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viewing 1 To 8 of 8 items
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LP
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DAK 022LP
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$35.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/4/2025
"From their early '90s inception to the latter years of the 21st century's first decade, No Neck Blues Band appeared (to distant observers, anyway), to be something of the Platonic ideal for the 'improvisational collective,' in turn confounding ideas of authorship, recognition, and fame. A fragile symbiosis at best, the scrim of anonymity began to fray sometime around the turn of the century, and a group that looked like it might, for a second, become the ur-rock, drug-soaked United-States-of-American AMM, instead unraveled. As individual members began to emerge from behind the veil, the conceptual, compositional, and improvisational personalities behind the group's untouchable alchemy took form. Two of the group's lifers stood out -- Dave Shuford, undeniably the group's guitar powerhouse (who also revealed himself to be an ace songwriter with Rhyton, D. Charles Speer, et al), and Pat Murano, who founded his label Daksina to explore obsessions with deep electronics, metal's outer reaches, and late-night murmurings of all sorts. In addition to whatever else they were, Murano and Shuford confirmed their status as high-order improvisers, albeit with an expansive grip wielding far more power than the polite conversationalism permeating most 'non-idiomatic' improv genres. On their second duo LP Sing and Play for the Guru, Shuford and Murano dig deep into the crevices of nocturnal electric moan, the first side a meditation on the abyss that sits easily on the shelf next to Murano's blackest Decimus musings. Building at a horrifically slow pace towards a sunless molten boil of vocals and electronics, the side is a perfect soundtrack to our ongoing entropic apocalypse, a 'dark ambient' opus that manages to make Abruptum sound like Kiss. While it's a stretch to call side B 'brighter,' it moves from its opening guttural cyborg eviscerations into tranced-out elaborations on non-Western modalities (something both of these punters excel at) with synapse-cleansing grace. As a whole, the LP ups the ante yet again for Daksina, whose every release effortlessly resets the pinnacle for non-rock psychedelic entanglement. Regardless of your take on the future, it seems foolish to muse on society's collapse with anything other than this record on the deck, your ass in an armchair, and your libations of choice flowing into your gullet." --Tom Carter
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LP
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DAK 023LP
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$35.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/4/2025
"C & PM -- two adepts of improvisation again alight their paths with esoteric flame. The emotional tenor of their masterful double LP release Four Infernal Rivers (MIE 027LP) is maintained: frightful urgency blends with a kind of poised resolve, the auditory version of a thousand-yard stare from an aloof predator. The guitar based sonics in evidence here on Songs of Éliphas Lévi Zahed congeal into a monolithic viscous clarity. 'The Will' is marked by vibrant strings slowly coaxed into vocalese. A few minutes in, a trap door delay takes the listener instantly to the tripping basement, forced to navigate a respirant rug in near total darkness. Tunnel vision tiny dot of light then dilated to max. Blinding flashes of a green horizon. Fuzz plumes are heard staggering into the distance, slowly passing over the hill of setting sun. 'Astral Light' piles on the pastoral waves as it glides along the edges of a shimmering ray. These tracks have been dedicated to the legendary ceremonial magician, Éliphas Lévi, the one who illustrated the Goat of Mendes for all to see plainly. This man of constant sorrow cut his teeth in socialist circles in Paris but later focused on more obscure routes of societal impact. In one of his books, he arranged 22 chapters to match the major arcana of the tarot. Lévi brought cartomancy into the realm of Kabbalah and the larger magical tradition. In his system, the will becomes interlaced with astral light - allowing for influence from far remote locales. Another version of what was known in neo-platonic circles as the pneuma, the field of transmission for extenuated mind force. Near the end of his life, Lévi hid away a catalog of ethereal songs written in the major and minor keys of Solomon. 'The Imagination' is where magic stakes its claim. Within the mind's eye, where images can hold fast and bind the viewer. Splatter tones draw out a tumbling duel, infernal internals. Molten pickup sound but enhanced, like drinking direct from the tap of voltage control. Faith based magic -- even faith based on lies, can be efficacious." --Dave Shuford
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LP
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DAK 020LP
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"Decimus' Evening Ragas Vol. 4 is Pat Muranos first solo guitar LP. Pat uses setting here both as accompaniment and foil. Side A opens with the outdoors and its accompanying sound and slowly over the course of the side, mirrors them back at us in a mutated form -- a photograph melting on the dashboard of a long-inert car. Strings mingle with crickets and become a pair of twins vocalizing, reminiscent, in a way, of a children's lullaby from Night of the Hunter. A plucked string becomes a glistening soap bubble that pops on the end of a branch. A palm muting strings becomes a storm front rolling in and dissipating just as it's noticed. The guitar obscures itself as it becomes cats and foxes communicating across empty fields. The natural world and the sound world meld into some winged thing -- cicadas giving way to delay, giving way to unknown things landing in fields while most of us sleep. I'm reminded more of 'recordists' like Anne McMillan and Knud Viktor than of other guitarists. I sense that Pat is steering and being steered throughout this record. A really true improvisation where any need for authorship kind of falls away and allows for a true sense of discovery and joy in the sounds being made. The B side also twists the familiar but in a different way. Instead of something being reflected back at us, sustained notes rise up, meet and coil around the sound of crickets. A new totality that tonally feels like a microscope placed on the artificial. Melodrama smooths out into morse code. Again music becomes nature, nature becomes music and they are both held there until something real and new emerges. Some kind of Steve Ditko cosmos unfolds into something that feels very modern and very old -- like a skipping media that creates a new world completely unintended or contained in the original piece. I find Pat's approach to be very inspiring and loose, true and unconcerned with anything but what the sounds themselves want." --Bill Nace Philadelphia 2024
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DAK 017LP
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Within this interference pattern, to the contrary, any similitude dissolves and hence the dependence of space on a reference frame is no longer maintained. Orientation is now relative and arbitrary, for the dismantling of the fixed-point strips fifteen years of, let's call it, empirical reality of its novel status. Fear not, this is small-scale stuff! Should your future, whether protracted, brief, or fluctuant in relation to your daily needs, include any examination of the appearance and disappearance of things, this document of a divergent path will, most likely, have no impact on your experience. If one were to speak candidly, innocently, there's a possibility that a statement such as the following might be uttered -- "There is no longer a linear chronicle, there are only shards of a perceived history, a formless sludge made up of endless neutral particles. Malleable, yes, but with increasing frequency recombined under a set of standards dictated by the obligations of a collective unlived memory, never mind by a commercial venture, although it remains implied." Fear not, servitude is still conditional! In this instance, at least. And, you'll still need some form of cash -- cold, hard or subjective -- and you'd do well to consider what methodology of relinquishment you plan for these slabs of plastic after your inevitable departure. Consider the serenity of your executor! Recorded, mixed and edited by Jason Meagher in 2007. Rejected by the powers that be shortly thereafter. Limited to 100 copies.
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DAK 016LP
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"In some distant future? No, you say. Now, there's a logic in being skeptical about seers, but there have been some murmurings that perhaps you're devoid as well. Easy stuff is fun, it's the obvious stuff that should make your hair stand on end. Fun stuff is fun, they say. So, drop it and have a little conjuring session. If there's desert access, take advantage of it, you'll be glad you did. For the less fortunate of us, find a field, a rooftop, a city street corner. Let's say that you're worried that you've been dubbed a thing, marked. Who isn't? Who hasn't? Now look up at the sky; please don't be concerned with the time of day or night. At some point, they'll be born into it. In how distant a future? A requiem for a failed space program vibrates the air. Electronic fireworks sizzle in the distance. Somewhere, a beacon has been received. Will they shed it, their mark? Remember, there's comfort in not suffering. And the profanity of genre, it's like a curse! Worse still, each remaining one a lonely scaffold supporting the crumbling edifice, their backs to the proverbial wall and thus facing the wrong way. Will there be more? Think of the awful words they'll designate to them, spat out. The edifice presupposes something on the other side of it. Something to come; this is what's to come music. Can you hear the signals embedded within? How about the patterns? Are you counting, are you good with numbers? Here being the moment when a nay-sayer could interject some paradox about the difference between remembering and repetition. Or a haiku about the void. But if you look over there you can see those wavering shadows. There is light around that corner, fire born maybe. See how it glows, then see the projected flickering darkness? This is music for a deprogramming. In some distant future? you ask. Well, not yet." Recorded winter 2021/22. Silkscreen by SIWA Prints. Limited to 100 copies.
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DAK 014LP
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Decimus: "New dimensions of silence, solitude, and isolation found us all in the spring of 2020. Herein lies a document of my own personal journey. Recorded outside and alone." Art by Alan Sherry at SIWA Prints.
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LP
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DAK 012LP
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No Neck Blues Band, recorded in Marseille 2009. Limited to 100 LPs.
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DAK 013LP
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Recorded during the summer of 2014. The sounds enshrined here document the final days of Raajmahal. After this there was silence. Art by Alan Sherry at SIWA Prints. Limited to 100 copies.
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