Iva Bittova – Entwine/Propletam - May 2014 May 18th, 2014

Iva Bittova stands alone in the isolated star-shaped 17th century Czech church of St John of Nepomuk, at Zelena Hora, her quavering explosive vocal and stark violin humming in the cold stone acoustics. Bittova blends ancient Eastern European folk phrasing with experimental modal improvisations and ecstatic ejaculations, an analogue gypsy Bjork, or some conservatoire star…

Stefan Jaworzyn – Eaten Away By Shadows ’82 – ’83 - May 2014 May 11th, 2014

It’s assumed the ’80s New Zealand lo-fi noise of bands like The Dead C reflected geographical and technological isolation. But contemporaneously, in bedrooms from Bristol to London, and within earshot of pop cultural civilization, a young Stefan Jaworzyn plugged whatever sounds he could source into cassette recorders and carved his own archipelago of clattering loops,…

Adam Bohman – Music And Words II - May 2014 May 11th, 2014

33 years of Bohman’s home recording highlights and they sound like something found next to a decomposed body in a forgotten flat. At Southend and Wiesbaden he simply says what he sees, field anthropologist style, and scrambles the documents. On Screams Of Undead Earthworms he fearlessly enacts the tiny hermaphrodites’ agonies. On the inner sleeve,…

Vialka – A L’Abri des Regards IndiscretsVialka – A L’Abri des Regards Indiscrets - April 2014 April 28th, 2014

From their rural French fastness, Marylise Frecheville (free jazz percussion and torch singing), and Eric Boros (anarcho-art-punk guitar and stentorian declamations), continue to surprise. Largely sung in English, and enclosed in a 54 page cloth bound libretto, A L’Abri des Regards Indiscrets pitches reproachful psychoanalytical duets over slapped face rhythms, broken gutter blues, and anthemic…

Kosmischer Laufer – The Secret Cosmic Music Of The East German Olympic Program 1972-1983, Volume II - April 2014 April 21st, 2014

Martin Zeichnete was an electronics boffin press-ganged by the state into writing trance music for East German Olympians. This second newly unearthed volume of Zeigler’s Kraftwerk and Neu fuelled visions is marginally inferior to the first, but it’s strangely moving to experience these stirring retro-futurist analogue fusions now both the Communist and the Olympic ideal…

Dan Stuart – Arizona: 1993 – 95 - April 2014 April 12th, 2014

In the ’80s, Dan Stuart’s Green On Red played punk in a Crazy Horse style, a hardcore era heresy, dissolving messily in bad drugs and bad business. His 1994 comeback, Can O’Worms, sounds even better here than twenty years ago; a heady country blues fever dream, with spicy Mexican flavoring, and Carveresque deadbeat lyrics, painting…