tachdé - Deluge

finally! a 2012 release from the boys of Tachdé. this album will surely cleanse your soul with some psychedelic soundscapes, acoustic compositions, haunting vocals and floor rattling grooves. give it a try, you wont be disappointed.

stream it brah.

Brigitte Fontaine - Comme à la radio

The french Nico. With the Art Ensemble of Chicago.



"Of all the strange records this French vanguard pop chanteuse ever recorded, this 1971 collaboration between the teams of Brigitte Fontaine and her songwriting partner Areski and the Art Ensemble of Chicago -- who were beginning to think about returning to the United States after a two-year stay -- is the strangest and easily most satisfying. While Fontaine's records could be beguiling with their innovation, they occasionally faltered by erring on the side of gimmickry and cuteness. Here, the Art Ensemble provide the perfect mysterious and ethereal backdrop for her vocal explorations. Featuring the entire Art Ensemble of that time period and including fellow Chicago AACM member Leo Smith on second trumpet, Fontaine and Areski stretched the very notion of what pop had been and could be. With strangely charted arrangements and mixing (percussion was in the foreground and horns were muted in the background, squeezed until they sounded like snake-charming flutes), the ten tracks here defy any and all conventions and result in the most provocative popular recording of 1971 -- and that's saying something. For their part, the Art Ensemble hadn't played music this straight since before leaving Chicago, with long, drooping ballad lines contrasted with sharp Eastern figures and North African rhythmic figures built in. The finest example of how well this works, and how seductively weird it all is, is on the two-part "Tanka." Here, Malachi Favors' bass and Areski's percussion meet everything from bouzoukis to clarinets to muted trumpets to sopranino saxophones, courtesy of Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Smith, and Lester Bowie, who play in tandem, using striated harmonies and modal intervals in order to stretch the notion of time and space under Fontaine's vocals. The effect is eerie, chilling, and hauntingly beguiling, and sets the tone for an entire album that runs all over the stylistic map while not adhering to anything but its own strange muse. This is remarkable stuff from a very adventurous time when virtually anything was possible."

La petite mort

Albert Ayler - Witches & Devils

Albert starts to shake the foundations of Jazz and Music in general.

"...Here, though the trumpet chair -- Norman Howard, a friend from Ayler's hometown of Cleveland -- is a weak link in the chain, this situation allows Ayler's music to shine through, more or less. Needless to say, the quartet with Grimes and Murray, which yields two tunes here -- the title track, which also features Henderson, and "Holy, Holy" -- offers the first real glimpse of Ayler in command. His statuesque take on the tonal and timbral fronts comes from both Ornette Coleman and the honking R&B bar-walkers. And in looking inside the various registers on the title cut, he explores the emotions inherent in timbral modulation without refracting the notes themselves too much. He moves from a whisper of great tenderness to a bloodcurdling scream, and it all sounds natural. On "Holy, Holy," the arco bass work by Grimes complements the intensity with which Ayler is playing. He goes for the upper register buoyed up by Murray's triple time, timberline beats and cross-handed polyrhythms, screeching to the point of sounding like a crying child, quoting hymns and blues tunes throughout. Howard's trumpet playing is no great shakes, but he moves through note displacement very well, opening up the harmonic registers for Ayler and Grimes to break through unencumbered. This is a revealing if not completely satisfying recording". - Thom Jurek

Spirits

Merzbow - Live in Prague 3-24-09

Courtesy of our friend Felix, a live set from the undisputed Emperor of Noise, as prolific and ear-obliterating as ever.

Get It

Einstürzende Neubauten - Silence is Sexy

As requested by Jorge, i'll be uploading some EN works from the the late 90's-early 00's. We start with this magnum opus.

Disc 1

Disc 2

John Cale & Terry Riley - Church Of Anthrax [1971]

whuuuuuuut

George Antheil - Ballet Mécanique

Here's George Antheil's score to Fernand Léger's experimental, dadaist, masterpiece Ballet Mécanique. The film is insane and the score is just as insane with the use of pianos, airplane propellers, sirens, electric bells among other things. This shit was way ahead of it's time and can be seen as the precursor to more experimental stuff that came out later.

Above is the film, here is the score

PASS: NS1

Psychic TV - Force The Hand of Chance

One of the best albums released in the 80's, an almost seamless mixture of industrial dissonance, ethnological sorcery/forgery and the most beautiful pop songwriting. Just listen to "Stolen Kisses" and "Catalan" (with guest Jordi Valls) back to back and you'll see what I mean.

The story of Psychic TV is a very long and consistently fascinating one. I remember an old PTV site that had a huge amount of PTV paraphernalia and documentation, an impressive effort at preserving this group's assault on mass media and 20th century communications. Sadly I can no longer find this site, but If you do please drop the link in the comments. Meanwhile there's a little info coming from the head honcho here.

"The first Psychic TV album in many ways remains its best, a double album worthy of the space needed that's readily comparable to the best efforts of the World Serpent circle of acts like Current 93 and Coil in its variety, dark power and very English take on things. Admittedly the Coil (and therefore Throbbing Gristle) connection is further heightened by the participation of Peter Christopherson throughout, while Alex Fergusson's re-emergence after time spent with Alternative TV further heightens the overall musical excellence of the album. Add in some fine guest performers -- most notably Marc Almond, who appears on the winsome pop of "Stolen Kisses" and the slow burning, threatening mood piece "Guiltless" -- and Genesis P-Orridge would have had to work damn hard to screw everything up, which he certainly didn't. The opening track alone must have confounded more than a few Throbbing Gristle fanatics -- "Just Drifting (For Caresse)" is a slow folk song with gentle string backing written for and about P-Orridge's newborn daughter. The musical references throughout the album refer to everything from Ennio Morricone-styled spaghetti western twang and doom ("Terminus-Xtul," which eventually transforms into a grinding howl of feedback and a calm acoustic coda) to post-punk dance grooves ("Ov Power," in a "radio promo mix" that's still not entirely American Bandstand material). Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka get a direct salute with "Thee Full Pack" which, while not representative of that collective's music, still sets a haunting, mysterious mood. The Temple ov Psychick Youth coterie doubtless still gets a kick out of "Message from Thee Temple," in which an authoritative but warm voice quietly delivers some philosophical strictures against a rich, sorrowful combination of strings and low key beats."

Bachir

Glenn Branca - The Ascension

Long live Branca.

"If one chooses to categorize the music on this recording as "rock," this is surely one of the greatest rock albums ever made. But there's the rub. While sporting many of the trappings of the genre -- the instrumentation (electric guitars), the rhythms, the volume, and, most certainly, the attitude -- there is much about The Ascension that doesn't fit comfortably into the standard definition of the term. Not only does the structure of the compositions appear to owe more to certain classical traditions, including Romanticism, than the rock song form, but Branca's overarching concern is with the pure sound produced, particularly of the overtones created by massed, "out of tune," excited strings and the ecstatic quality that sound can engender in the listener. Though his prior performing experience was with post-punk, no-wave groups like the Static and Theoretical Girls, it could be argued that the true source of much of the music here lies in the sonic experimentation of deep-drone pioneers like La Monte Young and Phil Niblock. Happily, the music is accessible enough that one can jump right in, regardless of one's direction of approach. Branca's band, unlike some of his later enormous ensembles, is relatively modest (four guitars, bass guitar, and drums), so the sound is comparatively clear and each member's contributions may be easily discerned. The chiming notes that begin "The Spectacular Commodity" are allowed to hover in the air, awash in overtones, before being subsumed into a rolling groove that picks up more and more intensity as guitar chords cascade one atop another, threatening to, but never succeeding in, toppling the whole affair. "Structure" plays with sonic torque, whipsawing between two differently stressed voicings of the same theme, pulling them back and forth like taffy. But the title track is both the consummation of the record and the surest indication of Branca's direction in later years. It begins with a marvelously dense haze of ringing guitars, feedback, and percussion, with a foreboding bassline contributing to the strong sense of disorientation. Midway through, it abruptly shifts to harsh blocks of sound over a rapid rhythm, the blocks differing in texture but played in alternating sections, smacking into each other and further heightening the tension. These disparate sounds eventually coalesce into a pure, ringing tone that, over the last minute of the piece, explodes into a spectacular cacophony, a seism of bell tones, microtonal eruptions, and near orgasmic guitar bliss. An absolutely stunning, jaw-dropping performance. Branca's music has served as a major inspiration to many alternative rock bands that surfaced in the '80s and '90s, notably Sonic Youth; both Lee Ranaldo (who plays on this recording) and Thurston Moore were regularly members of his early ensembles. The Ascension, in addition to being an utterly superb album on its own merits, uniquely invites listening from both adventurous rock fans and aficionados of experimental electronic music. For years, the vinyl release on 99 Records, with its stunning cover illustration by Robert Longo, was a highly sought-after collector's item. It was finally issued to compact disc in 1999 by New Tone." - Brian Olewnick

Lightfield

Nico - Desertshore

Another Nico masterpiece.

Afraid

Nurse With Wound - Second Pirate Session

More NWW for the freaks.

Git

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Les Stances a Sophie

Abe request. One of the best jazz albums ever.

Yoyo

Cecil Taylor - Conquistador!

More implacable Cecil-ness for the bearded folkie in you.

"More so than with any label, the greatest recordings on Blue Note, those that pull rank on the merely great and that we can most comfortably say will belong to all ages, seem to prove a burden for many listeners to embrace, no matter how enthralled they are by the sounds of Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Blue Train —the label's signature sounds, really. Consider Out To Lunch! and Point of Departure, often dismissed as acquired tastes, or worse, noise, and flouted as inspired nonsense—such chivalrous chicanery!—irrespective of the idea that applying whatever principles—"drawbacks" of shape and form—might lead one to this critique could likewise have at Finnegans Wake. And so too with Cecil Taylor and Conquistador!, another warranted entry in the Rudy Van Gelder series, with a bonus cut of "With (Exit)."

Odd as it may sound, if you are new to Taylor's music, and before proceeding to the Caf' Montmartre sessions, you're perhaps best off starting with this record, an avant-garde jazz walkabout of sorts, or at least a Cecil Taylor walkabout; here we can bear witness to the qualities, in different ideas, forms, themes and styles, that characterize an entire body of work—archetypes of interaction and by-play, suggestion and statement, however indirect, and then subversion of whatever feeling, emotion, idea, had been conjured up in the first place, and thus we continue on with the journey.

For the seasoned listener, the principal value of this release is naturally having it available again, and, more importantly, the alternate take of what was the original album's second and final track—side B for the vinyl lovers. Two minutes shorter, this "new" version of "With (Exit)" is even more disturbing and, frankly, invasive, than the official take, with Taylor creating textures that pulse and recoil, frantically trapped in one dark alley of a nightmare, and turning, alone, down another. Speaking analogously, it is though the happy version of "Dedication"—once titled "Cadaver"—had been chosen to close Point of Departure —instead of the proper requiem—or that we have discovered the lost soundtrack to Dementia, such is the gap between these two takes.

In terms of Conquistador! as a whole, note the by-play of Taylor and altoist Jimmy Lyons, foil and compatriot both, depending upon the composition, or the movements within the composition; and, let it be said, that along with Armstrong and Hines, Dolphy and Little, Coleman and Cherry, theirs is a partnership that seems so inevitably wrought and well-suited, one can scarcely imagine the sound of the one without hearing the sound of the other—that is, until spinning Jazz Advance or Burnt Offering."- Colin Fleming

Git

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Bap-tizum

"The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The group continues to tour and record through 2006, despite the deaths of two of the founding members.

The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz's entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed “little instruments” in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; “little instruments” can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects). The group also uses costumes and face paint in performance. These characteristics combine to make the ensemble's performances as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with each musician playing from behind a large array of drums, bells, gongs, and other instruments. When playing in Europe in 1969, the group were using more than 500 instruments. [1] Contents

Members of what was to become the Art Ensemble performed together under various band names in the mid-sixties, releasing their first album, Sound, as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet in 1966. The Sextet included saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, who over the next year went on to play together as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. In 1967 they were joined by fellow AACM members Joseph Jarman (saxophone) and Philip Wilson (drums), and made a number of recordings for Nessa.

As noted above, the musicians were all active multi-instrumentalists: Jarman and Mitchell's primary instruments were alto and tenor saxes, respectively, but they played many other saxophones (ranging from the tiny sopranino to the large bass), flutes and clarinets. In addition to trumpet, Bowie played flugelhorn, cornet, shofar and conch shells. Favors added touches of banjo and bass guitar. Over the years, most of the musicians dabbled on piano, synthesizer and other keyboards.

In 1969, Wilson left the group to join blues singer/harmonica player Paul Butterfield's band. That same year, the remaining group travelled to Paris [2], where they became known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The immediate impetus for the name change came from a French promoter who added “of Chicago” to their name for purely descriptive purposes, but the new name stuck because band members felt that it better reflected the cooperative nature of the group. In Paris the ensemble were based at the Théâtre des Vieux Colombier [3] and their distinctive music with percussion roles dispersed throughout the quartet was documented in a range of records on the Freedom and BYG labels. They also recorded “Comme à la radio” with Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem as a drummerless quartet before welcoming percussionist Famoudou Don Moye to the group in 1970.

In 1970 the ensemble recorded two albums with singer Fontella Bass, then Lester Bowie's wife. These were The Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass and Les Stances A Sophie. The latter was the soundtrack from the French movie of the same title. Bass' vocals, backed by the powerful pulsating push of the band has allowed the “Theme De YoYo” to remain an underground cult classic ever since.

The ensemble returned to the United States in 1972, and the quintet of Mitchell, Jarman, Bowie, Favors and Moye remained static until 1993. Upon their return to the States, they came to prominence with two major releases on Atlantic Records: Bap-Tizum and Fanfare for the Warriers. Members of the group made the decision to restrict their appearances together, allowing each player to pursue other musical interests. It seems likely that this has contributed to the longevity of the ensemble. Despite the self-imposed limitations the Art Ensemble managed to release more than 20 studio recordings and several live albums between 1972 and 2004.

The makeup of the ensemble changed in 1993, when Jarman retired from the group to focus on his practice of Zen and Aikido. Bowie died of liver cancer in 1999, and the group continued as a trio (featuring a number of guest artists in their performances) until 2003, when Jarman rejoined the ensemble. In January of 2004 Favors Maghostut died suddenly during the recording of the group's latest album, Sirius Calling. The group was joined for their 2004 tour by trumpeter Corey Wilkes and bassist Jaribu Shahid, but it remains to be seen whether they will become permanent members of the ensemble, though a 2 CD live release by this quintet from 2004 is scheduled for release in 2006 on Pi Recordings.

Ensemble members embrace the performance art aspects of their concerts, believing that they allow the band to move beyond the strict limits of “jazz”. Their operating motto is “Great Black Music: Ancient To the Future”, which allows them to explore a wide variety of musical styles and influences; the band's distinctive appearance on stage also reflects this motto. As Jarman describes it, “So what we were doing with that face painting was representing everyone throughout the universe, and that was expressed in the music as well. That's why the music was so interesting. It wasn't limited to Western instruments, African instruments, or Asian instruments, or South American instruments, or anybody's instruments.”

Immm

Scott Walker - Tilt

This ain't the Scott your mom listened to.

"Tilt was Scott Walker's first album following over a decade of silence, and whatever else he may have done during his exile, brightening his musical horizon was not on the agenda. Indescribably barren and unutterably bleak, Tilt is the wind that buffets the gothic cathedrals of everyone's favorite nightmares. The opening "Farmer in the City" sets the pace, a cinematic sweep that somehow maintains a melody beneath the unrelenting melodrama of Walker's most grotesque vocal ever. Seemingly undecided whether he's recording an opera or simply haunting one, Walker doesn't so much perform as project his lyrics, hurling them into the alternating maelstroms and moods that careen behind him. The effect is unsettling, to put it mildly. At the time of its release, reviews were undecided whether to praise or pillory Walker for making an album so utterly divorced from even the outer limits of rock reality, an indecision only compounded by its occasional (and bloody-mindedly deceptive) lurches towards modern sensibilities. "The Cockfighter" is underpinned by an intensity that is almost industrial in its range and raucousness, while "Bouncer See Bouncer" would have quite a catchy chorus if anybody else had gotten their hands on it. Here, however, it is highlighted by an Eno-esque esotericism and the chatter of tiny locusts. The crowning irony, however, is "The Patriot (A Single)," seven minutes of unrelenting funeral dirge over which Walker infuses even the most innocuous lyric ("I brought nylons from New York") with indescribable pain and suffering. Tilt is not an easy album to love; it's not even that easy to listen to. First impressions place it on a plateau somewhere between Nico's Marble Index and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music -- before long, familiarity and the elitist chattering of so many well-heeled admirers rendered both albums mere forerunners to some future shift in mainstream taste. And maybe that is the fate awaiting Tilt, although one does wonder precisely what monsters could rise from soil so belligerently barren. Even Metal Machine Music could be whistled, after all. " - Dave Thompson

Tilt

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Hymnen

For Felix. My favorite KS work and one of the most important musical constructions of the 20th century. More info about it here.

Pluramon

Albert Ayler - Love Cry

"Of all the protagonists of free jazz, Ohio-born tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936) had the shortest career (he first recorded in 1962 and committed suicide in 1970 at 34), but he nonetheless managed to articulate one of the most radical aesthetics, second only to Cecil Taylor's. He often sounded like someone who wanted to create a virtuoso art out of anti-virtuoso playing. Ayler started out playing rhythm'n'blues. By the time he landed in New York, he had developed his idiosyncratic style (notably via an unrecorded European experience with Cecil Taylor in 1962). A quartet with trumpeter Norman Howard, drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Henry Grimes recorded Spirits/ Witches and Devils (february 1964), that contains four lengthy pieces: Spirits, the twelve-minute Witches and Devils, the eleven-minute Holy Holy and Saints. Each of them sounded like it was coming from a distant past, from a remembered childhood, as it incorporated simple, naive, catchy melodies. The performance was ferocious, though, as if Ayler wanted to contrast innocence and experience, or European order and African disorder. The live Prophecy (june 1964) introduced his trio with double bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, and added Ghosts (his most famous theme), Wizard and Prophecy to his exoteric canon. That trio was responsible for one of the most revolutionary recordings of the era, Spiritual Unity (july 1964), the (brief) album that made it explicit how Ayler was not interested in creating music out of notes but out of timbres, how his music was not a harmonic construction but a "soundscape". These new versions of Ghosts, Spirits and Wizard were delivered according to an apparently demented logic that mixed melodies inspired by folk tunes and nursery rhymes with emotional bursts of saxophone noises simulating the human voice. Murray's percussions (more cymbals than drums) had little to do with keeping the time: they produced a flow of disorienting noises that intersected and amplified Ayler's saxophone noises. By now, Ayler had refined his melodramatic vibrato. The "free" approach permeated the two side-long improvisations of New York Eye And Ear Control (july 1964), AY and ITT, with the trio augmented with trumpeter Don Cherry on cornet, Roswell Rudd on trombone and John Tchicai on alto, although the result was far less tight than on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1960), proving that Ayler was a different spirit from the free-jazz crowd. The trio and Don Cherry returned to a humbler format with Vibrations/ Ghosts (september 1964), that added Children (actually just a fast variant of Holy Holy), the moving ballad Holy Spirit (with a spectacular Cherry solo), Vibrations and Mothers to the canon, and The Hilversum Session (november 1964), that introduced Angels in a tense mid-tempo version. Donald Ayler replaced Don Cherry for the one-sided LP Bells (may 1965), containing just one 20-minute track (fundamentally a madcap medley of marches and nursery rhymes) also featuring altoist Charles Tyler and bassist Lewis Worrell besides Sunny Murray. Spirits Rejoice (september 1965), particularly its title-track (performed by Donald Ayler, Sunny Murray, altoist Charles Tyler, bassists Henry Grimes and Gary Peacock), marked a transition towards a more religious mood and a regression towards the collective improvisation of New Orleans' brass bands. Spirits Rejoice basically revisited the format of Bells in a more organic and structured way, picking up along the way an impressive amount of debris of musical stereotypes. Holy Ghost (july 1967) documents a live performance with Don Ayler on trumpet, Michel Sampson on violin, Bill Folwell on bass and Milford Graves on drums (particularly Truth Is Marching In/Omega and Our Prayer). Ayler considerably toned down his music on In Greenwich Village (december 1966) and Love Cry (august 1967), that featured Donald Ayler on trumpet, Call Cobbs on harpsichord, Alan Silva on bass and Milford Graves on drums, and eventually returned to his rhythm'n'blues roots. After some kind of hippie-like spiritual crisis, Ayler turned to jazz-rock, soul and funk music, adding lyrics by a vocal singer, notably on Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe (august 1969). By employing a virtually unlimited repertory of tricks and a rich vibrato, Ayler expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone, but, most importantly, he did so while staging a multi-dimensional regression to a simpler age of music (whether the catchy folkish melodies or the military tempos or the collective improvisation of the marching bands). Ayler seemed to fuse the musical background of the pre-industrial society with an impulse towards the expressionistic cacophony of the industrial society. At the same time, his saxophone often seemed to intone shamanic invocations except to derail into frenzied explosions of vitality. Underlying all these contradictions was Ayler's exploration of sound for the sake of sound, that accounted for a completely new idea of music, away from the pillars of harmony, melody and rhythm. That was, ultimately, an exploration of the human psyche. Thus, at several levels of introspection and metaphor, Ayler's art was a mirror of society. Ayler's was the music of the collective unconscious." - Scaruffi

He once said the patch in his goatee was evidence that God had marked him as someone who would change the course of history. He was right.

Love Cry

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Elektronische Musik 1952-1960

It's Stockhausen dammit, nothing more needs to be said. Includes brilliant performances of "Gesang der Jünglinge", "Kontakte" and "Etude".

Teutonic master

Supersilent - 1

Supersilent are:

Helge Sten (electronics, guitars, keyboards)

Ståle Storløkken (keyboards, synth, electronics)

Jarle Vespestad (drums)

Arve Henriksen (trumpet, voice, drums, electronics)

Cream of the crop of Scandinavian jazz and avant garde scenes, Supersilent play an incredibly energetic mixture of free improvisation with fearsome sound processing and inner ear-burning analog circuitry dead in the center.

"In the course of these long improvisations (each disc contains a track at least 25 minutes long and many others reach 15 minutes), the group moves through countless moods, drawing from ecstatic jazz, avant rock, noise, and electro-acoustics to produce captivating music that pushes far into experimentation and yet remains immediate, even at times accessible." - François Couture

This is the first album of the initial trilogy.

Audio Virus

Nico - The Marble Index

You can't hype this, son. Just download and listen. Intently.

Memento Hodie