Peter Ulrich – Pathways And Dawns Label: Infinite Fog Productions – IF-103LP Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue, Remastered Country: Russia Released: 2020 Style: Folk Rock, Ethereal, Folk
Tthe first vinyl edition of Peter Ulrich’s debut solo album “Pathways And Dawns”. Widely known for his past work as drummer/percussionist with legendary Dead Can Dance and contributor to 4AD’s This Mortal Coil, Ulrich emerges here as a writer of hauntingly beautiful melodies and deeply poetic lyrics. “Pathways And Dawns” is packed with driving rhythms and meditative ritual patterns of percussion. With some inspired guitar-work, arrangement, and production from DCD mastermind Brendan Perry, the result is a pure delight…
The album was recorded in two parts, the first in England in 1990, and the second after a long time break in 1996-97, by Brendan Perry at DCD’s Quivvy Church studio in Ireland. The album was released on CD in 1999 on the US label Projekt and was dubbed by critics as «the album the Beatles might have made had the group signed with 4AD instead of Capitol» and «a wonderful collection of songs that, while in the 4AD school, shimmers with an inner lightness that makes it very different «.
This absolute masterpiece of spiritual music, so badly wanted on vinyl for so long, is available now. Mastered from Original master takes by Martin Bowes (Attrition).
Anne Clark – The Sitting Room Label: FD Administration – AC0017-V Format: Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM, Album, Reissue Country: Europe Released: 2021 Style: Downtempo, Synth-pop
Anne Charlotte Clark (born 14 May 1960) is an English poet, singer and songwriter. Her first album, The Sitting Room, was released in 1982, and she has released over a dozen albums since then.
Her poetry work with experimental musicians occupies a region bounded roughly by electronic, dance (techno applies on occasion) and possibly avant-garde genres, with varying hard as well as romantic and orchestral styles.
Clark is mainly a spoken word artist. Many of her lyrics deal critically with the imperfections of humanity, everyday life, and politics. Especially in her early works she created a gloomy, melancholy atmosphere bordering on weltschmerz. She has been considered one of the pioneers in the spoken-word music genre, as well as being acclaimed for her synth-pop and new wave music, especially across Europe.
Arcana – Raspail (Vinyl, LP) Label: Cyclic Law – 160th Cycle Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition Country: France Released: Apr 25, 2022 Style: Modern Classical, Ambient
Continuing with the vinyl re-issue of Arcana’s catalog, we proudly present for the first time on vinyl their 6th album «Raspail». Arcana’s approach to neo-classical and symphonic-ambient could well be defined in the meaning of the word “Arcana” itself: specialized knowledge of something generally considered a mystery or a secret. On their sixth album, Raspail, the powerfully moving music of this Swedish quintet creates an atmosphere which weaves together lush elements familiar to Arcana fans old and new. Mystery, silence and revealed secrets are interconnected within these 10 songs.
Comparisons to Dead Can Dance have been made, but it must be said that Arcana’s approach picks up the tangent that DCD left behind and brings it to a new and fully realized place. Lush electronics mix with acoustic guitar, serene piano and intricate oriental percussions. Warm vocals return to the focus: a heavenly blend of baritone and soprano courtesy of Peter Bjärgö and Ann-Mari Thim. In fact, never before has an Arcana album contained so many vocals giving Raspail an emotional touch, a deeper thoughtfulness, a profound feeling of mysterious vision and a sense of secrets.
Standard Edition of 300 copies on black vinyl. 3mm Sleeve, printed inner sleeve, Matt Lamination. 10 Tracks, Running Time 36:28
King Dude – Death (Vinyl, 12, White) Label: Ván – Van355v Format: Vinyl, 12″, 33 ⅓ RPM, Album, Limited Edition, Stereo, White Vinyl Country: Germany & Switzerland Released: Sep 16, 2022 Style: Neofolk, Psychedelic Rock
Full-colored gatefold jacket with cut-out, inside-out print and UV lacquer Flooded black inside 2-sided DIN A2 poster Insert with illustrations and UV lacquer Download insert Poly-lined inner-sleeve White vinyl Plastic protection sleeve
I’ve always planned on ending King Dude with Death. started out writing and recording these songs in my bedroom with no intention of anyone other than my roommates hearing them. I certainly didn’t plan on releasing ten albums. Shortly after my first the success of my two EPs I knew that King Dude had the potential to become a problem for me. I worried the meager success I was experiencing could end up luring me into the trap of making King Dude records for the rest of my life. So in order to avoid that fate I planned out the rest of every King Dude album from that point on, ultimately deciding that four of the records should work as companions pieces to one another. Those four albums are Love, Fear, Sex and now finally Death. So as you can clearly see I’ve already made up my mind in this matter. Ten years ago. And there’s nothing I can do to change it without lying to myself about what my life is. Death fulfills the pact I made with my former self and sets me free from acts of repetition and stagnation. It’s a necessary, beautiful thing.
Lume (Eloy Platas) – Faino Ti Mesmo Label: Ferror Records – FR-016, Batir Records – BR-06, Contubernio Records – CRLP125, Lusco e Fusco – FF02 Format: Vinyl, LP Country: Spain Released: 2019 Style: Experimental, Ambient
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Lume es tradición musical gallega en pleno siglo XXI. Desde el absoluto respeto a los originales pero basándose en métodos electroacústicos, electricidad y ruido, Lume es un pequeño repaso a las canciones que pasaron de generación en generación dentro de la cultura del noroeste peninsular en los últimos siglos. De forma hipnótica, influenciada por el drone, el ruidismo y otras músicas de carácter experimental, Lume invita al oyente a conocer las canciones y piezas de toda la vida interpretadas de forma no convencional.
Compuesto, arreglado e interpretado por Eloy Platas. Grabado en los estudios T-37 por Eduardo N’gongo. Mezclado en los estudios Linneo 2 por Eloy Platas. Mastrizado en los estudios Sonoplan por Ángel Álvarez.
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Lume é tradición musical galega en pleno século XXI. Dende o absoluto respeto ós orixinais pero baseándose en métodos electroacústicos, electricidade e ruido, Lume é un pequeno repaso ás cancións que pasaron de xeración en xeración dentro da cultura do noroeste peninsular nos últimos séculos. Cun xeitohipnótico, influenciado polo drone, o ruidismo e outras músicas de carácter experimental, Lume convida o ouvinte a coñecer as cancións e pezas de toda a vida interpretadas dunha forma non convencional.
Composto, arranxado e interpretado por Eloy Platas. Gravado nos estudios T-37 por Eduardo N’gongo. Misturado nos estudios Linneo 2 por Eloy Platas. Masterizado nos estudios Sonoplan por Ángel Álvarez.
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Lume is Galician musical tradition right in the XXI century. With an absolute respect to the originals but based on electroacustic methods, electricity and noise, Lume is a short summary of songs that went from generation to generation in the northwest peninsular culture over the last centuries. In a hiptonic way, influenced by drone, noisism and other experimental music forms, Lume invites the listener to get to know these songs and all time pieces interpreted in a non conventional way.
Composed, arranged and performed by Eloy Platas. Recorded at T-37 studios by Eduardo N’gongo. Mixed at Linneo 2 studios by Eloy Platas. Mastered at Sonoplan studios by Ángel Álvarez.
CURRENT 93 – If a City is set upon a Hill Label: House Of Mythology – HOMALEPH 05 Format: CD Album Country: Germany Released: 2022 Style: Experimental, Neofolkcording tool, we discover the pleasure of the regular things in a world each day more processed.
Current 93 are an English experimental music group, working since the early 1980s in folk-based musical forms. The band was founded in 1982 by David Tibet, who has been Current 93’s only constant member, although Steven Stapleton (of Nurse with Wound) has appeared on nearly every Current 93 release. Michael Cashmore has also been a constant contributor since Thunder Perfect Mind. Douglas P. of Death in June has played on well over a dozen Current 93 releases, and Steve Ignorant of Crass (using the name Stephen Intelligent), Boyd Rice, runologist Freya Aswynn, Nick Cave, Björk, Andrew W.K., Anohni, Baby Dee, Will Oldham, Ben Chasny, Rose McDowall, have also lent their talents over the years. Current 93 have released over twenty albums and many singles as well.
Much of Current 93’s early work was similar to late 1970s and early 1980s industrial music: abrasive tape loops, droning synthesizer noises and Tibet’s distorted, excoriating vocals. The earlier recordings reflect his preoccupation with death, Christ, mysticism, Aleister Crowley (Tibet borrow-ed the term «93 Current» from Crowley – the 93 Current being the current of Thelema or Agape), Tibetan Buddhism, Gnosticism, runes, swastikas, Noddy, The Wicker Man, and a variety of other ridiculous occult notions. The later to present-day period of Current 93’s recordings increasingly reflect Tibet’s interest in Christian mysticism and apocalypse.
Three years in its creation, birthing and borning, The new album it being released on 3, highly over-priced formats.
David Tibet says the following about “If a City is set upon a Hill”… actually: What he has to say is THAT MUCH ridiculous, that I omitted to include on here in its completeness. An excerpt?
Diamanda Galas – The Divine Punishment Label: Intravenal Sound Operations – ISO-006CD-RE Format: CD, Album, Reissue, Remastered Country: US Released: Jun 10, 2022 Style: Industrial, Experimental, Vocal
On June 30, 1986, the same day that Diamanda Galás’s The Divine Punishment was released, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s so-called sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, criminalizing consensual sex between men. At the time, about 15,000 people were known to have died of AIDS in the U.S. alone, with little government acknowledgement besides suggestions to quarantine homosexuals on island colonies. By the end of 2021, the number of AIDS deaths globally would exceed 36 million.
The first album in her Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Divine Punishment is one of the most jarring works of art produced in response to the AIDS epidemic, and a milestone in Diamanda Galás’s artistry and activism. Galás uses her famous voice both as an orational instrument and as well as a physical representation of AIDS and those it afflicts.
The album features the panphonic* dirge work of Galás, accompanied by analogue synthesizers and piano played by Diamanda Galás with additional synthesizer work by Dave Hunt. The texts are primarily taken from the Old Testament, contrasting the hectoring lawmakers of Leviticus with the desperate appeals of the Lamentations and Book of Psalms (Psalm 22, 59, and 88). In doing so, she indicts those who use religion to instigate the witch hunts that inevitably accompany real and perceived plagues.
«[On The Divine Punishment] Galás offers her voice as an expression of anger, succor, and simple fellow feeling. Giving public expression to a rage and loss that might otherwise be confined in loneliness, she provides a cathartic focus or condensation of emotions.» – Artforum
«Diamanda Galás has a vision of the world that makes the horror-stricken likes of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft seem like pink-cheeked Pollyannas.» – Rolling Stone
«Compelling but brutal. An ugly, brooding masterpiece.» – AllMusic
1986 was a year marked by global political turmoil and disasters both natural and man-made: Chernobyl, the space shuttle Challenger, Reagan’s race-driven wars on drugs and welfare while opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa. The Washington Post wrote, in a year-end editorial: «It was a year in which a new spirit of patriotism and national well-being, proud heralds of the ’80s, was tarnished by evidence of a new wave of greed, a lowering of ethical standards of conduct, a celebration of self over country, a crisis of government spawned by duplicity and hypocrisy in high places, a breakdown of technological prowess…Not since the turbulent ’60s, a time of national tragedy and breakdown, had so many things gone so stunningly awry.»
Meanwhile, the music industry was enjoying its most profitable year in history, as compact discs began their lucrative rise. Many artists—Janet Jackson, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, Beastie Boys, Robert Cray—had commercial breakthroughs, while major labels were mining the semi-underground for bands like Hüsker Dü and the Smiths. The top-selling single in the U.S. was «That’s What Friends Are For,» which raised a laudable $3 million for AmFAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research) while keeping the disease at such arm’s length that most connections between the song and AIDS are long forgotten. Perhaps the only artists confronting reality in as visceral way as Galás in 1986 were, depending on your perspective, Slayer, Swans, or Schoolly D.
Today, The Divine Punishment sounds no less audacious than when it was released, but one hears it with a sense of shared trauma and a renewed call to action. Galás imbues all her work with the crushing weight of history–the hypnotic cadences of her vocal work are precisely aligned to the liturgical texts employed. Remastered with exceptional clarity by mastering engineer Heba Kadry working from the original mixes by London-based producer/composer Dave Hunt, it’s a work of great empathy, solidarity, and physical power. Coming amid another pandemic marked by ignorance and division, its anger and fervor feels remarkably urgent.
ABOUT DIAMANDA GALÁS A composer, vocalist and activist, Diamanda Galás is one of the most uncompromising and influential avant-garde performers of the last thirty years, with an extensive catalog of work that is often oppressive but always thrilling.
Galás has collaborated with Vinko Globokar in the opera Un Jour Comme Une Autre (1978),which was inspired by Amnesty International’s account of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for treason. She also performed Xenakis’ N’shima under his tutelage in 1980 with L’Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Brooklyn Philharmonia. In 1982 Galás released her debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which set the stage for extended forays into vocal experimentation, improvisation, and manipulation; and which included the 15-minute solo piece titled “Wild Women With Steak Knives.” Her eponymous album included «Song from the Blood of Those Murdered,” which was dedicated to the victims of the Greek Junta that ruled Greece from 1967-1974.
Diamanda Galás continues to deal with mortality, isolation, and the abuse of power. Her new and forthcoming work, Broken Gargoyles, concerns the facially-mutilated and stigmatized soldiers from WWI and their diseased comrades, who were isolated in industrial buildings until their death. Broken Gargoyles will be released this fall.
ABOUT INTRAVENAL SOUND OPERATIONS In 1977 Diamanda Galás began her own vocal research into what she describes as the ‘shredding of complex vocal sound into slivers moving back and forth to the host sound.» Her work in the area would be published in 1982 by Perspectives of New Music. This manifesto was entitled “Intravenal Song.” Galás was very excited about the parallels between her work and the subtractive synthesis of complex sound by Iannis Xenakis. Since that time she has championed his work.
These eleven tracks, all recorded in Luanda, Angola, orchestrate the military vengeance march of an entire bloodied continent that stands proudly and which, day after day, keeps arming itself in the shadows.
Decolonization wars, civil wars, cold war, ethnic wars, barbaric wars, let no one dare believe the African people’s struggle is over. The oppression of the Western civilization has devastated our infrastructures, severely weakened our governmental agencies, violated our religious institutions, and battered our economic fabric.
For our cultures to never again be humiliated, for your oppression to never again be a degrading threat, for our recurring famines and your ceasefires to never again be fertile grounds for the shameless exploitation of our natural resources, African Imperial Wizard fights back and will fight back over and over again.
To finance the arming of our revenge-hungry factions, African Imperial Wizard presents Behanzin, our brand-new CD which gathers the 11 tracks of our first two opuses, the Cetshwayo kaMpande EP and the Isandhlwana LP. This record is intended to be the echo of a violent revolt that will spell the end of the tyrannical exploitation of our proud nation!
To all the rebels, commandos, dissidents, guerrillas, and squadrons plotting their fierce revenge, African Imperial Wizard offers you the soundtrack to your bloodthirsty retaliation! We will never bow down again to your ruthless battalions! Never again will we turn a blind eye to your inhuman crimes. From now on, we will mercilessly retaliate blow for blow. uSuthu!
Von Thronstahl / The Days Of The Trumpet Call – Pessoa / Cioran Label: Infinite Fog Productions – IF-06 Format: CD, Album, Reissue Country: Russia Released: 2010 Style: Modern Classical, Ambient, Neofolk
Since 1998 year Von Thronstahl, led by the founder and leader Josef M. Klumb, remains to one of most appreciable and interesting groups on martial industrial/neofolk scene. The Days Of The Trumpet Call, it’s neoclassic project by Raymond P., the musician of the Von Thronstahl. This split, is devoted the Portuguese poet Fernando Antonio Pessoa (1888-1935) and Romanian philosopher Emil Michel Cioran (1911-1995), their writings are used as lyric for this album. The melancholic neoclassics from The Days Of The Trumpet Call and probably strangest of all records Von Thronstahl where they balance on border between neoclassics and ambient, with a light touch martial and all the same, beautiful and charismatic, Josef’s Ê. voice…CD is released in 6-pannel Digipak, with design by Federico Salvador(All my faith lost…)
Amber Asylum – Songs Of Sex And Death Label: Prophecy – PRO 131 Format: 2 CD, Album, Digisleeve Country: Germany Released: 26 Dec 2015 Style: Ethereal, Ambient
