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viewing 1 To 6 of 6 items
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LOW 016LP
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For the final release on Low Company Records, this is Static Cleaner Lost Reward's gonzo dub-pop melter Breathing Under Honey: an aquatic ruin zone of echo-distressed, loop-me-crazy song-forms, zonked exotica, slacker-techno and crudely soldered, seasick cyberpunk. This album is just the latest expression of Australian artist Tarquin Manek's powerful and inimitable gift/curse, arriving ten years deep into his career as major player, and enabler, in a now rightly revered seam of the Melbourne/Naarm underground. The nine tracks here showcase both a keen taste for timeless pop umami and a super-evolved grasp of mind-pranging dubwise psychoacoustics; an intermeshing of DIY concrète chaos and supple, locked-on rhythm mechanics that feels not so much futuristic as extraterrestrial.
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LOW 012LP
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Bobby Would LP#2. Wistful waltz-time psycho-beat for warding off/wallowing in the 2020-21 Weltschmerz. Swelling and smearing the vision of 2018's skeletal rock n' roll heartbreaker Baby, most of the songs here are ballads -- minimalist, ultra-hypnotic but lavishly melodic space-punk lullabies and bright, bruised expressions of jingle-jangle mourning. Highs, lows and heavenly blows. BW's guitar is, more than ever, a thing of fearsome and filigree beauty, moving effortlessly from misty, mellifluous DIY pop-dreams to wailing vertiginous whiplash leads and dazed, epiphanic, angels-wept metha-drone, ringing in infinity -- and tethered to this earth only by his beloved monotone, numbed-out, serial-killer croon. Spinning in its own orbit, but with recognizable dabs -- perhaps -- of Phantom Payn/JG39, Les Rallizes Denudes, Gary War, Peter Gutteridge's Pure... and of course Bobby's own work in Heavy Metal and Itchy Bugger.
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LOW 006LP
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Supremely hungover, red-eyed-and-can't-quite-be-arsed but utterly life-affirming bedroom/loner-pop masterpiece from the Itchy Bugger. Songs that somehow combine punk concision and psychedelic whimsy... lusher and more intricately arranged than on the first LP, even as they double down on the DIY, drug-scrambled weirdness, and that unmistakably private, nocturnal, kitchen-creeping, don't-wake-the-flatmates vibe... oh yeah and still with that same sad-sack fucking drum-machine beat on every song. The careening post-punk riffage contributed to Heavy Metal and Diät is here repurposed into something more textured and introspective and jangling and dazed, making you recall The Moles, Pip Proud, Alastair Galbraith, subtly out early '90s Flying Nun gems like David Kilgour's Here Comes The Cars (1991) as well as things like Television Personalities, Razorcuts, Solid Space, and all those long hot summers that passed you by...
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LOW 005LP
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Smudgy existential electronics and pristine minimal jazz with a furtive, fugitive feel. It's a creepy, brown-carpeted, Cold War-ish mise-en-scene, painted with a wonderfully peculiar palette -- keyboards, double bass, vibraphone and rigid drum-machine tick-n-tock, a perfect marriage of fluency and stiffness, of all-pervading paranoia and carefully-portioned camp (Kraftwerk in The Red Room?). Romance too -- "Djurgardsgatans Ogonblick" and "Jag. Mitt Kaffee" could be considered some of the most beautiful, tear-jerking ambient ice-shifts of all time. A pulpy but curiously moving 2005 CD-R curio, produced by Karl Lukas Petersson, aka Luke Eargoggle, and originally released on Danny "Legowelt" Wolfers's Strange Life label. LP in full picture sleeve.
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LOW 008LP
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Fire in the hold! LP/action-painting documenting the entire musical output/psychosis/self-immolation of short-lived North London destruction-unit I Can I Can't, all previously unreleased. Side one consists of six barking, bucking audiac anxiety attacks recorded to dictaphone in 2009, in a warehouse up the Seven Sisters Road: a-pause-button-controlled, high-speed-collision of skeletal trogged-out garage-punk and queasy electro-mechanical abrasions, eventually unravelling into uncanny, sublimely fatigued ambient tone-poems beamed direct from, and to, the eternal wet Tuesday afternoon of the mind! The bunkered, light-starved claustrophobia of the mise-en-scene hits you almost as potently as the kinetic energy it can't possibly contain: Chrome-cum-Index guitar scorch; bonehead drum clatter that sounds like some poor soul they've been keeping prisoner in the basement banging his shackles against the radiator; and maniacal half-shouted, half-sung vocals that hector and gabble and murmur and howl and effortlessly communicate the essence of the English Disease... look busy! If the piledriving, flat-rush one-chord death surf primitivism of "Favours In" is the sound of thwarted prison-break, the bruised minimal synth space-blooz of "Ah Ran Bee" is the sound of yer man being recaptured and heavily sedated, trying to make peace with what remains of his life sentence and taking up water colors. Hard to think of accurate precedents for this fiendish oscillating between detachment and rapture, demolition and dream... Vincent Over The Sink? This Heat's most pranged-out Cold Storage creations? Maybe Swell Maps' Train Out Of It (1984)? Shoes This High crash-landing on Another Green World? Side two is given over to a pair of studio creations that are more sensuous and hi-fidelity, heavily foreshadowing the band members' future work as Speedbooth, Bons, Jam Money, etc. under the umbrella of their Spillage Fete private press: the life-affirming, all-problems-solving, sunrise-over-suburban-rooftops heartburst of "Hobbyist", and the surreal, sleep-deprived kossack-dance of "Plume", which sounds everything and nothing like the mutant offspring of Pascal Comelade and Pram. I Can I Can't is the real thing: refined and anarchic, brutal and tender, insolent and withdrawn, a coming-together and a falling-apart, a pure unmediated expression of drudgery and ecstasy. The imagination that does not recognize its own dilemma in these songs... simply does not know the score! Includes printed insert and download code; edition of 250.
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LOW 002LP
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Pristine rhythm and blooz for fugitive hearts from David C. Gray and Guy Gormley, originally released as a tape on Jolly Discs in 2017. The Word's sleek, synthetic urban pastorals collapse the space between the OCD pop geometries of Pyrolator, the opaque art-ache of Eno's Before & After Science (1977), and the sloooooow, sweet seduction of choice Jam & Lewis productions. Romantic but ever so slightly paranoid, all muted lovelorn horns, sighing synths and playful bossa/house-wise drum loops, it's true DIY in that it simply suits itself. Mostly instrumental, it's bookended by two Gray-sung songs, "The Hours I Wait" and the title track: drifting, downbeat, quietly devastating things, with a blue-eyed soul vibe judged just right (down-at-heel not flash with cash), and echoes of Scritti, The Blue Nile, Gareth Williams, Disco Inferno... but really the The Word has a sadness and sway all its own, and above all it feels of the now: with tight, tucked-in arrangements and ultra-lucid production (a Gormley trademark, but especially apparent here) that leaves just enough space to dream. LP in full picture sleeve.
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