Uton - Alitaju Ylimina: Excellent. Most engaging/interesting thing I've heard from the guy. Uton is fast becoming my favorite of the 'new weird Finland' thang. Great cover too.







Also chanced upon a used promotional copy of John Fahey's City of Refuge. I've been searching all over the internetwebnet for hours now trying to find a positive review and have yet to find one. Even reviewers who seem hip to this kind of experimentation can't seem to wrap their noggins around it which is a gaddang shame cause I think this has to be the most beautiful (not in the "pretty" sense) pieces of music the guy ever made. Sounds so fragile and shakey and mourful like a limping three legged puppy with one eye, lost and starving in the rain and staring at you with his one big sad eye and you take him home and try to warm him and feed him only for him to die the very next morning. <---- gayest thing I ever wrote! But true! 'hope slumbers eternal' is my favorite track.

shellac - at action park on vinyl

This week:
Ice Cube- Death Certificate
Skull Defekts- Skkull
Dave Phillips- (forget the album name)
Sutcliffe Jugend- When Pornography is not enough
Whitehouse- Racket
Pharoah Sanders- Pharoahs first
Soft Machine- 1st one
Eddie Gale- Ghetto Music

fuck, I spent waaaaaay too much.

just came back from austin with these

pj harvey = white chalk




newest chk chk chk









battles - mirrored



all on vinyl

Where did you do your shopping in Austin, Rob?

Just picked up A THousand Leaves and The Destroyed Room

sound on sound down the street from where my brother lives and waterloo.

Finally picked up Trees outside the academy, and got a Pop Montreal sampler with it (yay, freebies!)

Whoaaaa, this is some superb cover art, esp. the Battles and chk chk chk, these must be stunning in LP format!

they are very very beautiful

Yeah, I've got Mirrored on LP, too. Big beautiful cover for a big beautiful album.

Mission of Burma-Horrible Truth about Burma
Sonic Youth-Evol (finally!)

Geoff Mullen - Armory Radio 2xLP



Geoff Mullen, a string picker and dronelord, released two amazing records over the last few years, both huge favorites around here. Both thrtysxtrllnmnfstns and The Air In Pieces were gorgeous, slow unfolding collections of buzzing strings and slow burning ambience. Mullen's instrument of choice was the banjo, and on thrtysxtrllnmnfstns he twisted and stretched that instrument into new and amazing shapes, whereas The Air In Pieces found Mullen exploring even more abstract territory, smearing and blurring the source material until it was unrecognizable.

But on Armory Radio, his brand new vinyl only double lp, he's exploring a whole new world of sound. Expansive and epic and abstract, but dense and heavy, and thick with sound, intense noisy, busy soundscapes, fuzzed out and droning, buzzy and washed out. A similar vibe as folks like Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Aidan Baker, Dialing In and Axolotl...

But where those folks take their piece of music and leave it out in the rain, recording it through a dusty window onto a wax cylinder, played back on a tin can and twine, evoking faded memories, old photographs, rainy twilights, foggy mornings, everything bleary eyed and soft focus, Mullen's Armory Radio is a much more intense and sonically aggressive proposition. Beneath the fuzz and whir, the layers of grit and glitch, there aren't just simple pop songs hidden underneath or muted melodies blurred and buzzed, there's a whole world of sound, chunks of field recordings, bits of melody, huge sweeping drones, epic, slow sprawls of shimmer, of dark and light, strange arrangements fall to pieces and somehow reassemble often in completely different order then before they crumbled, or pieces from some crumbled melody will be swept up by a wash of whirling low end, and tangled up into some new, more alien melody.

Armory Radio begins with a burst of grinding fuzz, a dense slab of furious grinding thrum, which quickly gives way to softer squalls of glitched out buzz, warm throbbing sonic stormclouds, everything in a constant state of motion, chaotic and unmoored, but with little threads that connect all four sidelong pieces. This is definitely a noise record, but SOFT noise, thick and corrosive, but with soft edges, like stepping into the eye of a hurricane, watching all sorts of shapes and sounds spinning around you, a grinding, thick morass of constantly shifting crunch and crumble, of billowy soft smears, all barely obscuring a mysterious and impossible to fully grasp world of beauty beneath. So good.

LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES!! Pressed on thick 140 gram vinyl, packaged in super deluxe sleeves, all hand-screened, hand-stamped and numbered.



I pre-ordered it a month or so ago, and it turned up today. I'd kind of forgotten that I had it on order, and when this vinyl-size parcel turned up from Brooklyn I was sitting there scratching my head trying to think what it might be. So when I opened the parcel and saw what it was, it was almost like receivng a surprise birthday present (except that it's not my birthday and won't be for another seven months).

vinyl:







(i got the new xasthur album's promo with this)


also, skin graft - drug addict (cassette)

jesu are playing in houston soon. are they metal?

Radiohead - In rainbows (the MP3s at least)

basically, they are a super heavy mbv-like band.

yeah, i cant wait to go see them


syr1 on vinyl

The COMPLETE MACHINE GUN SESSIONS

Arguably the single most important landmark in European free music: The original BRO Records LP restored to its 1968 format, with two alternate takes, new liner notes by Br÷tzmann and John Corbett, plus the only live version of MACHINE GUN ever recorded- in a deluxe UMS O-card package!

"mind-blasting... a smashing, clanging wonderland of noise." - Thurston Moore
"Jaw-dropping, face-peeling, DNA-changing music." - Mats Gustafsson

"In 1968, there was a palpable sense of optimism in the air. This in spite of the fact that the shitheads seemed to have the upper hand, with the quagmire of Vietnam, the intractibility of the American struggle for Civil Rights, Martin Luther King's assassination, the "shoot to kill" order in Chicago. But in Paris during the spring of '68, the students took the reins, and across northern Europe a euphoric attitude had spread, charged by a sense that the world was not stuck forever but in fact could be changed. That was the impetus behind Peter Br÷tzmann's composition and subsequent LP "Machine Gun." As Br÷tzmann has said: "It was the feeling, the very naive feeling that we could take a little part in changing the world." Adopting its title from Don Cherry's nickname for Br÷tzmann, "Machine Gun" drew on the huge horn section of Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" for inspiration, translating the hilarious saxophonic power of the jump blues, and Illinois Jacquet's booting and hollering into an abstraction painted with a flame-thrower, a la Alberto Burri.

Machine Gun was a watershed, and even if it has taken four decades to find its appreciative audience, it is now an essential recording, both in terms of the development of free music in Europe and taken on its own merits, outside of the context of its creation. For this reissue, we have resequenced the CD as the original LP, self-produced and released on Br÷tzmann's own BRO label in 1968, followed by the two extant alternate takes. For comparison, UMS has included the live version, recorded two months earlier at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival, which adds Gerd Dudek to the ensemble." - John Corbett / Chicago, May, 2007