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viewing 1 To 6 of 6 items
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LP
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AZD 008LP
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"If you've been following his work (and even if you haven't, you big bugbear) you know that Mattin brings a conceptual musician's ear to his rock 'n' roll but he keeps it out of the museum and on the 'streetz,' 'cos that's where the riots went down, and this places him at a helluva impasse: the European dialectical impulse has no choice but to hurtle head-on into a game of chicken with the American-historical rock narrative (not the name of a band, though it should be) or to get in bed with it and allow their legs to intertwine in an awkward genital embrace. So it was that in the winter of '08, the bellicose Basque recruited globetrotting bass pervert Margarida Garcia, Kevin Failure of Pink Reason (guitar and piano), and erstwhile Chinese Restaurant 'Lucky' Lloyd Frackkbonner (drums) for an exquisitely corpsical seance conducted on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Lautreamont shakes hands with the Language Poets and hunkers down for a burger and a smoke with Ivan Julian and Dougie Bowne (engineers and Vietnam vets both). Together they perform an ontological autopsy on the body of rock & roll form, then hogtie the improviser's process with a rope made of crisis (remember the bailout?) -- the Surrealist parlor game subjected here to crushing technology and a stopwatch plus liquor and god-knows-what else. The Rules: ten songs, each exactly three minutes in duration, recorded in strict ass-backwards fashion: first the vocals, then Kevin's guitars, etc., then Margarida's bowed and throbbing bass, then the drums. No second takes. No two musicians were allowed in the studio at the same time and none of them could hear a playback so their only guide -- their score, if you will -- was Mattin's lyrics, which themselves are a living corpse that slices itself open to display its guts, which look like these ten songs or a mangled womb. So we hear it for the first time and guess what? It sounds like a Top-40 station playing nothing but side B of No New York. No shit. Every song is a hit."
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CD
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AZD 005CD
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"Among other things, Lucio Capece, Axel Dörner, and Robin Hayward are exponents of what one might, for ease of use, call the Berlin style of improvisation, an approach to real-time music creation characterized by its emphasis on silence, ambient noise, and extended technique. Dörner (trumpet) and Hayward (tuba) have been key figures in the Berlin improv scene since the late '90s. Capece (soprano sax, bass clarinet) joined them in 2004 upon relocating from his native Argentina, and the trio took the name of Kammerlärm (chambernoise). Together the three men create a non-narrative music that evinces a strict reserve with respect to 'self-expression,' an acute awareness of the materiality of their instruments, a sustained exploration of the possibilities of instrumental playing. Their first full-length release as a trio is culled from two recording sessions at Dörner's home in 2005. It is an intensely disciplined music. Within its spaces, gestures, and silences, unfolds a finely textured sound-world that rewards deep, repeated listening."
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CD
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AZD 003CD
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$14.00
NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER
"In 1998, Starving Weirdos began crafting a body of staggeringly beautiful, unsettling freeform soundscapes, unbeknownst to all but a tiny circle of friends and neighbors in their native Humboldt County, California. The duo's recorded works had not surfaced until very recently, in the form of extremely limited CD-Rs on such labels as Jyrk and Root Strata and on the group's own imprint. They have, without exception, met with resounding critical praise and intense curiosity from the experimental music community. At the core of Starving Weirdos is the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay. The pair weave intricate tapestries of sound from strands of electroacoustic improvisation, ambient noise, free-folk, and musique concréte. The density of these works is matched only by their clarity of purpose and execution -- each piece brings into existence a distinct sound-world, rendered with a pointillistic attention to sonic detail that belies the duo's economy of means. The result is a profoundly disorienting music that thrives on the tension between artificiality and organicity, stillness and constant mutation. Starving Weirdos' music sits uneasily beside that of their contemporaries in the free-drone/noise/improv underground. While the group undoubtedly has something in common with such outfits as Sunburned Hand of the Man or Double Leopards (the two groups with whom they are most often compared), SW's expansive, understated approach to improvisation and recording more closely resembles an amalgam of early AMM, Taj Mahal Travellers, Basil Kirchin, and Pauline Oliveros' deep listening experiments -- as filtered through the crisp night air of California's redwood forest."
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CD
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AZD 004CD
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$14.00
NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER
"With no discernible connection to any current micro-scene or music-making community, Howlin' Magic, aka California free-blues guitarist Jesse Rakusin, works in relative isolation, laying down impossibly heavy blues licks, amp noise, and expressionistic drum tracks at a breathless clip. In early 2006, Rakusin began circulating a self-titled CD-R of twelve private, four-track recordings. Those fortunate to hear it were fairly astonished. This was the sort of record that might have emanated from Siltbreeze or PSF in the early '90s, a devastating set of home-recorded, white-hot splatter-blues, at once formally way-out and ultra-primitive in its execution; and its chief 'architect' was this kid from Santa Cruz whose influences included Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Simply Saucer, White Heaven, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Holy smoke! Rakusin's command of the blues, combined with his seemingly insatiable appetite for psychedelics, has yielded one of the most scorching records to issue from the U.S. underground in years. There's nothing ponderous or 'searching' here -- the hippie affectations and inchoate mysticism that infect our current cultural environment are all but absent from Rakusin's purview. Instead, what we've got here is a successful marriage of raw garage-psych and highly advanced freeform noise."
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AZD 001CD
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"El Pabellón ('The Pavilion') is Fankbonner's first release under his own name. It's also the first document of his electroacoustic compositions for sampler and field recordings. The album was recorded over three months in a small room in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. It is assembled entirely from the sounds filtering through the windows of the apartment: amplified room tone; tape hiss; and heavily treated samples of very small sounds arranged in spacious, richly layered sonic tableaux in which microtextures surface at the threshold of audibility. The eight pieces of El Pabellón represent a dialectical zooming-in and-out between the controlled sonic environment of the composer's workspace and the noise of the environment beyond its walls. Eschewing the documentary aspects of field recordings and sound-walks, the layers of ambient sound at the heart of El Pabellón enter into a dialogue with Fankbonner's more or less intentional music-making process, calling attention to the mediations between the composer, his sonic environment, and the barebones recording equipment at his disposal (four-track tape recorder, sampler, one microphone). The result is an intricate, varied, surprisingly lyrical collection of soundscapes that evoke both AMM and INA/GRM, Francisco López and Ramón Sender."
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CD
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AZD 002CD
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$14.00
NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER
"Mattin once described his approach to music-making as a matter of 'trying to contradict the preconceptions that people might have, to put a different perspective on what can be done in a performance situation.' And so it was that in 2005, the Basque laptop artist best known (depending on who you ask) for his exquisitely restrained laptop improvisations with Radu Malfatti, Eddie Prévost, and Axel Dörner; his palate-cleansing duet with Tim Barnes at ErstQuake 3; or the deformed, impossibly strange 'rock & roll' he makes in Billy Bao and Josetxo Grieta. This fourth volume is far and away the best and quite possibly the strangest in the 'Songbook' series. Whereas earlier volumes found Mattin ripping away at an acoustic guitar and doing his cheapest, most grating Lou Reed imitation, Vol. 4, recorded live in Tokyo, is a concise electric ensemble set featuring Anthony Guerra on second guitar, Tomoya Izumi shouting as Jean-Luc Guionnet plays sax 'in the toilet,' and Taku Unami punctuates Mattin's anguished vocals with popping bass licks and brief piano phrases. Somehow, the resulting 'songs' suggest a particularly fucked-up, drummerless outing by Fushitsusha. In point of fact, Songbook Vol. 4's closest relatives in the rock & roll canon are Suicide's famously confrontational live shows of the mid-'70s, the Electric Eels at the point of disintegration, or the between-song 'banter' on Reed's Take No Prisoners reimagined as a score for five very exciting young improvisers. It is, in other words, one of the greatest live records ever made."
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