Die schwedischen Death'n'Roll/Stoner-Rocker HAYSTACK um Gitarrist/Sänger Ulf Cederlund (ENTOMBED) melden sich mit ihrem neuen Studioalbum 'Doomsday Goes Away' zurück! No bullshit, no trends, honesty, in your face, older than ever, forever underdogs, anarchy and hope. Für Fans von Unsane, Melvins, No Means No, Hammerhead, Nirvana, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Dinosaur Jr, Wipers, Dead Moon, Killing Joke oder Joy Division.
Jorge Gamarra and D’Marc Cantu - two true hardware heavyweights - come together for a split EP, marking the sixth release on Zonate.
Jorge Gamarra takes the A-side with two emotion fuelled productions. Eleven Minute Shrink opens - an instantly memorable, ear-worm melody underpinned by driving electro. A standout production with real versatility. This is followed by Prolonged Grief Disorder, a more textured and immersive piece, with tension conveying a real sense of raw emotion. D’Marc Cantu handles the B-side. Based on the outskirts of Detroit, and with over two decades of stellar releases behind him, he delivers two tracks written between 2019–2020.
Haystack explores the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack - a peak-time weapon that toys with chaos through rising energy and chopped vocals, before pulling itself back into tightly controlled club pressure. Closing the record is Madripoor, a deeper cut built around floating synth lines, capturing the essence of electro’s golden era.
A humanity-reminding suite of miracle moments, Someone Like Me unites a geographically unbound cast of real people in pursuit of a meaningful connection. Taping their lived experience in economic studios in quiet English counties, Pacific Northwest woodland retreats and the big city bustle of Sydney and Los Angeles, these kindred spirits rendered sheer beauty in the process. Custom pressed folk songs of love, loss and the lord saviour.
Illuminating minor works from seasoned players such as former Syndicate Of Sound chart-topper Sharkey and late-era Canned Heat lynchpin James Thornbury, the collection simultaneously honours the fleeting amateurism of hobby musicians. With their one shot at tangible vinyl, freshman Lynne Ann Kingan realised her loose bubblegum rocker on campus time, while U.S. Navy recruit Fred Potts cut his unconditionally serene ballad remotely stationed on a Spanish naval base. Spartan production continues to reign with Jon Betmead’s hair-raising gospel, howling into infinite space, and Goldrust’s stripped back garden hymn.
Throughout the hour-long reflection, faith has an intermittent yet revelatory presence, most overtly with the divine choral soul of Seventh-day Adventist quartet Remnant. More subtly, Gary Ramey and Jim Kennedy both turned to song in their spiritual quests, offering their all to a universal power. An irrefutable compilation cornerstone, the National Office For Black Catholics showcased Charles Murphy’s lionhearted account of the Black experience at a 1971 concert. Five years earlier, high school seniors The Superwomen would use their hauntingly angelic harmonies to address racial inequity with a breathless take on ‘Lowlands’.
Reaching the furthest corners, Someone Like Me secures the inaugural licence of three homespun masterpieces. Discovered by fluke in the digital haystacks of Youtube and Soundcloud, Jim Huxley’s bedroom pop earworm melds peacefully into Charlie Webster’s synthesized reverie. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s John Agostino introduces us to the bizarre world of tax scam records, with the artist only now learning that his tender psych-folk demos were leaked via a 1977 bootleg.
Compiled and lovingly restored by armchair digger Mikey Young (Eddy Current Suppression Ring/The Green Child), Someone Like Me pays due service to seventeen rarefied journals of truth and devotion. Adorned with visual artist Chris Fallon’s figure and flora dream extractions, the uniting songbook is further detailed by expansive track-by-track liner notes and a forward from San Franciscan poet Rod Roland.
I first discovered khroniky – Ukranian folk songs – in the Highlands of Scotland. I was watching a screening of Bajka, a mesmerising documentary made by the filmmaker Lucia Nimcová and sound artist Sholto Dobie. I knew nothing about these ballads beforehand, but I was fascinated by these odd, beautiful songs, especially the easy way in which they mixed misery and levity, where gentle melodies blend with tales of dark violence. The folk songs describe hardship, murder, torture, death in gulags, heavy drinking, outsmarting men, love affairs. But they’re often very funny too – many of the songs make fun of marriage, and there’s an amazing subcategory of khroniky songs called potka (vagina) songs.
The khroniky have never been properly documented because they were considered too crude, or contained lyrics that were problematic, politically. When Ukrainian folk songs have been archived in the past, it’s normally a sanitised, more polite version of the ones that Lucia remembers from her childhood. Lucia grew up on the other side of the Ukrainian border in Slovakia. She is part of the Rusyn (Ruthenian) minority ethnic group found in the borderlands of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. Rusyn is a centuries-old Slavic language, looked down upon as a poor, uneducated dialect by the neighbouring Ukraine and Slovakia. It was forbidden to talk about Rusyn culture at Nimcova’s primary school, but the khroniky stayed in her memories.
“I remember weddings when I was young,” says Lucia, who now lives in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. “At the end of the night, when everyone was drunk and the young couple would go around their guests, people would sing in Rusyn. There was singing and dancing, and songs about being in prison or falling in love. I picked up the lyrics and sometimes my mum would make my sister and I sing them for people we met on the train. I was about five or six but the lyrics still come back when I sing to my kids.”
Determined that these rich, nuanced, unique songs shouldn’t be forgotten, she decided to record them. Over two years, Lucia, joined by experimental musician Sholto Dobie, visited Rusyn villages high in the Carpathian mountains to rediscover the songs and make the documentary. It was at the beginning of war breaking out in Ukraine in 2014.
“The Rusyn community is a very closed one,” explains Lucia. “Sometimes we’d have to wait several days to hear someone sing; we had to earn their trust before they shared something very personal to them. We’d stay up ‘til 5am at a wedding, then go straight to a morning baptism, or collect haystacks with the villagers, hoping they’d sing while they were working.”
DILO is named after an important independent Ukrainian daily newspaper that was shut down when the Red Army entered Lviv in 1939. The four long tracks on DILO blur field recordings with song; an unpolished, privileged glimpse into a private world. We hear dogs barking and insects buzzing in the summer heat, then a blast of hurdy gurdy or violin will drift in, or a plaintive song soars softly over the rural background noise, with casually harrowing lyrics about a cuckoo, “lifeless in a world of misery”, as translated in the album’s booklet.
For both Lucia and Sholto, it was important not to tamper too much with what they heard. “When you think about ethnography,” Lucia explains, “you have to have a lot of time, love and respect to document it with sensitivity.”
“The songs all have their own atmosphere and intimacy from the spaces they were recorded in and it was important to maintain these particularities and move with them,” adds Sholto, who now lives in Vilnius, Lithuania. “They guide and sometimes interrupt a journey between interiors – domestic spaces; in kitchens, by the fire – and exteriors; marketplaces, cow sheds. We used contact microphones to record metal bridges and fences, and we spent one afternoon recording a wool processing machine, the details of the rattling and tuning wheels are the ground layer for the third track.”
Lucia took rough notes and diary entries during the recording process, which are now shared in the booklet alongside a selection of lyrics, loosely translated, but revealing the depth and astonishing beauty that sometimes lies in the language of these folk songs.
The feel of the album is intimate, flipping between laughter, where a woman sings about selling her pussy to buy a cow in one track, then shifts to a raw, painful truth; an adult son asks his mother why his dad won’t be back for dinner, as he’s gone to war.
Since Lucia and Sholto began working together in 2014, they have shared the audio recordings on radio and film and shown photos in gallery spaces, making sure these special, smutty, poignant songs don’t get lost. This new record and booklet joins that same continuum, another glorious fruit from the same rare tree.
The cassette (TWI 007) is a faithful reproduction of the 1980 original, complete with PVC wallet, 16 page booklet and tracklist insert.
Les Disques du Crepuscule is proud to present newly remastered vinyl and cassette editions of iconic compilation album From Brussels With Love, which was the very first release on the Crepuscule label back in November 1980 – and is now celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Originally released as a deluxe cassette/book package in a PVC wallet, From Brussels With Love featured 21 exclusive tracks from the international avant-garde and new wave, as well as contributions from the celebrated Factory Records roster. Then, as now, the featured artists include A Certain Ratio, Gavin Bryars, Harold Budd, Thomas Dolby, Dome, The Durutti Column, John Foxx, Martin Hannett, Richard Jobson, The Names, Bill Nelson, Kevin Hewick + New Order, Michael Nyman and Der Plan.
Running for 78 minutes, the cosmopolitan ‘cassette journal’ was curated by Michel Duval, Annik Honore and Wim Mertens, and also includes extended interviews with Brian Eno and legendary French film actress Jeanne Moreau. The cover art by Jean-Francois Octave, with additional graphics by Benoit Hennebert, Marc Borgers and Claude Stassart in the booklet.
From Brussels With Love quickly sold 6000 copies around Europe, earning rapturous reviews in the UK music press. “This is a reminder – without really trying, without being obvious – that pop is modern poetry. Is the sharpest, shiniest collection of experiences. Is always something new” (Paul Morley, NME). More recently, Dan Fox of art magazine Frieze described TWI 007 as “a masterpiece of distinctly northern European post-punk eclecticism.”
To mark the 40th anniversary of From Brussels With Love, Crepuscule will issue 3 remastered editions.
There is also a deluxe 2xCD ‘earbook’ edition (TWI 007 CD) presented as a 10-inch square hardback book, with two full length audio CDs and 60 page book including rare images, posters, sleeve designs and period ephemera, plus a detailed history of the Crepuscule label between 1979 and 1984.
Apzolut & MC Goatzak are two brothers with a pretty damn unique background. These viking brothers measure over 2 meters in height each and most women out there wish they had long hair as good as them. Meeting them for the first time we expected them to come from somewhere near the fjords of Norway, but this turned out to be seriously mistaken...
These metal heads grew up in the Caribbean island of Aruba and lived there till somewhere in their 20's before finally making the move to the Netherlands. With no real metal scene on that tropical island
and definitely no breakcore scene it's still a bit of a mystery to us what drove these guys to start producing and playing such extreme music - but we are happy as f*** that they did.
This brand new 5 track EP is one seriously brutal death/black metal breakcore rave mash up. Definitely not suitable for the top 40 radio listening weaklings out there. But if you're a wo(man) that has a hard spot for extreme out of the box music, then this one just might be something for you.
To keep the nostalgic memories alive and as sort of an ode to those dark times years ago - when for a lot of the youth trading and copying cassette tapes was the only way to even be able to find and enjoy underground music - we've decided to make this release physically available only on cassette tape and those are limited to just 75 copies!!
"...don't ask if there will ever be a Volume 2. We don't know yet. What we do know is that if we ever come across a similar tour de force as Don McCaslin's composition, Praise Poems, then there will certainly be one..." These were the final words of the sales notes for Praise Poems Volume 1 - which we proudly released earlier this year. And indeed, since then, we have discovered a tune which led us to continue to curate this series of obscure, soulful, jazzy and spiritual sounds from back in the day. The song to which we refer to is Abraham Battat's jazz-samba masterpiece, Fly Away. Fly Away is a righteous combination of sonorous jazz guitar, crackling drums and warm acoustic piano. Floating through the tones as if in a private concert for you in your very living room, it is an earnest, honest vocal performance bringing a rainbow message of freedom and liberty to the world. This is the standard by which we judged the entirety of this compilation. Though they may be known in some circles, selections by Richard Martian, Larry Covin, and The Gingerbread Express are in the same category of pure beauty. Of course, good luck finding a copy of Larry Covin's Masquerade or the Portis Brothers' Summer Love. The single hit you receive while doing an online search is the exact same copy from which we took the master. To find a needle in a haystack is a cakewalk compared to turning up a copy of some of these gems to be found here.
