Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society - Simultonality LP (Eremite)

Our Review:

Simultonality is the fourth fully-realized album from Joshua Abram's Natural Information Society, and while it continues down the path tread by its predecessors, it's a truly remarkable record in and of itself. Simultonality is Abrams' strongest declaration of purpose yet, presenting his vision of ecstatic minimalism with striking clarity.

For more than 25 years, Abrams has played with everyone from tenor icon and AACM co-founder Fred Anderson to the Roots. Also, his hands are in seemingly every important Chicago post-rock project in between. He was in Sam Prekop's band, played on a milestone early Tortoise EP and was a member of Town And Country. Despite this breadth of experience, the focus of the Natural Information Society project has been nothing but consistent. In this platform, Abrams weaves his experience in experimental rock groups, study of postwar American composition, and training in jazz and North African trance-music traditions into an intricate array of continuously collapsing patterns of sound. You wouldn't be wrong to call this music meditative, but you'd be remiss to not also mention its relentless, momentous pulse. Early in his career, Steve Reich famously borrowed from traditional African musics. Simultonality strips from American minimalist music any sheen of secular, academic sterility and returns it to the source, albeit delivered by a furious motorik beat.

On most of these tracks Abrams plays a ceremonial instrument of the Gnawa of North Africa, the guimbri. The first Natural Information Society album to be recorded with a regular band, Simultonality also features guitarist Emmet Kelly, who Abrams has played with in the Cairo Gang and with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and harmonium player Lisa Alvarado, whose paintings are hung to accompany performances by the group. One of those paintings has been reproduced for the album's cover, beautifully silkscreened by Alan Sherry of SIWA. Pressed on heavyweight vinyl by RTI, in a limited edition of 825 copies.

Can - Ege Bamyasi LP (Mute/Spoon)

Limited edition gold vinyl.

Our Review:

Can's indispensable fourth album contains some of the group's best-loved and most influential work. Released by United Artists in 1972, Ege Bamyasi offers brittle, propulsive funk-pop and boundless avant-rock in equal measure, offering strong evidence of Can music as a genre unto itself, wholly unlike anything before or since.

The commercial success of the 1971 single (and Ege Bamyasi closer) "Spoon" - used as theme music for the German TV miniseries Das Messer - had allowed Can to move into a disused cinema in the small town of Weilerwist, which they soon converted into a recording facility dubbed Inner Space, and got to work. Ege Bamyasi jumps out of the gate with the taut livewire funk of "Pinch," Jaki Liebezeit's skittering drum beat quickly encircled by the rest of the group as Damo Suzuki's glossolalia coats the track. As the album progresses, Holger Czukay's edits hew closer to pop form than they ever had before, or would again, in sharp contrast to the astronomical sprawl of Tago Mago, the group's mind-rending previous release.

Thankfully, the Can discography has been beautifully served in recent years by Spoon/Mute's closely-supervised reissue series. Ege Bamyasi is the highwater mark of Can music, the most fluent and accessible example of the band's unparalleled march through late 20th century sound.

Autechre - Tri Repetae 2xLP (Warp)

Our Review:

Each of Autechre's records express a progressive advance from the previous outings through technology and conceptual frameworks. While this does eventually lead Autechre down the rabbit hole of radical deconstructions that eschews all the rave culture norms of rhythm and melody, Autechre's early hybrid-works of rhythmic complexity and formal experimentation remain pinnacles of electronic music. Tri Repetae from 1995 is one of these brilliant chimeras in their catalogue. True to form, Autechre engage a notable aesthetic shift from the previous two albums. If memory serves this reviewer, Autechre had once claimed they built their sample banks from scratch upon the completion of each record to insure they wouldn’t repeat themselves and keep them pursuing their own increasingly insular adventures in sound. Both the drum programming and the basslines for this album have moved well beyond the electronica standards for 808 and 303 demonstrations. Tri Repetae is brimming with a punchy immediacy, sculpted from a highly articulated set of abbreviated hisses, sparks and crackle. Autechre shapes all of these into jittery, jagged breakbeats through the manipulation of bit rate samples, the re-engineering of mainframe hardware and the early strategies of computer coding. The impressive aspect to Autechre's engineering prowess is not merely the technical reconfiguration of ones and zeros, but it is through the graceful melodies and organic fluidity that they are able to impart through inhospitable material.

Tim Hecker - Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again 2xLP (Kranky)

Our Review:

Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was the first in a series of releases that would establish Tim Hecker as a master of sonic conjuration, manipulating sounds into something living and breathing. With a monochromatic palette of fractured samples, expansive washes and textural drones, Hecker never forgets the basic tenets of composition. As sublime and very subtle forms, delicate melodies of just a few slowly repeated notes swell to the surface only to quietly retreat into the many diaphanous folds. His rhythmic elements appear in the form of time-stretching samples into brittle, repetitive chunks that flicker in and out with dense rumbles. A gorgeous work of epic abstraction, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again sounds as fresh today as when it was first released in 2001. It's easy to see how much modern music was foreshadowed by this album and Hecker's beautiful, hazy soundscapes.

Coil - Another Brown World / Baby Food LP (Sub Rosa)

Our Review:

At the height of England's hidden reverse, Coil (alongside Current 93 and Nurse With Wound) were tireless contributors to various experimental / industrial compilations hither and yon. The two lengthy tracks on album represent what Coil offered to Sub Rosa. A suitably scatological recoloring of Brian Eno's classic, "Another Brown World" was featured on the 1989 compilation Myths 4, alongside Current 93 and Cheb Mami. While built upon an insistent, haunted synth line, this particular track is darkly-lit labyrinth of divergent musical ideas: a repeating phrase from a fuzzed-out guitar, eerie flares of electronic trickery, and various cut-ups from ethnographic studies recorded at the Animist Monastery at the summit of Mount Popo in Burma. In the same year, Coil contributed a track called "Contains A Disclaimer" to a Pathological Records compilation which used many of the same elements -- that guitar freak-out and that reductive Goblin-ish synth motif. While these tracks are clearly linked, it's always been unclear if "Another Brown World" is the lysergic dub of the other or if it is the early exploration of ideas later ratcheted into submission. It's always been a corker of a track, no matter how anybody looks at it.

"Another Brown World" is coupled with the 1993 track "Baby Food" which finds Coil in their post-rave guise. From here, the Balance / Sleazy duo also delivered their iconic Worship The Glitch album a few years later. This particular track looks forward actually to what Aphex Twin would produce on his seminal Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2. It's a psychoactive track of rounded acid tones shaped into a hypnotic / aquatic percolation. It's a beautiful and melancholy example of Coil's take on '90s electronica, easily bettering most of their peers at the time.

Maria Monti - Il Bestiario LP (Holidays)

Our Review:

Holidays Records present a welcome first-time vinyl reissue of Maria Monti's Il Bestiario, a hidden gem of the Italian avant-garde. Monti's collaborators form a free music supergroup with Alvin Curran, Steve Lacy, Prima Materia's Roberto Laneri and guitarists Luca Balbo and Tony Ackerman. Monti sings evocative texts by radical poet Aldo Braibanti, whose imprisonment in the late '60s under Fascist-era legislation caused a furor among the Left a few years prior to the album's 1974 release.

Il Bestiario is anchored by Monti's hypnotic voice, around which the ensemble constructs lush electro-acoustic filigrees. Braibanti's plaintive texts stand as wry allegories saturated by an inchoate desire – cautionary tales of snakes, peacocks and chameleons that only partly mask a more general protest against needless privation, loss and longing. While breathing the same air as Emmanuelle Parrenin, Brigitte Fontaine and Desertshore-era Nico, Il Bestiario remains an unlikely and beautiful record at the intersection of several visionary careers.

Psychic TV - Pagan Day LP (Sacred Bones)

Our Review:

Originally subtitled "Pages From A Notebook," Pagan Day is a revelatory album delving into the song-writing process for Psychic TV in the early '80s. Various half-truths and self-generated myths surround Pagan Day, including a claim that the album was recorded in a single session of a cup of coffee. It nevertheless remains an intriguing album of primitive 4-track recordings from the core PTV duo of Genesis P-Orridge and Alex Fergusson. A few of these songs were reprised on the 1988 album Allegory & Self, and there's also a primitive version of the baroque pop-ditty "The Orchids" from PTV's iconic Dreams Less Sweet, here christened "Cold Steel" and sung by Fergusson, not P-Orridge. Continuing a peculiar fascination with the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones, Psychic TV appropriate the arrangement from the Stones' "As Tears Go By" with entirely different lyrics under the new title "Farewell." The best tracks on Pagan Day are of the post-punk / motorik variety as heard in the eeriely empty rhythms on "New Sexuality" and the sinister grooviness of "Cadaques."

Newly remastered and reissued on vinyl for the first time since the late '80s.

Jack Rose - Raag Manifestos LP (VHF)

Our Review:

Arguably the most dense and deep of Jack Rose's back catalog, Raag Manifestos is just so personal and lovely, dark and mysterious and darn near perfect. Appalachian guitar stretched into droning, dense ragas, steel strings that go from delicate melody to prickly nests of inter-tangled notes and buzzing overtones. Always completely hypnotic even at its most fierce and always intense and compelling, even at its most ethereal. Channeling the ephemeral psychedelic alchemy of the Fahey School, not only musically but also how Fahey through his influential Takoma label often used appropriated personas, text and image in his cover art to frame a surrealist spin of mythic artistry that bridges histories and traditions. Rose sets that trajectory to new heights and towards new unfamiliar directions, and through it all has definitely become one of our favorite guitarists. Record after record he never fails to blow us away.

Brian Eno - Music For Films LP (Astralwerks)

Our Review:

1976's Music For Films compiles various fragments of recorded material, some of which Briann Eno made specifically for films and others that were not created as soundtracks per se, but eventually found their way into films. Forty years later, filmmakers still mine this album for material, and Music For Films still holds together rather well. You can hear a lot of similar ideas for what would go into Another Green World and Before And After Science, which makes one wonder how much of these recordings came from those sessions. In fact, "M386" is a dead ringer for a half-speed dub mix of "No One Receiving," the opening track on Before And After Science. While not immediately rock in nature – the songs lack any verse/chorus/verse structure and seem to be devoid of any beginning, middle or end – Music For Films is not all texture either, like many of Eno's other ambient works. With a cast of heavy hitting musicians that includes many from Another Green World – such as Phil Collins, Fred Frith, Dave Mattacks, John Cale and Robert Fripp – this is without doubt a must-have record.

Patrick Cowley - Afternooners 2xLP (Dark Entries)

Our Review:

One of the most revolutionary and influential figures in the canon of disco, Cowley created his own brand of Hi-NRG dance music, "The San Francisco Sound." However, little known during his brief lifetime (Cowley died from AIDS in 1982), he also composed seductive electronic soundscapes for gay porn soundtracks based on his pioneering work as founder of the Electronic Music Lab at City College of San Francisco in the early seventies.

Afternooners is the third and final installment of unreleased film scores released by Dark Entries / Honey Soundsystem following two previous collections, School Daze and Muscle Up. The songs on Afternooners reflect the advances of the equipment available at the onset of the 1980s. Cowley's unadulterated electronic forms are stripped down and dubbed up. Lush electronic percussion, soaring synthesizer riffs and low slung funk grooves co-mingle on these magnificent downtempo trax of proto-techno instrumentals.

Featuring 70 minutes of remastered music never before released on vinyl including three bonus tracks not featured in the original film. Comes with a fold-out poster featuring a handmade collage using photography and xeroxed graphics of classic gay porn imagery and an essay from Drew Daniel of Matmos. This is provocative and sensual music for those unafraid to show off in the bright light of day. For fans of Giorgio Moroder, John Carpenter, Oneohtrix Point Never and Bernard Fevre.

F.J. McMahon - Spirit of the Golden Juice LP (Anthology Recordings)

Our Review:

Santa Barbara's F.J. McMahon cut one record, 1969's impossibly rare Spirit Of The Golden Juice, before disappearing into the ether (or, in reality, a career as a computer engineer). A brilliant slice of singer-songwriter folk-rock and one of the most brutally personal and honest treatise on the Vietnam War, Spirit Of The Golden Juice has long been one of the more coveted obscurities of the hippie era. It was originally released on the Accent label, the sort of befuddling enterprise that released 45 after 45 of the most tepid schlock you've ever heard while simultaneously gracing the world with three and four figure garage, psych and soul rarities from legends like The Human Expression, and intriguingly named acts like Soul Injection, Silk Winged Alliance, and Peacepipe, as well as this lone(r) singer-songwriter masterstroke. Accent was the kind of label whose bi-polar A&R work could seemingly only be explained by something like the label owner's turned on, tuned in and dropped out offspring being brought into the fold circa 1967; the kind of label with such counter-cultural disconnect that they'd describe the monster garage-psych of The Human Expression on their 45 labels as "vocal with orchestra."

Inspired by McMahon's time in the military, the songs of Spirit Of The Golden Juice are dark and rarely hopeful. These are the reflections of a young man unable to come to terms with what he has seen and a humanity that would allow such things to happen. While the songs are anti-war, they are not cliched or preachy. Instead they are uniquely personal (like "Black Night Woman" about the suicide of a GI's foreign girlfriend or "The Road Back Home" about struggling to find yourself after war). They are the songs of a man who spent the Summer Of Love in Southeast Asia, not San Francisco, a man who hated war not just on principle but because he had lived its atrocities.

Spirit Of The Golden Juice draws comparisons to everyone from Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, to Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. While the Dylan comparison falls flat lyrically and vocally, where it makes perfect sense is in the musicianship; Spirit Of The Golden Juice plays out like a West Coast John Wesley Harding, as it employs a country session drummer whose in-the-pocket drum work is a centerpiece of the record - subdued yet funky, complex but unobtrusive. It's the perfect complement to McMahon's stellar lead guitar work which was inspired by surf wizards like The Ventures and Dick Dale. When transposed to the acoustic guitar as it is here, it delivers a swirling, haunting effect that renders the songs' even more powerful. But nothing is as important to the record as that voice and those lyrics. The gripping tenor of McMahon's voice rivals that of Hardin and Neil. Dare I say it, while both of those more famous artists may have had higher highs in their songwriting career, neither of them ever put together an album as consistently honest and striking as Spirit Of The Golden Juice.

Stars Of The Lid - And Their Refinement Of The Decline 3xLP (Kranky)

Our Review:

Since their first record Music For Nitrous Oxide from 1995 up to their beloved The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid from 2001, it's been fascinating to observe their sonic development, from 4-track recordings of murky bedroom guitar drones to their current sound of richly produced, almost orchestral compositions of reverberant swells.

The Stars Of The Lid sound has obviously become much more clear and well defined and polished, much from Nitrous Oxide is still present, albeit in slightly altered form. Stars Of The Lid were always about swells, with the ebbtide of melodies and compositions played out over expansive stretches of oceanic shimmer. Notes aren't just played, they begin as tiny sparkles that gradually grow into thick massive rumbles, before fading away again. Oceanic is definitely an apt descriptor, like some epic dimly lit sonic sea swirling and churning, sometime tranquil and barely moving, other times heaving and tumultuous. It's so completely epic while at the same time managing somehow to be pastoral and contemplative and breathtakingly beautiful.

In the early days it was just 2 guitars and a four track, and the sound reflected that, much more gritty and the mood a lot darker. And only now it seems that the band is able to fully realize the sound they have been hearing, and essentially creating, all along. Stars Of The Lid incorporated guitars here and there. This is after all still the root of their sound, but they seem to be overshadowed by the other instruments, heavy on the strings as well as a surprising arsenal of horns, and a children's choir! And the results are divine. Many of the tracks do sound like bits of modern classical compositions stretched out into languorous stretches of muted drone and subtle shimmer, like watching the planets from outer space, observing the epic drifts of solar systems and an infinity of cosmic interactions. Others definitely reference more earthly sonic treasures, such as "Apreludes (In C Sharp Major)" which has some serious Morricone going on, and "Don't Bother They're Here" references Scott Tuma's washed out guitar work in Souled American. But whatever subtle flavor is introduced into each track, the sound is definitely and distinctly Stars Of The Lid. Their shift to a triple LP also seems to suit them, allowing their slow burning soft swell compositions plenty of time to sprawl and spread and evolve into epic and soul stirring soundscapes.

Maki Asakawa - s/t 2xLP (Honest Jon's)

A stunning survey of the 1970s heyday of great Japanese singer and countercultural icon Maki Asakawa (1942-2010). Deep-indigo, dead-of-night enka, folk, and blues, inhaling Billie Holiday and Nina Simone down to the bone. A traditional waltz abuts Nico-style incantation; defamiliarized versions of Oscar Brown Jr. and Bessie Smith collide with big-band experiments alongside poet Shūji Terayama; a sitar-led psychedelic wig-out runs into a killer excursion in modal, spiritual jazz. Existentialism and noir, mystery and allure, hurt and hauteur. With excellent notes by Alan Cummings and the fabulous photographs of Hitoshi Jin Tamura.

"Japan's answer to Scott Walker, with a visual aesthetic and a death-decadent appeal that is straight out of the Keiji Haino songbook." – Volcanic Tongue

Andrew Chalk - Time In Hayfield LP (Faraway Press)

Our Review:

Andrew Chalk has long been one of our favorite drone / ambient composers. Following his first noise productions as Ferial Confine in the early ‘80s and his early contributions to David Jackman’s Organum during that same time period, Chalk came into his own through the ‘90s and early ’00s, during which his work is slowly shifted toward a brightly cast sensibility. Across records like Goldfall and Blue Eyes Of The March (both from 20016), he manifests a soft focus impressionism of his ringing overtones and dynamic vibrations. Here on Time Of Hayfield, Chalk employs the talents of Vikki Jackman on piano. The airy, ethereal ambience of Chalk's drones shimmer as if they were the reflections of the sun striking the windswept body of water of your choice. For us, it would obviously be the cold waters off the Northern California coast; but for Mr. Chalk living in the northeast of England, it's the North Sea. There's something bitingly cold about this album; but the slippery icy drones that evolve and tumble in their organic cycles enjoy a beauty so profound as to ameliorate anything threatening and hostile. A beautiful, airy and meditative drone record. Originally released in 2007 on CD, Time Of Hayfield gets a beautiful repress on vinyl with a set of prints from the artist.

Michael Rother - Fernwarme LP (Groenland)

Our Review:

We'd assume that the majority of Stranded regulars are largely familiar with at least one of Michael Rother's projects. Whether it be his work with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Cluster, or Harmonia, Rother's contributions to the last 30 plus years of music are innumerable. Still, his solo work has been conspicuously absent from most write-ups and record shelves. Perhaps that's because the early '80s saw Rother in a bit of transition period from his kosmische glory days to a point where he embraced New Age with arms wide open.

Like the three preceding releases, 1982's Fernwarme finds Rother accompanied by drummer Jaki Leibezeit of kosmische legends Can. Unlike the first three solo albums, this one shows Rother returning much closer to his days with Harmonia than attempting to incorporate elements from anything like, say, Kitaro. In fact, despite the lead guitar of opening number "Silberstreif" relying heavily upon the "Do-Re-Mi" tune taught in grade school music class, Fernwarme is an excellent contribution to an incredibly impressive career, full of simple beauty, a warm embrace of blissed-out pop melodies. Jaki's lightly propulsive motorik shuffle is the heartbeat pulse that underpins the harmonized guitar lines spun by Rother, his harmonies at times making us think of Citay's most exquisite moments... elsewhere Rother delves into darkly droning keyboards, and Fernwarme starts to sound not unlike a much mellower Zombi. A highly recommended early '80s spacey prog kosmische classic!

William Basinski - A Shadow In Time LP (Temporary Residence Ltd.)

Our Review:

On A Shadow In Time, William Basinski returns with an homage to David Bowie, eulogized on the lachrymose side-long track "For David Robert Jones" in reference to Bowie's birth name. Still using the tape loop as a principle means of production, Basinski guides the two tracks on this album with the elegance and grace of an artist who has long mastered his craft. The title track is the more striking of the two pieces, with Basinski capturing golden hues and deep-space mesmer from an archaic Voyetra 8 synthesizer. This is a notoriously difficult piece of equipment that has even irked the composer with its grumpy insistence on not bothering to start up one day, only to creakily awaken the next. The twinkling vibrato and Plutonian shiver from Basinski's source material slowly spin in the tumbling orbits of his delay and reverberant tape loops. It's beautiful and languid, making for one of the few Basinski pieces that doesn't relate to the semantics of decay. "For David Robert Jones" focuses on the tape loop as the structural device, lacing several scratchy tape loops against one another. Here, Basinski's work does redress the forgotten dreams and deleted scenes so often recounted in the Caretaker's work with antiquated media through the tropes of lost memory. In a rare instance of jarring the listener, Basinski pops a loop into the foreground of a suitably maudlin saxophone riff. The hypnotic quality of the loop quickly settles this unusual rupture to Basinski's oeuvre, and the whole of the piece drifts once again into stately wistfulness. Sublime as always.

Swans - The Great Annihilator 2xLP (Young God)

Our Review:

The exhausting discography of Swans arguably can be broken into four distinct facets of their uncompromising, brutalist avant-rock practices. The first fruits from Cop and Filth are rightly described as "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography" with the aggressively barked vocals from Michael Gira who directs a muscular thud of tactical assaults, neither punk nor metal, but an abject creature of its own making. Children Of God and the World Of Skin side project marked an early middle period for Swans in the late '80s, shedding some of their purposeful ugliness in favor of expansive dirges that matched a more complex mythological content, with a sublime and thoroughly ashen beauty. During the '90s, Swans brought a baroque density to their constant crescendos of noise, riff and drone through a series of albums that included The Great Annihilator from 1995. Just two years after the release of this album, Swans dissolved through the end of a relationship between the Gira and Swans' Jarboe. Well over a decade later, Gira re-energized Swans in the brilliant late-period chapter to the band with a monstrous line-up that included the original guitarist Norman Westberg but without Jarboe.

As each of these periods is marked by a singular triumphant album, The Great Annihilator stands at the pinnacle of the third period for the Swans. The militant goose step rhythms remain as punishing as ever, but have been subjected to the all-encompassing swarm of buzz-saw guitar, bass and keyboard drones. Yet amidst these dense orchestrations, the interlocking vocals of Gira (with his commanding baritone) and Jarboe (with her lilting theatricality) adeptly counter the jagged fury of the multiple guitar arsenals. For the 2017 reissue, The Great Annihilator has been entirely remastered from recently discovered unmastered session mixes. Michael Gira describes the discovery as "a revelation of great sonic effect." How true!

John Lennon/Yoko Ono - Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins LP (Secretly Canadian)

Our Review:

To many, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music Vol. 1: Two Virgins, predicted the forthcoming death knell of The Beatles. Few commercial records of the era were ever allowed to be made to be purposely so polarizing. Starting with the provocative album cover of the couple naked framed as Adam and Eve that was immediately censored with a modesty sleeve, Two Virgins marked an extraordinary sea change in rock music experimentation. An extension of Ono's already established radical art practice (Fluxus poetic instructions, performance happenings and oblique sculptures that confounded the relationship between object and action), her high-profile marriage to John Lennon only accentuated her arts' profound and often times primal intensity, allowing her a more visible platform for new sonic trajectories.

Utilizing tape recordings, guitar feedback, organ, piano and vocal-less voice into impromptu Musique Concrete-inspired process art, the duo upend the role of commercial musical expectation into something both simultaneously artless and avant garde. It's akin to a weird rebirthing therapy session where they are trying to create the most instantaneous sound as possible without invoking anything remotely cerebral. There is a curiously strange amalgamation of sounds from vaudeville tunes to haunted organ as well as Ono's nearly animalized mewlings that it begins to sound like some bizarrely haphazard and oblique radio play. Not a far cry from Alan Sondheim's Ritual-All-7-70 ensemble or Alan Watt's This is IT.

Delia Derbyshire / Elsa Standfield - Circle Of Light LP (Trunk)

Our Review:

Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) was an English electronic music pioneer best known for the original version of the Doctor Who theme song, one of the earliest television themes to have been recorded using entirely electronics. That theme and much of her known work, including the groundbreaking and influential avant-electronic-pop group White Noise, was all recorded during the 11 years, from 1962 to 1973, that she was employed in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop.

Here, released for the first time in any format, is her soundtrack to the experimental film Circle Of Light, which she recorded in collaboration with Scottish artist Elsa Stansfield, Derbyshire moonlighting from her day job at the BBC. The film is the work of photographer Pamela Bone, and filmmaker/producer Anthony Roland. Featuring transparencies Bone shot during travels throughout India, including the states of Sikkim and Kashmir, this is hardly your standard nature film; Bone experiments with double exposures, laying transparencies on top of one another, blowing images up until all that's left is an unidentifiable texture, while Roland slowly tracks the images, transporting the viewer not into another world, but a distorted version of this one.

In perfect lockstep with the film, Derbyshire's soundtrack mixes electronics with field recordings of birds, insects, water, wind, and more. This soundtrack has very little in common with, say, that CD you bought of soothing sounds at The Nature Company circa 1994, though the source material may be similar. There's a undercurrent of disquieting darkness and drone flowing through the two pieces here that is at times reminiscent of another landmark recording of 1972, The Wind Harp's Song From The Hill, while some of the segments are downright Hitchcockian. The soundtrack flows seamlessly from manipulated field recordings to electronics and back again in a way that feels almost like proto-new-age, in the darkest, best sense of that weighted term. As usual, Derbyshire was leaps and bounds ahead of the field and this 1972 masterwork, her longest known recording to date, should further cement her legacy as an electronic pioneer.

Carl Stone - Electronic Music From The Seventies And Eighties 3xLP (Unseen Worlds)

Our Review:

Even amongst fans of minimalism, avant-garde and electro-acoustic music, Carl Stone is not necessarily a household name, but he has worked with a veritable who's-who of the scene – studying under Morton Subotnick at CalArts and working with Phill Niblock, Tetsu Inoue, Joan La Barbara, Otomo Yoshihide, Conlon Nancarrow, Stockhausen and more in various capacities in his 40+ year career. His early career from the '70s until the late '80s saw only one commercial release, the highly regarded Woo Lae Oak, but he was a prolific composer and this set makes available for the first time a vast body of work that encompasses nearly 15 years and a wide variety of styles.

Two of his earliest pieces ("LIM" and "Chao Praya") are the only things here composed entirely on synthesizer, the Buchla 200, while everything else incorporates some combination of electronics, live acoustic performances, samples and analog tape manipulation. Of particular interest to Stone has been the manipulation and sampling of LPs, an innovation born somewhat out of necessity as, after graduating from CalArts in the mid-'70s, he no longer had access to their vast studio and instead was working at KPFK radio where the most abundant resources were LPs and tape recorders. The use of LPs can be heard on many pieces in this 3xLP set, but none more powerful and intriguing than "Shibucho" from 1984, which is built entirely out of a Motown greatest hits boxed set. Elsewhere Stone can be found manipulating classical records, Japanese pop singers and Asian folk music. Stone has worked primarily via laptop for many years, but in his early work he used what was on hand – from LPs to tape recorders, Prophet 2002 samplers and early Macintosh computers. The innovative techniques he came up with in that time – showcased here on this beautiful set – make a strong case for Stone being on the short list of electronic pioneers.

Aphex Twin - Richard D. James Album LP (Warp)

Our Review:

If Richard D. James had not made the Richard D. James LP there would probably not be Matmos, there would be no Hrvatski (although the electro-acoustic complexities that Keith Fullerton Whitman later produced might have still spilled out), and there would have definitely been no Kid 606. This record was released on Warp back in 1996 and was the crossover album between IDM and jungle, with the purists from the latter crying foul that Aphex Twin had ruined their party, while giving the former a whole new template of rhythms to mine, deform, and mutate with lightning quick precision. Still, what set this album apart from so many of its contemporaries was the adventurousness with form and the ability to maintain an emotively complex sense of melody. Where much of the more playful forms of electronica tends to get precious and saccharine really quickly, James' rounded basslines and idyllic synth arrangements on such tracks as "Fingerbig" or "To Cure A Weakling Child" spiral Amen break deconstructions around the rhythmic architecture of the tracks. But the standout tracks on the album still are the lead single "Boy/Girl Song", with its amazingly inventive tricknology sampling plucked strings molded into an utterly captivating synthesized harmony that propel still one of the most skittery and most dynamic drum 'n' bass numbers ever produced, and then there's "Milk Man" in which a deliberately sniveling James sings for the first time, with lyrics obsessing over the mammary glands of wife of the neighborhood milk man. Ah, David Lynch would have been so proud!

J Dilla - Donuts 2xLP (Stones Throw)

Alternate front cover version.

Our Review:

Chock full of soulful vocal snippets, sloppy edits and stony melodic breaks. This is like a worn mix-tape of short buttery sonic collages culled from the cream of bad thrift store records: trashy R'n'B, mid-'70s jazz, easy listening and peppered with more pedigreed takes from the likes of the Three Degrees, Esther Philips and Raymond Scott. The beauty of Jay Dee's production is the unconventional way he pulls the sounds together, exposing instead of polishing the rough edits and scratchy recordings. Delicious and catchy, these "donuts" will keep you humming all day long. This sublime record of hip hop instrumentals is made sadder by Jay Dee's recent untimely death at the age of 32. For DJs, fans of Jay Dee and Stones Throw records, purchasing this is a no-brainer: It's essential! For those of you who may not know the mad production skills of J Dilla, there is no better introduction than this. Totally Recommended!

Michael Rother - Sterntaler LP (Groenland)

Our Review:

We'd assume that the majority of Stranded regulars are largely familiar with at least one of Michael Rother's projects. Whether it be his work with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Cluster, or Harmonia, Rother's contributions to the last 30 plus years of music are innumerable. Still, his solo work has been conspicuously absent from most write-ups and record shelves. Perhaps that's because the early '80s saw Rother in a bit of transition period from his kosmische glory days to a point where he embraced New Age with arms wide open.

Sterntaler is from 1977 and is Rother's second solo work recorded by Conny Plank and featuring Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums. Similar in scope and feel to Cluster's more pastoral efforts, namely Sowiesoso, Rother's signature gliding guitar playing is recognizable throughout. Think Neu! light. And that's not a diss. Put in the context that Rother's first solo album Flammende Herzen sold more than all Neu! records combined, we might understand why Rother would pursue this more New Age-ish direction. Sterntaler definitely reaches to the heights of late-period krautrock a la Cluster and for curious fans is very worthy of your time. Lovely and recommended.

Sun Kil Moon - Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood 4xLP (Caldo Verde)

Our Review:

After dissolving Red House Painters, singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek resurfaced in 2002 with Sun Kil Moon, refining his acoustic balladry and confessional lyricism. Sun Kil Moon's ambitious double-album, Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood, maintains Kozelek's stream-of-consciousness style of songwriting with a few notable detours, at least in terms of content. Since the 2010 album Benji and through Universal Themes from 2015, Kozelek has steered the poetry of his lyrics away from the plumbed depths of a world-weary romantic towards sardonic observations, with these tribulations becoming damning epithets at the turn of a quick phrase. Kozelek's declarations that lead up to the release of Common As Light (with many of these themes spilling into the songs themselves) set him up as a polarizing character in the public eye. It's almost inevitable that this stance is by design, even if he's harvesting his honest reactions. There's his disdain for Twitter and his animus for those who only pine for his early recordings; and these are just two of the targets of his gall. As much as he celebrates one perceived virtue and denigrates one perceived vice, Kozelek is very much the product of self-absorption that he so often rails against. It makes for a complicated, complex exploration of the self here on Common As Light. Kozelek nakedly spills his lyrical soup through his inimitable hushed hymnal voice onto Sun Kil Moon's unadorned indie-folk arrangements that profess a surprisingly bold use of electronic sequencing. Kozelek deliberated held back the vinyl edition of this album by three or four months, meaning that his fans who patiently awaited this 4xLP opus probably already passed judgement on Common As Light And Love Are Red Valleys Of Blood.

Crass - Feeding Of The 5000 LP (Crassical Collection)

Our Review:

Legendary for a reason, Crass is the uncompromising anarcho-punk collective that has lived and breathed punk rock like few others. Starting in 1977, Crass not only recorded some of the most scalding and energetic punk, but they thrived putting on gigs, setting up squats, coordinating political actions, starting a label, creating art, making films, advocating for animal rights, environmentalism, feminism, direct action, anarchism, pacifism and protesting across the political spectrum.

Feeding Of The 5000 is the incendiary debut for Crass, originally released in 1978, and almost didn't come out, as the pressing plant refused to carry it due to the lyrical content of a song called "Asylum." This was to be the opening salvo to the record: an intense spoken word rallying cry against religion, filled with violent images and foul language, all over a field of buzzing feedback. But no plant would press the record and in turn Crass replaced the song with silence, in protest. Then and there, Crass decided to start their own label which then re-released the record the way it was initially envisioned. Feeding Of The 5000 still stands as a frantic chunk of pure punk rock, full of chaotic angular guitars, wild scowling urgent vox, caffeinated drumming, samples and snippets of spoken word. These songs manage to be angry and caustic and intense, but still catchy as hell. The lyrical vitriol reflect a relentless punk rock energy, just as energetic and as lyrically relevant as it was all the way back in 1978. Which speaks well of Crass, but not so well for the state of the world.

Colin Newman - Not To LP (Sentient Sonics)

Our Review:

The melodic apotheosis of Colin Newman's early 80s output, Not To redelivers a full band lineup and sees 3/4 of Wire clocking in, as Newman is again joined by Robert Gotobed and Bruce Gilbert contributes guitar to "Indians." It's not only through this personnel overlap, however, that Not To gives the impression of being a "lost" Wire record and akin to 1980's A-Z. Nearly half of the album is made up of tracks that had been part of the Wire repertoire (and would remain to this day), intended for the follow-up to 154 and reworked several times over during the decades that followed, most recently on 2013's Change Becomes Us. Keyboards retreat from their dramatic prominence on A-Z, conducing atmosphere and texture rather than melody, and Newman's anfractuous singing renders even the most trenchant dada-materialism ("Truculent Yet") poignant and arresting.

Byron & Gerald - Unity LP (Eremite)

Our Review:

To put it simply, Unity is a monster of a record. The first album recorded under Byron Morris and Gerald Wise's leadership, this legendary blast of liberated fury was originally privately released in 1972 on the artists' own E.P.I. Records. Unavailable in any format since, Eremite has finally brought us the gorgeous reissue this album deserves.

Recorded over two days at Howard University in 1969, Morris and Wise play with frenetic and inspired abandon. Unity also features incendiary playing from percussionist Keno Speller and his regular sparring partner Byard Lancaster, fresh from making his Vortex debut and a rejected session for ESP, along with an assortment of rarely-recorded local players from DC. Eric Gravatt rounds the group out on the drum kit, but whereas his playing in the 1970s with Wayne Shorter and various icons of the Japanese jazz scene blurred the line between bop and fusion, the pummeling he lays down here is decidedly avant garde.

The first of two side-long tracks, "JWM+53" opens with lyrical playing that recalls "Lonely Woman," but Ornette's ballad is all about longing and his playing of it plaintive and tender, whereas this piece seizes all that possibility and liberates its passion in the name of an anarchic new order. "Black Awareness" is even more powerful: amplified and tuned percussion reminiscent of Marzette Watts "Backdrop for Urban Revolution" sets the scene before crashing tidal swells of drums wash it out to sea, carried away by a righteous storm of trumpet and saxophones.

This reissue is limited to 550 copies. Pressed on heavyweight vinyl by RTI, with an insert featuring Byron Morris' newly penned liner notes screenprinted by Alan Sherry of SIWA.

Carla Dal Forno - You Know What It's Like LP (Blackest Ever Black)

Our Review:

Carla Dal Forno's solo debut emerges on the heels of her work fronting the bleary art-pop outfits F Ingers and Tarcar, both of whom also have releases on the seminal Blackest Ever Black imprint. She's a liminal songwriter, often highlighting the space between the decentered, oblique elements. The songs economically plink through her spare instrumentation and suspend themselves in a chilly vamping of 4AD ethereal-dub atmospherics. Throughout the album, her arrangements spin through collapsed basslines, sad-girl piano notes and the slow-motion whirr of a drum machine here and there. As instrumentals, these recall the strange interludes of fumbled objects and spectral half-melody that dot Swell Maps albums. Yet, it is her voice that is the key to the success of You Know What It's Like. She spools that voice in a deadpan cooing with near monotone delivery, yet it's disarmingly beautiful. Dal Forno's gossamer pop is at its best on tracks like "Fast Moving Cars" and "What You Gonna Do Now?" There, she effortlessly channels the A.C. Marias/Dome sci-fi ballads of psychic disengagement amidst languid reverberations and satellite flicker of minimalist electronica.

Autechre - Incunabula 2xLP (Warp)

Our Review:

Incunabula is the debut release for Autechre. When this album was released back in 1992, it gave the impression of being an inscrutable object built through a cryptic logic seemingly without any reference beyond itself. As the duo progressed through their increasingly complex array of electronic sequencing throughout the '90s eventually upgrading to Cycling '74 technology a decade or so later, the ghostly allusions of deconstructed acid house and b-boy hip-hop found on Incunabula become all the more apparent. Autechre's Sean Booth and Rob Brown had mentioned in interviews well after the release that Incunabula was compiled from various tapes by Warp, aligning itself rather unintentionally with Aphex Twin's first volume of Selected Ambient Works. We can thank Warp thus for the curated sound for Incunabula, which gracefully evolves through an almost literary storyboard of prologue, conflict, climax and denouement. The first few tracks awaken with twinklings of synthetic melodies that spiral around rounded 303 squelches often detached from a rhythmic spine. The eccentric pleasantries of Incunabula's opening numbers darkens considerably with the mechanoid breakbeat monster of "Basscadet" with its industrial menace and ear-worm burrowing melodies grafted a swaggering rhythm prescient of what Pan Sonic and Carsten Nicolai would groove through sine-tones and white noise many years later. Autechre work through several other swaggering chunks of crisp breakbeats, heavy percussive blows and lush melodic constructs in "Eggshell" and "Doctrine" before dissolving into clouds of future-science ambience for the album's hushed conclusion. An auspicious beginning to say the least.

Laraaji - Ambient 3: Day of Radiance LP+CD (Glitterbeat)

Our Review:

Ambient 3: Day of Radiance is the breakthrough album for Edward Larry Gordon (aka Laraaji, to use his preferred, new age moniker), produced by Brian Eno and published in 1980 on Editions EG. It was this album that introduced Laraaji's majestic, electric zither ambiance to a wider audience. Discovered busking in Washington Square Park after years of self-releasing tapes, studying eastern mysticism and developing a practice of laughter therapy, Laraaji was soon after enlisted by Eno to release an album in his Ambient series, much as Eno did with Harold Budd. Comprised of two suites of music, "The Dance" and "Meditation", Laraaji employs gamelan-like rhythms on an electronically treated hammer dulcimer in the first suite, while the slowed down zither is featured in the second suite. Eno as usual keeps a restrained but guiding role in delicately layering and treating the tracks with a beautifully soft-focus feel. An essential release!

F Ingers - Awkwardly Blissing Out LP (Blackest Ever Black)

Our Review:

A trio comprising Tarquin Manek, Sam Karmel and Carla Dal Forno, F ingers creep and curl all through Awkwardly Blissing Out, the unnerving and brilliant follow-up to 2015's Hide Before Dinner. Arrangements creep from the corners in queasy synth fogs as skeletal rhythms of stutter-step basslines, flanged drum machines and muffled handclap flurries eddy in a collapsing gyre of echo. F ingers sculpt a subterranean dub at once spectral and sensuous.

The runic psychedelia of Dal Forno's vocal limns the edges of songs, carving contours with washes of wordless tone and delay-smeared chirrups. As with both the previous F ingers album and Dal Forno's stunning solo debut You Know What It's Like, for this reviewer, one of 2016's standout releases, this is an unusually dense minimalism, its gauzy fragments of menace and melody hanging in negative space, distant yet looming.

Listening to this new album by F ingers, a series of dazzling postpunk counterfactuals press against your bleary eyes: sides three and four of Tago Mago cut to Adrian Sherwood's Tascam, Virginia Astley sitting in with This Heat, Liz Harris taking a knife to Bourbonese Qualk tapes. But even such vaunted comparisons stop well short of doing justice to the music on Awkwardly Blissing Out, which is undoubtedly among the best you will hear, this or any year.

Yoko Ono - Plastic Ono Band LP (Secretly Canadian)

Our Review:

The Plastic Ono Band emerged out of an urgent need to recast Lennon and Ono's Fluxus sound experiments into a more progressive live band setting. Debuting with Live Peace in Toronto 1969, Lennon enlists Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman for the rhythm section for a split-sided affair with Lennon's exploded blues on one side and a two part extended vocal piece of Ono's called "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow), that made "Cambridge 1969" seem like a walk in the park. The addition of a rhythm section gave Ono's primal vocal extensions a more ferocious but focused attack, but at the same time made her work more aligned with progressive and punk influences that were just beginning to make themselves heard.

Following that release, The Plastic Ono Band released two separate albums, (one focused on Lennon, the other Ono) with the same cover of Lennon and Ono basking under a tree, only a childhood photo on the back told you which record was which. Ono's version for years was the most difficult to find, though it was the more revolutionary sound-wise of the two. While still heavily experimental, the full band line-up in a studio brings almost a krautrock groove to Ono's vocal assaults. Pivoting her voice into flanging screams reminiscent of distorted guitar and slow echoing chants that bring forth a sense of abject theater, the use of studio effects pushes Ono's work into a new palette of sounds and strategies. She even jams with Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden on "Aos," a rehearsal recording for a concert at Albert Hall. Coleman invited Ono to collaborate and she only agreed if it was her piece and not his, asserting herself as a formidable female artist in what was then a heavily male-dominated field. Love her or hate her, Ono quickly emerged a musically performative artist in her own right and this electrifying Plastic Ono Band release paved the way for her defining solo masterpiece, Fly the following year.

Vito Ricci - A Symphony For Amiga LP (Intelligent Instruments)

Our Review:

Amiga hardly has the same name recognition of contemporary 1980s gaming systems like Nintendo or Sega or even Atari, much less the personal computer behemoths it was competing against at the time like Apple and IBM, yet Amiga's fatal flaw was not technology, but rather marketing. In the decades since its initial release Amiga has become recognized as an ahead of its time machine – with sound and video cards that were unparalleled for years. In 1994 Byte Magazine wrote, "Today, it's obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound and video."

Vito Ricci, it could be argued, is the Amiga of the 1980s downtown New York scene. Though he may not share the fame and commercial success of many of his contemporaries, he has since become recognized as a groundbreaking composer and innovator in experimental electronic music. Composing mostly for theater and dance pieces, Ricci only released a few albums in the 80s and 90s and was far more known in the insular world of contemporary experimental theater and sound design than in record collector circles, until Music From Memory's 2015 compilation I Was Crossing A Bridge shed light on the three-decade career of this influential composer and performer.

Composed using Laurie Spiegel's 1986 electronic software for Amiga, Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument, and complemented only by voice and guitar, Ricci's first new release in 20+ years, A Symphony For Amiga (the inaugural release for the Intelligent Instruments label) may be deeply indebted to the 1980s, but it has a sound that is completely timeless. Throbbing, suspenseful minimalism combines with drone washes and ethereal post-new age to gorgeous if haunting effect. A wonderful and long overdue new release from a New York pioneer.

Terry Allen - Lubbock (On Everything) 2xLP (Paradise Of Bachelors)

Our Review:

Lubbock (On Everything) is a sprawling double album from 1979 of some of the best alt-country-folk Texas had to offer. Recorded by Lloyd Manes who also plays pedal steel with a full-on backing band of Joe Ely and The Flatlanders, this is considered Terry Allen's masterpiece. Here he sets his eagle-eyed observations on the peculiarities of life in Lubbock, a small north Texas town that despite its remoteness, was home to a highly creative clan of artists, musicians and eccentrics. A key influence for the album and movie version of The Talking Heads' True Stories (David Byrne contributes liner notes to this reissue as well as Allen's wife), and the artist Jo Harvey Allen who played "The Lying Woman" in that film also sings harmony here. Over 21 tracks, Allen sets his dry lyrical wit on the art world, art collectors, threesomes, wolfmen and waitresses, and he contributes some of his most well-known songs such as "Amarillo Highway" and "New Delhi Freight Train," which was recorded by Little Feat two years earlier. The Flatlanders' able-backing provides the perfect musical atmosphere for the nuanced poignancy of Allen's gifted songwriting. Such a great record that we can't recommend enough. Plus, it's been remastered from the original analogue tapes, correcting pitch/tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions.

Various - Imaginational Anthem Volume 8: The Private Press 2xLP (Tompkins Square)

Our Review:

This is volume 8 in Tompkins Square's signature Imaginational Anthem series of dreamy guitar soli, and for this edition they really put together something special. Handing the curatorial reigns over to record collectors Brooks Rice and Michael Klausman (former used lp buyer from Other Music), the duo provided a crate diggers dream roster of impossibly rare private press recordings spanning from 1968-1995, mostly by artists whom Tompkins Square label-head Josh Rosenthal, a premiere guitar soli expert, had never even heard of before. Spanning styles from modal jazz progressions, electric ragas, Spanish-influenced explorations, sitar excursions, and wistful slide-guitar reveries, this is an incredibly researched collection of little-heard solo guitar gems. It's guitar music that doesn't necessarily tread through the same paths of the Fahey school, but instead sets out on a deeper trajectory into blithe solitary worlds. The included booklet of notes and photographs contain some very interesting rock folklore such as Perry Lederman being the man who reportedly taught Bob Dylan how to fingerpick, and how Joe Bethancourt was gifted a sitar by Jimi Hendrix who was an admiring fan, but each of the 14 artists have their own unique story. Most importantly, it's really wonderful to hear such divine music that would have otherwise remained buried in obscurity be brought out into the light for the world to behold.

Grouper - Paradise Valley 7" (Yellow Electric)

Our Review:

Liz Harris (aka Grouper) returns with a brief eight minutes of music, her first recorded work in two and half years following the fantastic Ruins album. The two tracks on Paradise Valley have all of the quintessential aspects of Harris' best work: bleary soft-focus of bedroom drone-folk illumined with the beauty of sadness. Even as brief as these are, Harris continues to rely less on shoegazing echo to drive the emotional content of her work. Instead, elliptical and hypnotic fragments of song carry the weight – doing so with brilliance. Cut at 45 RPM so you can have an extra sad listen at the wrong speed.

John Lennon/Yoko Ono - Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With The Lions LP (Secretly Canadian)

Our Review:

The most radical of provocative sound/art statements from John Lennon and Yoko Ono wouldn't arrive until the release of Unfinished Music Vol. 2: Life With The Lions. Opening side one is the sidelong "Cambridge 1969," a barrage of feed-backing guitar squalls and Ono's primal scream vocalizations that towers with a majestic enduring intensity on the same par as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Ono hadn't quite explored the long-form scream performance on tape before and "Cambridge 1969" set the stage for later works with The Plastic Ono Band.

The second side is even stranger if somewhat less intense. "No Bed For Beatle John" is a spoke-sung lullaby intoned by Yoko in a dadaist sound poetry vein describing Lennon's day to day activities as reported by the media, followed by field recordings of baby's heartbeats when Yoko was pregnant with Sean Lennon, an extended silent piece, and finally "Radio Play," a sound piece likely made with what sounds like a guitar cable being pushed in and out of a loud amp, or a radio dial oscillating between fields of static. Perhaps not so much a musical statement, as a concrete document of the resultant process of an undefined mutual engagement inspired by John Cage, Guy De Bord, and Fluxus aesthetics, the Unfinished Music series still remain as heartily curious documents of the uprooting of standard conventions of just about any kind.

Jack Rose - Dr. Ragtime And His Pals LP (Three Lobed)

Our Review:

Back in the day, a new Jack Rose record was always cause for celebration around here. Along with James Blackshaw, Ilyas Ahmed, Richard Bishop and a few others, Rose was one of the new modern masters of the steel string guitar, helping to reinvent and redefine neo-Appalachia or modern folk or whatever you want to call it.

Dr. Ragtime from 2008, features more of Rose's gorgeous steel string beauty, gossamer sheets of buzzing shimmer, droning ragas, traditional bluegrass, slippery slide, melancholy melodies, jaunty pick and strum, the mood occasionally dark and ominous, sometimes playful and festive, and other times dreamy and serene, it's as much about the sound as the songs. To see Rose play live is pretty mindblowing, his mastery of the guitar is truly humbling, his playing incredibly physical, but so fluid and seemingly effortless. And the sounds that emerge from that chunk of wood and steel are consistently breathtaking. Which is true even on record, those sounds well removed from the actual recording, but retaining much of the physical act of the performance, the energy and the emotion, the sound vibrant and alive. This record is no different. Sonically, well in line with the rest of Rose's recorded works, but like every new Rose record that comes along, it manages to subtly expand and progress, sonically and compositionally, while continuing to sound classic and timeless.

For folks who have yet to discover the magic of Jack Rose this is a perfect place to start, and odds are those same folks will very likely find themselves wanting and perhaps even needing more!

Cocteau Twins - Heaven Or Las Vegas LP (4AD)

Our Review:

Heaven Or Las Vegas - the 1990 album that marked the creative peak of this ethereal and influential British trio - gets a proper remastered vinyl reissue and it has never sounded better.

This was the last album the band did for indie stalwart 4AD of which the band had a long, genre-defining relationship with throughout the eighties, before they headed for major label territory. The sound had noticeably more polish, sparkle, and shimmer in its production than anything previous, introducing them to a whole new audience. Also very noticeable was that the lyrics of singer Elizabeth Fraser contained actual words instead of the wordless glossolalia that had become one of the band's hallmarks. Not that anyone could really divine any coherent narrative from the lyrics, still, these were big changes for a band that seemed so far removed from outside influences and popular trends. They were really going for something larger here as evidenced in the title, and at the time, it seemed sadly like it was the end of an era, and perhaps it actually was. Yet, we have to say, this record has really grown on us over the years and eventually became one of our favorites. The music swoops and floats as if conjured by the wings of the most lovely and magical birds. Somehow it's at once immensely majestic, deeply comforting and sweetly infectious. Robin Guthrie's glistening guitars and Fraser's voice spiral together effortlessly while Simon Raymonde forms waves of regal bass lines that anchor the proceedings. And its influence stretches far and wide into the ethereal-pop sound of so many recent bands from the past couple of years. Perhaps the band's most fully realized and strongest release in a string of incredible records. Beautiful and highly recommended!

Brother Ah - Sound Awareness LP (Manufactured Recordings)

Our Review:

Ex-Sun Ra band member and musical visionary Brother Ah created a world even farther out than Sun Ra's if you can believe that. This early seventies classic features two extended numbers, the first a dreamy, spacy, psychedelic soundscape with heavily reverbed, chanted vocals, and heavily affected nature sounds. Dark and drone-y and completely overpowering. As tripped out as anything Acid Mothers Temple or any other modern psych band has attempted. The second, a spare, rhythmic, super free, clattery No Neck Blues Band-ish hippy jam, with thundering percussion, howling horns, and bells and chimes and hand drums that slowly develops into a throbbing, jazz rock revival complete with celebrated drummer Max Roach testifying to the glory of LOVE while an enthusiastic crowd cheers him on as gongs and shouts and thrumming bass lines get more and more feverish, climaxing in a furious eruption of wild percussion. Way, way out there. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely for fans of Sun Ra, No Neck Blues Band, and all sorts of out rock/free jazz.

Broadcast - Tender Buttons LP (Warp)

Our Review:

Ooooh soooo gooood! As seems to be the case with each new Broadcast album, a couple of listens is all it takes to get Tender Buttons hooks into ya! The effects of Broadcast's pop intoxicants aren't as immediate nor as obvious here as those of 2003's The HaHa Sound, but they're no less potent. Broadcast continue to melt their sound into the ultra-pretty sounds of '60s girl groups. In doing so, they perfectly showcase lead vocalist Trish Keenan's unbelievably lovely vocals which occasionally take on a more somber tone here than they did on the airier HaHa Sound. Despite the undeniable sweetness of Keenan's voice, the band always gracefully sidestep excessive syrupiness with the counterbalance of heavier guitars, a propulsive groovy rhythm section and a broad spectrum of hefty analog synth melodies and textures. A luminous dreamboat with a tiger in its tank. Swoon!

Broadcast - The Noise Made By People LP (Warp)

Our Review:

Broadcast's debut full length, The Noise Made By People, released in conjunction with Tommy Boy back in 2000, was a dark and cinematically dreamy departure only hinted at from the early singles. Early and lazy mischaracterizations of the band just being another Stereolab copy (which we might have though ourselves), couldn't be farther from the truth. Keegan's thoughtful and psychically focused lyrics and delivery were a far cry from Stereolab's vocals as rhythm instrument approach. Instead, typified by the opener "Long Was The Year" much of the sound was largely and selectively lifted from electric psychedelic bands from the '60s like United States of America and White Noise where ring modulators and synthesizers transport female voices into environments of psycho-acoustic dream states with an infectious pop moodiness. While their albums like Tender Buttons and The Ha Ha Sound have a more popular following and rightfully so since each album is its own particular gem, we believe their debut is equally potent, underrated and probably the best place to start for the uninitiated. Highest Recommendation!!

Aphex Twin - I Care Because You Do 2xLP (Warp)

Our Review:

The mad-scientist of electronica - Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin - released I Care Because You Do in 1995. This album's single "Ventolin" stood as one of the more cantankerous tracks that RDJ had recorded to date. A harsh, tinnitus-inducing squeal permeates the sequencing of clunky rhythms and dum-dum melodies of that single thumbing its noise at everybody who took the whole Intelligent Dance Music thing way too seriously. At the time, the track was a blatant provocation, and after all these years, it still sticks out as a grotesque distortion, with the album moving somewhat like a palindrome around that track - progressing up to that nasty piece of electronics from more stately and subdued tracks before reversing course. One of the tracks that brackets "Ventolin" is the majestic "Icct Hedral" which spirals around an orchestration worked out by Phillip Glass for Aphex Twin, with James girding the cauldron of repetitive woodwinds and strings with his trademarked crunching breakbeats and phase-shifting parametric filter sweeps. The sweaty acid-breakcore track "Come On, You Slags!" is the other bookend to "Ventolin" with more introspective abstractions pooling on either side with plenty of counterpointing rhythmic complexities tossed in for good measure. It was on this record that the Aphex sense of humor - with its broad spectrum from the strange to the village idiot - first came into its own as a unique facet to Aphex Twin's vocabulary. So much of this work still sounds amazing after all these years, and it's also great to see this on vinyl again finally, too!

Beverly Glenn-Copeland - Copeland Keyboard Fantasies LP (Invisible City Editions)

Our Review:

Beverly Glenn-Copeland emerged out of the Toronto folk scene in the early 1970s, releasing a self-titled album in 1970 on GRT that drew comparisons to Joni Mitchell but fell into obscurity rather quickly. Throughout the 70s, he worked with other Toronto folkies such as Bruce Cockburn, but did not make another full length until this record, in 1986, originally released only on cassette.

At the time of this recording Glenn-Copeland was living in the northern Canadian town of Huntsville and the calm and quiet of that town certainly rubbed off on the artist. Performed entirely on DX-7 and TR-707, the music here is new age on its face, but has a deep pulsing undercurrent of bass that gives even the tracks without synthesized drums the impression of a distant dancefloor. Interspersed with ethereal vocals, the songs here bring to mind Steve Roach and the brighter side of Eno's ambient series. Recording far removed from the epicenters of new age and ambient music allowed Glenn-Copeland to work without any kind of commercial or cultural constraints and the freedom that created is palpable in his work.

A beautiful and obscure new age piece that has been lovingly restored and made available for the first time on vinyl thanks to Invisible City Editions.

Arrived with some light wear to the seams and minor corner dents.

Autechre - Amber 2xLP (Warp)

Our Review:

As an obvious precursor to Boards Of Canada's bleary and beloved electronica, Autechre's second album Amber ranks as the most accessible of their albums. Released in 1994, Amber retains much of the Incunabula's structural signatures for clipped breakbeats, whirling snares and hovering basslines. Autechre engineer these magnetic rhythms with liquid melodies that tumble and fold upon themselves. This rhizomatic approach to composing melody results in a hypnotic listen that have lead many to erroneously qualify this album as beatless. This magician's trick of obscuring the rhythm in plain sight makes this album all the more intriguing. In fact, there's only two tracks - the brief noodling interlude in "Nine" and the pastoral drawl of "Yulquen" – that escape the grips of Autechre's drum programming. Autechre are at their best on Amber when they turn toward bold gestures and cinematic overtures. This is especially true for intricately sequenced phrasing found on "Piezo" and "Further" which cycles elegantly with a weeping melancholy in almost Vangelis-like stanzas. The deus-ex-machina heft of the albums closer "Teartear" erases much of the album's illusory self-vaporization in one grandiose electro-clad march of gristled paranoia.

Arthur Russell - Corn LP (Audika)

Our Review:

The curious case of Arthur Russell continues with a new posthumous collection of previously unreleased versions of archival material recorded in the early eighties, but sounding as modern as ever. Like Love is Overtaking Me and Calling Out of Context, Corn was material that was being prepared for release at the time of its making, but for reasons unknown was scrapped. Russell was infamous for never being able to finish anything (he only released one proper album, World of Echo, in his lifetime, and many of his most popular dance tracks had multiple versions and often had to be finished by other producers such as Walter Gibbons and Francis Kevorkian), and it wasn't until after his death from AIDS in 1992 at the age of 40, that the world got to hear the full breadth of his musical genius. Flirting with modern classical, folk, disco and rock sometimes all in the same track but oftentimes exploring one genre expansively at great length, Corn mostly explores electro-pop, with a little bit of everything in between. With voice, drum rhythms and distorted cello, the music is neither quite aimed for the dancefloor like The World of Arthur Russell collection, nor is it as spare and oceanic as World of Echo or Another Thought. Instead, it strikes a highly listenable middle ground that takes a few of his better known tracks such as "Let's Go Swimming" and "This Is How We Walk On The Moon" into quite different pop-dance territory than on previous collections. And we don't recall the distorted cello having been such a sonic force on previous collections either, culminating in the eight minute abstract noisescape "Ocean Movie" that concludes this collection. While we originally thought this wouldn't be the collection we'd recommend for the uninitiated, we have been consistently selling copies every time we have played it in the store to folks who have no idea who Arthur Russell was, and we ourselves and been loving this release more and more each time we listen. Recommended!

Michael Rother - Katzenmusik LP (Groenland)

Our Review:

We'd assume that the majority of Stranded regulars are largely familiar with at least one of Michael Rother's projects. Whether it be his work with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Cluster, or Harmonia, Rother's contributions to the last 30 plus years of music are innumerable. Still, his solo work has been conspicuously absent from most write-ups and record shelves. Perhaps that's because the early '80s saw Rother in a bit of transition period from his kosmische glory days to a point where he embraced New Age with arms wide open.

On Katzenmusik, Rother moves more and more into New Age territory, mellowing out even further than on previous solo efforts. The blue sky, fluffy white clouds, and arcing jet-trail of the cover photo are well-evoked by the music inside. Twelve untitled, again all-instrumental tracks, with guitar and synth lines floating on air along to the tick-tock of Jaki's drumming.

Vivien Goldman - Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982) LP (Staubgold)

Our Review:

Perhaps best known as a journalist chronicling punk, reggae, and Afro-Carribean music since the early '80s, Vivien Goldman produced a handful of exceptionally good dub-punk / art-rock tunes with some very famous friends – notably John Lydon, Adrian Sherwood, Robert Wyatt, David Toop, and Viv Albertine of The Slits. Her very first foray was as one of the vocalists / lyricists for The Flying Lizards, and then she produced one hell of a single under the mentorship of the production team of Lydon and Sherwood, after that forming the theatrically inclined Chantage new wave duo with Eve Blouin. We've got all of those tracks from her early '80s days on this fantastic new Staubgold compilation, though it should be noted that she also recorded with Prince Far I before all of this and co-wrote tracks with Massive Attack and Moritz Von Oswald afterwards. The dub of "Private Armies" (featured here, in its slightly more sprightly vocal version) has been featured on a number of New Age Steppers collections, with its stark low-slung baselines and heavily flanged rhythms certainly cut from the same British dub production that delivered PiL's Metal Box and The Pop Group's Y. Goldman's "Laundrette," along with her two Flying Lizards cuts, embrace the taunting grooves of The Slits, whilst deconstructing the stereotypical gender roles of housework and other banalities left for women by society. The Chantage tracks shift the focus slightly away from a dub-punk and towards a ramshackle rocksteady, as if recorded in a Parisian cafe of absinthe drinkers. It all comes together as a remarkably good historical look into the British hybrids of punk, dub, and Afro-beat, snapped in vivid Kodachrome with Situationist smarts and feminist brashness.

Slapp Happy - Acnalbasac Noom LP+CD (Tapete)

Our Review:

Following a similar musical vein as Brian Enos' early pop recordings, Kraus's unique voice, as well as surreal lyrical sensibility, give the songs an eccentric aura of timelessness. Stylish 40's jazz motifs collide with primitive rock experimentation in a strange amalgam of high art and commercial pop music sensibilities. Not that the band were ever that commercially successful. In fact, Acnalbasac Noom was rejected by their British label, Virgin, and they were forced to re-record it with new arrangements including a string section for the more well-known self-titled release, also known as Casablanca Moon. The original version wouldn't be heard until 1980 a few years after the band split up. While it's arguable about which version of the album is better, the original recording with Faust rings truer to its art-rock conceits than the Virgin re-recording. While Acnalbasac Noom contains their most well-known songs, like The Drum and Me and Parvati, Sort Of more loosely sets the stage for what the band would become and has a fresh and unexpected feel to it. Both albums are highly worth your time.

Sparks - s/t LP (1972)

Our Review:

Newly reissued, the debut album by Sparks sounds as unique now as it must have 45 years ago. Produced by Todd Rundgren for his Bearsville Record label imprint, this must be one of the strangest debut records of 1971. Apart from early Alice Cooper, we can't quite think of a record or band so out of left-field as this (check out Ron Mael on the cover looking like early Prince with a Hitler 'stache). While the dominant sound coming out of LA at the time was either mellow singer-songwriters or country inflected roots rock, Sparks arrived on the scene with art-y bombast, campy falsetto vocals and strange time changes straight out of musical theatre. Never quite fitting in the confines of glam, classic rock or power pop, Sparks infectious blend of smart, satirical song-writing and vocal theatrics would take a while to connect with mainstream audiences. However, they definitely set the stage for the likes of Queen as well as, of course, almost all of New Wave.

Robert Millis - The Lonesome High LP (Abduction)

Our Review:

Robert Millis is a man of many talents with a knack for unpredictability to the direction of any given project. Nowadays, he's probably best known as one of the curators for the Sublime Frequencies label and a couple of amazing anthologies of recorded esoterica for Dust To Digital. Yet throughout the '90s and '00s, Millis has co-piloted the Climax Golden Twins – a convoluted project of careening art-rock, swampy folk twang, collaged Victrola recordings and rarified minimalism. The CGT records jump-cut brilliantly from one genre to another with an internal logic designed for cognitive dissonance. It should be no surprise that Millis' solo work persists in confounding expectations. Recently, his live shows have found Millis adopting the role of the beleaguered troubadour. His forgotten murder ballads and rumpled cautionary tales are in stark contrast to the recorded experimental works that detoured into feverish sound-collages and electric hauntings. The Lonesome High collects many of the songs that Millis has been performing over the years, fleshed out in the studio with swaggering arrangements. The balladeering persona of Millis is an effortless one, in which charmed melodies and poignant couplets pop amidst his slack-strummed songs. "The Tortured Butcher" is the closest to a barnstormer, showcasing Millis' quavering baritone falsetto above a mighty fine cow-punk arrangement. The spaciousness of two of Millis' finest numbers "Notes On A Scandal" and "Drowsy Sleeper" allows room for him to weave eerie tones and clouds of dissonance into his cautionary tales. Like the post Sun City Girls work of Alan Bishop, Millis' songs are impish in nature thanks to Millis' wry sense of humor that even seems to be lurking around the corner when Millis is plumbing the poetics of misery. The Lonesome High admirably carves out his identity as a complex songwriter, as yet another illustrious side to his multi-faceted body of work.

Porest - Modern Journal Of Popular Savagery LP (Nashazphone)

Our Review:

Mark Gergis is one angry dude – and he has never had any qualms about making his audience squirm with the uncomfortable truths about living under the influence of America, with its messy politics, problematic foreign affairs and unsavory histories. Porest is the moniker that he has used for only a portion of his musical productions, as he also fronts the agit-prop Khmer-styled rock band Neung Phak and he's responsible for some of the very best collections from Sublime Frequencies (i.e. Cambodian Cassette Archives, Choubi! Choubi!, and of course Oman Souleyman, amongst many others). In the curation and context of all of those other records, Gergis constructs a viable alternative to what is marketed as "world music." With Porest, all the pleasantries that hang on those other productions are dropped in his naked expression of his "post-globalised hate pop, cabalistic text-to-speech drama and violent tape music against soapbox anthems and swirling barbed-wire psychedelia." The opening salvo to Modern Journal Of Popular Savagery is a ridiculous rap-battle via earnest radio-drama dialogue between Gergis and a sampled voice who constantly demands for Gergis' passport. He later parodies the politics of progressive liberals, who blindly leap into any revolutionary cause without any self-reflection or existential grounding and may cause considerable harm to places like Syria and Iraq. Humor always plays a part in the politics of Porest, even as the subject matter can be deadly serious. Modern Journal Of Popular Savagery counters the lyrically driven pieces with a number of approximations of Iraqi-pop and Indonesian fuzzed-out psychedelia. Given that Gergis is working with Peter Conheim and Alan Bishop on these recordings, one can easily locate the aesthetics between Negativland and Sun City Girls.

Mor Thiam - Dini Safarrar (Drums Of Fire) LP (Jazzman)

Our Review:

An afro-jazz-funk masterpiece of the highest order, Senegalese drummer and singer, Mor Thiam's 1973 private press release Dini Saffarrar (Drums of Fire) finally sees the light of day. Recorded shortly after Thiam (pronounced "Chahm") emigrated from Senegal to St. Louis, Missouri, Dini Saffarrar was made with close family and friends to celebrate the spirit of the Black experience and the social empowerment that was beginning to happen in urban centers following the civil rights movement. The magnetic groove of the opener, Ayo Ayo Nene (Blessing for the new born baby) sets the scene for the glorious good vibes of the whole record, even more so when you know that song is celebrating the birth of Thiam's son who turned out to be multi-platinum hip hop star, Akon. The beautiful melding of horns, flutes, vibes, drums and voices in uplifting African harmonies and uproarious carnival rhythms will bring the sunshine out even on the darkest of days. Highest of recommendations.

Moondog - The Viking of Sixth Avenue 2xLP (Honest Jon's)

Our Review:

In our minds, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century was a man with a long white beard and a viking helmet on his head - Louis Hardin (aka Moondog). Whether it was how he incorporated field recordings into his compositions, unleashed riveting vocal cannons or created confusional worlds of percussion that were light-years ahead of their time, he had such a singular touch and far reaching vision, it's no surprise he's an all time shop favorite!

While we love so many avant composers of the 20th century, there tends to be an undeniable academic angle to their work which sometimes leaves us a bit cold. Moondog on the other hand employed such a playful approach to his work. Whether he was building his own instruments, creating new scales, experimenting with field recordings, inserting fun wordplay into otherwise austere pieces, you get this amazing sense of playfulness, childlike wonder and a totally unique strangely sophisticated kind of joy. The outsider that he was, Moondog answered to no one. No movement, no school, no tradition. He took his love, appreciation and deep running knowledge of classical music, his poetic mind, and his free spirit and created sounds that were like nothing of its time. Losing his eyesight at an early age he began writing scores in Braille. Like most truly special artists, he spent much of his life in relative obscurity, he spent much of the 50's and 60's on New York street corners where he would sell his poems, record the sounds of daily life, and soak in all aspects of his atmosphere. Most New Yorkers just thought they were walking by some crazy homeless guy in a viking costume, they had no idea they were passing one of the most brilliant musical minds of the last century. Thanks to the help of some of his big fans like Janis Joplin, who covered All Is Loneliness on her first outing with Big Brother Holding Company, he got a record deal with Columbia and eventually recorded with the London Symphony, and then spent the last 20+ years of his life in Germany where a rich family supported him while he continued to make music, up until the time of his death. His influence runs so deep and continues to spread among the musical underground, but also slowly but surely permeates into mainstream music. There is talk of a tribute album coming soon, in the '90s many hip-hop and electronic producers sampled his works and many avant electronic folks were definitely influenced by his strange musicks, including Mr. Scruf, DJ Shadow and Aphex Twin. Antony and The Johnsons have been doing an amazing version of All is Loneliness in their live show, and you can hear echoes of Moondog's sounds in everyone from Rhys Chatham, to Jon Brion, to Steve Reich, to Philip Glass and even The Residents. We urge you to let these 36 songs introduce you to what will no doubt be a life long love affair with one of our favorite musical minds of all time!

Harry Bertoia - Clear Sounds / Perfetta LP (Sonambient)

Our Review:

Harry Bertoia came to the research and development of sound sculptures through the success of his furniture design. The chairs he crafted for Knoll in the '50s were fashioned from simple grids of steel rods molded into ergonomic forms. These became iconic of the mid-century modern aesthetic, still beloved by many to this day. By the early '60, Bertoia turned his attention full-time to sculpture using many of the same types of steel rods from his furniture, often stacking and bundling these in geometric shapes. Through the use of these rods in both furniture and sculpture, he became intimately familiar with the sounds of his materials banging and clattering together. Thus, he began producing sculptures that were intended to make sound by affixing parallel rods of to a soundboard, harnessing the resonant shimmer and glisten of his material. These sound sculptures proliferated in his large barn of a studio, with Bertoia tinkering with the possibility of recording these sculptures in the context of composed interventions. These sounds are haunted and ethereal with lengthy acoustic decay on the metallic timbres, showcasing a complexity of sustained tone that were rarely matched outside the electro-acoustic drones of Organum and Andrew Chalk. Throughout the '70s, he self-published 11 albums under his own Sonambient imprint, all of which had been reissued through Important on a CD box set earlier this year.

Somanbient unearths two previously unpublished recordings from the Bertoia archive, with "Clear Sounds" dating from 1973 and "Perfetta" from 1971. Both pieces are emblematic of the Bertoia sound: lush, harmonic passages of glistening tones that billow, collapse and dissolve as manifestations of organic yet hallowed sound. A necessary rediscovery to one of the great American sound sculptors of the 20th Century.

Jack Rose - Opium Musick LP (VHF)

Our Review:

Like the title suggests, Opium Musick originally released in 2003, is a dreamy hallucinogenic journey into long-form slow building raga visions. Featuring Mike Gangloff from Pelt and Glynn Jones from Cul-De-Sac, these four tracks feature mesmerizing solo and duo guitar sometimes interlaced over moving tambura foundations. Eastern and western influences of slide guitar and raga drone meld into drifting sun-dappled meditations. Rose's playing here is more drawn out and considered, letting subtleties and space create a ponderous atmosphere of stunning beauty and melancholy.

Jack Rose - I Do Play Rock And Roll LP (Three Lobed)

Our Review:

Jack Rose was a practitioner of his own unique brand of modern Appalachia, a master of the steel string, whether finger picking or playing with a slide, Rose can coax amazing sounds from a guitar, and all by his lonesome create lush steel string guitarscapes, that range from haunting and mysterious to folky and familiar.

This lp originally released in 2008 gathers up three long live tracks, all quite different. The first is a track from Kensington Blues, a big favorite around here, recorded live in Chicago, and is of course amazing. Swirling clouds of notes, tangled melodies, shimmering drones, almost like Lubomyr Melnyk on the guitar, incredibly fast finger picking, the notes whirling and piling up into blurred chords, all woven into a rich layered expanse of droning folk. So fantastic. The second track was recorded live by Berry Kamer, for the VPRO radio show in Amsterdam, and demonstrates Rose's more traditional side, much more classic folk and Appalachian sounding, folky and wistful, dreamy and gorgeous and fluttery, but still plenty dense and deep, with more incredible fingerpicking, but much more subtle, the result some classic Fahey style pick and strum.

The whole of side two is taken up but a single looooong high end drone exploration, that harkens back to Rose's days in his old group Pelt. Previously released on the now WAY out of print vinyl-only compilation By The Fruits You Shall Know The Roots, this track finds Rose getting all Sunroof! with a gorgeous wavery field of high end drones and metallic shimmer, buzzing pulsing layers, overtones and buried melodies, glistening and glimmering, all upper register tones blurred and smeared into effulgent streaks, moaning and scraping and singing, the various tones allowed to burn bright and blend into the surrounding tones, a serious chunk of divine ur-drone for sure.

Folks who have been going crazy for James Blackshaw, Ilyas Ahmed, Matt Baldwin and the like, will definitely dig this. Rose fans, well, you know you need this already. The drone track will definitely hit the spot for Sunroof! fans and anyone into otherworldly and transcendent drone music.

Jordan De La Sierra - Gymnosphere: Song Of The Rose 2xLP (Numero Group)

Our Review:

Boy, has this reissue been a long time coming! Seeing that it's been a holy grail for new age collectors and long-form music heads long before the new age revival began revving up nearly a decade ago, it's surprising how long it has actually taken. We in fact have been listening to our ripped mp3's for the past few years courtesy of Greg Davis's incredible (and deeply missed) new age tape music blog, Crystal Vibrations. But now Jordan De La Sierra's masterpiece from 1977 has been given the deluxe reissue treatment it deserves, and for the very first time has been released as it was meant to be. Four gloriously long form well-tuned piano tracks (one per side for the lp, 2 for each cd), that hypnotically spiral and cascade in delirious transcendent clouds of chordal clusters and glacial repetitions. Recorded and edited from hours of sessions, the subsequent tape recordings were then taken to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and taking advantage of the space's unique acoustics and 30 second natural delay, played back and rerecorded as they transmitted throughout the deep resonant space.

Hailing from California's Central Valley and later influenced by Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Pandit Pran Nath as well as teachings from his spiritual explorations in India, De La Sierra wanted to take his classical music training to a different place when he was granted a scholarship at San Francisco's Conservatory of Music where he immersed himself in the avant-garde and performed works by John Cage, Robert Ashley, and Earl Brown. He eventually moved into Project Artaud right here in our own Mission District where he worked with small ensembles of like minded artists and musicians. His spiritual curiosity led him everywhere and under the tutelage of Pandit Pran Nath, to composing music in India. But he eventually worked his way back to the Bay Area, where he met up with Stephen Hill who ran the legendary radio program Hearts in Space on KPFA, who championed De La Sierra's music and led him to the fledgling Bay Area label Unity Records, which released Gymnosphere, but not without a few hiccups. Poorly managed and hemorrhaging money, the label ditched the planned release of a double lp by De La Sierra complete with booklet of Indian inspired drawings and poems and instead only released the first half on one LP. The process had taken so long that by the time of the release, De La Sierra had moved onto other projects, one of them forming the Dylanesque folk ensemble The Jemstone Band. Gymnosphere sank into obscurity.

So now The Numero Group has restored the original release to its originally intended glory, including a full catalog of drawings, poems and liner notes, housed in an embossed outer sleeve with a tantric design. Beautifully packaged, this long awaited reissue has long influenced many modern day soundmakers like James Blackshaw, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Gregg Kowalsky. Fans of Iasos, Lubomyr Melnyck, Ariel Kalma, Anton Batagov or any of the musicians mentioned above, this is essential!

Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia LP (Groenland)

Our Review:

A record with one of our favorite album covers – from probably the best kosmiche supergroup ever – reissued on vinyl once again. Called the "world's most important rock group" by Brian Eno, Harmonia consisted of Neu founder, Michael Rother and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster. Michel Rother, after contributing to Cluster's breakthrough record, Zuckerzeit, which heralded a new direction in sound from their earlier dark and cavernous analog synthscapes to a more pastorally melodic and motorik driven percussive vibe, decided to take a breather from Neu. He moved into Cluster's newly built studio in the German countryside where they began collaborating on a more combined sound. While each member still continued to focus on their own main projects Harmonia was never considered a sideline affair, recording two stellar albums plus a series of recordings with Brian Eno that didn't see the light of day until twenty years later.

Connecting the aesthetics of Pop and Minimalism, the first Harmonia album is a product of their source bands but with a fresh twist on the motorik ideal. Less clinical than Kraftwerk, less funky than Can, each member's multi-instrumentalist abilities are employed in a variety of approaches at once playful and murky, steady and mechanical, using electronic beats, distorted rhythms, warm keyboard shimmers, drifting piano, and gliding electric guitars. It's no wonder Brian Eno was a fan. Fans of Boards of Canada, Susumu Yokota and electronica-heads of all types should check this out too. They even coined the term "hausmusik!"

Clara Mondshine - Luna Africana LP (The Great Thunder)

Our Review:

OH YES!!! We've been intrigued by this artist & album ever since seeing mention of it in a useful reference book we found called New Sounds: A Listener's Guide To New Music, published in 1987. One might hope for Clara Mondshine to be among the rare female krautrock composers, but no, in fact Clara Mondshine was the pseudonym or project name for a man named Walter Bachauer, a radio director and journalist as well as composer and musician. His krautrock pedigree does extend back to the ‘70s when he played in Peter Michael Hamel's excellent improvising acoustic/ethnic ensemble, Between. As a solo artist, he released three albums under the Clara Mondshine moniker, starting with this one, Luna Africana, in 1981. (Perhaps he would have made more records, but he sadly passed away in 1989.)

Mondshine's music on Luna Africana is DIY cosmic electronica, 'Berlin School' style, made with analog synths and other probably fairly lo-tech, lo-fi electronic gear. Mondshine's repetitive machine mesmerism is super droney and trippy, and almost playful too. These all-instrumental space-outs also sometimes having a touch of ethnic/world music to them as well (a la Between). This is also another example of something at the intersection of krautrock and new age. Hence titles, once translated into English, like "Raga Of The Rising Planet" and "Harp Of The Amazons." On one track, delightful melodic figures repeat over equally charming pulsing patterns of motorik rhythm, followed by a more atmospheric excursion into the outer space drone-zone on the next, and then it's back to relaxing runs of gentle tones over cyclic bleep-bleep-bloop, wreathed in whips of drone. What's not to like about that? Definitely for fans of Cluster, Kraftwerk and A.R. & Machines, among others.