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FTR 755LP
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$22.00
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RELEASE DATE: 1/19/2024
"From the sui generis pop Wonsongwriting mind of Ryan Power comes World of Wonder, his first album since 2020's Mind the Neighbors (FTR 519LP). Following a string of influential releases on the Vermont label NNA tapes, World of Wonder is Power's second release on Massachusetts imprint Feeding Tube Records. While its predecessor presented Power in a largely stripped down, acoustic setting with lush horn and string arrangements, World of Wonder has Power return to his characteristic hyper-produced, high-fidelity home studio to craft a set of ten songs which harmonically undulate, consistently surprise, and which all further solidifies him as one of the most engaging songsmiths of our time. Power, 48, describes the lyrical content of this album as reckoning with a 'midlife crisis' -- or maybe more appropriately, myriad crises -- which encompass breakups, regrets, reconciliations, a horrific bike accident, childhood traumas, and personal forgiveness through it all. Despite the remarkable candor with which these morose issues are delivered, Power makes sure to convey them with levity and a surprising amount of humor. Power has always lyrically been an open-book, and World of Wonder is perhaps his most personally revealing statement to date. To that point, he says: 'I love art where at one second it's hysterically funny, but then at the next it's tugging at your heartstrings.' World of Wonder is laden with imminently catchy earworms, and even as they oscillate in mood and approach, Power never once sacrifices his penchant for songcraft and intricate, crystalline structures. The album opens with the infectious masterpiece 'Psychic Mechanic,' whose fitting opening line has Power wondering about 'how many people [he's] disappointed,' within a 'jungle of misguided faith.' Other highlights include the buoyant 'Was That Love,' a reckoning of previous relationships; the highly emotive ballad 'Back Online' where Power croons about how 'everything is a little precarious;' 'Silent Star' where Power mourns the loss of a friendship with the potent 'It's true, I still love you/it's true, we are through,' the meaning of which comes across despite the line being delivered in something of a British accent; 'Dracula Reality' where the singer reflects on being painted as Dracula by his grandfather for Halloween in 1983 but using that as a trojan horse for questions of identity and anxiety of attention on himself. World of Wonder concludes with the exquisite eponymous track where Power begins by asserting that '[he's] amazed by the world around [him]' and that he gets 'lost in the world of wonder' -- within Ryan Power's idiosyncratic pop universe, we listeners likewise get lost and are astounded by his singular accomplishments." --Sam Weinberg, 2024
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FTR 734LP
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$22.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/12/2024
"Jaw Guzzi is the ninth LP Melted Men have released since 1995. This is reportedly the year they formed, but as with all Melted Things, there is little hard information to back this up. Like an earlier experimental 'rock' band from Northern California (by way of Louisiana), Melted Men have embraced something akin to Nigel Senada's Theory of Obscurity. Facts regarding the band's details are smudgy at best, and that's the way they like it. About all I could get out my contact for the group is that they are currently a six piece, with members based in France, Croatia, Holland and America. They seem to have initially been centered in or around Athens, Georgia. And while they play live infrequently, the reviews of shows I've managed to dig up seem to be amazingly freaked out and fucked up. Which comes as no surprise. I've not heard all their records, but the ones I have are as bizarre as they are beautiful, and the same is certainly true of Jaw Guzzi. The music is a tough-to-untangle bramble of live racket, pre-taped material and audio fuckery of unknown origins. There are surely comparisons to be made with artists like Orchid Spangiafora and Glands of External Secretion, but Melted Men display more overt musical structure than those collage-oriented maestros. I have the (perhaps misplaced) notion that Melted Men are able to recreate larger portions of this sonic smut in live performance. Like the aforementioned (or at least aforalluded-to) Residents, Melted Men mix 'actual' and pre-recorded material in a way that taps deep into the artistic vein of surrealist/dada-damage that has pumped through the best fringe culture for a century. There are also similarities to certain units of the L.A.F.M.S, as well as the Birmingham Alabama Surrealist coven that birthed the Say-Day-Bew and Trans Museq scenes. Most of the material here is instrumental, using sly pinches of style ranging from lounge-exotica to Gary Wilson-style porn-funk to noisy ethnic forgeries, the music flows like sweet hot lava, igniting everything it touches into woozy gouts of flame. Jaw Guzzi is a bracing goddamn spin, sure to please anyone who likes buzzing guitars, clonky percussion and cascades of dark weirdness. In the immortal words of Roald Dahl, 'better coffee than this, there isn't.'" --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 751LP
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$27.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/5/2024
"Having listened to this disk 20 or so times over the past week, I have been struck time and again by the gently naif quality of Dan Beckman-Moon's songwriting. I keep thinking of Neil Young's earliest solo tunes, particularly 'Sugar Mountain,' as a sort of spiritual touchstone, although truthfully the music doesn't really sound anything like that. Still, the emotional core of the material has a similar sweetness and simplicity, while managing to steer clear of mawkishness with a nimble delicacy that parallel's Neil's early work. I have come to think of Valley of Spaces as a collaborative effort between Dan and his partner, Amy Moon, but this album often feels much more like Dan's solo effort. Amy definitely shows up in spots, but I miss the weird edge she brings to everything she does. I mean, there's a reason she was one of the first people Chris Corsano picked when he was putting together the original Ecstatic Yod crew back in the '90s -- her off-kilter perspective adds depth and subtle strangeness to her entire oeuvre. The same is often true of Dan as well (he was in Impractical Cockpit, after all), but That's Understanding has a purist hippie quality that owes karmic debts to the waves and hills of Santa Cruz, where Villages was based for the Plague Years (the years during which this music was written and recorded.) Most of Villages's avant proclivities are put on-hold this time. And whether or not that was the plan, this decision provides a folky balm for the last few lost years. Amy, Caleb Mulkerin (Big Blood), Don Godwin (Impractical Cockpit), and others -- especially violinist Kaethe Hostetter -- add to the gentle vibes that abound on this album. It's a set of music that bears up to many repeated spins. A very charming slice, for sure." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 735LP
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$29.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/22/2023
Albany, New York's Sky Furrows -- guitarist Mike Grifin, bassist Eric Hardiman, drummer Phil Donnelly and poet/vocalist Karen Schoemer -- release their second album, Relect and Oppose. Recorded in 2022 with Justin Pizzoferrato at Sonelab Studios and Pete Donnelly at Katonah Sound, the album's eight songs crush and crunch, agitate and sprawl. All songs were written by Schoemer/Grifin and arranged by Sky Furrows, except for "Koba Grozny," with music by Grifin and words adapted by Schoemer from Martin Amis's 2002 book Koba the Dread. Sky Furrows formed in 2016 and released their self-titled debut album in 2020 on Tape Drift/Skell/Philthy Rex Records, but band members had been crossing each other's paths for decades. Schoemer and Hardiman overlapped in the late '80s at WCWM, a college radio station in Virginia. In the late '80s and '90s, Donnelly used to trek from his home in Saratoga Springs to Hoboken, New Jersey to see shows at the legendary club Maxwell's, where Schoemer was a regular. By the mid 2000's all four were living upstate. Grifin, Hardiman and Donnelly have roots in the local experimental scene and are longtime members of Albany psych band Burnt Hills. Schoemer, a former music critic for the New York Times, was developing her craft as a poet and began contributing to music projects around 2013. She has an MFA in creative writing from The Writer's Foundry in Brooklyn, NY and collaborates with Mike Watt in the bassvoice duo Jaded Azurites and with Oli Heffernan and his rotating cast of free-jazzers in Ivan the Tolerable. Grifin records and performs as Parashi and with the band Valley of Weights; Hardiman operates solo as Rambutan and plays in Century Plants and Spiral Wave Nomads. Sky Furrows' aggregated knowledge of, dedication to, and participation in postpunk, psych and experimental music scenes is vast and deep. This institutional commitment infuses every moment of Relect and Oppose. Grifin's razor shred and calamitous distortion and a foil in Schoemer's semi-spoken delivery and onslaught of observations and images. In "Shopping Bags" a woman doesn't realize the loneliness she's carrying around, while "No Cause for Concern" relentlessly builds into a mental and physical breakdown. Hang on the words or cruise on waves of sound -- Relect and Oppose melds both, forcefully.
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FTR 733LP
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$27.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/15/2023
First Nod release from 1992, now on vinyl for the first time. Originally self-released as a CD, a subset of the recordings were perfectly re-mastered by James Plotkin for this slab of black vinyl. During the "year punk broke," this trio (and sometimes four-piece) were holed up in a Western NY enclave, perfecting their craft of imperfections. A combination of studio and home recordings, this self-titled gem perfectly introduces you to the charming shambly rock which Nod has been creating for the past 30+ years. And after many self-released CDs and singles, and while getting "this close" with a stint on Steve Shelly's Smells Like Records (Steve was the drummer of Sonic Youth), the band has been producing a solid string of releases for Rochester NY based Carbon Records. The release includes driving/catchy tunes like "Summertime" and "Running Into Trees," while "It Don't Bring Me Down" has a perfect overlay of strumming guitar, similar to the guitar interplay of Bowie and Ronson circa '72, on top of an intense groove, while then breaking down into a slow warble, giving you enough time to take a swig. The meat of the release consists of a great combination of scratchy-guitar rockers -- transitioning into the Dada-esque blues of "Hot Potatoes," and then finally ending with "Wooden Chair" and "Queens of Lattice," which could almost be cassette out-takes from Reed & co. Co-released with Carbon Records.
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FTR 730LP
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Co-released with Repetidor. With five albums released, several tours around Spain, Europe, Uruguay and the United States in which he has paired among others with Geoff Farina (Karate) or Glenn Jones and even performed at the legendary John Fahey tribute festival in Takoma Park, Maryland (The Thousand Incarnations of the Rose), the passing of time has consolidated Isasa's musical career to the point of winning the praise of such exquisite critics as Byron Coley or Wire magazine, the blessing of masters of the new guitar such as Max Ochs or Richard Osborn, as well as the unanimous admiration and recognition of his contemporaries. Now, after a decade of solo career and the recently released debut of his current side project, Burro (featuring Trice), Conrado Isasa presents this fifth studio album, entitled Canciones de amor (Love songs). Sublime artefact with which the guitarist from Madrid (of Uruguayan origin) celebrates love in capital letters, through one of the purest poetic articulations that exist: the form without words. In this case, song without words. Recorded with Carasueño in Lar de maravillas, Zaragoza, although the album incorporates new timbres as far as instrumentation is concerned; such as the autoharp of Lorena Álvarez, the voice of Trice, the synthesizers and the piano of Carasueño himself and even suggestive voices stolen in the intimacy; all of this works at the service of the melody. A narrative melody that responds, concatenates and harmonises, displaying a polyphonic palette of chromatic relations that is so expressive that it moves. Isasa masters the tempos of melodic language like almost no one else nowadays (much less in the genre). What's more, in these compositions his skill is such that the maestro gradually, partially and carefully -- in chiaroscuro -- unveils the refractory legacy of his life experience to place it, bravely, before us. In doing so, he achieves the most difficult thing: to turn his life into music, to touch the universal.
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FTR 697LP
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"Like last year's brilliant Wings Dipped in Fire (FTR 398CS, 2023), this new album was recorded by Taylor Hales at Chicago's Electrical Audio. But this time, the duo (once known at Mako Sica) is joined not just by keyboard/trumpet master Thymme Jones, but also percussionist Hamid Drake, bassist Tatsu Aoki (on shamisen) and bassist Joshua Abrams. A total post-form all-star line-up, with more combined chops than a breakfast table crammed with lumberjacks. The mood on june 22 is weird and simmering. Blasts of heat alternate with spaced-out jam abstractions with Brent Fuscaldo's vocals and Przemyslaw Krys Drazek's guitar and trumpet dodging in and out of available crevices. As with all of this combo's recent music, exactly what genre they occupy is not easy to say. This is something they share with this generation of Chicago improvisers, who often seem to begin in jazz, but evolve into something much more intangible, mysterious and beautiful. Just as Abrams' Natural Information Society is making sounds requiring multi-hyphonic descriptives, so Drazek Fuscaldo have dissolved categorical confines, although their journey to this point began in a rock (or post-rock) formulation. By now the music contains multitudes -- jazz, folk, world music, avant-garde experimentalism and beyond. It defies being called anything other than MUSIC. Great music. And to quote the Captain once again, 'If you got ears, you gotta listen.' Don't know what else to say, except june 22 is a killer." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 739LP
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"Vinylization of the splendid 2021 cassette, issued by Garden Portal. The music was recorded partially out west in San Francisco and Point Reyes (hence the title), as well as in Jeffrey Alexander's current locale of Philadelphia. An instrumental addition to Alexander's canon, the music was mostly generated on guitar, but other sonic elements include -- bass, pebbles, fake mellotron, waves, moog, shells, fife, magnetic tape, and talking book phonograph. The results are a sweet, rural stroll through the kind of mind gardens the various off-shoots of the Youngbloods explored back in the Raccoon Records era, when they were based in Point Reyes as well. Reyes's other main counter-culture avatar was Philip K. Dick, who lived there for a few years in the late '50s and early '60s. But Jeffrey's music displays none of the red-hot paranoia that flashed through PKD's work of that time. If anything, the mood is paranoia's antidote -- a rolling, casual float through cheeb-scented air with lots going on around the edges, but none of it in the least bit threatening. Given the loud sluice of Alexander's recent work with the Heavy Lidders, Reyes feels laid back and reflective, but there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there's everything right with it. In times like this, when the cultural shit storm shows no sign of abating, we can all use a record that allows us to lay back and center ourselves. Reyes is just that kind of record, and man is it ever perfectly timed for just such a moment as this." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 751CD
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"First off, there will be an LP of this coming along, but as with Wednesday Knudsen's solo material, the analog manufacturing process is slower than the digital one. In the meantime, here's a CD for play in cars and kitchens everywhere. Having listened to this disk 20 or so times over the past week, I have been struck time and again by the gently naif quality of Dan Beckman-Moon's songwriting. I keep thinking of Neil Young's earliest solo tunes, particularly 'Sugar Mountain,' as a sort of spiritual touchstone, although truthfully the music doesn't really sound anything like that. Still, the emotional core of the material has a similar sweetness and simplicity, while managing to steer clear of mawkishness with a nimble delicacy that parallel's Neil's early work. I have come to think of Valley of Spaces as a collaborative effort between Dan and his partner, Amy Moon, but this album often feels much more like Dan's solo effort. Amy definitely shows up in spots, but I miss the weird edge she brings to everything she does. I mean, there's a reason she was one of the first people Chris Corsano picked when he was putting together the original Ecstatic Yod crew back in the '90s -- her off-kilter perspective adds depth and subtle strangeness to her entire oeuvre. The same is often true of Dan as well (he was in Impractical Cockpit, after all), but That's Understanding has a purist hippie quality that owes karmic debts to the waves and hills of Santa Cruz, where Villages was based for the Plague Years (the years during which this music was written and recorded.) Most of Villages's avant proclivities are put on-hold this time. And whether or not that was the plan, this decision provides a folky balm for the last few lost years. Amy, Caleb Mulkerin (Big Blood), Don Godwin (Impractical Cockpit), and others -- especially violinist Kaethe Hostetter -- add to the gentle vibes that abound on this album. It's a set of music that bears up to many repeated spins. A very charming slice, for sure." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 738LP
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"One of the first things you notice about Dennis Tyfus is that his lips are too small for his mouth. This becomes especially obvious if you go out to eat with him late at night in Antwerp. He has to really grease up whatever sausage he chooses with a lot of mayonnaise in order to slide it through the taut sphincter that guards his mouthly cavern. This physical fact has made Dennis's speaking voice a thing of horror for many years, but we have only just realized he is able to sing pretty well through this tiny aperture. Indeed, if you are not watching closely, you might think he was actually able to open his mouth as wide a typical human. Which he is not. So it is all the more remarkable that the vocals he creates inside Jeugdbrand (a Flemish slang term for 'lips as of a pony') have a faux full-throated magnificence to them. But this is only one of the great surprises of this new record. Those who have not heard Jeugdbrand's brilliant debut, Siamese Dream (Team) will be shocked... to discover how utterly musical Dennis's new duo with drummer/etc-ist Jeroen Stevens actually sounds. Tyfus is one of his generation's most aggressively polymathic tricksters. The vast majority of his projects are... 'a slap in the face of public taste.' But there is something genuine and generous about the music on Smile. It's not not-weird, but the twisted pairings of vocals with percussion, piano, organ and recorder are not off-putting in the least. The vocals show touches of various Folkways Ethnic Library titles, but manage to create a wily and mysterious cloud of sound art, with which the skeletal musical arrangements play beautifully. Jeroen's instrumental inventions are as blasted as Dennis's in their own way. Stevens is probably best known for the insane De Stoeltjes project, on which he covers the entirety of the first Stooges album playing three chairs! But he has done jillions of things, including a quartet with Eric Thielemans, and Chris Corsano whose set is still being drooled over in the Low Countries. But in the context of Jeugdbrand, he is the man who sets the scene in which his partner's canary is allowed to warble." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 740LP
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Co-release with Carbon Records.
"It's my great pleasure to introduce you to guitarist Liam Grant and his debut album, Amoskeag... It's one of those records that critics, fans and musicians alike will look back at and say, 'This is where it all started'... [Liam] has since played with folks like Mike Gangloff, Glenn Jones, Trevor Mackenzie, Buck Curran, Dave Shuford, Joseph Allred... the list of heavy-hitters is already long and continues to grow. Every song on this album taps into raw, rich veins of sound that are simultaneously dense but easy to enjoy; vintage and modern; new yet timeless. The album kicks off with a monster track entitled 'Stratton-Eustis' -- one of those complex yet flowing tunes that makes you think overdubs were involved or the player has grown an extra set of limbs. Then there's 'Kenduskeag,' a raga-esque group recording in an abandoned New England Conservatory building with Ethan WL and the long-standing anonymous drone collective The Suncook Symphony that showcases his already masterful skills for composition and band leadership. The title track, 'Amoskeag,' is a powerful, overflowing whiskey glass full of deep, raw soul, drawn from ages past and times present. The closer, 'Androscoggin River Ragg,' is exactly that, an old-timey blues rag sucked straight from the ether of hundred years past, with Grayson McGuire on banjo and Mike Gangloff on jaw harp. This old, worn-out dog can't begin to express what an honor and privilege it's been to work with Liam and the other various musical misfits and mysticks that he's drawn into his circle. This album captures all that magick and then some. It's not just a good album... nor just a great one... it's a fuckin' important, much-needed beacon in the dark seas of overproduction, ephemera and watered down, easy-to-sell dullness of today...." --Rob Vaughn, 2023
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FTR 659LP
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"Recorded in Madison Wisconsin a year after In The River, the latest record from this amazing trio (Troy Schafer, Patrick Best, Mikel Dimmick) breaks a bit with Spiral Joy's drone-dominant tradition. There is a crackling, noise energy curtain surrounding much of the playing here that makes me remember the sound of the Richmond VA trio, Pelt, from whom Spiral Joy Band draw specific inspiration (as well as two members). The listed instruments are bowed gong, gong, bowed bowls, electric guitar, bowed materials amplified and acoustic, mouthpiece and effects, modified zither. So yeah, there is still a patchwork of drones at the heart of Elvehjem, but there is little in the way of uninterrupted flow. The music on this one is a cascade of sound events with a feel almost more in line with the less antic inventions of Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza than anything inside the 'rock' realm. But there has often been a certain rockist element lurking inside Spiral Joy Band's music (which supplanted the overt hayseed elements of their original iteration) and the direction and manner of their clangor here has the weight of rock rather than something more ephemeral. The two sides are presented as discreet pieces -- 'Shore' and 'Shine' -- but they run together seamlessly, both displaying surface pocks and tremors with a pride usually reserved for magic tricks. The drones are often created with a searing metallic edge, and their spiky protuberances brook no guff. If that ain't rock, at least attitudinally, I'll eat your fucking hat. In the meantime, Elvehjem, is a stone gas to listen to. And, by the way, the name is taken from a famous Wisconsin biochemist, and is not meant as a mean commentary on Orlando Bloom's obsession with the Dave Matthews Band. Although that would be warranted as well. Dig in!" --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 712LP
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"At last, the trade edition of Schiamachy has appeared, following the test-press/tour version by more than a couple of months. The album's title is a term used to describe mock battles between warriors. It's a fair description of the music on this record, although it's safe to say the battle was a friendly one. Michael Zerang is a very well-known percussionist, composer and improviser from Chicago, with an amazing jazz-based discography. He previously appeared on the Illinois Glossalia LP (FTR 285LP, 2017) playing with Spires That in the Sunset Rise. Asheville-based guitarist Tashi Dorji is a generation younger than Zerang, but has been an unstoppable force since he hit the scene in 2009, playing in all manner of rock and improv situations. He has appeared on four other Feeding Tube releases, most often with his free form power duo, Manas. It's also worth mentioning that both musicians are nice guys. But even nice guys can get a thrilling mock battle raging, and Schiamachy is surely one for the books. Recorded at Chicago venue, The Hideout, in August 2016, the music ranges from splotchy plucking in the British plink-plonk tradition to something more akin to sophisticated post-rock noise explorations. I kept expecting passages to emerge styled more in the vein of the free-fusion ecstasies explored by McLaughlin with Tony Williams, or what Bishop, Chasny and Corsano do with Rangda, but Michael and Tashi always opted to keep their battle plans more smudged and confounding. The music is not about edges and momentum, it's about textures and collaging. Zerang stays away from any sort of standard set-up here, choosing instead to play an instrument he calls 'Queequeg's Coffin.' He describes this as 'a large hurdy-gurdy like instrument where four cello strings are bowed simultaneously with a friction wheel that is hand-cranked.' It looks as wild as it sounds, creating vast fields of whizzing and ringing, while the guitar strings and knobs wrench and wobble and throb. The sounds on Schiamacy are all about unexpected interactions and the pleasure of new discoveries. The deeper you let these sounds into your head, the farther they'll transport you. Be not a moldy fig, embrace the unknown." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 398CS
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"Domestic issue of a Polish LP released in 2022 by Przymyslaw Drazek, Brent Fuscaldo, and Thymme Jones. In Poland the record was credited to Mako Sica and Thymme Jones, but that Chicago unit has now decided to work under the Drazek Fuscaldo banner. And that is that. Recorded at Electrical Audio in the Windy City, with Corey Bengston playing keyboards on the first side, this is music with all the dreamy jazzoid mystery you expect from Drazek Fuscaldo. I have always felt these guys operate in the same post-punk universe as the Sun City Girls, blending free psych, free jazz, free world, and avant-garde impulses into something that probably could have existed in a pre-Sun City universe. But where SCG were constant maximalists, DF accept the minimal as an equally power compositional gambit. The music on Wings Dipped in Fire sometimes offers as much open space and breathing room as Pauline Oliveros while maintaining a connection to impulses rooted in wildest expanses of free rock improvisation. As DF's recent work with Hamid Drake (and others) has shown, they have the ability to function at high levels of the post-form jazz idiom, in manner different yet parallel to folks like Natural Information Society. That potential is abundantly evident here, but there is also a very ethereal kind of prog blended into the mix, and lots of other beautiful touches that strike me as unique in the way they're combined and presented. Any way you slice it, Wings is another brilliant recording by this group. And a great place to start listening to them if they have thus far avoided your attention. We at Feeding Tube couldn't bear to let this album languish as an impossible-to-find import. Hope you have the time to dig into Wings Dipped in Fire. Its rewards are boundless. I shit you not." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 699LP
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"The first American release by this wonderfully strange Norwegian musician, whose previous releases have been with labels such as Kjetil Brandsdal's Drid Machine and Dennis Tyfus's Ultra Eczema. This is enough to tell you that Gaute is a highly regarded twirler of unusual sonic inventions, but not much else. The music on Monstersol is a bit more focused on Granli's own voice work than some of his earlier releases, but it shares certain elements with them. Instrumentally it's as hard to fathom as ever exactly what's going on. The music has a brilliant way of interweaving obvious loops with what seem like they might be real time sound events. From what I understand this is an illusion -- everything apart from some vocals is derived from samples, but the manner in which the pieces are assembled gives them a deviously weird heft. You want to believe Gaute has a choir tied up in his studio while he jumps around the room hitting random instruments and blasting space lasers into the air, or that he has somehow entered the subconscious ping-pong chamber of Harmet Geerken's brain. But facts argue against both these notions. Somewhere, in a room in Stavanger Norway, Gaute Granli just sat his ass down and created a crazy, cartoony universe of avant garde mystery and hijinks. Maybe the keyboards are his. I don't know and frankly, I don't care. However he manages to conjure up these jungles of adventure, disguised as songs, I think it's a pretty amazing trick. And who but a fucking dud really wants to know the details of how magic works? Monstersol is a messy masterpiece of experimental psychedelia at its most mental. And if you can't dig that, please leave the planet, you goddamned square. And I mean right now." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 732LP
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With the death in 2020 of long-standing occasional third member Peter Stapleton (percussion/electronics), A Handful of Dust has regrouped as the core duo of Alastair Galbraith (violin, guitar, cello, piano, drums) and Bruce Russell (guitar, electronics). This new set of live-to-four-track recordings from January 2022 is the first album to be wholly recorded "in the studio" since 1995's Towards a Soundtrack to the "Anabase" of St-John Perse. Committed to tape at the Rugby Hotel in Dunedin, the four-track recordings were played back in the room where they were made and recorded again, this time to Android telephone, to make a digital mono master which you hear on this record. Unadorned, brutal and sonically austere, this new set captures the "wild Mercury sound" for which this long-standing unit is rightly feted among cognoscenti of the Antipodean New Thing. Three pieces that will pop your third eye in seconds flat. Astral travel for now people. "Duck and Sally" continue their unplanned career in the extreme abuse of the rock n' roll tool kit. Drowned phoenician sailors bob disconcertingly to the surface while the captain's tower rocks to a sustained monomachy 'twixt Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, brought back from the grave for that specific purpose. Don't be shy -- please jump out of your window. You know you gotta trust us, when you need a friend...Co-released with Carbon Records.
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FTR 690LP
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"Fantastic debut LP by this severely talented instrumental duo, currently based around Hampshire College unless I am much mistaken. Living Window is comprised of drummer Cameron Mitchell and guitarist Mila Dorji, who have created an album of pile-driving avant-garde hunch reminiscent of pre-Mahavishnu McLaughlin's slow-hand recordings with Tony Williams or Billy Cox. Mitchell drumming mixes rock and jazz attacks in equal measure, either drawing out rhythms or pounding them straight into pumice. And Dorji collects his amped notes into a huge mass before he releases them, displaying far more taste and patience than most of his contemporaries. This kind of jazz/rock guitar/drum dueling can be traced back (more or less) to Doug Snyder & Bob Thompson's Daily Dance LP from '73. Whether or not they've heard it, Living Window are fully in sync with that amazing record. They also hint at the early duo improvisations of the Alex/Nels Cline Duo, and combos such as Manas (led by Mila's dad, Tashi), Chris Guttmacher's Louis Farakhan! and other nimble purveyors of stripped-down excess. Living Window have chosen a hybridized aesthetic route, which presents opportunities to bring jazz to rock masses and vice versa. But it's also a path that can lead to playing concerned with mere 'chops' rather than invention. At this stage of their trajectory, Living Window are bursting with so many ideas they display no weakness in that area. At times their moves almost evoke a one guitar version of 'Randga', which is about as high a praise as I can imagine. Astralturfing is the first blast of music from a duo with amazing potential. Towers open fire." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 709LP
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"After a handful of whacked-out cassettes & CDRs, for labels as discerning as Chocolate Monk and Beartown, this Nottingham trio has final made their debut LP, and it is a beautiful, swirling cone of sounds. Unlike some of their more savage kith, Food People's basic template is based less on explosive dynamics than it is on twisted invention. Their music is rarely overtly aggressive or ornery. Its power is drawn from quietly disorienting musical details that are assembled and fiddled-with at a patient pace. Sometimes the sounds they use are taped, at others they come from various strings (both plucked and bowed), maybe some simple reeds and possibly even a key or percussion or two. Can't exactly tell without actually seeing them, but this confusion is part of the music's appeal. And Many Glorious Petals is as appealing as any instrumental record you'll spin this year. Genteel backwards-masking lends 'Cheese Dreams from Oxney Green' a feel akin to Fripp & Eno collaborating with Orchid Spangiafora. 'Eat Paper' combines guitar-string-buzz-riffing, imaginary percussion and fiddle sawing into a deep meditation on the transitive existence of form. The way the flute tones (or whatever they are) layer-up at the end of 'Old Thresh' put me in mind of Robert Dick's compositional gambits, before leading into a brief piece called 'Blue Solar Arrow,' which is redolent of the New Orleans tripping scene in Easy Rider. There are also tracks like 'Scrim,' impossible to unravel in terms of instrumentation, but managing to sound amazingly tripped-out in the way they flip toggle switches inside your brain's sonic-receptors. Many Glorious Petals is not a long album, but it's got more audio nooks and crannies than you can easily explore. And every spin reveals new dimensions of otherness. Burrow in today." --Byron Coley, 2023. Food People are: Matthew Hamblin, Lila Matsumoto, and Greg Thomas. Mastered by Caleb Mulkerin at Tank 28. Layout by Derwent. Artwork by Matthew.
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FTR 727LP
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"This is the 14th album released by this Georgia-based improv trio, but the first to come out on LP. The Electric Nature has gone through a variety of phases during its decade-plus history, but its recent work has been fairly abstract, and so it continues here. The basic threesome -- Michael Potter, Michael Pierce, and Thom Strickland -- are not credited with individual instruments here. It is merely noted that between them they play guitars, synthesizers, drums, percussion, samples and field recordings. Additionally, Jeff Tobias plays sax on one side, and John Kiran Fernandes adds clarinet and violin to the flip. Those with a serious working interest in the Athens GA sub-underground will associate these names with a variety of bands: Bleachy Asshole, Future Ape Tapes, Leisure Service, Smokedog, Wet Garden, as well as a couple of labels. Tobias and Fernandes bring another host of associations, from Arthur Doyle to Frank Hurricane, so we should assume this is a crew that knows exactly what it wants, as well as how to get it. In this instance, what they want are two side-long squalls of sound, so good they have an almost Japanese cast to their improvisational distentions. Despite their parallel intensity, the essential natures of these sides are disparate and distinct. On 'Enter Chapel Perilous,' field recordings give way to swampy sax blister, the sound of boots stuck in mud while spirits voices gibber in the background, and swirling horror-movie synth. These elements are twisted into a sonic fire storm that gets hotter and hotter. Eventually everyone gets spit out onto the parched sands of the Sahara. Meanwhile, on the title track, the team raises a sweetly muzzy curtain of drum splatter, amp roar and swoosh, through which curlicues of clarinet and shards of broken guitar are pushed like puppets at a Punch & Judy show. Anyway, that's my take. The Electric Nature surely have their own chronicle of this music. But who really cares what any says it sounds like. The proof is in the sonic pudding. And The Electric Nature have whipped up a very tasty batch of mystery. Yum." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 627LP
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"Newest entry in the Jason Meagher's great Drowned Land series is the long-playing vinyl debut by Lexington, KY's Warren Byrom. Recorded back before the Plague, the idea for Dreaming the Sun emerged when Jason caught a show by Warren and Philly-based pianist Hans Chew, who'd already been involved in lots of bands and recordings with Meagher. The sweet depth of Warren's songs and guitar playing resonated with Jason, and Warren soon found himself in Black Dirt Studios with Nashville bassist Steve Poulton (whose work stretches back to Louisville's legendary Paul K & the Weathermen) and drummer Ryan Jewell (who has played with half the musicians you can name). Other lovely bits were added by Wednesday Knudsen, Ma Turner, Hans Chew, and Chris Sullivan, with some additional seasoning done later in Nashville. The three days of recording at Black Dirt resulted in a classic set of material. Byrom writes and sings tunes that have their base in the rural songwriter tradition, but which are infused with tendrils of knowledge gained through pursuing more avant-garde interests. I would compare his work to the Ranaldo/Gunn/Brokaw wing of musicians. Players whose vision of "inside" music follows their mastery of a more "outside" aesthetic. This may be a projection, but it's what I hear in Warren's tunes. And I know that Jason Meagher is attracted to music that has followed this trajectory. So, sue me! Regardless, Dreaming the Sun is a beautiful album that should wiggle the spines of everyone who hears it. The relative straightness (or not) of Warren's approach is entirely in the ear of the be hearer. What you bring to the album as listener may shape the details of your experience, but its quality is undeniable. Nice damn stuff." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 397CS
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"After recording three studio albums (two of which -- 2019's The Whole of Each Eye (FTR 498LP) and 2022's Map of Dawn (FTR 669LP) -- we were honored to co-release with Cardinal Fuzz), this amazing Portland OR sextet decided to try something different. An experiment. They packed a vanload of gear and headed out to a rural house in Central Oregon with an 8-track recorder. Besides their standard array of axes, they also brought various 'little instruments' as well as acoustic strings and percussives of various stripes, then spent three full days jamming from very early to very late. There was a lot improvisation, instrument swapping and musical hijinkery quite different from their standard approach. This resulted in a dozen tapes filled with all sorts of ideas and sounds, and the band started fiddling with them as soon as they got home. The High Desert Sessions is the result. The music is arranged into two side-long suites, which ramble around some very weird stylistic junctures, ranging from dusty slide guitar segments to loud roars of rock aktion, dissonant blares of jazzoid skronk and dreamy smears of shimmering sunshine avant-pop. There are also a few winks of the massive drum/guitar dualism for which Abronia is known. But most of this tape explores previously unvisited sonic regions. The High Desert Sessions' first side offers a relatively unhurried flow, the flip has more squirrely segmentation, but it's all cool as hell. And heard as a whole, it may augur some new points-of-interest that Abronia might be visiting in the future. Or not. Because that is nature of experimentation. But it's very hep to have this aural peek into their ongoing process. Especially because it all sounds great. Can't wait for the next album!" --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 710LP
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"Hazy Road is the debut album from Bong Wish, the solo project of Palestinian-American artist Mariam Saleh. Former bassist for beloved garage rock band Fat Creeps, Saleh got her start in the Boston music scene of the early 2010s. While living above a music venue, where she was also employed, she was exposed to a myriad of jazz, psych, and experimental music. In turn, Bong Wish incorporates both the high-energy and distortion of garage alongside kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and folds them into its folk rock sensibility. Hazy Road is a coming-of-age album, documenting Saleh's self-exploration, as fueled by her interest in psychedelia, spirituality and the desire to know oneself. 'Love is in season, love is in me,' she declares in the song 'Witches.' Saleh's vocals and phrasing maintain a smooth and cool quality throughout the album, lending the songs a deep wisdom and a sweet breeze of confidence. A fan of both Love's surreal folk rock and Ween's eccentric expression, Saleh enjoys infusing her tunes with a touch of tripped-out freakiness. The title track 'Hazy Road' seems to borrow its vocal line from the sound of a record being played backwards in order to reveal its true message, as alluded to from the sample at the start of the song. 'I Can Feel' could have been sung by the Byrds or Vashti Bunyan, albeit at half speed, while 'Moon For You' could have easily appeared on the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. On 'Breeding Evil,' Saleh confronts the senselessness of Israel's apartheid against the Palestinian people and broods over how it has personally affected her family. 'Your fire soldiers have left a mark on all that I have known,' she summons. But she pledges strength in the face of all the cruelty: 'You can't kill lovers, we will only rise and love once more.' Bong Wish has been Saleh's journey through home recording and beguiling live shows. Over the years it has been a solo project, a glam rock band, a trio with flute and piano, a spoken word act, and more. The process has paid off. Hazy Road has a natural, immensely listenable quality to it that only comes when an artist gives themself the time to discover a sound that is uniquely theirs. The album is both a homage to the rock and folk music that Saleh loves and a collage of memories, dreams and moods. A reverie on a misty beach. Nostalgia for a love gone away. Hope for the future. Hazy Road accompanies Saleh through the dark as she strives toward light and love." --Sally Horowitz, edited by Alaina Stamatis.
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FTR 696LP
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"Another fantastic slab by Virginia-based guitarist Jordan Perry, whose style fuses disparate threads from the American Primitive and avant-garde songbooks into a unique alloy. For this album Primitivism has largely been eclipsed by avant urges. Still, there is one track, 'Days Have Gone By Volume' where Jordan is joined by guitarist Ned Oldham for a piece evoking Fahey in more than its title. But that is the exception. Most of What Do You See Every Day? is filled with abstractions for acoustic guitar. His work has a genteel aura and pacing in which free melodies are played inside the context of graspable rhythmic structures. This simultaneously highlights their weirdness, and dials it back contextually by having the music emerge in a clearly delineated flow. The act of not-rushing things has the effect of softening the potentially sharp edges of the sound. Jordan also plays melodica on a track, 'For Three,' which shimmers with a liturgical edge reminiscent of plainsong. He is joined on another track, 'From Traces What Do You?,' by wordless vocalizing from two Virginia singers, Diane Cluck and Devon Sproule. Their voices (plus Jordan's own) add an ethereal otherness that is quite lovely. As is the avian field recording on 'Five Hours.' But the bulk of the music is guitar-centric and beautiful off-kilter. There are little flashes of jazziness that make me think of some of Duck Baker's work, but only for a moment. There are also bursts that seem to parallel some of the experimental work Mike Cooper has been doing for last couple of decades. But, as usual, Jordan Perry is walking a path all his own. And it is a beautiful way to wander." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 677LP
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"Fifth vinyl album (there have been four cassettes as well) by this Baltimore-based duo with international roots. Zomes began as a solo project by Asa Osbourne (ex-Lungfish, The Pupils), and recorded mostly solo drone-based instrumentals for several years. While performing at a festival in Stockholm, Asa met vocalist Hanna Olivegren, who shared his musical conceptions. Zomes's first record as a duo was 2013's Time Was (Thrill Jockey), and they have remained a two-piece ever since. The music on Love's Lesson is largely built around Asa's simple keyboard washes and drum box, atop which Hanna's vocals stroll like Little Red Riding Hood walking through the Black Forest. The overall effect is beautiful and lulling, with a dream pop vibe very much in line with Kendra Smith's monumental 1995 album, Five Ways of Disappearing. Spare and otherworldly, additional possible comparisons can be made to Young Marble Giants or Damon & Naomi. Zomes's material shares the same sort of genteel literary feel those combos broadcast. Something about the pacing at which the vocals are presented makes them feel weighted with promise, and this heft carries over to the instrumentation as well. There's no fat or excess to the music's skeleton. Hanna's voice carries the full range of Love's Lesson's melodic content, but it's the rich harmonic range of Asa's keys (and maybe guitar in one spot?) that give the whole its ghostly weight and depth. A brilliant record that delivers an unending stream of warm electric shocks." --Byron Coley, 2023
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FTR 722LP
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Feeding Tube in collaboration with Ba Da Bing present: "She can be a real pain in the ass," is how Big Blood's Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella describe having their daughter as a member of the band they formed in the wake of Cerberus Shoal's dissolution. A band made up of family seems like an ideal situation. You get to play with those you love, and practicing/recording is always just a matter of going into the next room . . . Quinnissa, who was 13 when First Aid Kit was recorded has skills . . . Quinnisa's voice has developed into an astonishing powerhouse of force. While she has been contributing to Big Blood records almost since birth, First Aid Kit solidifies her clear talent. All her lyrics are improvised in the moment while recording, a real shock to realize considering how insightful and perfectly suited to the song they are. 'Never Ending Nightmare' candidly and perfectly describes the anxieties of being a teenager today. Or the heartache of '1000 Times' . . . Teenage impulses fit right in with the band's intent, which is making music that's honest, inclusive and flawed. Inventiveness in the moment wins out over belabored, repeated takes, as the group is in a constant state of creation. Songs sound fully built and realized, but they actually rise out of improvisation. Big Blood channel the moment and let go once they finish . . . Mulkerin's descriptions of different songs on the record run like faint recalled dreams . . . Many songs touch on the fear and horrors outside a safe home space, fitting for a record made during COVID. They sing about their feelings in the moment, so lyrics are often topical. 'Makes Me Wonder' is about Ma'kihia Bryant, a 16 year-old black girl shot by police. While any fan of the band will tell you that no two albums sound very much alike, First Aid Kit displaying for the first time their affinity for the emotional effects of bands like The Cure, Bauhaus and The Clean, there's a clear thread throughout all their records. First, there's Kinsella's voice, which pivots from upbeat fun to pure dread, presumably based on how she was feeling that day she recorded. Secondly, Mulkerin's production preserves layers of could-have-beens by keeping the ghostly presence of past takes alive in the background of tracks like subliminal thoughts. Their songs achieve the double satisfaction of being immediate, catchy and memorable, while also revealing inner depths at repeated listens. Some of the best experimental music is cloaked as mundane. First Aid Kit was recorded entirely at the family's home onto 1" eight-track tape. It achieves the magic of capturing a moment and making a lasting impression. There aren't many family bands, and there's definitely no other band like this." --Ben Goldberg
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