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viewing 1 To 10 of 10 items
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CD
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TERU 001CD
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Yan and Teruyuki Kurihara are two thirds of Blue Tapes' Tokyo-based improvisational kosmische-techno wonders, Check!!! Blue Tapes released a collection by Check!!! in 2018 that proved well received by music fans of many affiliations, earning comparisons to luminaries as distinct as Can and The Future Sound of London. Now, Check!!! is no more, but bassist Yan and guitarist/producer Teru have streamlined that band's sound into something equally as beautiful, with the parent unit's eclecticism replaced by a newfound sense of purpose. The mesmerizing vortex of delayed and panned guitar notes that opens this new CD sets the tone for a largely instrumental, guitar-focused work that is deeply soulful -- almost bluesy -- while at the same time as hypnotic as the most intense minimal composition or entrancing ambient music. You could imagine Scrapbook being a great, lost Factory Records album -- its floating, delicate guitar tones nestling up close to Vini Reilly's The Durutti Column, while its more electronic elements are as elegiac as early '80s-era New Order. Scrapbook is resolutely graceful music, whether it is delivering spiraling, bird-like guitar vignettes, or slowly, painstakingly building through a one-note throb of bass guitar into a heavenly chorus of synths over the course of the 11-minute epic "F". Features Akiyuki Ishizaki from The Cavemans.
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BLUE 028CD
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Todd Barton honed his craft composing for acoustic instruments - string quartets, small ensembles and orchestras. In the 1970s, he was drawn to emergent synthesizer technologies, because of their abilities to access tones "between" the standard 12 notes of the Western musical scale, and to have the power to craft music out of glitches and unique sonic gestures that are unplayable on acoustic instruments. Multum In Parvo is reflective of this approach; it has a definite and logical flow as a composition, but its content is abstract sound sculpted out of pure energy, something only analog synthesis can offer. Sometimes sparse, sometimes bristling and jumping with detail, Multum In Parvo provides a genuinely multidimensional experience. Like the classic Forbidden Planet (1956) soundtrack, by which Todd was inspired or indeed his collaboration with Ursula K. Le Guin on Music and Poetry of the Kesh (originally released in 1985 and reissued by Freedom To Spend in 2018), Multum In Parvo seems to function as part of some unique sonic ecology, according to its own rules, in its own universe and somewhere just beyond time.
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XRAY 136CD
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Nothing hurts harder than a surprise ending, and the title track of this album has a real face-slap of one. One minute you're in bliss, carried away in a crescendo of spine-tingling post-rock guitars and soft, wordless "oohs", the next you're through -- the song's out the door, down the street, pulling away from the curb and into a new life. That the overall tone of Jolly New Songs is so anthemic and -- for Trupa Trupa -- uncharacteristically triumphant, only makes having the rug pulled out from under you like this seem so much more cruel, so much more funny. Perhaps the harder the fall is, the more you have to laugh. Gdansk-based post-punk-psych band Trupa Trupa are sodden in a particularly cryptic kind of gallows humor. This isn't just down to some glitch in translation -- it could be in part due to the band's art-rock origins and because their singer and guitarist, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is an award-winning poet in Poland. And then there's the fact that the band's name roughly translates to "Corpse Corpse". This is The Beatles in a universe where their most famous song was "Tomorrow Never Knows"; a Pink Floyd that split when Syd Barrett's mind did. There is no "Wonderwall" here. Instead there's "Coffin", a uniquely morbid love song that comes in the form of a seriously ear-wormy pop ditty. You can dance to this album -- check out the to-die-for funk groove that propels the Can-like "Falling". You can trip out to it -- check out the psychedelic meltdown that mutates the Wurlitzer fairground music of "Only Good Weather" into something dark and psyche-scarring. Sometimes it sounds like the end of the world (the bleak roar of "Mist"), but sometimes it sounds like the start of a new one (the unashamedly gorgeous "To Me"). The Quietus declared Trupa Trupa's acclaimed 2015 album, Headache (IDA 125CD/LP, XRAY 017CD), to be "their first moment of true greatness. This is incredible work," and suggested that these musicians were on the cusp of a Dog Man Star (1994) or Daydream Nation (1988) -- something genuinely era-defining. Jolly New Songs is that album and it does not disappoint.
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XRAY 136LP
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LP version. Nothing hurts harder than a surprise ending, and the title track of this album has a real face-slap of one. One minute you're in bliss, carried away in a crescendo of spine-tingling post-rock guitars and soft, wordless "oohs", the next you're through -- the song's out the door, down the street, pulling away from the curb and into a new life. That the overall tone of Jolly New Songs is so anthemic and -- for Trupa Trupa -- uncharacteristically triumphant, only makes having the rug pulled out from under you like this seem so much more cruel, so much more funny. Perhaps the harder the fall is, the more you have to laugh. Gdansk-based post-punk-psych band Trupa Trupa are sodden in a particularly cryptic kind of gallows humor. This isn't just down to some glitch in translation -- it could be in part due to the band's art-rock origins and because their singer and guitarist, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is an award-winning poet in Poland. And then there's the fact that the band's name roughly translates to "Corpse Corpse". This is The Beatles in a universe where their most famous song was "Tomorrow Never Knows"; a Pink Floyd that split when Syd Barrett's mind did. There is no "Wonderwall" here. Instead there's "Coffin", a uniquely morbid love song that comes in the form of a seriously ear-wormy pop ditty. You can dance to this album -- check out the to-die-for funk groove that propels the Can-like "Falling". You can trip out to it -- check out the psychedelic meltdown that mutates the Wurlitzer fairground music of "Only Good Weather" into something dark and psyche-scarring. Sometimes it sounds like the end of the world (the bleak roar of "Mist"), but sometimes it sounds like the start of a new one (the unashamedly gorgeous "To Me"). The Quietus declared Trupa Trupa's acclaimed 2015 album, Headache (IDA 125CD/LP, XRAY 017CD), to be "their first moment of true greatness. This is incredible work," and suggested that these musicians were on the cusp of a Dog Man Star (1994) or Daydream Nation (1988) -- something genuinely era-defining. Jolly New Songs is that album and it does not disappoint.
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12"
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XRAY 005EP
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Adam Kalmbach, the sole musician and producer behind Jute Gyte, is the most important musician in metal since Death's Chuck Schuldiner. Adam has crafted two side-long pieces. The first of these, "The Sparrow", is a kind of modernist black metal symphony that might share some signifiers with the despair-loaded blizzard hymns familiar to fans of Norwegian black metal. The second piece, "Monadanom", is from a suite of ambient microtonal guitar pieces that Adam has been incubating for us since early 2014. It is oceanic, not in the usual new agey sense most often applied to ambient music.
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XRAY 017CD
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2015 release. Sharp as a migraine and twice as psychedelic. There is something about Trupa Trupa's music that borders on an interface with pain -- sometimes the vocals and guitar are all treble and daggers, for instance -- but then there's that anesthetic cushion of organ and the rolling sighs of the rhythms and melodies. Trupa Trupa's music teeters between a yawn and a shriek. It sways but does not stumble. There is something almost threatening about the way it affects to lose control at moments when one knows full well that it's never under any less but the most precise and steely control of its creators. These four men from Gdańsk, Poland, make rock music that swells with exquisitely executed tension and release. This is the noise one might imagine four 20th-century minimal composers making (Schoenberg? Stravinsky? Satie? Pärt?) if they had electric instruments instead of sheet music and a grudge instead of an audience. The band's lyrics are marked by the same economy and brutality as their deployment guitar, bass, drums, and keys. Everything is sparse and happening at once. Those repetitive grids of words and tones are in agreement but offer no clues. This could be the most vicious music Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records has ever released. At least one person has described it as sounding like Faust. It was recorded in a synagogue and an abandoned marine machinery plant.
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XRAY 004LP
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Clear 180-gram LP in screenprinted sleeve. Limited edition of 500. The two side-long pieces on Mats Gustafsson's Piano Mating sound like two holes puncturing the fabric of reality; holes that disobey laws of time and space; black holes, even. The pieces are pure, simple-sounding, slowly ascending drones that feel convincingly like conveyor belts for the soul. X-Ray Records asked Gustafsson to compose an album using an instrument with which he'd never recorded before. He responded with one of the most bizarre instruments ever, the Dubreq PianoMate. It's a synthesizer from the 1970s designed to be operated in conjunction with a piano, but Gustafsson here manipulates the machine on its own to wring out strange, expressive sonic prayers. "Microtonal electronic maracas is perhaps an apt description," says Gustafsson. "It is just a totally different beast compared to anything else I ever played. The PianoMate does whatever it wants really. But I can control pitch and volume and detune it while playing. The microtonal clusters that it offers are highly inspirational to work with and really something that is quite hard to achieve on the saxophones. And I just love the sound of it. That color really kicks my mind and ass." Compositionally, Gustafsson let the unique restrictions and limited tonal palette of the PianoMate guide him rather than attempting to bend the unwieldy instrument to his will. "Making this music was a lot about creating a specific state of mind. Letting the music take over," he explains. "Letting the sounds create the music. Slow. Listening for it and going for it. Never pushing it. Hard to describe, actually. And of course, part of the mystery of it all." Although he admits he rarely listens back to his recordings once he's finished with them, Gustafsson says that Piano Mating has brought something new and indefinable to his iconoclastic music. "I really hear very different things every time I listen back to these recordings. I found them still very surprising and, funnily enough, very inspirational to me. In my sax playing, I get a lot of inspiration from listening to the PianoMate. I love my PianoMate! -- there should be one in every household!!!"
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XRAY 003LP
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"It has all the music I like in it" was Blue Tapes' response to Benjamin Finger's initial submission of Amorosa Sensitiva. That music is cloud-rolled drones and sun-speckled synths; it is low tides of distant cello, ebbing into view; it is tiny hits of percussion clustering protectively around sustained piano patterns; it is techno slowed down and stretched out and reconfigured as free jazz; it is cascades of notes that tilt your head back and lift your legs into the air and scroll around you; it is snatches of human conversation rendered as abstract song textures, which lends a hallucinatory logic to the LP's narrative. Since 2009, Finger has conjured half a dozen albums of meditative, atmospheric compositions that draw from multiple sources but retain a very natural and intuitive musicianship -- one that prevents the juxtaposed sounds from sounding patchwork or contrary. Amorosa Sensitiva isn't just stylistically varied, though; it has a wide emotional palette, as comfortable exhibiting ferocity as bliss. Benjamin Finger is influenced by Alice Coltrane, Slayer, Spacemen 3, Arthur Russell, Butthole Surfers, Slint, Loop, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Charles Mingus, Disco Inferno, Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy, Broadcast, Labradford, Laurie Anderson, Flying Lotus, Pharaoh Sanders, Fugazi, Panda Bear, Suicide, Flying Saucer Attack, The Frogs, Frank Zappa, early Jane's Addiction, Bardo Pond, David Bowie, Autechre, Philippe Sarde, George Michael, Frédéric Chopin, Terry Riley, Gescom, John Zorn, Omar-S, Morton Feldman, Mr. Bungle, Talk Talk, Vincent Gallo, Gas, Drexciya, Laurel Halo, Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, François Truffaut, Hal Ashby, Louis Malle, John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, Ettore Scola, Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Paul Thomas Anderson, Roman Polanski, and early Jim Jarmusch films. Amorosa Sensitiva was mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate, Scorn, Nadja, Sunn O)))). Features Are Watle on saxophone ("Whirlbrainpoolin") and additional guitar ("Bum Finger Notes") and the looped voice of Inga-Lill Farstad ("Headspincrawl" and "Darnskullgreyness"). In terms of both packaging and sound, this LP forms a natural counterpart to X-Ray's fourth edition, Piano Mating by the legendary Mats Gustafsson, which is forthcoming at the time of this release. LP pressed on frosted clear 180-gram vinyl; housed in screenprinted PVC wallet; includes download code.
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12"
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XRAY 002EP
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The closest Blue Tapes has come to a movie soundtrack. "Tin Machine" is all perpetual energy and fluid tracking shots, beats coalescing into a beautifully poised disco strut while an acid-funk synth bassline carves cocaine shapes in the air. "The Movie" is all hissing sewer grills, human silhouettes blown up by menacing car headlights, nervy walks down alleyways where our protagonist senses darting figures in peripheral vision. "Girly Hole" is the moment when the 1970s filmstock turns into a computer game and the characters go raving in a shared lucid dream -- futuristic and nostalgic and pulverizing to the soul.
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XRAY 001LP
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Frosted clear 180-gram vinyl in screenprinted PVC wallet with download code. Blue Tapes inaugurates its X-Ray Records vinyl series with a reissue of one of its most loved tapes, Blue Twelve by Tashi Dorji. This was Tashi's first set of electric guitar recordings and was originally released in March 2014. Since then he has released a widely acclaimed LP for Ben Chasny's Hermit Hut label and toured with luminaries and admirers like Sir Richard Bishop. This is a very special LP package on frosted clear vinyl with screenprinting that forms a photo negative of the original tape artwork when held up to the light. It doesn't sound like a guitar. But I know you like guitars, so don't let that put you off. It sounds less like an instrument, in fact, than many voices -- swooping and surrounding the listener. Whispering lovely nonsense-poetry in one ear while their shadows quietly circle and shout abominations in the other ear. You know Forbidden Planet? Yeah, sort of like that. Not music so much as a real-time dialog of different distinct voices, each with its own character. Except it is a guitar. One guitar. All recorded live, improvised, with no edits or overdubs. What's more, this is Tashi Dorji's first ever electric guitar release. His previous cassettes and download albums have stoked up feverish praise from fans. Ben Chasny was so impressed with Tashi's gorgeous acoustic improvisations that he formed a label -- Hermit Hut -- specifically to put out Tashi's music.
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