Ron Morelli - A Gathering Together LP (Hospital Productions) $55 SGD
SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
A Gathering Together is RON MORELLI's second full-length for Hospital Productions: a ‘techno’ cacophony brought to its granular detail and reduced to its most elemental tonal depths. A cohesive fusion of surreal and feverish deja vu loops, brittle noise, fucked rhythms, scrap metal percussions, pro-one metal synths, and an injection of near-buried, Drano vocal samples, it’s a fearsome celebration of brokenness, of amplified surroundings. Stereo-shifting drones and driving rhythms that tell the stories of those now gone, more a soundtrack for a wake than 4/4 crafted for the dancefloor. There’s a naked anxiety at work that doesn’t turn away from loss, but runs with an excited melancholy that looks to a future that won’t exist. The boldness of the gestures are not to be confused with exuberance.
Listen - A Gathering Together
Exoteric Continent - Referandum LP(Hospital Productions) $55 SGD (Pre-Order)
Exoteric Continent draws the listener into the awkward spaces and styles around the shifting, jagged borders of techno and noise, using drums, percussion, magnetic tape, and synthesizers to outline nine atonal and enigmatic silhouettes. The work ranges from the creeping slow-techno misshape of "Percentages" thru the sagging chamber feeling of "Posicions" to the Soisong-like gamelan tones of "Transició" and the kinky industrial swing instincts of "La Mirada Llarga"; he mixes rugged structures with stranger, keening electronics in the insectoid logic of "Autoritat" and the rubbled electro-acoustic texturhythm of "Agrupació Civil" to forge a fractious, unstable brace of noise techno that sits somewhere between classic Pan Sonic and his Hospital lablemate Alberich. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.
Listen - Posicions
Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica LP (Software) $50 SGD SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
Replica is an electronic song cycle based around audio procured from TV ad compilations. These sample-based meditations are as lyrical as they are ecological, featuring re-purposed "ghost vocals" which serve as narration for DANILE LOPATIN’s signature amorphous, ambient passages. Lopatin's Juno-60 is still prominent, but Returnal's placid, synthetic surroundings are accelerated through darker, more unpredictable terrains via Lopatin's use of samplers, analog filtering, tape-op, piano, plate reverb and sub-bass. The result is a heightened sense of music as part and parcel of an overall sonic terrain. Vinyl edition of 1,000 hand-numbered and spot varnished copies.
Listen - Sleep Dealer
The Rita / Dead Body Collection Split 7"(Peripheral) $28 SGD
SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
A terrifying odyssey into harsh noise by two of the world’s hardest hitters. Uncompromising walls of icy static that soothe and hurt. Edition of 200.
Nick Forté - Primodial Forms LP (Amish) $55 SGD
SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
Forté is one of the most innovative and overlooked figures in contemporary experimental and extreme music, though those aware of his discography recognize the arch and foundational significance of his work. Primordial Forms is NICK FORTE's most demanding and conceptual work to date with five pieces that comprise the record, Forté created five one-second sounds on his computer based purely on the visual appeal of the waveform. He made these waveforms with the speakers off. These visually appealing forms became the seeds for the pieces on the record. With the speakers turned back on, Forté then turned these discrete sound units into long form music through a slow and deliberate process of looping, editing, and manipulation. The entire record was made in a pirated version of Sound Forge from the late '90s.
Listen - Imperfect Birth
Slogun - I will bury you! LP (Peripheral) $56 SGD (Pre-order)
Ten harsh bursts of brutal noise and monosyllabic vocal stabs, plus an extra track from JOHN BALESTRERI’s darkly ambient side-project SELF. With insert. Edition of 250.
Ambarchi/O'Malley/Dunn - Shades Theme Form 2xLP (Drag City)$65 SGD (Pre-Order)
Shade Themes From “Kairos” is a new iteration of the dream for all the guitar freaks out there, bringing together a couple of singular players together, just to see what happens. In this case, the players were old friends and collaborators OREN AMABARCHI and STEPHEN O’MALLEY, playing in a space engineered and co-populated by RANDALL DUNN. The Shade album began in 2009, when Belgian filmmaker ALEXIS DESTOOP asked Ambarchi and O’Malley to score his short feature, “Kairos.” Randall Dunn was their first and best choice to record and co-produce the music—and as the session progressed, all three men found themselves acting as a trio to bring the music. And in the end, this album was made by a trio of players. Decamped in an old radio station in Kortrijk, Belgium, they filled a bare, stripped live broadcast room with the needed equipment as well as other amazing old pieces made available by the gearheads of the European lowlands. With guitars, drums, analog synthesizers, vibes, crotales, Sruti box and a mellotron, deep emanations were evoked, while other spirits emerged from the old wooden sound panels in the room—the ghosts of music makers past? It will suffice to say that all who were there contributed something. The soundtrack was completed—but the vast space they’d discovered together required deeper investigation. Ambarchi, O’Malley and Dunn determined to go further with the music, reconvening back at Randall’s ALEPH Studio in Seattle (now R.I.P.), where further recording and mixing was done.
Listen - Circumstances of Faith
Dreadlords - Death Angel LP ( Not just religious music) $40 SGD SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
Church of Misery : Terror in Tokyo DVD (Emetic) $34 SGD SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
Terror in Tokyo is CHURCH OF MISERY’s fourth DVD and first to ever be available outside of Europe or Japan and first since since 2007's Live In Red - Eurotour 2005. Along with the main feature the entire set from the 2012 Maryland Death Fest has been added as bonus material.
Sleep - Volume One LP (Tupelo) $40 SGD (Pre-Order)
Volume One is the debut album. It was the only album recorded with second guitarist Justin Marler, before he became an Orthodox monk. Volume One showcases a darker sound and stronger doom metal influence than Sleep's later work.
Listen - Prey
Jim Haynes - Scarlet CASSETTE (Helen Scarsdale Agency) $15 SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
Jagged bursts of strobe lights. Cackling radio signals bristling with interference. Sawtooth patterns of tactile noise. Torn flesh. Scabbed wounds. These are some of the building blocks to Jim Haynes' Scarlet. This crucible of unkempt rhythm and noise-pulse turbulence was decomposed and sutured together from the various sources of electromagnetic and psychic detritus into an unstable mutation of sequential error. The eight tracks of Scarlet stand as vastly radical and obsessive variations on the theme of repetition through trauma. Each of the tracks may have begun with the same system of building blocks, but quickly spiral into disparate orbits, time-lag accumulation, tunnel-vision mania, schizoid detours, amplified seances, and teleological endgames. This strategy of rupture and release was first noted on Haynes' 2012 album The Wires Cracked, but has become all the more unhinged here on Scarlet. The analog tone generation and shambolic futurism harken to an earlier era of industrial immolation, with Haynes' echolalia of Le Syndicat, Mika Vainio, and Martin Rev stridently tracing and electrically bleaching the forms of those antecedents without the benefit of drum machine, sequencer, and whatnot. Bruitisme, indeed.
Listen - Venal
Lx Sweat - Sweat Sweat Sweat CASSETTE (Not Not Fun) $15 SGD SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
Given that we're living in the age of the come-back, one terrain we’ve been extra-pleased to see get resurrected and siphoned through the stargate of cassette-crud mutation is hypno R&B. A significant cut of global listeners can count the style as one of their formative musical memories, so there’s nothing shallow or ironic about its recent reappropriation in alien-ized bedroom beat scenes (regardless of what blog conservatives post to the contrary). All of which is joyously confirmed and celebrated in the retro-futurist exoskeletons scavenged and funkified by Germany’s one-man groove merchant LX Sweat. Screwed Up Click backing tracks are stacked high with sci-fi vocoder-soul vox, lush synthesizer counter melodies, and classic echo/reverb unit studio trickery for a production that’s vaguely reminiscent of Barry-White-on-morphine-transmitted-through-a-fax-machine-to-a-low-wattage-pirate-radio-station. Steamy, disembodied bubble baths of endorphin slow-rides and pleasure crunk. Excellent shit, and only the beginning for this inspired dude.
Listen - Mess Around
