Black Vinyl[27,94 €]
High Roller Records, black vinyl, ltd 700, lyric sheet, 4 page insert, poster, A5 photo card, 425gsm heavy card board cover, mastered for vinyl by Patrick W. Engel at Temple of Disharmony in March 2021. Cutting by SST Germany on Neumann machines for optimal quality on all levels... The ultimate reissue of this eternal Thrash Metal classic! FOR EUROPE ONLY!
Splatter vinyl[30,63 €]
High Roller Records, black vinyl, ltd 700, lyric sheet, 4 page insert, poster, A5 photo card, 425gsm heavy card board cover, mastered for vinyl by Patrick W. Engel at Temple of Disharmony in March 2021. Cutting by SST Germany on Neumann machines for optimal quality on all levels... The ultimate reissue of this eternal Thrash Metal classic! FOR EUROPE ONLY!
Black Vinyl[28,11 €]
High Roller Records, black vinyl, ltd 700, lyric sheet, 4 page insert, poster, A5 photo card, 425gsm heavy card board cover, mastered for vinyl by Patrick W. Engel at Temple of Disharmony in March 2021. Cutting by SST Germany on Neumann machines for optimal quality on all levels... The ultimate reissue of this eternal Thrash Metal classic! FOR EUROPE ONLY!
"The box set contains all eleven studio albums, researched extensively from all the very best available master tapes. I worked with renowned mastering engineer Miles Showell at Abbey Road studios to have the albums remastered at half speed which achieves the best quality possible" Alan Parsons Originally released in 2014 on CD, The Alan Parsons Project – The Complete Albums Collection is now being made available in a beautifully packaged deluxe vinyl 11LP box set and is limited to 1,500 copies worldwide. It includes the 11 original studio albums including The Sicilian Defence album that they originally recorded in 1979 and was previously unreleased until 2014 when it was included within The Complete Album Collection 11CD box set. - All albums half speed remastered at Abbey Road and cut from hi-res files transferred from the best available master tapes where analogue was originally used and from the original digital master tapes for all albums from 1983 onwards with everything approved by Alan Parsons. - Pressed on heavyweight 180gm vinyl, and beautifully replicated sleeves including original text and imagery. - Beautifully packaged in a ‘cigarette type’ hardback outer box with the outer design containing the words that Eric Woolfson felt best described The Alan Parsons Project. - Includes 60 page 12” x 12” hardback book containing full lyrics, brand new sleeve notes and essay from Miles Showell, Abbey Road Studios on the half speed remastering process. - Also includes giant A1 size poster The Alan Parsons Project was a progressive rock music entity comprised of engineer/ producer Alan Parsons and songwriter, musician and manager Eric Woolfson. They released 10 concept albums which focused on subject matter such as science fiction, supernatural, literary and sociological themes between 1976 – 1987 and have sold in excess of 55 million albums world-wide. Their focus was on very high-quality studio sound production and they recorded most of their work at Abbey Road Studios in London. They used a variety of different lead vocalists and musicians on every album but did employ some relatively consistent session players such as guitarist Ian Bairnson, arranger Andrew Powell, bassist and vocalist David Paton, drummer Stuart Elliott, and vocalists Lenny Zakatek and Chris Rainbow – choosing who they felt was the best for each song rather than being constrained to moulding the material for one specific artist.
Vinyl come packaged in a custom printed plastic casing, gatefold jacket, full color printed sleeves, metallic silver color double vinyl, 8-page LP lyric booklet, and free digital download card. While Southsiders is a celebration of the group's fortitude, it is also a deeply introspective, and sometimes conflicted, work. "It's a natural progression from the last record,The Family Sign, which was about growing my family," says Slug, now a father to three, who finds himself contemplating mortality. "I'm starting to think, 'What is post-family man? What am I supposed to rap about now?' I'm sticking to my roots, rapping about what I'm doing, what I think about. This record is, much like the other ones, a very detailed look at my life."
Another side of Serge Gainsbourg permeates this 1963 film soundtrack about ‘a stripper lost in the nocturnal world’ of Paris, according to director Jacques Poitrenaud, who cast Nico in the lead role (after her appearance in La Dolce Vita and just prior to the single she cut with Jimmy Page for Andrew Loog Oldham). Created by Gainsbourg with arranger and longstanding collaborator Alain Goraguer, the music is fittingly the cool jazz of dingy nightclubs and seedy bordellos, with Gainsbourg on piano, and there’s the sultry title track, delivered breathlessly by Juliette Greco. Another lost gem for all serious Gainsbourg and Goraguer fans.
Legendary lost glitter-punk! - Once called the Doll's front man's favorite
band, these glamazons released one coveted 45 in the early 70s and
you'll pay close to four figures for one
Turns out they cut eight more studio cuts all stronger than that single! With
gender fluid cuts about S&M, spray paint, and bubble gum, this high heeled kick to
the teeth finally leaps from glammy glitter punk myth to your turntable on lipstick
pink vinyl & CD! Includes a 15 page liner note zine with the LP! .
Charbel Haber is Lebanese musician, performer, visual artist and composer from Beirut. His work has seen him collaborate with artists from a wide range of disciplines - film, video art, visual art, theatre, dance - both in Lebanon and abroad.
As a solo artist and as a member of post-punk band Scrambled Eggs, he has composed music for directors Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, Ghassan Salhab, Mohamad Malas, video artists Lamia Joreige and Akram Zaatari, Maqamat dance company and playwrights Rabih Mroueh and Lina Saneh, to name but a few. His prolific and collaborative career includes free improv group Johnny Kafta Anti-Vegetarian Orchestra, psychedelic Arabic music ensembles Malayeen and Orchestra Omar, cold wave band The Bunny Tylers and minimal ambient duo Good Luck In Death. He is the founder of Those Kids Must Choke and co-founder of Johnny Kafta's Kids Menu - two experimental record labels - and he has recorded and collaborated with notable artists from the fields of free rock and improv such as Oiseaux-Tempête, Radwan Moumneh, Tarek Atoui, Jean Francois Pauvros, The Ex, Michael Zerang, Mats Gustafson, Eddie Prevost, Xavier Charles and Tony Buck.
And once again, here I am telling you to go look for the truth and its beauty in the words of dead poets, in the little tales of ravaged cities, in aborted dreams, in the melancholy of the ruins of tomorrow, in meaningless plastic totems, in the enigmatic end of restless fools.
I'll be here long after you all disappear.
These are the first and last sentences from Charbel Haber's latest offering, A Common Misunderstanding of the Speed of Light: a multi-media musing on the chronic and the chronological, the subversive nature of time. This combination of a record and book observes the slow passing of life and the illusion of retrogradation in his every day. Simply by documenting - via image, text and tune - Haber assigns value to everything that is cast in amber by this project. There's an acceptance and appreciation of the destitution he witnesses, it is an homage given in overlapping forms.
ACMOTSOL has two parts. The book, hardcover in an embossed orange, features photographs and texts taken from Haber's personal digital diary spanning from 2020 to the start of 2022. Broken into six chapters - named for the six tracks on the record - the entries are an artist's log of sorts during a peculiar period of global hyper stagnation and navigating the aftermath of the Beirut explosions. The 96 pages highlight Haber's interest in decay, negative space and the temporality of the human condition. Instead of presenting the images and texts as they were originally paired online, they're reordered and recontextualized in the book. New connections are formed, as tenuous and fleeting as the content they surround. The images interrupt the texts in many instances, forcing pauses and inviting distraction.
At the center of the book is a sudden burst of orange pages, with stylized pluckings of the text framing a QR-code that grants access to the record. With the brilliant orange covers and matching innards, pregnant with the music at the core, it's almost as if these central pages act as a way to turn the book inside out. There, the book's purpose is altered, fixated on a mirror image of itself. It forms a self-completing arc for the project, a loop.
ACMOTSO's second half is that mirrored album. Six tracks totalling just under 52 minutes. The music could be a continuation of his solo albums Of Palm Trees and Decompositions (2016) and It Ended Up Being a Good Day Mr. Allende (2012), an exploration into the expansiveness of seemingly simple loops of a lilting guitar. Careful electronic effects add dimensions or reground the listener. There's a swelling of sound, the illusion of the push of space before it retracts back into itself or fades into the distance. Much like the images and texts the music complements, the songs challenge the purity of cycles. Endings are beginnings, beginnings are endings or is everything just the middle? Haber is quietly and elegantly grappling with the troublesome act of place-making. In music, in words and in visual storytelling.
ACMOTSOL is a work that can be calming or disorienting, depending on what is requested of it. Similar to the way loops and cycles can signify both meditation and mania. The tendrils of Haber's past - his home of Beirut, fictional and real characters encountered, authors read, films watched, composers listened, walks taken - knit themselves together for a presentation of our immediate present. An evidence of a happening. A considered project of time.
All photographs, texts and music by Charbel Haber. Album mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. Design by Maziyar Pahlevan. Printed by Albe De Coker in Belgium.
This dual-part project will be released on XX XXX 2022 on 'Other People.'
Description by Nereya Otieno.
…If I Die, I Die was released only weeks before the Heresie box set. The two albums show very different faces of the Virgin Prunes – one that explored mythical worlds and another that showed their surrealistic interest in the creative power of insanity. They also highlight the ways in which the band enjoyed experimenting with different genres, sound forms and recording techniques. As Friday has commented recently, ‘The Virgin Prunes contained four different bands at the same time.’
The album was recorded at the Windmill Studios in Dublin in the summer of 1982 and produced by Wire’s Colin Newman. Rather than adopt an A/B format, the sides of the 1982 vinyl and album cover, which was designed by Steve Averill, were given brown and blue colours, signalling earth and sky respectively. The art work on each side of the sleeve was also inverted so that either side could be read as the front cover. Ursula Steiger’s photography captured, on the brown side, the band running through a forest like a nomadic tribe. On the blue side we then find them in different costumes, performing with fire and mannequins within a derelict building.
This 40th Anniversary Edition of the album sees a full remaster housed in a Limited Edition Special Finish Gatefold Sleeve on Transparent Vinyl. This Deluxe LP also comes with a 16 page booklet featuring sleeve notes by Dr. Jonathan Wood exploring the writing, recording and production of the record. Plus an exclusive 12x12 Art Print. The album is also available as 2CD Mediabook & Digital Deluxe.
Mechanical Reproductions stay true to their original mission statement of being 'an outlet for editions of vinyl and print' and, for their third release, serve up a 48 page archive of some of the posters created by Young Echo's Amos Childs & Sam Barrett for the long running nights the collective have been running since 2010.
'Heavyweight Champion is the result of six years' collaborative collage works for Bristol's Young Echo collective.
The collective's 12 members have been running club nights, radio shows and releasing music since 2010. Two of them, Amos Childs & Sam Barrett (who also make music together as O$VMV$M), have been responsible for creating the posters to promote the club nights since the start.
These posters are a regular fixture in the visual landscape of the city, on walls, bins, bus stops and pretty much any other available surface in the lead up to each event. Their informal visual language immediately sets them apart from the other flyers vying for attention. They're intriguing: through not having the artist names featured as prominently as possible they encourage the viewer to take a deeper look. There's dense layers of images and cut-and-pasted phrases to be deciphered - ultimately a far more engaging experience than being shouted at by a generic and large-fonted neon specimen.
Thanks to the local council (and keen fans who would rather see them on their walls at home), more often than not these works are gone soon after they're tacked up, meaning the only archive of them is as low resolution images on various social media channels. 'Heavyweight Champion', then, aims to provide a lasting document of this unique and vital part of Bristol's musical culture...'
The origins of Cos date back to the second half of the sixties when Daniel Schell joined forces with Jean-Paul Musette, Pascale Son and Robert Pernet to form Classroom. When Classroom split, Daniel Schell and Pascale Son moved ahead and formed Cos together with Charles Loos, Alain Goutier and Bob Dartsch. They produced an experimental jazz rock sound linked to the influences above mentioned, but without being mere copycats since they always managed to keep to their own personality.
Postaeolian Train RobberyI is an obscure classic from the 1970's Belgian jazzy prog scene that has become a much sought after piece in the collector's market since it was originally released in 1974. Highly inspired by both the UK's Canterbury scene and the Zeuhl sound, the debut album by Cos has been compared to the likes of Soft Machine, Gong, Hatfield & The North, National Health, Gilgamesh, Egg, Placebo, Magma or Zao, with Pascale Son's unique wordless vocals and nonsense syllables singing in a voice that some sources have compared to Flora Purim's.The album was released on the small obscure label Plus, and has arised interest not only among prog-rock psych-heads and jazz experimentalists, but also among those looking for breaks and bits to sample.
The Wah Wah reissue comes housed in a beautiful reproduction of the original gatefold sleeve, featuring a 4-page image booklet and an insert with photos and liner notes. Mastered from the original tapes. We did the first official LP reissue with its original sleeve of this album some time ago and it sold out so soon that many of you has been asking for a reprint since - here is another 500 copies, again licensed from and with the collaboration of Daniel Schell.
Comes with a reproduction of killer original poster.
12 of the heaviest early tracks by the master of rebetika music. Markos Vamvakaris sings from the hash dens of the Greek ports of the 1930s - mournful, poetic, bitter music of love and long nights. Rebetika is the sound of Greece and Asia Minor clashing amid civil war, mass population exchange, and the anarchy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Poetic, mournful, and bitter, rebetika music was born in the hash dens (tekes) of Mediterranean ports, its verses whispered in Greek prisons before spilling out to the greater population in the 1930s, propelled in no small part by a series of remarkable recordings by Markos Vamvakaris. Markos, as he’s known to this day, sang heady, drugged out songs of love, pain and yearning at brothels, bars and hash dens in the port of Piraeus. He arrived as a youth in 1917, working as a skinner in a tannery. By the time he picked up the bouzouki around 1924, he was fully taken by the life of the manges, the lowest rungs of the Greek social ladder. They lived by their own code and in total opposition to the rest of the population, and rebetika was their music. On these twelve early tracks, recorded in Athens between 1932 and 1936, Markos was already a master of the bouzouki. His forceful, clean playing compliments his hoarse voice and his stunning rhythmic sensibility, the result of his years as a champion zebekiko dancer. Tracks build and spiral outward, his open-note drones and melodic lines drawing calls of ecstasy and encouragement from his fellow musicians. Translations of songs like “Hash-Smoking Mortissa” and “In The Dark Last Night” provide a glimpse into the life and language of the manges - Ottoman cafe music, the calls of displaced Greeks of Smyrna, the chaos and suffering of port life, it all comes through Markos’ songs. These recordings, incredibly rare and expertly remastered, mark the height of rebetika, the brief period between the music’s emergence on the recording scene in the early 1930s and government censorship of all lyrics starting in 1936. During the Axis occupation there was no rebetika recording, and though Markos had some hits in the years after the war, he never again attained this level. These are the dizzying, entrancing, and heaviest works of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Pressed on 160gm vinyl, includes full size 8 page booklet with historical notes, rare photos, and lyric translations.
Laila Sakini's new album 'Paloma' arrives via Modern Love and is her most striking and ambiguous to date - a pointed and timely meditation on hope and hierarchies that riffs on Zbigniew Preisner's magical "The Double Life of Veronique" score and enduring outsider music tome "The Langley Schools Music Project". Subtly transcendent, fathoms-deep music.
When Laila Sakini's debut album ‘Vivienne’ arrived in 2020, it felt like the record we were waiting for to map out our tangled reactions to an uninvited reality. Never self-consciously strange, it revealed itself slowly and cautiously, like a shadow in the corner of the eye, or an alchemical symbol in a bowl of alphabet spaghetti. This time around Sakini has worked her unique world-building to an even finer point, forming six tracks around a theme that's so close to our heart it's almost beating in time. Initially inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski's 1991 arthouse classic "The Double Life of Veronique", the cult Polish director's enduring modern fairytale that serves as a cosmic rumination on identity and choice. Detailing two identical women - both singers, both in love - the film lets one live as the other dies, forcing us to consider the implications of art and endurance in the face of life's myriad challenges.
Sakini takes Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's influential score for the film and uses it as a jumping-off point for ‘Paloma’, bending the more grandiose moments into baroque awkwardness on opening track 'Fluer D'Oranger' and evoking the mood of scene-setting cues 'Weronika' and 'Véronique' on the recorder-led 'The Light That Flickers In The Mirror'. And while Preisner's score zeroed in on the musical virtuosity of the film's lead characters, Sakini reinterprets that as a metaphor for self-discovery. Playing piano, violin, glockenspiel, timbale, recorder, and occasionally singing, Sakini captures a mood of innocence that immediately transports the listener back to simpler times. Her music isn't self-consciously simplistic, but forcing herself to interface with instruments impulsively rather than studiously, her sounds are all heart, no filigree.
In spirit, it reminds us of cult Canadian album "The Langley Schools Music Project", a collection of 1970s recordings of school kids singing rudimentary renditions of pop songs in a school gymnasium. That album's genius was in the bottling of hope and innocence: the feeling of joy from hearing and wholesomely interacting with music that's known and loved without a sense of hierarchy or desire for cultural clout. Sakini subtly subverts this by evoking the amateur spirit in the most bewitching way; instead of sourcing her ideas from Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys, her stock is the established art canon, and by reforming those sounds she makes an insightful comment on intellectualism and access. European classical music is all too often trapped behind the frosted glass of respectability and assumed skill - craft replaces spirit, and technique replaces soul. By approaching these gestures from a different angle, Sakini softens the edges sonically and intellectually, finding music that bubbles with emotion, and most strikingly - hope.
Her choice of instruments and the way she interacts with them allows us to feel as if we're not only listening but contributing. It's a bottom-up way of absorbing art that's traditionally been top-down, and a reminder that we're all part of the experience, whether we're humming along to the remnants of a theme as it dribbles out of an ear in the shower, or dreaming of spotlights in a parallel life that may or may not be real. Sakini's music is nostalgic in a sense, but nowhere near the buttered popcorn and high-fructose candy migraine of the Netflix/Spotify algorithm generation of regurgitated churn. She makes sounds that remind us of what time and experience may have stolen from us, and how we might recover it.
27 of the greatest hits by the central figure in the golden age of Cuban
music and multiple Grammy Award winner, Bebo Valdes
Includes the classics 'Lágrimas Negras', 'El Manisero', 'Descarga Caliente', and
'Ansiedad'. Package comes with a comprehensive 12- page booklet. Presented
here are Cuban pianist and legend Bebo Valdés' greatest hits recorded during the
most prolific period of his career from the mid-'50s to the beginning of the '60s.
Bebo is the leader on all of these recordings, which feature diverse formations
and include many of the greatest Cuban jazz musicians, as well as the singers
Celeste Mendoza, Pacho Alonso, Rolando Laserie, Fernando Alvarez, and Pío
Leyva.
Beatservice Records are thrilled to present the hotly-anticipated third album from Oslo-based production maestro, Third Attempt. 'The Novel Sound' follows on from the widely acclaimed 'Beats From The Quarantine' album released in April 2021, and further compliments the young artist's deserved reputation as one of the dance underground's most exciting talents to emerge in recent years.
Third Attempt (aka Torje Fagertun Spilde) has been dazzling us with his far-reaching music since arriving in the Beatservice fold with 'Shoreline' back in 2018, and since then his ever-evolving repertoire has continued to serve up immaculate sonic surprises. The fast-rising 23-year old artist has wasted no time making his indelible mark, displaying a frenetic work rate alongside an impeccable ear for constructing compelling leftfield grooves.
'The Novel Sound' opens with the rolling deviance of 'Freak Out', where a dusty string sample makes way for vocal samples, scratches, and searing sirens permeating a bass-heavy groove, setting the tone magnificently for the music that's primed to unfold. Next, we arrive in the mid-tempo chug of 'Age Of Steam'. Evolving over a crisp, club-ready rhythm, heavy funk guitars, dancing keys and distant vocal stabs cascade over driving bass before soaring strings herald the arrival of a slick breakdown section. The icing on the cake arrives as bubbling acid joins sensational horn motifs, breaking down once again for a starry-eyed beatless passage that leaves us yearning for a reprise.
'My Girl' features amorous vocal samples hovering over an irresistible disco beat, with alluring rhythm guitars and dreamy e-piano chords setting the scene for rousing horns to blast off into blissful summer skies. Before we've found time to catch our breath, 'Nu Funk' arrives with snappy hip hop samples scratched over tight beats and a delectable bass guitar hook. The groove pauses for dubbed-out space delays to echo into the night before a singing lead guitar joins the rhythm elements to burst back into life, with flute motifs, elegant strings, and otherworldly sweeps elegantly meandering across the panorama.
Set over a groove that arrives like a cool summer breeze, 'Sunbeam Symphony' drifts over soul-soothing chords, weighted bass and slick, rolling beats. Hypnotic keys guide us into position as the drums build energy and the bass notes power us forward. Third Attempt's dextrous keyboard solo dazzles momentarily before subsiding for a dub-infused break, with spaced-out vocal chops and rising sweeps building tension before the groove resumes and the virtuoso solo once again majestically soars. Maintaining the sun-kissed meditations, 'Definite' effortlessly floats through waves of thick bass, funk guitar chops and elegantly fused samples, with seductive chords, hypnotic horns and laser-tight drums combining to create a near overpowering dream state.
The heavy trip-hop rhythms of 'Nightfall' enrapture the listener as rich chords discreetly beckon, with cascading congas, mysterious melodies and exotic refrains building before the glorious lead vocal appears like a hyper-luminous flash of light. The chords disappear into the nothingness, before the carefully selected sample of 'Working Man' drifts in to fill the empty space. Smokey drums soon arrive, joined by weighted bass, foggy chords and an enigmatic whistle lead, fusing to conjure a half-lit world lifted from the pages of an evocative film noir novel.
The enlivening tablas, glitchy effects and saucer-eyed sweeps of 'Greed' hide subliminal messages casting a knowing eye over the consumer-driven society and self-help culture that pervade our society, before we arrive at the album's charmed finale. 'Last Winter Of My Childhood' yet again manages to transport the listener into a gently hallucinatory realm, with drowsy bass notes, tripped out pads and emotive strings building to a profound and rush-inducing crescendo.
'The Novel Sound' once again sees Third Attempt dextrously merging expansive musical aesthetics that fuse trip-hop, funk, soul and disco to deliver a sound that – although endowed with vintage sensibilities – feels proudly up to date. Continuing his breathtaking development in dazzling style, the album feels destined to echo over blissed-out sunsets, back-room excursions and twilight skies for many years to come.
An empty page is before us.
Inner silence takes over our mind. A silence louder than our anticipation of what's coming.
With each of our cells, we just do one thing: wait.
Then, we hear the whispers of the page turning. The next chapter is about to start.
----
Introducing Gnork's new album: Inner Ride. Influenced by the cosmic and psychedelic sound of the 70's, from Pink Floyd to Herbie Hancock, with a twist of the synths of the Berlin school.
The tracks were made between 2017, and 2022, though it's are not a collection of random jams. Inner ride is a conceptual, full-length musical work with 10 songs. A classic album that was designed to put on to your record player and to get lost in it.
Pressed on Red vinyl and presented in gloss laminated gatefold sleeve.
Double album set contains the original LP plus 13 bonus tracks taken from their first four singles and the re-recorded version of In Purgatory which originally appeared on the PINK compilation E.P “It sells or it smells” plus bonus 7” a reproduction colour vinyl copy of McCarthy’s first 7” “In Purgatory”
All three tracks have been remastered from the original master tape and presented in a wraparound sleeve, just like the incredibly rare “Wall Of Salmon” original.
Also Includes
20 page 12x12” full colour booklet containing all the lyrics and packed full with photos, many previously unpublished. Press clippings and other memorabilia. Introduction by Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers and track by track commentary by Malcolm Eden.
8 x 10 Black & White press photo
Reproduction European Tour poster “The Well Of Loneliness” Promo poster McCarthy sticker
By the time McCarthy appeared on the NME’s C86 cassette they had already been playing together for a couple of years and released two excellent singles. Their debut “In Purgatory” and the indie masterpiece “Red Sleeping Beauty” (both included on this release). The following year McCarthy released the brilliant “Frans Hals” before unleashing their debut album “I Am A Wallet”
Now recognised as an indie pop masterpiece it has gone on to achieve cult status, receiving praise from the likes of Nicky Wire (Manic Street Preachers) as one of the most important albums of the 80s. Known by today's indie acolytes as the band that spawned Tim Gane and Leititia Sadier (who of course went on to form Stereolab).
It’s a seamless album reminiscent of the Byrds. Wonderful, if slightly twee, jangly guitars with complex and rarely rhyming lyrics, Malcolm Eden’s strident left wing political views are manifest on I Am A Wallet. Cloaked in pretty guitar and propulsive drums, Eden sets about attacking the pillars of the day, MPs, Prince Charles, Fleet Street, religion, the response to AIDS and on almost every song, capitalism. The horrors and inequalities of the capitalist system are laid bare for all the see. The system which enables some to get rich at the expense of others is reviled and attacked.
After a year of releases exploring recent musics from the USA, Europe and the southern hemisphere the Horn of Plenty presents a survey of archival private, demo, and live tapes from local avant-anarcho-punks The Apostles. The tapes were (poorly) recorded in Islington & Hackney squats between 1981-1983 and they capture the fledgling band exploring various line-up’s, styles & techniques with limited means and ability. In 1983 The Apostles released their first vinyl EP and switched mainly to a more straight-ahead anarcho-punk style. They gained a strong following then called it a day in 1989. Their vinyl output is still regarded highly by fans and collectors and their ‘official’ demo tapes have become highly sought-after, particularly since being namechecked by Ty Segall in a 2014 interview. In a 2009 article charting the band’s history (frontman) Andy Martin gives these early tapes a mere footnote and states that, in his opinion, they are ‘Best Forgotten’. With respect Andy, I beg to differ. Best Forgotten shows the band grappling with the political, racial and cultural tensions of the time whilst exploring radical politics and issues around homosexuality and mental health. Their sympathies with The Angry Brigade’s ‘direct action’ ethos extended to their involvement with the squatted Centro Iberico and The Wapping Autonomy Centre where they worked closely with Crass, Poison Girls, Flux of Pink Indians and The Mob among others. Viewed retrospectively, it’s easy to draw comparisons with early Fall records, The Door and The Window etc… but also at their melodic best they echo 60’s beat groups and even 70’s blues-rock. A keen interest in tape collage (supplied here by Ian Rawes who later became established with his London Sound Survey project) and the avant garde also inform the mix. Highlights include a bleak reworking of Lemon Kittens’ Chalet D’Amour and a live version of Simon & Garfunkel's I Am A Rock segueing into their take on Alternative TV’s Splitting In Two recorded at The Recession Club in Ponsford Street, Hackney. The short-lived Recession Club, which The Apostles co-ran and where Andy Martin worked the door, also hosted the first ever Coil concert. On that night he refused entry to Death In June on account of their ‘inappropriate attire’. Best Forgotten comes in a hand stamped, stickered and assembled edition of 500 copies and includes an A3 poster and 32 page A4 zine collecting archival photos and images from The Apostles tapes & zines along with liner notes and reflections on the tracks written by Steve Underwood (Harbinger Sound), Chris Low (former Apostles drummer) and The Apostles frontman Andy Martin, who thought this whole thing was daft.
experiment in markmarking and sound, as a kind of writing by ear - metallic, brushed, wooden - lines imprinted and pressed circular. The record takes its name from the discarded title of the several-hundred-page draft of Clarice Lispector’s eventual 96-page novel Água Viva. Devoid of characters or plot, Água Viva appears always in suspension between the interior and exterior and impression and expression. Weird and formless (like the jellyfish ‘agua viva’ translates to in Portuguese) Lispector’s text deals less in the cerebral or the knowable realms of words and more in the unknowable moment of experience. Its joy is found in its looseness, its meaning found in its lack of definition. Loud Object began as six sides of violin improvisations, four of them abandoned and the last of them added to or processed using samplers in moments Steiger calls ‘wells’ - gaps or dips in the recording which could be filled or poured into. The process of filling up and taking away, of repeating and multiplying, of building tension between the finite and the lost - all wrestle with actualisation. Which line will be drawn? In the liner notes for the LP, Evie Scarlett Ward writes, “The record holds loss.” Though the lines are fixed, its contents are fluid - forty minutes filled in and manipulated, before time moves on. Steiger’s relentless rearranging of convention means no two of his live shows are the same, and his decade-plus involvement in London’s free improvisation scene constantly surprises. Loud Object is no exception. Recorded on the 12th, 13th and 14th February 2021 by Daniel Blumberg. Produced by Billy Steiger. Mixed by Billy Steiger and Shaun Crook. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Billy Steiger. Layout by Oli Barrett. Liner notes by Evie Scarlett Ward.
International Anthem is proud to present this expanded double LP edition of an album that Carlos Niño released exclusively via his Bandcamp page in 2020. Featuring a whole LP worth of entirely new, additional material, the remastered and expanded Extra Presence features Niño alongside an incredibly high profile slate of collaborators including: Jamael Dean, Nate Mercereau, Shabazz Palaces, Deantoni Parks, Sam Gendel, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Jamire Williams, Iasos, and more.
