250 copies only and no re-press ever; 180gr vinyl in custom-made screen-printed outer (sealed), containing two risograph inserts featuring original writing by director Jack Mcnamara; no digital Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods reads two stories by Alan Moore: In the Drownings (AD 43) and The Sun Looks Pale Upon the Wall (AD 1841). A new and unique collaboration marking 25 years since the publication of Moore's 'Voice of the Fire'.

The first vinyl LP release from Fluxus pioneer Alison Knowles (b. 1933). Sounds from the Book of Bean is an assemblage of noises and texts related to The Book of Bean (1982), Knowles’ 8-foot tall walk-in book constructed at Franklin Furnace in New York. This recording, the sounds of making the big book, was continually played back inside of the installation. Echoes of Yoshi Wada hammering together the circular spine of the book, other collaborators mixing ink, feeding a horse, the flowing waters of the Hudson Valley... all superimposed with texts and poems read by Knowles and her daughter Jessica Higgins. On the second side of the album, the piece Essential Divisions features Knowles performing with red, black, and white beans. Recorded in Annea Lockwood’s underground studio, Knowles sounds the beans in glass, ceramics, wood, as well as in her mouth. Further bean histories and sound poems are recited, concluding with “Popular Bean Soup” – an ancient recipe translated by George Brecht. Knowles’ big books are, as she describes them, transvironments: a transformationally experienced environment. The phenomenological nature of her book is distilled aurally in the case of this record. As Knowles describes the end of her book, “the reader leaves via a ladder or out the window and through a muslin panel printed with contradictory wisdom concerning beans and dreaming… one can begin again either by going on or turning back.” Originally published as a cassette in 1982 on the New Wilderness Audiographics label, this remastered edition has been transferred from original tapes. An expansive 20-page booklet is included, holding graphics and writings from Alison Knowles, George Quasha, and Charlie Morrow. 

Edition of 250 copies. Rod Summers (° 1943) is a sound, visual, conceptual artist, performance poet, dramatist, mail and book artist, publisher, archivist, and lecturer on intermedia. Has worked as a Mail-Artist from 1973 to the present day. The results of Summers’ multiple, art-related activities have often appeared as part of his concept of VEC (Visual, Experimental, Concrete), which he originated in 1973. Summers is a sound, visual, conceptual artist, performance poet, dramatist, mail and book artist, publisher, archivist, and lecturer on intermedia. Has worked as a Mail-Artist from 1973 to the present day. The results of Summers’ multiple, art-related activities have often appeared as part of his concept of VEC (Visual, Experimental, Concrete), which he originated in 1973. Summers is among the “second wave” of intermedia artists. The first wave including Dick Higgins. Vito Acconci, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, and Joseph Beuys. He differs from Higgins and members of the first generation, however, in that he is less theoretical and more experiential in his approach to his art.

Staggering concrète tape cut-ups and raw electronic collage from from the duo lineup of Charlie Mumma and John Wiese. Another pinnacle of modern, harsh musique concrète!

These recordings were collected by William English from the floor of Captain Seddon’s cottage shortly after he died and just before the building was demolished. Many other tapes were left behind. The only recordings he made were audio letters, diaries and most prolifically, his phone conversations. The 12 pieces on this LP were recorded between 1968 and 2003 and mainly consist of phone calls, incoming and outgoing; to TV and radio stations, friends, relatives, his dentist and sundry others. That anyone would routinely record their phone conversations on a 2-way system of their own devising is odd enough, but the sheer range and sometimes bizarre nature of these calls turns them into a strange ‘objet trouvé’, and offers a glimpse into the life of a man who undoubtedly left a strong impression on everyone he came into contact with. Edition of 500 numbered copies, Comes with an 8 page 12” insert to help explain it all.Captain Maurice Seddon -- a living anachronism. A unique combination of eccentricity and military discipline. He also bore the confidence endowed by an elite public school education, but due to a change of family fortune he was left with no money, and eventually, no job. Far from being snobbish, he faces the world anew and becomes an inventor of heated clothes, with a tremendous willingness to talk to and meet people from all walks of life, cheerfully maintaining and advocating his own exacting standards, occasionally proclaiming a well measured indignation towards the modern age. Somehow he manages to stay (most of the time), on the right side of pomposity, by exuding a calm, forgiving good nature and natural charm. Speaking English, but lapsing into German, only adds to the eccentricity.

"Fore Main Mizzen is made entirely from sound recordings taken on visits to Southend-on-Sea and Sheerness that are specifically focused on The SS Richard Montgomery, a ship that sank in the Thames estuary during World War Two. It is lying on a sandbank packed full of the high explosives it was transporting. At low tide its masts are visible from Southend and Sheerness either side of the water. The ship is corroding in the salt water and it is unknown when it might explode, or how much of the Kent and Essex coastline would be affected. Taking inspiration from this impending bang, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe is approaching the underwater architecture from both sides of the estuary on repeated excursions to record, re-record and re-experience the landscape. The work is driven by the impossible task of reaching the ship, its corrosion, slow entropy, potential for catastrophe and the lacuna before the '1 big 1' (as Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' would call the explosion). The vinyl features two locked grooves so that the process of listening reflects the unfinished intentions of the high explosives: repeated tides, getting stuck, starting again but never reaching the 'bang'."

A reissue of the demo tape by the New Orleans band who combine elements of no wave, glam and industrial music. First time vinyl pressing with bonus track, new sleeve designed by Studio Tape Echo and 8 page risographed zine insert. Four of the tracks here are raw early versions of songs that would appear in slightly more refined form on their debut album, 2018’s Spiralling. The other four pieces are unique to this release, including a cover version of Italian new wave band Chrisma, raging opener “Disease”, the over-saturated shoegaze-punk of “ATC” and comedown lament “I’ll Never Do Ketamine Again”. The band’s second album The Passion Of (2020) was widely acclaimed and appeared in many album of the year lists. It was recently followed by a companion album of remixes on Boy Harsher’s Nude Club label, with all profits going to NOLA charity House Of Tulip. “A blistering vision of punk as possibility.” - Pitchfork “Members Alli Logout (vocals), Ruth Mascelli (synth and drum machine), Maria Elena (guitar), and Nathan Cassiani (bass), together manage to make their instruments and vocals sound like a fight for our existence.” - The Quietus

Klaus Roeder is a guitar virtuoso and electronic music artist who studied with Kelemen and joined Kraftwerk for their famous "Autobahn" LP. He often works with very small sound particles, whose sound comes from different sources like tearing paper, the voice, a musical instrument, synthesizer or computer sounds. Sound structures are built by joining together those sound particles and by mixing those structures Roeder forms chords. Then the process of crystallization begins. Usually crystallization means that small parts are deposited around a germ and form a growing crystall. The shape of the complete crystall is a consequence of outer influences. A series of sound crystals forms then the complete musical composition.  Side 1 presents two electronic music works: "10: 11: 12" (1980) for self-built Impulse Generator is an obscure, very minimal and abstract pulsating piece, while "Kristallisation 4 (1991) for Computer Sounds and Yamaha DX 802 might be considered one of the peaks of Klaus Roeder "Kristallisation" series. Side 2 introduces us to a different formal result of Roeder crystallisation process: the short "Haenschen Blues" (1993) for children singing and crying, Yamaha TX 802 controlled by selfmade programs for Atari TT is a both playful and sinister electronic assemblage anticipating the peak of this record, "Potpourri" (1985) a Collage of short sound particles from German Pop Hits of the 1970s and 1980s. In the perspective on sound collages (from Battiato "Ethika Fon Ethica" to Bladder Flask first LP, from NWW most surrealistic works to John Oswald classic plunderphonics) "Potpourri" might be more close to the brut masterpiece "InOut" by Anton Bruhin, only constructed in a more advanced and scientific way.

Mine is the Heron” is the new Tom James Scott record, the first document of his solo work since 2017. Over the past decade, the UK-based composer has released a diverse body of recordings via labels such as Bo’Weavil, Carnivals, Where To Now?, and his own impeccably curated Skire imprint.This album finds Scott in half-remembered, sanguine moods, some of which are likely to remind listeners of his collaborative work with Andrew Chalk. Fragile acoustic piano runs are meted out with painterly finger strokes, buoyed by subtle, idiosyncratic FM sound design, chimes, and guitar. Culled from recordings composed and put to tape over the past several years, the collection has the feel of a poet's selected works, or perhaps more appropriately, a compendium of letters - exquisite vignettes that feel simultaneously private and important to disseminate into world. The hermetic nature of this quietly stunning music is evocative of abandoned shingle beaches and misty marshes, and of the Virginia Woolfe novel from which the album takes its title: “Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields - all are mine.”

Following her debut LP (KRAAK, 2018) and a string of tapes and 7-inches, Red Brut drops her second album, Cloaked Travels. It is a joint release by the Finnish labels Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal. In many aspects, Cloaked Travels is an amazing realisation of what Red Brut does best: molding the absurd, the amateurish, and the crude into beautiful and elegant sound pieces. These eight “songs”, organised in two suites, dwell between abstract avant-garde and pop sensibility. Working with cassette tapes, Red Brut enhances the ambiguous qualities of her sounds with the warm distortion and background hiss typical of the medium. The music leaves the listener to him- or herself, happily lost in small universes that contain many layers of beauty, discomfort, and intimacy. Susan Sontag once claimed that diaries, despite secretly kept by the author, are meant to be read by others. Red Brut’s intimate and highly personal take on musique concrète is characterised by a homely feeling: sounds of doors, kids outside her house, a synth that sounds like a house pet, muffled whispers of her voice. Her compositions sound like you are secretly reading her diary. You are in the uncomfortable position of watching someone chasing her own tail, unaware of the fact that she is being the object of our gaze. Unaware? Cloaked Travels displays on a certain point the sound of a squeaking door. Over and over until it starts sounding like a wild free jazz solo. Is Verbiesen playing tricks on our minds? Is she actually the Unconsciously Watched? Or is she cloaked as that character, and in fact very well aware that we are peeping into her inner emotional universe; maybe she is even projecting a fake version of what sounds like here day-to-day, intimate environment — making us conscious of our own gaze? Again Sontag comes to mind: she deliberately projected a well-constructed character in both her diaries as in public life. Cloaked Travels contains distinct and carefully composed pieces that play upon the tension between the concrete and the abstract. Every song acts like a Cave of Plato: we are unable to see what is actually happening, we only see the shadows of a door moving or the sounds of someone gurgling. The album suggests some fundamental questions: is what we conceive as reality nothing but a derivative of the Ideal? Is there really something behind the shadow, or is the shadow the actual reality? --- Released July 2020, Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal.

Jeugdbrand is the voice (Dennis Tyfus) and the beat (Jeroen Stevens) of Antwerp. They perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in our classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor. This is a true art record with cover art by famous German painter Albert Oehlen. Recorded at Joris Caluwaerts’ Finster Studios - a landmark in Belgian music. Inside the multiverse that is Dennis Tyfus’ oeuvre there exists this body of detailed pencil drawings of various sizes. In these drawings the artist puts himself in many tragic situations. Like vomiting on his way home after a long night at the bar. Boiling right wing idiots. Telling sweet little lies on your Tinder profile. Or, you know, taking out the garbage on a Sunday evening. The horror. These seemingly hermetic pencil drawings show a deceivingly simple world. But you’re often stuck with a bitter aftertaste when you understand a bit more what is actually happening behind the colorful masque. When it comes to his music - and in contrast to aforementioned drawings - Dennis pencils a more piecemeal picture. His recordings and performances often feel like spliced excerpts. Strange sentences and funny remarks waiver by and interconnect. Musical symbols are casually thrown on the table. Instead of a clear picture, we now have the feeling of looking at a bunch of different doodles. Like... sometimes I have the feeling compared to how focussed Dennis works on his drawings, how unfocussed and sketchy he treats his music. We are simply thrown from emotion to emotion. From laughter to tears. It’s a bumpy ride. I’d like to imagine that Dennis constantly notates all the shards of conversation he picks up during his regular walks in the centre of Antwerp - a wormhole congested with characters, the one more tragic than the other. In a kind of R. Murray Schafer way, Dennis takes in every sentence very un-arbitrary... and that’s the soundscape. Dramatic, normal, boasted, silly, urgent... Enter Jeroen Stevens. Antwerp’s number one percussionist. If I would have to list all the bands he performs in this text, well, we would be truly wasting data and printers. Jeroen is the grand gift of the well- schooled session musician. But thank the heavens of white improv, he is also sweet and creative. Jeugdbrand is his second entry in the Edições CN catalogue, after taking care of some of the percussive fragments on the “KAGIROI" LP with Sugai Ken (2021). Recently Jeroen has been performing very lengthy - thus correct - performances of Satie’s Vexations for midi instrumentation; Christmas music; and his famed De Stoeltjes project, where he covers Stooges songs on a camping chair. Apparently much to the confusion of Iggy himself. This might all feel like a big joke to you, but when you dare to listen, you will have to admit that Steven’s adventurous music is very rewarding. Special stuff. The music of Jeugdbrand reminds me a bit of the music of the late Ghédalia Tazartès - especially when it comes to reinterpreting and combining musical idioms - but trying to put a direct reference on this album does it a bit short. Most important, this is music how it could be: incomprehensible, hilarious, serious, ludicrous, well crafted, sloppy, non-genre. With a strong sense of personality. You know, a fragmented beam for your own overstimulated temple. To shake things up a little ... “They told us, they told her. I told everybody.” 

split LP by tongue depressor and gateway Tongue Depressor - “never saw’m” And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Mark 16:17–18 Gateway - “why should not my spirit be troubled” But Job answered and said, Hear diligently my speech, and let this be your consolations. Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on. As for me, is my complaint to man? and if it were so, why should not my spirit be troubled? Mark me, and be astonished, and lay your hand upon your mouth. Job 21:4 I’ve just heard some of our neighbors think we have injected the mark of the beast as soon as we set foot into a CVS. Poison ivy grows someplace new every day in America. The sun is red. Most days our house is covered in flies. The question is: What dark lord here tests Gateway and Tongue Depressor? As Job wept among the ashes of Uz, the duos Filer & Gick + Birdsey & Rowden scrape the strings and freak the saxophones of late capital, making scrap-metal occult music both into & out of something sacred. If there is chanting, it feels like a recovery or recovering, as if voices that once held serpents had emerged from graves still green. Gateway’s side I imagined howled through a megaphone at a tent revival outside an abandoned Circuit City; Tongue Depressor grows down by the river leaking from a dishwasher, a rattlesnake-ivy covered by nematodes, growing in the shape of a satellite dish. They worry & they worship the sounds these places make. - Jacob Sunderlin 

“Scrape meets sigh, jagged fish-hook pluck meets sparse wire-damped drizzle, instinct meets intuition, and when the disc is done, it’ll seem quite sensible to dive back in and swim the whole length in reverse. - Bill Meyer, Dusted” Even though both Kaja Draksler and Terrie Ex are experienced improvisers, their methods and characters are so different that a sensible merger of their considerable forces seems out of the question. But then you realize that entire scenes and band catalogs were built on nonsensical premises. Don’t they say that opposites attract? Extremes can also cancel each other out and lead to something entirely new and thrilling. That’s exactly what happens here. Far from a trip full of explosive power, this performance is a celebration of textural possibilities. Sounds flail around, are thrown around to be disregarded, dismantled and reassembled again, turned into a shower of musical drops, with a minimalist sparseness that can switch to quick runs and jumpy intervals in the blink of an eye. Everything becomes malleable. There’s an unmistakable alchemy at work here - spiky and subversive - that is as refreshing as a piano sonata, as thrilling as the repetitive punk that Ex started playing before Draksler was even born. In the hands of born improvisers like these two, concepts such as age, nationality and background become irrelevant. Above all, it is about connection and its amazing, intoxicating potential. The Swim has a story to tell. 

Elodie’s Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk present their soundtrack for Peter Hutton’s ’Skagafjörður’, responding to the film’s desolate imagery of Iceland with half an hour of exquisite, weather-beaten, smoke-curl atmospheres, highly recommended if yr into the cold tonalities of Kevin Drumm's 'Imperial Distortion' or Aphex Twin's 'SAW II'... Recorded as part of ‘Night of Experimental Film’ event in Ghent, Belgium, 2018 that also saw screenings of Derek Jarman’s ‘The Angelic Conversation’ and performance by Tom James Scott, the recording captures the quintessence of Chalk and Van Luijk’s richly evocative music and the natural mystery of Hutton’s film, which is handily available on YouTube for you to synch with its suggested soundtrack for optimal zoner times.  Following a cassette edition in 2020, this vinyl edition gives the performance more room to breathe, with Chalk and Van Lujik’s patented atmospheric magick seeping out from the peripheries to best envelope the listener in their tantalising descriptions of the Icelandic landscape. Chalk & Van Luijk are masters of this kind of layer-within-layer rendering, where you no longer know if you’re listening to vast winds or analogue interference, where harmonic washes are often punctuated with frequency fuckries; feedback, jolts of electricity. The effect is quietly stunning and effortlessly transfixing; like so much of their peerless catalogue --- Faraway Press 2021

French-born, Amsterdam-based clarinetist Joris Roelofs has built his career balancing intense discipline and a deep commitment to post-bop tradition with a measured exploratory streak. He’s worked extensively in the Vienna Art Orchestra and maintains a wonderfully buoyant trio with the American rhythm section of Ted Poor and Matt Penman. But this new recording suggests that his attraction to freedom is growing stronger. Icarus is a lovely duo project with veteran free-jazz drummer Han Bennink, a perfect match for the reedist. The percussionist is both a master of chaos and one of the most naturally swinging musicians on the planet, and he provides both grounding and provocation to his much younger associate. Most of the music is freely improvised and the album opens with a blast of disorder on “Carmen,” with Bennink banging out piano clusters and injecting some discordant cymbal explosions, while Roelofs blows harsh squawks. Suddenly, a wild gear-shift occurs and a tender, breathy melody that sounds like a lost standard and a rumbling groove takes over, indicating the sort of polarities that the pair giddily explores throughout. The clarinetist’s lyrical gifts are so strong that when the duo tackle jazz standards like Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender”—presented with an attractively slack drag from Bennink that deftly adds tension to the in-and-out-of-focus treatment of the theme—or Charlie Haden’s indelible “Song For Che,” they feel entirely of a piece with the spontaneous creations. Icarus captures an electric dialogue: raw, giddy, trusting. Here’s hoping this conversation continues. - Peter Margasak

“‘Rhea’ begins as an event and concludes as printed matter. Much like Cage’s ‘Water Walk’, the event of ‘Rhea’ consists of a series of fragmented performative gestures each with their own sonic characteristics. These movements will have auditory qualities that contradict their symbolic meaning; such as stepping on a bag of crisps or spreading butter on toast. Over time, these actions accumulate to reveal various rhythmic and melodic structures to be repeated or interrupted. This will be documented and then printed into an auditory and visual format. The conceptual essence of ‘Rhea’ is that the event oscillates between the symbolic and the auditory, whilst the printed matter amplifies this oscillation by projecting it into past and present.” Released by Calling Cards Publishing

'UK-based purveyors of noise Sly & The Family Drone and Dutch/British free jazz unit Dead Neanderthals form the ultimate tag team of the murky European underground. After releasing a split on the God Unknown label last year, they are now gearing up for the release of their collaborative album 'Molar Wrench' on Hominid Sounds. Expect disgusting noise rock of titanic proportions ready to pound the muck out of your ears and the pus out of your eyes'

This is the third release from The Slowest Lift who are a West Yorkshire based band comprising of Sophie Cooper (Tor Festival) and Julian Bradley (Vibracathedral Orchestra). This record is being self-released by The Slowest Lift on limited edition cassette and on digital download. There will be a vinyl version coming later released by Feeding Tube Records.