Wagtail's first 7", Days Gone By is a magical little gem. Over the past few years, Reuben Son has been making his mark, merging thoughtful combinations of sounds and styles ultimately forming his own from his disparate influences. On "Days Gone By" Reuben artfully crafts two solo guitar portraits, which seem to hypnotize the listener in less then a second, provoking a sense of deeply rooted melancholy and immediate response. I hesitate to say too much about this one. It is contemplative and mood inducing and you will find yourself wanting to keep this on repeat.

Wagtail

Captured from a live set played in their hometown, and the debut material for the new expanded four piece line-up. Live drums that pound forward in a minimal post-punk way, accompanied by a drum machine, and dual synths. Layered with feminine shrieks and howls that loop and bounce off all the walls. Songs that are fragmented and dark, yet catchy. Also included is a bonus track of improvised noise recorded seperately, the band also known for a noisy approach with interludes made up of sheets of white noise.

Black Horizons

shortly following his debut on anton zap's ethereal sound imprint, dusseldorf machine maestro, garben eden got deep deep down on this slab for ecstasy.

the 2 originals were lovingly remixed by ukrainian wunderkind, vakula and italian e crew member, robotalco, respectively. limited to 300 copies of 12" vinyl right on time for the thick of summer!

Ecstasy Records

New LP from lo-fi sci-fi mood music master - Russian Tsarlag. Dark and haunting, strange and cracked pop songs, this time with more softness and charm. First release on new label Personnel limited to 200 copies.

Personnel

Reissue of two more significant tapes of RB from 2009/10: 'Finally Burst…' and 'Lone Gunman'. Bloody, and unhinged heart beat music culled from various emotions. Both recordings serve as a deconstruction of genre through primitivism and dissonance. Figuring out which things can be repeated and which things cannot. Pink covers, shrink-wrapped, stickered.

Personnel

In an instant Presence wells around you. Naucke (Face Worker, Catholic Tapes) moves deftly through this suite of ambient works, filling the stereo field with dense timbral structures, transcending placid drift through a series of oblique compositional transforms. Resounding polyphony gathers and crests, interrupted by radiophonic counterpoint, reforming, and finally resolving into an alive, dynamic stillness.

field studies

Ben Billington (Tiger Hatchery, White Prism) continues to redefine the possibilities of sampled percussion in synthesizer-based composition. Passing abstract percussive chatters, errant frequencies, and synth incidents fill the stereo field, articulating 3D constructs that shift, accrete, and re-orient endlessly.

Quiet environmental vignettes and dancing, staccato melodies. Envisioning Eco-Purity.

field studies

Omega is the soundtrack of a journey to the farthest reaches of the universe, circa 1971. Seemingly stationary and forever trapped on this silver needle hurtling towards the edge of time, all we have left is this inner-space in which we wander the halls of our recollections, which are warping and corroding due to constant scrutiny and an increasingly frantic tedium - the madness comes and goes but when leaving, even for a brief respite, a little piece of our defense goes as well, never to return and with no others to take its place...

Field hymns

In 1991 Capcom USA, in a bold move to reclaim market share lost to rival video developers and taking advantage of the new 16 bit processors in the Sega Genesis and its rival, the Super NES, commissioned of Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode to develop a more modern soundtrack for a game in development with a working title "Vital Organs". The project was eventually scrapped, the music forgotten and the world moved on. This is what that music would have sounded like.

Field hymns

Susurrus filters through the cracks of the city buildings and blocks broken only by the sharp, static pangs of decay – chaos begets order which begets chaos again – this is the root of all languages and is audible and accessible to all who have the patience to stop and listen…

Susurrus is a 31 minute piece in two parts, composed of feedback, ground-loops and other various unintended ephemera endemic to electronic instruments and the recording process. Taken singly these defects are purposefully avoided but when joined a remarkable synthesis can sometimes be observed. From an almost imperceptible beginning it rises in complexity until electrical arcs are almost visible…

Field hymns

An astute observer will recognize within the first seconds of the crackling drums that open A Candle in the Crown of the Dawn that this record is supercharged, blown out and stripped down. With the intensity of Black Mountain soaring over a splashing, hypnotic rhythm section, San Francisco's EYES bypass to the center, to a place beyond knowledge, beyond rock, where human batteries are charged by a Dionysus crystal, where the shimmering organs read your mind, and the sun and shadow voices dwell.

Field hymns

The Machine is ragged and greasy as it plunges through a hellish night thick with angst and sin. The Cadillac roars towards the dawn, gritty and loose, pushing the moist, dense air aside like a dirty curtain yet the sun never rises and we keep circling, circling, somewhere, in wide long ellipses through the night - the speakers shudder as the bass throbs and oily synths stab and all we can hear after hours and hours of this music - like a cross between Suicide and Cotton Mather - is that your salvation is nonexistent and that you will be alone, like everyone else.

Field hymns

Aria Statica is corroded channels, dull firefly blankets of energy, the birthing of subterranean mountains…this is the beat and pulse of the guts of the earth. Through the din of a thousand different machinations we hear brief snatches of calm as the pins align and then slide slowly back, drifting into cacophony. We walk through the swarm, the ebb and flow makes the shape of our bodies as we trail sparks; pinpricks of amber that twinkle and fade in the dark behind us.

Field hymns

It Was A Dark And Stoney Night is taken from two years of musical meanderings of analog synth jams and 80's action movie filled nightmares. We don't know what to think of it but we absolutely love it. It's like a family reunion of the survivors of a colossal record fire or a incomplete recollection of some distant experience over a couple too many beers. Whatever it is, we want more.

Field hymns

a seemingly endless array of sounds creates a warm density that is hallucinatory but never stifling. sean gadoury and scott johnson present listeners with repetitions to be traced and premonitions to be construed before the whirlwind vanishes into the low fidelity haze. bass, voice and occasional rhythms congeal with vibrating electronics to guide one inward.

fadeaway tapes

sharp textures and soft tones fuse and expand to fill the air. the four pieces on "watercolour experts," the second release from this collaborative unit comprised of members of sundrips and hobo cubes, show the group focusing on the free-flowing, low-gravity sound demonstrated on their 2010 release "carryin' on".

fadeaway tapes

ALARM is opening 2012 with a marvellous split LP by two of the finest noise duos currently around. Side A contains an awesome sidelong track by the two genre defying maestros John Wiese and Lasse Marhaug, recorded live at the Musica Genera Festival in Warsaw in 2009. Side B marks the debut release of Kalong from Cologne where this furious mixture of abstract turntablism, laptopnoise, samplingbombardement and ethereal voices was also recorded, live in an abandoned cinema in 2010. Both pieces were painstakingly mastered by Marcus Schmickler at Pietopraxis, Cologne. The LP is limited to 300 copies and comes in a beautiful cover, with printed innersleeve and poster. This will be no less than one of the most brilliant experimental/noise releases this year, no kidding.

ALARM

Berresheim and Thissen might not be the first one who chose the shipping accent as topic for a piece of experimental music - there has been Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic", of course or, more recently, "Shipwreck Radio" by Nurse With Wound. But, they are probably the first one who deal with SOS as central theme. "S" is a mix of industrial ryhthms, krautish bass, layers of alarming horn sounds and hysterical voice fragments which are heavily manipulated and become hardly discernable in "O" while being contrasted by smooth, delayed guitar sounds. Their gradual disappearance in "S"indicates that it's too late; it's just bass, guitar and drums that keep on grooving, in an almost transcendental way. No souls are saved, they are all gone. A wonderful, slightly uncanny piece of work. Three times 10:00 minutes, same on side a and b, a good option to get lost. Cover painting of one of Kublai Khan's sinking ships by Andreas Thissen.

ALARM

Jared Blum, co-founder of the great Gigante Sound label from San Francisco, is one of the finest plunderphonics artists around (as Blanketship as well as in Beaks Plinth and Vulcanus 68). The first solo release under his own name also follows the cut-up/montage et al principle, however this is a slighty harsher, more abstract affair. "Maxell, Sony, TDK & Tonemaster" comprises twelve intense tracks with cracked out tape noise - acoustic grenades solely done, as the title suggest, with mistreated old tapes on various cassette recorders - you will love that if you're into, say, Lasse Marhaug, Russell Haswell or Merzbow. Playing time about 25 minutes, great cover design by Blum himself

ALARM

This fine split tape is the first release on ALARM. The two stunning mixes were played during a nightly dance demonstration earlier this year in Cologne. Jessika Loers' amalgam of cut-ups, white noise and electroacoustics caused some confusion that night while Lena Willikens' (Titanoboa) wild combination of techno/house rhythms and field recordings proves that there is more than minimal techno on the Rhine. "Sandale des amateurs / Bubberand Mix" is the first in a regular serie of tapes on ALARM. Stay tuned for more maximal music.

The mixes have been produced for the Nachttanzdemo (nightly dance demonstration) which took place in Cologne on April 15th 2011. The occasion for this manifestation was the first anniversary of the squatting of the Autonomes Zentrum Köln. The two mixes were played in succession on one of the soundsystems while the demonstration went through Moselstrasse, Zülpicher Strasse and Hohenstaufenring.

ALARM

Deviating stylistically from his previous work with Former Ghosts and This Song Is A Mess And So Am I, Los Angeles-based musician Freddy Ruppert has constructed a forboding collage of churning industrial soundscapes. "Wait" is a highly personal collection of deliberately anti-climactic processed acoustics, from glassy piano fragments to deep, rumbling bells. While remaining bestial and dark, the sounds on "Wait" retain an emotionally complex and organic energy; a calculated exercise in tension and restraint, existing intimately in a place of no resolution.

NNA Tapes

Proud to present this tape for Andrea Pensado. Speaking in tongues, digitally controlled but precise in all its chaotic splatter. criminally under the radar and harsh.

YDLMIER

Howard Stelzer of Intransitive and AMK of Banned Productions team up for some cassette mulching of the highest order. Relentless and truly focused[decomposed] compositions.

YDLMIER

Imagine being locked in an anechoic dark room. The void space around you doesn't respond to any of your actions – and the only thing you begin to notice is the sound of your brainwaves. More and more your inner ear is hooked to a pulsating rhythm emerging from deep within your head. If that doesn't freak you out you're ready for some mise_en_scene.

In comparison to being challenged by frequencies from within, Thomas Gerandás (aka Skullorian Sound Sculptures) and Daniel Voigt chose a more comfortable way and exchanged and manipulated each other's soundfiles to end up with two pieces of damaged noise. A slightly deranged musical dialogue for your listening pleasure. Deep fried Hering on a crushed skull! Nothing tastes alike!

Sic Sic Tapes

Periodic automations of buzzing synth; polyphase alternator reality
Music by Michael Troutman

gift tapes

My third decade ended ascending into Libra Rising. Recorded September 23rd to October 23rd 2011 live with minimal edits. All modular synth melodies and vignettes from the TF50. The zodiac is not something I would typically align with, but I hear it works whether you believe in it or not.

Tone Filth Records & Tapes

Adam Bohman is a member of Morphogenesis and The London Improvisors Orchestra. He also regularly performs alongside his brother Jonathan under the guise The Bohman Brothers. Their sound art oscillates between states of the absurd and (sonically) grotesque to highly articulate explorations of extra-musical sound. Electroacoustic music and free-improvisation could be regarded as co-ordinates on the grid. However,unlike the hermeticism of electro-acoustic music or the purism of free-improvisation, the Bohman's freely quote from any source and aren't afraid to show it. So you get Varesesian sound montage supporting spoken word material sourced from a pub menu, or frenetic juxtapositions between amplified shoe brushes and a frenzied tape cut-up of 17th Century instruments. The Bohman aesthetic can be a dense and tangled thing to unpick and describe. Various and nefarious sounds and artistic influences merge and collide.

Dylan Nyoukis's work exists on the fringe of contemporary avant garde art and underground DIY insurrection. As a leading light in the UK's tape/CD-R scene, Nyoukis has long functioned as a rallying point for artists working to clear a space for original, non-idiomatic sound and feral performance modes. Alongside his sister and long-term collaborator Lisa (Dora Doll), he founded the Chocolate Monk label in 1993, an early experimental music imprint that combined hi-jacks of outmoded media - cassette, CD-R, pen and paper - with cutting edge investigations of the limits of form, while functioning as a home for Nyoukis's own projects, Prick Decay, Decaer Pinga, Ceylon Mange, Blood Stereo and countless one-off collaborations. His current group, Blood Stereo, is a duo with his wife, the musician and artist Karen Constance, that explores hand-cranked 20th century technology in combination with epiglottal gymnastics and free music modes inherited as much from punk rock's mutilated aesthetic as utopian art styles. His solo vocal and tape work continues to push the envelope in terms of the expressive options offered by amplified physicality while his rejection of any kind of theoretical backdrop liberates him from servitude to any specific agenda. He remains a singular voice. Over the years he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Ludo Mich, Chris Corsano, Thurston Moore, Sun City Girls, Bill Nace, Heather Leigh Murray, Phil Minton, Neil Campbell, Usurper and Wolf Eyes. He lives in Brighton, England. - David Keenan, Glasgow, June 2009

Scumbag Relations

Constellation Tatsu is prideful and pumped to announce its premiere release in the form of a cassette split between Blood Bright Star and Obsidian Towers. Side A, occupied by BBS, is a rousing journey which follows a bold and hopeful melody through different worlds of scuzz and static. Obsidian Towers cultivates a rich soil of drone scattered with screeching, screaming overtones.

We think the record is fantastic. But we also believe that music speaks for itself.

Constellation Tatsu

Adventure -> smashing through checkered marble flooring, over the seas of the Atlantic and onto an ever disintegrating lunar surface. Brazilian resident Gimu has a gift for this. Just let it happen.

Constellation Tatsu

The openness cannot be contained as stars brighten ten fold. We are on the verge of shattering. Hakobune aka Takahiro Yorifuji from a small town in Hyogo, Japan tears up the Netherworld. This is form. This is beauty.

Constellation Tatsu

Bouncy guitar riffs with splintering synth hits, Vincent Caylet of Archers by the Sea infinitely delays your thoughts. Don't let pollution make your mouth dry.

Constellation Tatsu

Nathaniel Ritter's solo project Circulation Of Light couldn't have a more fitting name for the sound he puts forth, as light circulates one would encounter moments of white intensity as well as moments of darkness, both represented well. Always minimal yet rich and organic; sometimes bright and buzzing, sometimes ominous and expansive. New age with it's flipside dark ambient. Profound work from Nathaniel including involvement with Burial Hex, Kinit Her, and Wreathes as well as half of the Brave Mysteries label. Offset printing with silver ink on bronze metallic stock. Silver labels. Edition of 100 copies on clear hi-bias chrome tapes.

Black Horizons

Two quick tracks make up this tape, intended as a single. Andy Lippoldt's Persistence In Mourning has grown sound-wise over the years from orthodox funeral doom to take on more diverse and experimental elements including electronics, heavy sampling, and a penchant for odd covers (see BH-34), aligning his project with acts like Thrones more so than much of the other doom crowd. Those elements find their realization here in rigid electronic percussion, fear-ridden sound clips, and synthesized sub-bass fluctuations. Comes packaged in a double OBI with a two panel insert as is becoming the new Black Horizons style. Printed offset with silver ink on moss metallic card stock. Also includes a silver ink on black fabric patch. Silver labels. Edition of 100 copies on black hi-bias chrome tapes.

Black Horizons

Pat Murano's Decimus project has been all over the map in the past few years, undertaking a massive effort to put out a series of 12 albums in accordance with the zodiac of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Previous to this Murano was perhaps best known as one of the founding members of No Neck Blues Band, K-Salvatore, & Malkuth, but it is with Decimus that the full story finally unfolds. With 11, Murano is going schizo and taking you down a hellish aural rabbit hole, deep into the abyss.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this might be the weirdest record we've ever put out on Digitalis. 11 opens with layers of looped, rusty-sounding strings mashed together with slowed down, death-rattle vocals. With buried crunch rhythms peaking out from the morass, the whole effect is like wandering through a funeral procession through a post-apocalyptic metropolis. Everything moves rapidly until it doesn't. Murano slows things to a crawl, pushing the demonic howl under a pane of glass. Blown-out minimal beats emerge to carry the bones along, but it feels like the worst is inevitable and there's no place to go but down.

And that's when Murano pulls the rug out from beneath. Solemn guitar chords are plucked like feathers, mourning the loss of the sun but never losing faith entirely. Of course, that's just a tease because just as abruptly as it appears, the section is destroyed and replaced by sharp synth stabs and manipulated tribal death marches. Everything has a crunch to it. 11 sounds like an album that was found in a sandy tomb. It's simultaneously ancient and still looking forward. The whole album is so disorienting and disfigured that it's oddly beautiful.

The thing about this installment in the Decimus saga is how much of story it tells. Murano deftly jumps from one chapter to another, throwing so many ideas and styles into the cauldron and spitting out something that flows like magic. This is the soundtrack for modern times, in all its ugly glory.

digitalis Recordings

Birch Cooper is an artist with his hands in multitudes of projects and different mediums. He moonlights with Barbara Kinzle in The Slaves and blasts havoc to all your senses in his multimedia duo with Brenna Murphy, MSHR. He's also spent time as a member of the enigmatic Oregon Painting Society and builds a lot of his own electronics. But that's not enough. His solo work has added a new point of light as it constructs new ground from nothingness. "I Was a Teacher," his first solo LP, following up last year's absolutely stellar tape, Weird Lesson, is the sound of machines warning each other that the end is near.

Fried circuits mutate and reform into something new and organic that sound like the guts of the Earth if it was all gears and escapement mechanisms. This music is harsh and frenetic. Electronic pendulums achieve locked-state oscillations as a form of aural catharsis. Frequencies shift like chameleons, working in forms of cryptic polymath to achieve the perfect destroyer. These tones screech out bleakness, worming their way through your ear canals until they can alter your synapses permanently.

It's incredible how Cooper is operating within a framework and language that is entirely his own. Cold electronics are twisted like scrap metal into impossible angles and bizarre shapes. It feels like you're trapped inside some kind of dystopian technological nightmare, searching every neural pathway for a way to escape. High-frequency blasts coalesce into cybernetic mountains, accented with neon trails and acid-laced electrons. This is complex music that is built to malfunction in unexpected ways. It is anti-whimsical. Sure, there's nothing beautiful about "I Was a Teacher," but it stays with you all the same.

digitalis Recordings

It's been nearly two years since we've heard new music from Gary War and we are excited to announce the release of his inevitable breakthrough "Jared's Lot".

Through the years we have heard the developments from the D.I.Y. psychedelia of "New Raytheonport" to the more current electronic acid-prog tracks we heard from "Horribles Parade" and the most recent "Police Water" EP. "Jared's Lot" brings the years of laboring and hard work full circle, with every facet of the project dialed into perfection. These tight and intelligently arranged pieces are the most concise and mind-blowing set of songs presented yet and we're sure you'll have a hard time taking this off your turntable.

The album kicks off with the incredibly anthemic "Thousand Yard Stare", which asserts immediately that the album is very different than previous efforts, crafted with hind-sight in mind and glowing with ambition. We can hear the melancholy voice of a man lost in the cosmos with nothing to lose going for broke, it's all or nothing. Tracks like "Superlifer" and "Pleading for Annihilation" contain such a powerful energy and pack such a wallop that you won't possibly be able to stand still. There is a great juxtaposition however, with songs like "Advancements in Disgust" and "World After" experimenting with new styles of pop/rock structure and incorporation of odd rhythm and melody.

Gary has a masterful control of his machines, and you can tell that countless hours were spent making sure that the vision came direct and absolutely pure, from his mind to the record you will hold in your hands. Even though we have a more synthetic based set of tracks, it's apparent that these transmissions are messages that are based in our reality, evoking a boundless range of emotions throughout.

The hectic fidelity of Gary War's previous recordings have morphed into a unique production style which rewards with it's rich tone and multi-layered tiers of sound and melody. We are witnessing a huge leap forward in both sound and vision, respectively. Meanwhile, the alienated code hardly discernible to the listener and clever pop structure remains, and in top form, making this album a warmly received gift to the Spectrum Spools catalog.

"Fear that man who has nothing to lose.'

spectrum spools

Mastered by James Plotkin