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LP
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LSSN 101LP
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$42.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 9/19/2025
"Greatest Heads is the fourth album by the radical Basque-Berlinesque group Al Karpenter. A deconstruction of structured 'rock' music, here Al Karpenter re-imagine 'the band' to explore the intersection between free music, Afro-beat, the avant garde and gonzo rock. Álvaro Matilla, Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini, and Mattin's response to the planet's slipping into a vortex of hate is to create a music ecstatic, a music of protest bursting with multiple musical languages and glossaries, full of overlapping histories and thrilling tensions. Greatest Heads posits a plurality of musics both in opposition and intertwined: Al Karpenter play rock instruments pulled apart in the studio in post-production. Distorted rhythm chunks bit-crushed and dissipated, segments of freedom oppressed by waves of sound invading from every direction. The interplay between the chief instrumentalists and renowned, storied sound artist Mattin creates something akin to ESP freedom-seekers Cro Magnon playing in Miles Davis' early '70s groups, The Los Angeles Free Music Society tightening up into a clenched fist of plunderphonics and runaway percussion. The modulating synth sound soon sucks the band into its wake to create a spine-chilling climax of distorted sound, made fully orgasmic with mastering engineer Rashad Becker's attention to detail. The band's cascading layers of references and polyglottal musics attempt to create the perfect lover, alive with rage and disorientating ecstasy: Al Karpenter."
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LP
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BRD 039LP
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"Beyond riot music from the MC5 to Sham 69, in front of Arthur Russell's Death and after Klein's Lifetime, Al Karpenter and Mattin come out from behind the mask of Lou Reed's Lulu." --Guy Mercier
In this moment of uncertainty and environmental trauma, as you recoil in the face of an emotional overload that demands retreat or even flight, a certain use of solitude in confinement has generated the possibility of taking it all on, of being with others again while still listening in solitude. Music From A Private Hell describes an understanding of sound as a habitable substance from this degree-zero of isolation. A handful of songs written in iron and dust, that allow just enough fiction or myth as to turn technology into a weapon. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us in On The Line: "run away, but when you run, bring a weapon." A remedy for mass fatalism, Hell begins with the first song, in which a tambourine of some sort plays an ostinato rhythm, punctuating each phrase with a long note that communes with the shadows. Of interest here are not the rhythms that recur throughout the record but their relationship to colors and timbres. The different harmonic openings and resonances evoke the different kinds of tension that occur when skin touches flame. "We'll burn it down before you land here," says a disembodied voice, and various noises and sound effects cut through it, indifferent to the threat, as futuristic today as they were at their inception. Al Karpenter's voice is a weapon. His inexpressive whisper is a weapon. On this record, the human voice is an excess, a surplus of the body; it is at once outside and inside. It can be listened to peacefully, but it can also generate the anguish of a voice attempting to escape from language, setting the logos free in the wilderness, scavenging in the semiotic debris.
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7"
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MR 7300EP
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A ghost walks through Bilbao: the ghost of Al Karpenter, the only wild rocker able to restore the hard core of the true rebel music. Once boss at the legendary Brutus fanzine, presents a biographical single where he bares himself. The Chosen One features key players of the Basque leftfield music scene such as Mattin and Loty Negarti. Al Karpenter doesn't disappoint and Bilbao becomes a temporary prism through which New York's no wave travels to London to pick up Alternative TV's strident side, while crossing paths with Scott Walker in a surgery where Iggy Pop mutates into a dog.
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