Peals — the Baltimore-based ambient duo comprising William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger) — released the digital reissue of Seltzer, a rarity previously available only as a 2015 limited-edition cassette. Far removed from the high-energy bombast of their primary rock outfits, Peals focuses on intimacy, loops, and texture. Seltzer serves as a time capsule of the duo’s prolific 2013–2014 period, capturing the “fermentation of improvisation” that would eventually lead to their sophomore LP, Honey.
The release is structurally fascinating. While Side B, “Before and After,” acts as a seamless mixtape of home experiments, Side A documents a unique site-specific collaboration with multimedia artist Zoe Friedman inside Baltimore’s…
Category: reissue
“An integral factor behind the production of Abacab was Hugh Padgham, an engineer responsible for the ‘gated reverb’ drum sound that defined the 1980s. As a result, Phil Collins’ drums have incredible definition across this entire pressing. Tony Banks’ keyboards often reside upfront in the mix, occasionally creeping in and out three-dimensionally during the title track or lush chords filling up the soundstage on ‘Keep It Dark.’ A massive highlight is ‘Dodo/Lurker,’ where Mike Rutherford’s bass is at its deepest, and the varying tonality of Collins’ vocals gives the different parts of the track a distinguishable characterization.”
Certified multi-platinum-selling in several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, Genesis’ album Abacab…
“Nothng but manna from analog heaven can be found within the balance of Analogue Productions’ year-long-plus Atlantic 75 anniversary reissue series … but to my ears, the crème de la crème of the lot are all the reissuances culled from the prime, more progressive-leaning ’70s era of the Genesis catalog. … A few highlights to whet your aural whistle: 1) Mike Rutherford’s high-pitched, 12-string acoustic guitarwork and the overall rise/fall drama of “The Musical Box” (LP1, Side 1, Track 1, November 1971’s Nursery Cryme). 2) The full majesty of Tony Banks’ lengthy piano intro (and outro!) and Steve Hackett’s career-defining guitar solo on “Firth of Fifth” (LP1, Side 2, Track 1, September 1973’s Selling England by the Pound). 3) Peter Gabriel’s pleading lead vocals…
…featuring new interpretations, rare B sides and unreleased archival gems.
Rivers of the Red Planet, the new LP from Berlin upstart Max Graef, hearkens back to an era when the album served the fundamental statement of a musician’s aesthetic. This is in no small part due to the young producer’s diverse ear. Graef has been making waves in the underground house world, but as he recently told, he spends most of his money on old records he can’t play in clubs. Rivers, meanwhile, was originally conceived as an instrumental hip-hop album. It has a loose, smoky feel that owes as much to beatmakers like Madlib or J Dilla as it does to any house producer. A casual synthesis of dusty jazz, hip-hop and house, Rivers speaks to Graef’s formidable talent.
Legendary French industrial pioneers Vox Populi! arrive on Dark Entries with a reissue of Sucre De Pastèque. Vox Populi! was founded in Paris in 1981 by Axel Kyrou, a multi-instrumentalist of Greek, French, and Palestinian roots. He soon recruited his future partner, Mitra, and her brother Arash Khalatbari, who were born in Iran and came to Paris in their teens, as well as bassist Fr6 Man (Francis Manne).
Their sound was motley, combining elements of musique concrete and early industrial with horns, flutes, and traditional Persian instrumentation. Improbably prolific and ceaselessly divergent, Vox Populi! found their way onto dozens of cassette compilations during the heyday of the 1980s DIY tape music scene, including releases…
The infectious energy and bombastic grooves of jazz/soul drummer/band leader Makaya McCraven are channelled into the most focused and cohesive overall recording of his career so far on Universal Beings. That the sound quality is more pristine than previous releases certainly helps — it’s no easy feat to get this kind of clarity on a live recording — but it’s the songs themselves that feel the most honed.
While the music is clearly rooted in jazz, the influences on this ensemble’s sound are vast and worldly, if not measurably universal. With “Black Lion,” McCraven and company tap into the deep pocket and simple repetitive hooks of hip-hop, while allowing room for jazzy flourishes filled with subtle nuance to sub in for the absent vocals. Elsewhere, surprisingly baroque violin…
There are few bands like Sand. Borrowing from jazz, industrial, techno and post-punk, somehow everything is mixed up to produce some seriously bowel-shifting grooves. Their 1999 debut Beautiful People Are Evil sees the York band still working on their formula which had been perfected by the time of 2002 follow-up Still Born Alive.
Sand musically walk the line between different worlds. They have played with, on the one hand, dance artists such as Robert Hood, Patrick Pulsinger, Andy Weatherall and Carl Craig and on the other hand with groups such as God Speed You Black Emperor, Squarepusher , Add N to X and ESG. Sand play diverse live events. They have performed on stage with the Karas Dance Company in Tokyo (where they played onstage with…
…includes two new, never released songs.
Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band — named for a river outside St. Petersburg, Russia — filled last year’s eye-opening Down the River of Golden Dreams with gentle ballads about beds and war criminals and forgiveness, but the songs on their follow-up EP, Sleep and Wake Up Songs, are more brittle and fragile, like a light sleeper’s snooze. The EP condenses the album’s best qualities and discards most of its weaknesses, and its brevity makes it all the more emotionally forceful.
“Rapt, in Star Wars sheets/ With my hand across your belly/ We waded through the watercolor,” Will Sheff sings on opener “A Favor”. The song…
35th Anniversary reissue of Oscar-winning composer Maurice Jarre’s original motion picture score to the 1990 thriller ‘Jacob’s Ladder’.
…Jacob’s Ladder was an exercise in surreal, psychological horror – a tale of a Vietnam veteran haunted by dark, unexplained visions. Legendary composer Maurice Jarre provided a fitting score packed with unusual flourishes, from unique instruments to haunting electronic work by Michael Boddicker, a notable synth player on works by Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and others.
Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, Danny Aiello and Macaulay Culkin (whose career was about to go supernova within weeks of this film’s release thanks to Home Alone) starred, and Jarre’s fusion of electronics and orchestral ideas was…
Karl Bartos, renowned as an essential member and songwriter of Kraftwerk during their most innovative years, is reissuing his solo album Communication on Hamburg’s Bureau B. First released in 2003, 13 years after leaving the legendary electronic group, the re-release arrives at a moment when its central theme, the transformation of culture through electronic media, feels more relevant than ever.
When Bartos departed Kraftwerk in 1990, he left behind a catalogue that had redefined electronic music: “The Model”, “The Robots”, “Numbers”, “Pocket Calculator” and many more bear his imprint as co-writer and melody-maker. 2021 Kraftwerk’s classic line-up was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for their innovative work…
…featuring six bonus tracks (and one song replaced).
Neil Young’s sixth studio album, 1975’s Tonight’s the Night, closed out the singer-songwriter’s so-called Ditch Trilogy. 1972’s country-rock landmark Harvest catapulted Young to superstardom, yielding the chart-topping single “Heart of Gold” and becoming the U.S.’ best-selling album of 1972. But he wasn’t comfortable with everything that fame brought, and his successive albums replaced the wistful glow and commercial sheen of Harvest with something altogether darker. Tonight’s the Night followed Time Fades Away (1973) and On the Beach (1974) in the trilogy, though Beach was actually recorded after Tonight’s.
The raw, unvarnished music of Tonight’s…
A spellbinding five-CD box set Archives Box 1983-2005 documenting the entire enigmatic production of one of the missing links in experimental electronic and prototypical industrial music: Anne Gillis. From her groundbreaking 1983 Devil’s Picnic release through her 2005 installations and exhibitions, this comprehensive collection unveils the hidden world of a visionary French composer whose work anticipated much of what would follow in electroacoustic composition and sound art.
Since the early 1980s, Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems, pursuing the smallest of impulses to their logical end-points. Her work exists in a space simultaneously quotidian and theatrical, transforming spoken word, breathing, and singing into blurred noise…
In the uncompromising world of Muslimgauze, few releases capture the raw urgency and political fire of Bryn Jones’s vision as powerfully as No Human Rights for Arabs in Israel. Now returning via MG Archive Vol. 033 as a double CD in a limited edition of 200 manually screen-printed copies, this confrontational masterpiece stands as one of the most rhythmically relentless and politically potent works in the entire Muslimgauze catalog. The album’s genesis reflects the chaotic creative process that defined Jones’s approach: Staalplaat received two DATs bearing the same provocative title but containing different content—overlapping in places yet distinct enough to warrant this expanded double CD presentation. The result is a work that captures Muslimgauze at his most focused…
On November 6, 2018, trumpeter Jaimie Branch was onstage in Paris, France, screeching out the blues with her quartet. The music was more somber than the jam-based jazz that marked the New York native’s impressive debut album, 2017’s Fly or Die. At the same time, voters in the United States shuttled to the polls for midterm elections. The music was a plea for them to do the right thing. “The blues we played was far from where it got to on the album,” Branch writes in the liner notes of her second record, Fly or Die II: bird dogs of paradise. “But the sentiment remained: It’s a prayer for amerikkka…” In its finished form, the 11-minute “prayer for amerikkka pt 1 & 2” — positioned near the beginning of Fly or Die II — is the album’s centerpiece; its plodding…
To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 is the first full-length release by a British artist to appear on International Anthem, but even a single listen makes it clear why the Chicago-based label was drawn to it: however much these eleven pieces by Manchester-born, London-based tenor saxophonist Alabaster DePlume (real name Angus Fairbairn) might sit comfortably within a certain sub-genre of jazz, they sound like little else currently available. Much of that has to do with the generally hushed pitch of the performances but even more the fragile quiver of his saxophone.
Interestingly, while the album is cohesive, it couples instrumentals that appeared on three earlier releases — Copernicus (2012), The Jester (2013), and Peach (2015) — with two new pieces…
Over the past few years Acid Jazz has been the proud custodian of the legendary Albarika Store label, which produced some of the finest, deepest West African cuts of the last century. The mainstay of the Albarika sound was the mighty T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, who were prolific throughout the label’s activity from the late ‘60s to the early ’80s.
When they reformed for their first-ever European tour in 2009, Benin’s T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo underscored their status as one of the all-time greats of West African music.
Formed in 1968 by bandleader Clément Mélomé, their rare alchemy of scorched funk and driving Afrobeat didn’t just defy a repressive political system; across fifty studio albums, it revealed a group infinitely worthy of the world stage.