Double LP version. "Over the past decade, the visionary musician Arthur Russell has entered something close to the mainstream. Sampled and referenced by contemporary musicians, his papers now open to visitors at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York, and his name synonymous with a certain strain of tenderness, Russell is as widely known as he's ever been. Thanks to Russell's partner Tom Lee and to Steve Knutson of Audika Records, who have forged several records from Russell's vast archive of unreleased material, the world now hears many versions of Arthur Russell. There's the Iowa boy, the disco mystic, the singer-songwriter and composer, and the fierce perfectionist deep in a world of echo. While all of these elements of Russell are individually true, none alone define him. Now, after ten years of work inside the Russell library, Lee and Knutson bring us Iowa Dream, yet another bright star in Russell's dazzling constellation. Blazing with trademark feeling, these nineteen songs are a staggering collection of Russell's utterly distinct songwriting. And although Russell could be inscrutably single-minded, he was never totally solitary. Collaborating here is a stacked roster of downtown New York musicians, including Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Henry Flynt, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon, Steven Hall, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Saltzman, and David Van Tieghem. Musician Peter Broderick makes a contemporary addition to this list: more than forty years after Russell recorded several nearly finished songs, Broderick worked diligently with Audika to complete them, and performed audio restoration and additional mixing. Several tracks on Iowa Dream Russell originally recorded as demos, in two early examples of his repeated brushes with potential popular success -- first in 1974, with Paul Nelson of Mercury Records, and then in 1975, with the legendary John Hammond of Columbia Records. For different reasons, neither session amounted to a record deal. Russell kept working nearly up until his death in 1992 from complications of HIV-AIDS. At once kaleidoscopic and intimate, Iowa Dream bears some of Russell's most personal work, including several recently discovered folk songs he wrote during his time in Northern California in the early 1970s. For Russell, Iowa was never very far away. 'I see, I see it all,' sings Russell on the title track: red houses, fields, the town mayor (his father) streaming by as he dream-bicycles through his hometown. Russell's childhood home and family echo, too, through 'Just Regular People,' 'I Wish I Had a Brother,' 'Wonder Boy,' 'The Dogs Outside are Barking,' 'Sharper Eyes,' and 'I Felt.' Meanwhile, songs like 'I Kissed the Girl From Outer Space,' 'I Still Love You,' 'List of Boys,' and 'Barefoot in New York' fizz with pop and dance grooves, gesturing at Russell's devotion to New York's avant-garde and disco scenes. Finally, the long-awaited 'You Did it Yourself,' until now heard only in a brief heart-stopping black-and-white clip in Matt Wolf's documentary Wild Combination, awards us a new take with a driving funk rhythm and Russell's extraordinary voice soaring at the height of its powers. On Iowa Dream, you can hear a country kid meeting the rest of the world -- and with this record, the world continues to meet a totally singular artist."

Volume One. WRWTFWW Records announce a reissue of both volumes of Yoshio Ojima's superb environmental music project Une Collection Des Chaînons I And II: Music For Spiral, originally released in 1988. The twenty-track opus is sourced from original masters and includes liner notes in English and Japanese. This marks the inaugural release from the Esplanade Series by WRWTFWW Records, which focuses on the works of Ojima and friends. Une Collection? gathers selected music pieces conceptualized and produced for sound-designing the Wacoal Art Center in Aoyama (Tokyo) also known as Spiral, a hub for a wide range of sophisticated cultural proposals spanning visual arts, theatre, music, design, fashion, and lifestyle. Spiral is a monumental work of architecture by Fumihiko Maki, designed according to the principles of Metabolism, a movement advocating evolving designs and constructions, adapting to human needs naturally. The first volume flows from the eerie and levitating "Entrance" to the quirky "Esplanade (Live)", the gentle and reassuring "Flius", and the measured and ravishing escalation of "Mensis." On the second volume, the nanoscopic neoclassical lullaby "Les Trois Grâces" brings attention to the importance of small details, "Pulse at Soothe" starts with the minimalism of a Satoshi Ashikawa piece and slowly drifts into mystical landscapes and cavernous echoes, "Entomology" and its melancholic artificial forest evokes a Twin Peaks mirage, and "Atrium" literally feels like a floating visit of a gigantic open space structure. Sitting alongside Midori Takada's Through The Looking Glass (WRWTFWW 018LP/019CD/019LP, 2017), Ashikawa's Still Way (WRWTFWW 030CD/LP, 2019), Hiroshi Yoshimura's Green (1986), or Yutaka Hirose's NOVA (WRWTFWW 028CD/LTD, 2019), as a pivotal work of Japanese environmental/ambient/minimalist music, Une Collection des Chaînons (which translates as a collection of links) is a delicately laid out sonic landscape connecting space and emotions, architecture and humanity, adjusting and transforming through the ears of the listeners. A note from Ojima: "Please listen to this album at around the same volume as daily life sounds such as air conditioners and refrigerators."

Une Collection Des Chaînons I And II: Music For Spiral is presented as two separate double LPs, RIYL: Midori Takada, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Yutaka Hirose. 2LP versions in 350gsm gatefold with selected UV high-gloss varnish, liner notes, sticker.

Volume Two. WRWTFWW Records announce a reissue of both volumes of Yoshio Ojima's superb environmental music project Une Collection Des Chaînons I And II: Music For Spiral, originally released in 1988. The twenty-track opus is sourced from original masters and includes liner notes in English and Japanese. This marks the inaugural release from the Esplanade Series by WRWTFWW Records, which focuses on the works of Ojima and friends. Une Collection? gathers selected music pieces conceptualized and produced for sound-designing the Wacoal Art Center in Aoyama (Tokyo) also known as Spiral, a hub for a wide range of sophisticated cultural proposals spanning visual arts, theatre, music, design, fashion, and lifestyle. Spiral is a monumental work of architecture by Fumihiko Maki, designed according to the principles of Metabolism, a movement advocating evolving designs and constructions, adapting to human needs naturally. The first volume flows from the eerie and levitating "Entrance" to the quirky "Esplanade (Live)", the gentle and reassuring "Flius", and the measured and ravishing escalation of "Mensis." On the second volume, the nanoscopic neoclassical lullaby "Les Trois Grâces" brings attention to the importance of small details, "Pulse at Soothe" starts with the minimalism of a Satoshi Ashikawa piece and slowly drifts into mystical landscapes and cavernous echoes, "Entomology" and its melancholic artificial forest evokes a Twin Peaks mirage, and "Atrium" literally feels like a floating visit of a gigantic open space structure. Sitting alongside Midori Takada's Through The Looking Glass (WRWTFWW 018LP/019CD/019LP, 2017), Ashikawa's Still Way (WRWTFWW 030CD/LP, 2019), Hiroshi Yoshimura's Green (1986), or Yutaka Hirose's NOVA (WRWTFWW 028CD/LTD, 2019), as a pivotal work of Japanese environmental/ambient/minimalist music, Une Collection des Chaînons (which translates as a collection of links) is a delicately laid out sonic landscape connecting space and emotions, architecture and humanity, adjusting and transforming through the ears of the listeners. A note from Ojima: "Please listen to this album at around the same volume as daily life sounds such as air conditioners and refrigerators."

Une Collection Des Chaînons I And II: Music For Spiral is presented as two separate double LPs, RIYL: Midori Takada, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Yutaka Hirose. 2LP versions in 350gsm gatefold with selected UV high-gloss varnish, liner notes, sticker.

For the fifth release on Grand River's experimental label, One Instrument, synthesizer maestro Donato Dozzy gifts us with an incredible, psychedelic 38-minute journey. "Slow Train" has been created using the EMS Synthi AKS, an extraordinary and rare portable modular analog synthesizer, first manufactured in 1972. This One Instrument Sessions release highlights the artist's most experimental side on what will be his seventh studio album. These tracks are the honest outcome from a long and intimate engagement with the instrument which were produced in his San Felice Circeo studio during an "altered state" night in October 2013. The resulting music is one of fluid continuity; Dozzy's most extensive, vigorous, and determined application of real-time studio recording to date. The intensity of both parts of "Slow Train" are comparable to a mindfulness experience in which the listener's perception of reality slows down enabling every small detail of the sound to become alive and increasingly vivid. Edition of 500.

Few DJs and producers are as widely and universally acclaimed in techno circles as Italian Donato Dozzy. He has a rare ability to work his way into peoples' minds in both contemporary and classical settings, conjuring real mood and atmosphere. Never one to pay heed to the zeitgeist, he prefers to deal in hypnotic soundscapes that really take you on a trip. Enigmatic as he is, and laidback as he seems, as an artist he is constantly unveiling new work. Displaying a large variation in terms of sound and method across many new releases each year -- some of which come on his co-owned label Spazio Disponibile -- he also puts out installations for public spaces and museums, uses obscure musical instruments, collaborates with like-minded producers, classical singers, or visual artists. Donato seems to continuously challenge himself on a creative level: whatever method he uses, though, he is always likely to permeate your cerebral cortex and rewire it in fascinating and compelling new ways.

Strafe Für Rebellion, or Strafe F.R., is a long-term collaboration between the artists Bernd Kastner and Siegfried M. Syniuga, which started in 1979. This release follows 2018's The Bird Was Stolen and sees them reemerge after a long period of hibernation. There are four tracks, four different windows to look out from our studio in Düsseldorf into the street and their different layers of sound. Four horizons, four spy holes in the door, four eyes, four shopping windows. Four landscapes. Witness the electric city and the power house. Strafe F.R. is sitting inside the fuse box. The electric chirp of the night. The socket in which we sleep. The dog comes, in order to devour Strafe F.R. First, he eats the rebellion and next he bites the Strafe. The house and the body, both are earthed and the veins are vibrating. Between the third and the fourth hour of the morning we enter the realm of insomnia. You fly by not using an airplane. An old woman is cleaning the door bells with her own spittle. The old man is distilling schnapps in his back garden. The swimmers are gliding through the day on top of a greasy film. The reception is a flare into seconds until it fades away into noise again. The kettle drum gives the rhythm of breathing, the bass determines the time. You stumble forward, forward into the next day. From our window we see a public building where there exists a toilet, its porcelain shows the most beautiful craquelé fissures. There is an historic poster of Lenin. It is fixed on a garden fence in the landscape and the stinging nettles grow over it softly swinging in the wind. There are shadows but there is also brightness, this means there are complementary colors and contrasts, movements, and reflection until there is stillness. We see the back-breeding of cattle in the Neanderthal age and at the same time we look into the large heating room of an art museum, where we observe tubes and their upstream pressure regulators.

LP version. Wewantsounds present a reissue of Donna McGhee's Make It Last Forever, originally released in 1978. Donna McGhee has been one of the key female singers of the New York disco scene, gracing several cult albums with her superb singing. The Brooklyn native began her career singing gospel in her grandmother's choir from an early age. Her first break in the industry came when she was spotted by bass player Johnny Flippin, who invited her to join his band. The group was none other than The Fatback Band led by drummer Bill Curtis. This was 1975 and the album was Raising Hell. McGhee's vocals can be heard throughout the album, including the dancefloor classic "(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop". She stayed with the group for another few years recording Night Fever in 1976 and touring across country. Following an encounter with producer Greg Carmichael, Donna McGhee jumped ship and started working with the prolific producer and his partner Patrick Adams. A string of collaborations followed with singles and albums: Donna can indeed be heard singing with Bumblebee Unlimited, Universal Robot Band, and on Phreek's classic self-titled album from 1978, singing on the track "May My Love Be With You". In 1978, After Greg Carmichael set up his own label, Red Greg Records, he and Adams decided to get McGhee in the recording studio and produce her first solo album. With the pair playing most of the instruments, they got five tracks out of the session. The result, Make It Last Forever is an all-time Adams/Carmichael classic: funky disco arrangements with a touch of synths over a pulsating groove magnified by McGhee's superb sexy singing. All five tracks have become classics in their own right. "I'm A Love Bug" was a remake of Bumblebee Unlimited's cult favourite from 1976, "Love Bug" (also released on Carmichael's Red Greg label) while "Make It Last Forever" was later re-recorded by Inner Life (featuring Jocelyn Brown). "Do As I Do" and "Mr. Blindman" keep the groove going and finally, we have "It Ain't No Big Thing". The remake of a 1976 single by Personal Touch, produced by Adams for his PAP label and arranged by Leroy Burgess, it is one of the highlights of the album and is a superb catchy composition which has now become a true underground disco standard. An essential disco album. Newly remastered audio.

Still Strange reaches back into the prized loft tapes of Jeff Sharp, aka Orior, following the revelatory discovery of his overlooked early '80s gems on 2016's Strange Beauty collection, as coaxed out by DDS dons Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. Huddling another sublime, dusty set of analogue tapes freshly baked and remarkably well-restored by Andy Popplewell, Still Strange contains four gorgeous flashbacks to the era 1979-1983 surrounding and even pre-dating Strange Beauty, and then shifts focus to recordings that Orior made around the early '90s. As with its predecessor, Orior is not alone on the material in Still Strange. From those feted early tapes, you'll find Phil Hollis returning to lend jagged guitar on the drum machine sizzle of "Feels Like Summer", while the mysterious synth player New Cross John makes vital contribution to "Invium". Along with the aching synth sigh of "To Return", which pre-dated all of these recordings, and the nine minutes of haunting bedsit strums in "Larbico Alt Mix" which came from the first batch, the early material is all arguably worth the price of admission alone for seekers of lost synth treasures -- really this stuff is just so good. However, the album's other six tracks expand knowledge of Orior's work into the '90s and also contain some extraordinary material. Salvaged from further loft tapes found in various states of degradation, and subsequently mixed down between London's Goldsmiths College and Miles Whittaker's Whalley Range attic (and elsewhere), they are decidedly more blunt and gloaming, especially in the Deathprod-like "Under Shadow" and the near static witching hour ambience of "Endless", while shorter vignettes such as "Unknown Future", "Gothic", and "Another" point to pre-echoes of Board of Canada's crepuscular scapes and even Bladerunner-esque sci-fi noir soundscapes. RIYL: Deathprod, John Bender, Boards of Canada, Vangelis. Restored from original 1/4" analog tapes; Mixed by Miles Whittaker and Ian Gilbert; Mastered at Dubplates & Mastering.

Regarded by Dominik Fernow as the "best US noise project in terms of texture and composition", Skin Crime return to Hospital Productions with an immanent inversion of noise convention exploring ideas of tense, slow-burn patience instead of aggressive intensity. Brutally active between the early '90s and mid '00s, Skin Crime took a 12-year hiatus until 2016 and the bloodshed of their instantly sold-out, 20CD boxset of archival material. That same year they also issued Ghosts I Have Been, a crushingly bleak album inspired by Japanese mythology and ghost stories which have paved the way for this new one, where the band's Patrick O'Neil and Mark Jameson continue to refine their instincts into the dankest brand of organic ambient noise. In key with their ghostly Japanese muse, specifically the Bakaneko (1968) or Ghost Cat movies of the '50s and '60s, as well as the writing of Lafcadio Hearn, aka Koizumi Yakumo, the author of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904) -- Skin Crime's music in Traveller on the Road is all about presence and the suggestibility of hypnagogic and half-awake states. Their cold-fingered sleight of hand is applied to exceedingly fine layers of textural enigma in long, unbroken tracts that hold the listener's gaze with frightening power. "Avoid Large Places At Night" takes hold with intravenous potency, very subtly drawing eyes to half-mast with its mechanical womb-like ambience, and stealthily introducing subharmonic rumbles and peripheral rustles that suggest unseen spectres lurking in a thicket of ghosts. A lack of sudden movement only ratchets the threat levels to seat-edge. Likewise, with its deeply soporific subs and texturhythms, the B-side's "Black Cat From The Grove" continues to numb the senses in a noise style, but eviscerated of all open aggression, preferring a dense mode of suggestion that only emphasizes the unheimlich nature of their music. It's a masterclass in saying it without saying it, and effectively amounts to a missing link between Kevin Drumm, Painjerk, and Mika Vainio, or even Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement and Meitei, that should not be missed by any fans of the above. Clear vinyl; mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

Le Tres Jazz Club presents a reissue of Makoto Terashita's Great Harvest, originally released in 1978. Pianist Makoto Terashita has only released three records under his name during his career. Topology with Harold Land, on the great indie Japanese label Aketa (1984), Ihatov, a trio, with only one of his composition (1997), and Great Harvest. Released in 1978 on the Japanese label Union, Great Harvest is the first record of a then young Makoto Terashita who proudly poses on the back cover of this album recorded in New York. In five tracks, three of them being his own compositions ("Samoa", "Great Harvest", and "Tell Me An Old Story Grand Papa"), Makoto Terashita shows an exceptional mastery of the piano, accompanied by Bob Berg on tenor sax, Errol Walter on bass, Jo Jones Jr on drums, and Yoshiaki Masuo on guitar. Essential for Japanese jazz fans and all great jazz lovers.

Le Tres Jazz Club present a first time vinyl reissue of Hiromasa Suzuki's Primrose, originally released in 1978. Hiromasa Suzuki is a Japanese pianist who began his recording career in the early '70s. Nicknamed "Colgen" in Japan, he is well-known for two amazing records combining jazz-fusion and traditional Japanese instruments (Rock-Joint Biwa and Rock-Joint Cipher on the RCA label), jazz-funk oriented albums (High-Flying and Skip Step Cogen), and the famous record from the Electro Keyboard Orchestra, his band along with other famous Japanese pianists Yuji Ohno and Hideo Ichikawa. But Hiromasa Suzuki was also interested in more classical jazz. In 1978 he released Primrose on the Union label. It's a beautiful record of modal jazz, with Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and Steve Jackson on drums. An absolutely hard-to-find record, even in Japan, the album features incredible compositions like "Hornet", "Discharge", or "Early Summer".

Way back in 2004, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. released the CD-only album Minstrel In The Galaxy on Riot Season Records. The decision to make it CD only at the time was down to the epic title track being almost 42 minutes in length. Fast forward fifteen years and new technologies and Riot Season present the first-ever vinyl release of this classic album, with a new edited especially for vinyl mix by main man Makoto Kawabata. Here's what Riot Season said back then: "Minstrel In The Galaxy is the sound of the newly slimmed down four-piece AMT recorded in their smoke filled basement Studio in Nagoya during summer 2004. The sounds captured on these three tracks are the first post-Cotton Casino AMT workouts. The diminutive beer and cigarettes Goddess has upped sticks and moved to the USA to start a new life and plan her solo career. We'll miss her that's for sure but we can't worry about that now, AMT have another ten albums to lay down before New Year. The AMT line up for this album features the core trio of Makoto Kawabata (Guitar), Atsushi Tsuyama (monster bass), Hiroshi Higashi (guitar and effects) and new permanent drummer (and ex-Mainliner man) Hajime Koie (drums). The free jazz style drumming from Hajime has helped give AMT their sense of improvisation back, most of their work is improvised and recorded live to tape which gives that great loose feel they have that takes them off on tangents and makes each new record that little bit different from the last. And with this new studio album I think we can safely say it's something of a new direction. They're joined on this album by Japanese underground queens Afrirampo . . . Musically this album is a slight departure for AMT, anyone buying it expecting a head-melting riff heavy record are going to be disappointed. To these ears 'Minstrel In The Galaxy' sounds darker and more stripped down that any previous AMT release. The title track alone lasts a staggering 41 minutes, over the course of which the band take our heads in a few gentle directions before letting rip towards it's crushing finale." Color vinyl; includes download code; edition of 500.

Alternative Fox present a reissue of Steve Lacy, Alvin Curran, and Frederic Rzewki's Threads, originally released in 1977. Playing in Dixieland jazz bands during his teens and then passing through some Kansas City jazz acts, New York-born alto saxophonist Steve Lacy became associated with the avant-garde jazz movement from the mid-1950s, playing on free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor's influential debut LP and early work by the Canadian pianist Gil Evans, before serving a long tenure with the idiosyncratic improv pianist Theolonius Monk, whose work he would continue to reference throughout his career. Visiting Europe from the md-1960s, starting with a trip to Copenhagen with pianist Kenny Drew (who made the Danish city his home thereafter), Lacy later travelled to Italy to form a quartet with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava (who had earlier played in Argentinian sax player, Gato Barbieri's group), plus South African exiles and former Blue Notes members Johnny Dyani on double bass and Louis Moholo on drums. Lacy subsequently moved to Paris, which became his permanent base from 1970, leading a sextet there whilst also exploring the limits of the alto saxophone as a solo instrument. The disparate and often discordant album Threads was recorded in Rome at Mama Dog studio in 1977 for filmmaker-turned-record producer Aldo Sinesio's Horo Records label; comprised of six of Lacy's own compositions, the album saw Lacy supported by Alvin Curran on piano and Frederic Rzewski on flugelhorn, synthesizer, and percussion, the pair both longstanding members of the experimental group, Musica Elettronica Viva.

"This first vinyl offering by a sporadically 20-something years unit, still extant, originally assembled under the name Cinema Soloriens by filmmaker/musician James Harrar in 1993, to play accompaniment to his films. The line-up usually includes legendary Sun Ra alto master (and current Arkestra leader) Marshall Allen with Harrar (who is also known for his work with Arthur Doyle and Daevid Allen), plus whoever else is tapped. For this date, recorded in Nashville back in 2016, the quartet was completed by a pair of under-documented musicians from the Atlanta underground -- jazz percussionist, Kenito Murray, and new music-oriented bassist, Maxwell Boecker. Together, the quartet unspools out two side long gushes of splotchy pan-generic FLOW. The music this stuff most resembles (if you really need a genre peg to hang it on) is probably jazz. The blend of electronics and reeds certainly brings to mind warped passages of many private press early '70s improv LPs, although most of those ended up devolving into funky traffic jams. Anywhere on Aerials and Antennas, the music starts to do something that might be described as 'simmering,' things quickly get weird. A horn takes off for Saturn, a voice starts mumbling as though spare change was just one prayer away, or the electronics emerge from wherever they were hiding to begin alien discussions. Not sure if there was a film shown with this or not, but the effect is cinematic. There's a great and blobby light show going on in my head the whole time it plays, never quite deciding which direction its audacious motion is headed, but always looking for an exit door otherwise hidden by the dull planes of reality. Nice work. Aerial and Antennas makes for a gloriously stoned listen, as mysterious in its motives as that second Charlie Nothing LP. And what the fuck was that one about?" --Byron Coley, 2019 Edition of 500.

Hospital Productions present a reissue of Smell & Quim's Cosmic Bandage, originally released in 1995 on their notorious Stinky Horse Fuck imprint. Cosmic Bondage stands as a monument to the universal perversion inside us all. Birthed into the world with an auto-asphyxiated doll complete with toy packaging and overgrown pubic hair in an edition of 100, despite its limitation the material within has become a staple of the groups live performances to this day. The dark humor enforced by truly masterful concrete noise and arrangements that sit alongside the best of the English electronic and avant-garde visionaries serves as a cautionary tale to the misinterpreted dualist literalism of where we are today. Enormous textures are turned inside out, to the howl and psychosis of British voices that can only be from the north of England and a cacophony of intricate and present adult loops that never let you relax into them and are always cut to engage one out of their lethargy. After Cosmic Bondage, we are all from the North of England. Audio restoration by Kris Lapke. Packaged in wide spine sleeve with deluxe starry slipcase.

Jessica Ekomane's debut LP, Multivocal, is brilliantly original, and will appeal to fans of Caterina Barbieri, Alessandro Cortini, Shasta Cults, ELEH, and the strand of minimal electronic music that runs through the Important catalog. Multivocal is a polyphonic maze that unfolds to both the body and the mind. A generative take on rhythm and spatial perception, it presents the same events in different configurations. The two pieces of the album, "Solid of Revolution" and "Never Odd or Even", mirror each other with the same principle in different musical scales: steady pulses with one millisecond difference in tempo start beating together, then slowly phase organically and progress into ever-changing rhythmic patterns until they finally return to unison. Multivocal emphasizes shifts of attention in the listener's experience and plays with the expectations that frame it. Originally conceived for quadraphonic sound, the pieces reveal the many different aspects and modes of perception that can arise within the same sequence of notes. In this way Multivocal is influenced by concepts of gestalt psychology such as multi-stable perception -- a term describing ambiguous patterns that offer multiple interpretations at once. The minimalism and repetitive quality of the music also refers to trance-inducing and collective music practices, driven by the strong bodily affects induced through the use of rhythms. Those two compositions were recorded live during Ars Electronica 2018 at the occasion of the sleeping event "Sonatas for Sleep/less", curated by multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang and cultural theorist Matthew Fuller. First pressing in an edition of 500.

Like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is an allegory for an individual's self-realization. The opera takes its imagery from the history of the Jews --beginning with their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and ending 500 years later in the United States. Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) was first conceived as a recording for Nonesuch Records (1991). Ashley followed with three other operas, making up a quartet or tetralogy under the name Now Eleanor's Idea (LCD 1009CD), and all four operas were performed often during the first half of the 1990s.

The opera was revived in 2018-19, with a new cast: Gelsey Bell as Linda; Brian McCorkle as Don, Mr. Payne, and Companion; Paul Pinto as Junior, Jr.; Aliza Simons as Now Eleanor; Dave Ruder as The Doctor; Amirtha Kidambi as Mr. Payne's Mother; Robert Ashley (on tape) as Narrator I; Amirtha Kidambi and Aliza Simons as Narrator II. Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) was presented by the Kitchen, February 7th through 16th, 2019. Live Sound and Processing: Tom Hamilton. Live cast recording by Eric Sherman and Tom Hamilton. CD mixed by Tom Hamilton.

"Improvement is engrossing because Ashley was one of the finest American prose writers of the 20th century and his writing was made thrilling Thursday night by the beauty of the performance. These new artists incorporate Ashley wholly in their musical experience, taking the work beyond the objective presentation of the opera's means, style, and form. Thursday night they were as characterful and plainly human as one will experience on the opera stage. Gelsey Bell was exceptional, the warm glow of her voice a colorful contrast with Ashley's pleasantly parched midwestern twang. She expressed vocally Linda's mix of befuddlement and optimism, her sense that her own life is a mystery -- and through some imperceptible means she outlined Linda's aging while always sounding the same. Hamilton's digital reconstruction of the original audio was superb, true to the source material and with the subtlety Ashley requires, while also having ample open space, depth, and vividness. He was just as much a member of the ensemble as the artists on stage, and just as vital to the human feeling that grew throughout the performance to a gentle but moving coda at the end of the evening." --George Grella, New York Classical Review, February 8, 2019

Restocked; LP version. "The renowned French horn player known as Brother Ah (aka Robert Northern) is one of the most prolific and respected musicians in the history of jazz music, with a recorded output spanning more than 30 years. Born in 1934 and raised in the south Bronx, Brother Ah was playing jazz trumpet as early as fifteen years of age. Following a classical French horn education at Austria's Vienna State Academy, he emerged in the late '50s and established himself as a skilled and consistent session musician, playing with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, and numerous Broadway theater orchestras. Brother Ah recorded well into the '60s with some of the most illustrious names in the genre, including Donald Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Gil Evans and, perhaps most influentially, Sun Ra. In 1969, Ah formed his own group, the Musical Sound Awareness Ensemble, and released several works under his own name from 1974 onward. In the late '60s, his interest in non-western music developed, and his '70s recordings, incorporated elements of Eastern and 'Third World' music, fusing them with jazz structures. His first solo recording, Sound Awareness was released on the Strata East label in 1972. By this time, Ah had recorded extensively with the Sun Ra Arkestra and his solo work continued the boundary-pushing approaches he explored with that ensemble. Consisting of two side-length tracks, 'Beyond Yourself (The Midnight Confession)', and 'Love Piece', the album features notable appearances by percussionist Max Roach and the M'Boom Re:percussion Ensemble, as well as a 90-piece vocal choir. The 22-minute 'Beyond Yourself' is billed as 'a sound journey' in seven parts, outlining a man's struggle to either give up drugs or become a monk."

The two collaborators Gareth Davis and Scanner, known separately for contemporary electronic music and free clarinet experimentations, team up to create the delirious trip, Footfalls. Two scenes are presented here, seemingly taken from different sides of the same desolated seaside setting, loosely inspired by poet and novelist T.S Elliot and Samuel Beckett. In "Towards The Door", Gareth Davis's bass clarinet breathes slow, wave-like tones that merge with the oft-rhythmic electronic textures from his counterpart. A third of the way in, Robin Rimbaud's synth erupts into a Blade Runner-esque epic harmonic section that disappears as suddenly as it arrives -- leaving ripples of oscillation in its wake, slowly unfolding into the sound of waves, as it arrives back where it begun: as a full circle, drawn in echoes of sound. "Smokefall" begins with the words "Invisible Choirs", subtly spoken by a woman's voice among a blurred distant conversation, as textural sound effects creep forwards to the point where a slow progressing but steady LFO rhythm enters. Water, metal, and smoke are absorbed into a creeping tribal passage, accompanied by long clarinet tones. The piece expands further and further into a state of ecstatic harmonic noise that fulfills all parts of your body -- if played loud. Both artists from here on move into full on crushing electronics, all while Rimbaud's Kilpatrick Phenol synth drives the background with its pulses and repetitive bassline. The piece has an ellipse like rotation that makes one feel a sort of blissful vertigo that reverberates in your mind after the piece has ended. Footfalls is a euphoric trip from two artists that -- although prolific -- manage to arrive at the perfect meeting point to deliver two hard to shake pieces of dizzying electro-acoustic perfection. Metallic pantone spot color artwork. Orange vinyl; includes download code; edition of 300.

During the height of the turned-on 1960s and '70s Occult explosion, even the under-the-counter men's magazines got in on the act and began a surreal exploration of the haunting netherworld of Witchcraft and Satanism. This monumental art book reveals a world of diabolical smut that was so compelling and obscure that many people today would actually question whether or not the magazines were real or just an elaborate and detailed modern photo editing invention. A few salacious titles and images on the internet sparked imaginations, and strongly inspired bands in the doom/black/heavy metal genre, eventually these alluring images found their way to record covers and T-shirts, but mostly remaining shadowy, mysterious, and elusive. Magazines so impossible to hunt down that their very existence seemed an urban myth. Well, they are real and they are spectacular! These magazines are in fact, out there in the world. They are collecting dust in attics, basements, and garages. Hidden away from sight. Unsavory treasures deemed too filthy and then forgotten by their lustful owners. This massive 384 pages deluxe hardcover book is a glimpse into a vast and shocking world that still remains virtually unknown and unexplored. These artifacts come from a bygone era promoting sexual revolution and freedom with overt and unholy occult themes. If you have any issues with hardcore witchcraft and Satanism, body hair or nudity, don't pick this book up and quickly get it out of your sight, and forget everything we've mentioned. Just remember life's too short to take everything so seriously. Flesh is beautiful It's time to descend into the infernal witches' cauldron and deep down into the hellish pit for a real Black Mass. Includes a thorough review and collector's guide of each rare publication as well as illuminating essays on the subject. Hardcover; 384 pages; limited edition of 1000.

Soundway releases first Caribbean compilation in over ten years, Body Beat: Soca-Dub And Electronic Calypso 1979-98. 17 obscure soca B-side versions, dubs, instrumentals, and edits as well as vocal tracks influenced by disco, boogie, house-music, soul, and the more conscious lyrics of roots reggae. Owing as much to New York, Toronto, and London as to the Caribbean cities of Port of Spain, Bridgetown, and Kingstown this compilation traces the genre from its explosion in the late 1970s right up to the period just before contemporary soca became established around the end of the 1990s. Compiled by Soundway label founder Miles Cleret and DJ/collector Jeremy Spellacey, Body Beat, as with many compilations on the label, explores the fringes of this often maligned (by outsiders) genre. Boiled down to the bare bones of the matter though: soca is party music. Soca was originally a re-invention of Calypso music; a genre that in the 1970s was fast becoming usurped around the Caribbean by Jamaican reggae and American soul, funk and later disco. The originator of soca (or sokah as he called it), the calypsonian Lord Shorty, began experimenting and modernizing on the formulation of calypso in the early 1970s. His first album featured a strong emphasis on East African rhythms and a punchier recording style that emphasized the beat, and introduced arrangements that often owed as much to American funk and soul as to calypso. So here you go -- seventeen slabs of soca crossover, rapso, electronic calypso, and Caribbean "soca-soul" for your enjoyment -- and bound to fit well into modern, open-minded DJ sets alongside the resurgence of burger-highlife, digi-reggae, soukous, and zouk. Features Cito Jarvis, Roger Bain, *D* Ivan, Bill Campbell, Brother Resistance, Adonijah, Peter Britto, Juno D, Colin Jackman, Levi John, Spiking, Mohjah, Andre Tanker, Touch, D'Rebel Band, The Millers, and Chocolate Affaire. RIYL: Rebles' Sweetest Taboo (Soca) 12" (SNDW 12036EP), George & Glen Miller's Easing 12" (SNDW 12037EP), Wilson LeGendre. Double-CD version comes in three-panel accordion cover; includes 20-pg. booklet.

Trading Places present a reissue of Mike Cooper's Oh Really!?, originally released in 1969. The guitarist and singer-songwriter Mike Cooper was a key figure in the British blues boom of the late 1960s. Born in Reading in 1942, Cooper began playing guitar as a teen in local skiffle groups. After seeing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee perform in 1961, Cooper caught the blues bug and began to play the harmonica and formed The Blues Committee, supporting John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Alexis Korner, and Long John Baldry, while Cooper was also performing solo. Acquiring a lap steel guitar in 1963, he studied Blind Boy Fuller's work and in 1965, teamed with Dave Hall to support Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, and others; after releasing work on the Kennet, Sydisc, and Matchbox labels, Cooper soon began incorporating country blues aspects into his work, drawing from Son House and Mississippi Fred McDowell, as well as non-blues artists such as David Bowie, John Martyn, Roy Harper, and Dave Van Ronk. Then, in late 1968, Cooper was approached by producer Peter Eden, resulting in debut album Oh Really!? for Pye; aside from agreeable covers of Son House's "Death Letter" and Blind Boy Fuller's "Bad Luck Blues", the rest of the disc is pure Cooper, with his deft picking accompanied by Derek Hall's guitar work only on "Leadhearted Blues" and "Electric Chair". 180 gram vinyl; 45rpm.

Lustmord is a Welsh electronic musician, composer, and sound designer based in Los Angeles. Active since 1980 he has released a prolific body of work across various labels such as Touch, Hydra Head, and Blackest Ever Black. Often credited for starting the dark ambient genre with his Heresy album in 1990, Lustmord's music has been described as sweeping and profound, a vast dreamlike soundscape that utilizes organic and real-world scenes as source material. Lustmord albums have been made from caves, crypts, car crashes, cosmological activity, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the site of the first ever nuclear detonation.

Lustmord has announced the launch of Vaultworks. Originally an imprint intended to release short editions of live CDs at his live shows, it is now launched as a wider platform for his work in general. Kick starting a planned series of new releases and reissues is the first time vinyl and CD release of his soundtrack to Paul Schrader's 2017 film First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, and Cedric Kyles. The release features extended versions of the score formatted as a standalone album. CD version has tracks formatted to crossfade into each other for a continuous listening experience.

2LP version. Gyedu-Blay Ambolley was born on the 11th Street in Sekondi, Ghana 72 years ago. On the cover photo, on the right side, is the house of his birth, which was also his parental home. The Ghanaian legend's latest release 11th Street, Sekondi shows off a pride in his heritage, and his honed talent for mixing highlife with other genres like rap, Afro-funk and disco Ghanaian highlife. 11th Street, Sekondi is his 31st album since his debut in 1973. The charismatic stage personality, no stranger to mixing humor into his music and who has performed alongside Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti and highlife bandleader Ebo Taylor, has been a record collector's staple since his appearance on the seminal Ghana Soundz (SNDW 001LP, 2002), which re-introduced the world to his trademark Simigwa style. Highlife, which started in Sierra Leone and Liberia, took hold in Ghana in the 1940s as a coming together of the musicians fed up with the foxtrot and quickstep parties originally hosted by English colonists. It began with big band horns and happy lyrics, popularized by artists such as E.T. Mensah, before opening up in the '50s and '60s with a wave of guitar-driven, socially conscious and more danceable Afro-funk hits -- a product of the easy movement of people between Nigeria and Ghana. It was then that Ambolley's trademark baritone vocals burst onto the scene, under the tutelage of close personal friend Taylor. Ambolley's latest album, named after the area of West Ghana in which he grew up, is a look back at the area and musical styles that shaped the musician's life. "Black Woman" is a funky number that opens the album with Ambolley on a tenor sax solo, while tracks like "Little Small Girl" showcase his renowned James Brown-influenced vocal flourishes. Soul, jazz, blues, and comedy are present -- in keeping with his fervent belief that music must always be entertaining for the listener. The album is the second of his to be released German label Agogo records, after the acclaimed Ketan (2017). It also stays true to highlife's social ambitions, with reflections on the misguided pursuit of European ideals ahead of African values. Ambolley's career has been filled with accolades, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Charles R Drew University in Los Angeles, and formal recognition from the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington DC for producing the first ever commercially recorded rap album.

LP version. Red vinyl. The older brother of Nicky Wire from the Manic Street Preachers, Patrick Jones is a brilliant poet whose hypnotic Welsh lilt empowers his compassionate and very human lyrics full of community and love in these Brexit times with a lone political voice. The 21st Century Dylan Thomas has recorded this album with the Membranes' John Robb who provides the haunting musical pieces, scoring powerful classical strings backings full of the same drama and landscapes as the words. Renegade Psalms, 18 months in the making. The personal is the political. The political has become personal. Raging words and brooding beats. A sonic document of our times. Jones takes aim at borders, the bedroom tax, the monarchy, Tory dismantling of the welfare state, greed, and austerity whilst celebrating the resilience of the human spirit, love, the power of literature and the growing tide of protest as Robb's atmospheric soundscapes fill the grooves with a sense of emotional urgency."Then the world will be for the common people, and the sounds of happiness will reach the deepest springs. Ah! Come! People of every land, how can you not be roused." --The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

"a cunning concoction of laissez-faire and big brother a meticulous maledicta that sets one against another as Starbucks and Amazon find new ways to fall beneath the radar the most vulnerable, the sick, the poor are targeted by IDS, the moral crusader" --from "Demonise or Die" (for Stephanie Bottrill) .

Mechanosphere is Cam Deas's staggeringly abstract yet poignant second album exploring ideas of rhythmic dissonance and head-spinning proprioceptions for The Death of Rave. Following directly from Cam's cultishly-acclaimed mini-LP Time Exercises (RAVE 022LP, 2018), which was surprisingly deployed in Richie Hawtin's "CLOSE COMBINED - LIVE" mix and hailed as "Holy F#ck-What is This?!?" by Brainwashed, his new album applies rich polychromatic color to his signature rhythmic constructions with a greatly heightened emotive traction and broader appeal while only going deeper on his radical ideas about the fundamentals of sound and composition. Using a computer-controlled modular synth, Cam takes the simple idea of layering pitches in multiple tempi to Nth degrees, resulting in a sensational and warped sense of temporality and gravity-defying physics. Effectively placing pitch on a scale in a similar way to Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano programming or even Ligeti's famous metronome experiment, Cam explores solutions to the problem of grid-locked linearity, or at least perceptions of it, by effectively ripping the rug from under electronic music convention to make his music appear as though in perpetual freefall, or a process of omnidirectional contraction/expansion that never quite resolves - always the same, ever different. In Mechanosphere listeners effectively navigate through the music by a loose means of pattern recognition, picking out accentuated kicks and hits that pierce thru Cam's incredibly dense swells of endless metallic tone. But where his Time Exercises LP was unreservedly abstract and emotive in an alien sense, his follow-up practically sounds as though aliens have developed a form of 3D midi folk-jazz or court music for bacchanals and spiritual reasons. From the vertiginous scale of "Ascension", thru the jaw-dropping hyper stepper "Slip", to the controlled chaos of "Reflect, Deflect", and ultimately the deeply solemn yet discordantly lush finale of shearing metallic pitches in "Solitude", Cam offers an often shocking and ever fascinating grasp of electronic music's potential to relate hard-to-communicate but intuitively felt ideas to the body and emotions. It's a sober but incredibly wondrous sound, and only confirms that Cam's seismic stylistic transition this decade from preeminent, post-Takoma 12-string guitar player to visionary synthesist was certainly worthwhile. RIYL Autechre, Xenakis, Ligeti, Rashad Becker. Art and layout by Tom Kilburn and Cam Deas; Spot gloss digipak. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

In the early 1970s, a devastating drought brought famine to the West African Sahel. This environmental disaster destroyed the region's agricultural and livestock economy. Millions of people were affected. International relief efforts tried to send emergency aid. "Les Bateaux", the title track of this album, recalls those hard years. It paints a scene of Malian villagers standing on the banks of the Niger River anxiously awaiting the boats carrying food. Mamadou Kelly remembers those years as he calls out the name of each boat's longed for appearance over the horizon. Kelly sings about life. He praises and thanks those who do admirable things. He evokes the spirits of collective memory. Seemingly simple, upon listening, his songs reveal multi-layered complexity. He is a master of the desert blues. His group on this album includes longtime colleague Aly Magassa (electric guitar), Kande Sissoko (ngoni), and Hamadoun "Afo" Guindo (percussion). They are joined on tracks by Malian musicians Adama Sidibe (balafon(, Madou Diabate (violin), and Hama Sangho (backup vocal), as well as American friends Jacob Silver (bass), Cindy Cashdollar (lap steel guitar), and David Rothenberg (clarinets). Les Bateaux was recorded live in Bamako and New York. The tracks were mixed in New York and Los Angeles, and mastered in New York. CD version contains four bonus tracks including a techno remix by David Harrow as well as Dave Cook's remix of two tracks from Kelly's recent EP, Ni Allah.

LP version. This album was recorded during Thollem McDonas's 2017 residency at Brooklyn-based multi-discipline mecca Pioneer Works. It's the second by Radical Empathy, which combines three uncategorizable improvisors. Michael Wimberly has been astonishing folks since his days in Charles Gayle bands and Steve Coleman & Five Elements in the early '90s, and has gone on become a composer and educator of note. Nels Cline has spent decades changing people's ideas about the role of the electric guitar in multiple contexts, ranging from Wilco to Anthony Braxton (think about that!) as well as many projects as a leader; this is his fourth album in trio with Thollem, and a fifth will follow in 2020, also on ESP-Disk. Some people have given ESP-Disk' flak (and "flak" was not the first word choice here) about putting out Thollem McDonas albums. "He's not in the jazz tradition," they say, and even though their idea of the jazz tradition includes Albert Ayler; ESP-Disk' think that this album will make their little, closed minds explode. The heavy electronic sound of the first track, with its swathes of distortion, put it very much in noise territory, with Wimberly contributing coloristic accents and heavier flurries of rhythmic activity. After the twenty uncompromising minutes of "Collective Tunnels", for "Conscious Tunnels" Cline switches to a guitar tone John Abercrombie wouldn't shy away from and Thollem sits down at an acoustic piano (for a while) -- though their free improvisation is just as uncompromising. The timbres cease pacifying jazzers when blippy 1950s electronic sounds slinkily slither from the speakers. Then the piano comes back, but the guitar's tone gets dirty. Genre boundaries are crushed underfoot as the moods continue to vary wildly as "Conscious Tunnels" covers an amazing breadth of timbres and textures. Personnel: Thollem McDonas - keyboards; Nels Cline - electric guitars; Michael Wimberly - drums. Recorded by Justin Frye at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY Sept. 13, 2017.

"Massively ripped sophomore LP by this Portland OR psych sextet. Half of the line-up has shifted in the two years since their great debut album, but the same berserk stack of musical elements remains on the table. A lot of bands who fly the psych banner these days have a minimalist view of the music, and choose a sort of post-shoegaze lassitude to present their 'vision.' This can be astoundingly great, of course, but it also fails to address the central gobble-crazed nature of true psychedelia. Many of history's greatest psych outfits were hewn from bizarre hybrids of disparate parts. Frankenstein monsters in search of sacred ecstasy. One gets the same vibe off of Abronia. Totally unexpected bits pop up amidst their rhapsodic jamming, conjuring shards of memory as disparate as Relf-era Renaissance, Joseph Byrd's United States of America, and even (at least in spots) real early Siouxsee. These are just a few examples of how wide Abronia cast their net. Their instrumental brunt moves from neo-prog to folk rock to thunderheads cast in the same mold as the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's (I shit you not!). Taken together, these freakishly disparate elements mange to create a gorgeous and simmering whole. If you aren't tripping to Abronia now, I suggest a change of lifestyle." --Byron Coley, 2019

Hospital Productions present a reissue of Masonna's first full-length CD from 1990, Shinsen Na Clitoris, originally on Vanilla Records. The supreme voice of Japanese noise here on vinyl for the first time with audio preparation by Kris Lapke. What would become an inimitable explosion of energy and vision from Japan heralded in the glory days of '90s alternative rock, death metal, and psychedelic synth music, Masonna surpassed all extremes with a full frequency violence that was as fast as it was psychedelic. Not once has any artist emerged with more intensity and focus in the history of noise. It was said onstage that Masonna has reduced the pure elements of classic rock, the guitar stack, the feedback, and the lead singer to an explosive few seconds of visceral feedback, metallic noise from the physical shaking and pressure of his fist around the shaker, processed through the self-described "harshtronics" and indeed ending in "exclamation!" If you have wondered where to start in the vast and increasingly difficult to find discography of this legend look no further. Presented in immaculate sleeve recreated original art with poster and insert.

LP version. Includes download code. Kranky veteran Benoît Pioulard (Thomas Meluch) has created his first full-length for Morr Music. The music on Sylva bears the beauty and strange shapes of nature: desert rock formations and colorful leaves, restless waters and peculiar plants. Meluch's dreamy ambient drones and saturated lo-fi pop embody the impressionist sensation of his visual aesthetic -- with this collection sound and vision are merged into an affectionate study of the organic. Sylva is the result of one of the most productive periods in Meluch's life. During a nine-month hiatus from his day job he embarked on daily recording sessions amid trips to the American southwest, Montana, Hawai'i, and his native Michigan. Back home in Seattle, he developed his recordings and wrote the album's two mesmerizing vocal tracks, which call to mind early Fleetwood Mac or peak pop-era Brian Eno. "Keep" is based on a tiny flower called Draba mentioned in the book A Sand County Almanac (1949), about which "no one ever wrote a poem"; considering all the little plants he had inadvertently crushed throughout a lifetime of hikes, he wrote it for them. The piano-driven "Meristem" features a striking violin contribution from Freya Creech (London, UK), and is dedicated to Meluch's brother, who died suddenly two years ago. Sylva's other collaboration is the soaring vocal arrangement created for "Raze II" by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer/singer Caroline Shaw (New York, USA), a former touring mate who resided at the Banff Centre (Alberta, CAN) during the same period in which Meluch completed his recordings there. The album's ten songs are divided into four movements: Solum (soil/solitude), Ignis (fire), Coeptum (seed), and Vireo (thrive), with each group embodying a slightly different environ. When paring down the photo collection Meluch abided three guidelines: no man-made objects, no redundant textures, and a color palette as diverse as his vintage camera allowed. Follows two albums by his band-project Orcas (with Rafael Anton Irisarri).

Compositions and arrangements for piano by Chris Burn. Performed by Philip Thomas. Recorded University of Huddersfield, September 16th-17th, 2009.

"The music on this disc is vivid and colorful, vivacious and brilliant, but it also rewards close and attentive listening, not just for the subtleties of the harmonics which are revealed after attacks, but also for the silences, the anticipations, and the overriding attention to sonority. Chris is a musician of extraordinary range and curiosity. As well as one of the most brilliant improvising pianists working today, he is an insightful interpreter of music by, amongst others, Henry Cowell (whose music he performed superbly and recorded in 1993 for the Acta label) and John Cage, and is a fine performer on trumpet and electronics. I am so thrilled that this recording enables a further glimpse into the work of Chris Burn, composer." --Philip Thomas, February 2018

Out-Sider present a reissue of Stone Harbour's Emerges, originally released in 1974. The absolute king of lo-fi basement psychedelia, originally released as a private pressing in 1974 by this duo from Ohio. From dreamy melancholic tracks to insane fuzzed-out heavy psych ones. Remastered sound; Insert with photos and liner notes by band member Ric Ballas; Includes download.

"... It's 1974, you're young and have a head full of Hawkwind and Roky and the Elevators, old brutalist blues in the Hound Dog Taylor/Fred McDowell backwoods whisky-fucked mode, freak folk and LSD; you're stuck in Hicksville, USA -- that's Youngstown, Ohio to you lot; the music scene sucks; glam's dead or dying slowly; punk a good year or so from even starting to get itself born. Town's too damn small to even muster up a band in. It's just and your buddy and that's it, man. So you grows your hair and wear satin, wander wide-eyed and tripping across small town railway tracks and hang loose at the weekend in your basement. You gather a bunch if cheapo instruments on the never-never and you start cutting low-fi bedroom demos... Stone Harbour were Ric Ballas (electric, acoustic and slide guitars; organ; piano; synthesizers; bass guitar, percussion, voice) and Dave McCarty (lead vocals, drums, and percussion), and out of nowhere and nothing, at entirely the wrong time, they cut an LP that will blow your head clean off. This is a trip into the true dark heart of psychedelia . . . Dave McCarty's vocals emerge from some subterranean cave and the keyboards flicker, flicker, flash across the periphery of the song; 'Rock & Roll Puzzle' is dark, twisted fried garage punk blues brutality in the same mold as 'White Faces' or 'Cold Night For Alligators', pre-empting The Gories and Pussy Galore by a good ten years!! . . . Songs fade in and out; finger-picking blurs into screaming squelching synths; guitars melt in the mid-summer heat. 'Grains Of Sand' frazzles like The Stooges through a fucked-up amp and filtered through a transistor radio with the valves burning out. 'Thanitos' is the freak-out ending of 'Julia's Dream' lost in suburban downtown US of A with the taillights cutting on the freeway... whilst 'Summer Magic Is Gone' is the most haunted, haunting song I've heard in many a long strange moon . . . Best record I've heard all year." --Hugh Dellar (Shindig!)

Theo Parrish's "This Is For You" with Maurissa Rose. Includes instrumental version.

LP version. Clear blue vinyl; edition of 500. Join Mattias Uneback (known from Ìxtahuele and The Test Pilots) on a fantastic underwater exotica adventure in sound. Sail the high seas, explore their depths, marvel at their strange and colorful inhabitants. Beneath the waves and through the depths, forgotten worlds lie waiting. Bioluminescent creatures that have never seen the light of day, ancient beasts of gigantic proportions, sunken continents and underwater caves all await you. The Voyage Beneath The Sea album project is about composing music based on underwater fantasy worlds, as well as actual places. A musical discovery below the surface of the ocean; the mysterious unknown and one of the last outposts still uninhabited by man, but also the cradle of all life on our planet. You travel in to the deep sea, as a parallel to, and parable with, the exploration of outer space, as well as the inner worlds of the mind and the subconscious. This is visionary music inspired by the space-age underwater themed exotica recordings of the early 1960s as well as the peculiar aquatic library type albums of 1970s. The songs are amusing and entertaining one moment, dramatic and fierce the next, but most of all: serenely beautiful. The production of the album has been an important process for Mattias and he feels it has seriously widened his views as a musical and composer. Using a variety of both classical and novel instruments; from exotic percussion and full-scale orchestra and choir to vintage electronics, Mr. Uneback paints a vivid and living tableau for the receptive listener. This is exotic orchestral seduction for those willing to embark on a journey of imagination. Submerge yourself in the sounds!

Tresor present a reissue of James Ruskin's seminal Point 2 album. First released in 2000, it marked a fine debut that entrenches the minimal sequences, utilitarian funk and eerie hypnosis found within Ruskin's body of work. As Tresor's relationship with the UK sound grew stronger across the course of the '00s, it was Ruskin, the label owner of Blueprint Records, who played a critical part in this. Throughout the trio of LPs released over that decade, inspirations of the sci-fi minimal Detroit sound lie abundant, rendered through corporeal slammers typical of the UK vein. Point 2 was the first of Ruskin's trilogy for Tresor, and brought a direct and uncompromising vibrancy to the fore, from the aquatic symphony featured on "From Over The Edge" to the pinpoint gaze of "Subject". Gurning loops beat against alien samples, drained into refined abstractions of pure techno. Newly remastered and featuring two tracks previously not cut onto vinyl, this upfront and bold classic is set to span dancefloors once again. New mastering, new cut, two tracks previously uncut on vinyl, new artwork. 180 gram; includes download code.