United, as a solo performer, and a sideman in Brodie Wests’ Eucalyptus and Luka Kuplowsky’s Ryokan Band, Alex has been an outsized influence on the Toronto music scene that spawned acts like Broken Social Scene and Owen Pallett. (Pallett, who has toured with Lukashevsky, went so far as to record an entire album’s worth of Alex’s songs, backed by a full orchestra.) Lukashevsky has approached each of his albums and projects as something completely new, using only the musical boundaries he creates with each song. Even when he has recorded songs with nothing but his voice and his own acoustic guitar accompaniment, the results are never “stripped down” or “back to basics,” Gong! How do you get to heaven / have fun! have fun! It’s cool to approach music as a game of “spot the influence”; Burt Bacharach-meets-Black Flag; Lana Del Rey-meets-LCD Soundsystem etc. Glorified mash-ups are promising because of their conversational nature. But they can turn us into hyperboreans; blowing cold air beyond ourselves while doing what we can to remain warm. To devise a game or a narrative is to have a winner and a loser, but we all know that just as you win/ so you lose. And does anything really change? Alex Lukashevsky and Cocoa Corner are more at ease drawing blind contours or playing an old game like consequences. They let things add up without knowing particularly how. Cognition is recognition. Lukashevsky, in addition to writing all the songs, plays guitar and sings on OOOOH!, doing both in ways that are soulful and spikey at the same time. Joining him on guitar and vocals is his oldest child, Charlie Lukashevsky, who, at 23, is already a talented performer and songwriter in his own right. Cocoa Corner also includes Aidan McConnell, an in-demand drummer and composer, Jack Johnston, a jazz bassist and Barry Harris acolyte, and percussionist Evan Cartwright (The Weather Station, U.S. Girls, Cola, Tasseomancy), who plays steel pan and marching drum. Working with his son and with other younger musicians is central to the album’s unpredictable aesthetic. It reinvigorated the sound in unexpected ways. Lukashevsky says, “I had to reconsider my own instincts. I had to deal with being 99 years old." In addition to these performers, the album includes a tasty contribution from Meg Remy, the visionary musician and producer who is the leader of the critically acclaimed project U.S. Girls. Remy duets with Lukashevsky on the imagistic and sprawling album closer “things keep happening.” About that album title: OOOOH! is taken straight from “that musician that’s dead” an arch and unhinged comment on the exertion required to navigate a lifetime of music making. Lukashevsky’s delivery of that one emotive word is a kind of cultural posture, but also a hundred percent primitive expression. The impact is never less than visceral. His vocal delivery ranges through rich baritone blues to keening falsettos to a kind of sprechstimme that periodically steps out from the music to grab the listener’s shirt. He doesn’t sound too nice, but he is sincere. When life gives you lemons lament. For OOOOH! his first official full-length album since 2012’s Too Late Blues, (a collection of knotty-yet-effervescent tunes built upon the enchantingly serpentine harmonies of Lukashevsky and his vocal collaborators, Felicity Williams (Bahamas, Bernice) and Daniela Gesundheit (Snowblink, HYDRA)), Alex has once again broken apart and rebuilt his own approach to music. Or rather (because that sounds too over-determined), he has allowed his music to build itself into strange new shapes that only fleetingly and coincidentally, but happily, resemble anything that might be called rock and roll. There is some editorializing within the song’s lyrics— Lukashevsky even cheekily contributes to the “spot the influence” game with the line “Muddy Waters, Rite of Spring!” a funny pre-emptive strike against anyone already reaching for some variation of avant-blues to describe what the song is up to here. In fact there are many names checked on this record (literally and in spirit); they are the lily pads that trace the path of this expression! Palestrina, Peter Pears and Benjamin Brittain, Andrés Segovia, Stravinsky, Lotte Lenya, Alice Coltrane, Skip James, Chuck Berry, D’Gary, Betty Carter, Mukhtiyar Ali, Chuck D, Yoko Ono, Hailu Mergia, David Bowie, Jane Siberry. rhythm is a skeleton mansion / haunted by melody / feckless prodigy / the world is under a spell / cast by some demon angel / Practice day and night / Try as hard as hell / no one can sing that well Musicians are often worried by the way in which they are prepared to fail rather than how they would like to succeed; it’s such a deep concern that it tempers their creativity and shackles their process. Current cultural proclivities, tend to comfort a certain kind of artistic failure and abnegate another kind. How many testimonials, full of heartfelt care and investment, have you heard for Taylor Swift, and yet a craftsman like Chris Weisman is often dismissed easily as though he’s doing something anti-social. what’s throwing itself in my ears and my eyes / arrogant devil ad hominem christ. The music you will hear on this recording veers off in multiple directions at once, and features a rock and roll spirit with a divergent heart. This is no sclerotic clomp of the Average Rock Song, but in fact a flood of humanity in all its darkness and moodiness and unpredictability. If most performers make songs that are like sports cars or pickup trucks to drive around, Lukashevsky has built something more akin to a rowboat in a tree: it’s weird and beautiful.

Tracks

1. that musician that's dead 2. preference is a good friend, mind 3. no one can sing that well 4. last herald 5. mo**real 6. things keep happening

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K.LEIMER - 'RESTING FORMS'

Formats

• POL07.2025 - CD

  195269318390

Details

Resting Forms is the second set of collected tracks in K. Leimer’s Forms series. While adhering to the same process used for Proximate Forms, these pieces tend to settle into slightly calmer, more meditative states. Bathed in lush timbres, smooth harmonic distortion set in wavering, modulated soundstages, the music is at once evolving and still. Pare closes the album as the clearest example of the guiding principle of Resting Forms: to reduce every aspect of the audio to some granular minimum. As the title implies, Periphery keeps its distance, refusing to coalesce or adhere to a center. Limn properly provides the barest outlines of a construct while Littoral evokes a more fluid state, perhaps referencing the watery calms of a Neu! track. All the while the instruments shift their character, moving in and out of their original state reaching for the remote and the recognizable, for distortions and deformations. Leimer sought to explore and manipulate sampled acoustic instruments in ways that find a balance between the original source and its reinvented self. The Resting Forms began by using a more traditional compositional approach — shared meter; chromatic settings; melodic gestures. All were present at the outset, then dismantled, reimagined, reevaluated, and reassembled. Across the nine tracks of Resting Forms Leimer guides and edits and processes and restates his work to invent a music which has never existed in any single genre. And he arrives again and again at a reliance on and an embrace of the absolute primacy of sound. K. Leimer’s Forms project is comprised of three collections emphasizing the free association of voices, pitches, effects, structure, and processing: Proximate, Resting and Muted Forms are scheduled to be issued throughout 2025.

Tracks

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C.JOYNES & MIKE GANGLOFF - 'TOM WINTER, TOM SPRING'

Formats

• VHF167 - LP

  783881016710

Details

Debut LP by the duo of Gangloff and Joynes, finding novel ways to combine their accomplished takes on avant folk, American primitive, and outsider sound into a unique and beautiful jumble. Side A’s “Rapid City” is a brisk fingerpicked jaunt featuring Joynes’ unique acoustic/electric hybrid sound, followed by “West Cavalier” where Gangloff’s sawing fiddle and Joynes’ guitar take on a straight mountain-style tune. “Two Bishops” is a languorous and atmospheric Joynes’ guitar feature that slips into an extended minor key fingerpicked tremolo. Gangloff’s “The Other Side of Catawba” is a solo fiddle staple from his recent repertoire (and heard on his VHF LP “Evening Measures”), rendered here in a haunting, reverberant version. The old-time staple “Sail Away Ladies” closes the side at a tempo made for a country store dance. Side B takes a more expansive and outré attitude, with Joynes’ nimble “An Opening” (and the brief noise interlude “Eight Sets of Inverted Commas”) setting up the lengthy “Witch Marks,” which closes proceedings with a dark and droning vibe.

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FIREFRIEND - 'FUZZ'

Formats

• CFLCR042 - LP (COLOURED)

Details

COLOURED ECO VINYL Firefriend Return With “FUZZ” — A Scorched-Earth, Sonic Manifesto From Brazil’s Psychedelic Underground São Paulo, Brazil – Fuzzed-out, fired-up, and fiercely unrelenting, Brazilian psychedelic rock group Firefriend unveil their latest full-length LP: “FUZZ” — built in the embers of a world unraveling, it's a wall of sound with intent — drenched in distortion, echoing with rebellion, and heavy with the beautiful chaos of now. Across searing guitar feedback, narcotic basslines, and trance-inducing rhythms, Firefriend constructs a world that teeters on the edge of collapse — and dares to find melody inside the wreckage. Songs pulse like electricity across concrete. There are no apologies here — only noise, atmosphere, and truth. “FUZZ evokes that searing noise that has echoed through rock records for decades,” says guitarist/vocalist Yury Hermuche. “It’s a sound that inevitably pulses with the same violence as the world we live in — increasingly chaotic, intense, full of surprises. I deeply admire artists who tell us about the brutal nature of their times. They’re the ones who draw me in, because they’re talking about reality — and how they dealt with it.” Bassist/vocalist Julia Grassetti adds, “The sound we’re chasing has this dynamic between transcendence and collapse. We’re after that pulse between explosive moments and more introspective ones. The sound of life — the sound of freedom.” A Political Pulse, A Global Noise Long known for their globally conscious, left-wing worldview, Firefriend continues to use music as a medium of resistance. Their psych isn’t escapism — it’s exposure. Through hypnotic repetition and blown-out frequencies, “FUZZ” draws a direct line from underground clubs in São Paulo to the struggles echoing worldwide — climate grief, social collapse, digital fatigue, authoritarian backlash. With this LP, Firefriend refuses silence. They crank the distortion, blow out the amps, and let the tension bleed through every track. About Firefriend One of the most revered acts in the modern psychedelic scene, Firefriend has amassed a cult following through years of relentless recording, international touring, and uncompromising art. Their influences are clear — Spacemen 3, Black Sabbath, John Coltrane, The Velvet Underground — but their vision is their own: intense, immersive, and politically tuned-in. “FUZZ” joins an already formidable discography, but carves its own place: a louder, darker, more defiant chapter in the Firefriend story.

Tracks

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