Category Archives: UPDATE

Jari Pitkänen – ‘Siam Soul’
[EN] A prequel to Anima Ombra, Siam Soul blends lost sounds from 70s and 80s into an uplifting mashup album, reminiscent of positive memories from our glory teenage summer days. [PT] Precedente ao Anima Ombra, Siam Soul mistura sons perdidos dos anos 70 e 80 num album de mashups, reminescente das memórias positivas dos tempos áureos de verão da nossa juventude.

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Justin Scott Gray – ‘Adult Music’ C24/CD $5/$6
“Roomy acoustic instrumentation cascades with triumphant synth swells and melodic post-rock… 6 instrumentals & 2 vocal-based songs…. Physical copies include a new 24 minute downloadable EP of field recordings. // 20 half black & half white tapes, packed in an O-card with glossy card + 30 inkjet print CD’s, packed in a recycled chipboard sleeve with glossy insert.”

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Mole People – ‘Red Reflector’ 7” $6
like the 1950s dragged into 2013. blown-out and pawn-shopped up. big guitars, rumbling base, digging drums and jagged singing = sludge grunge pop. pushing the stab rock formula of eerily quiet calm and brick thick loud apart while exploring themes of control, isolation, devolution and bravery. // 300 black vinyl 7”, color cover, lyric sheet, digital download.

Raven – ‘Louder Than Bombs’ C22/CDr/t-Shirt $5-12
an onslaught of harsh noize and feedback from serbia. blasting chaos and scorching sound. buzzing, like a nuclear plant melting down, the dials dissolving, fear mounting as alarms screech their dying breath. // 50 red tapes with color covers, 10 cd-rs with meat collage cover, various colored t-shirts.

The Dictaphone – ‘The Dictaphone’ C28 $5
our favorite french glue-wave band returns with a slew of dirty, pummeling synth punk tunes. partially live, grinding songs, melodies screaming from help from inside the fire. // 100 blue tapes, black and white covers, photo insert.

Nature Camp – ‘Bot’ C38 $5
long awaited tape proving that space is the place and its more warped than you think. a menagerie of twisted melodies, feedback squawks and delayed suspende disbelief. shimmering and stimming. // 100 blue tapes, color covers.

Mole People – ‘Mole Scroll’ C40 $5
the stab rock opera so to speak, 20 sparkling grimy songs each based on a mole poem. a dark, strange voyage down, creep rock opus focusing in on the small amount of light and hope available. // 100 black tapes with glow-in-the-dark labels, color cover, mini 20-page poem book.

Horse Thieves – ‘Horse Thieves’ C20 $5
haunting, guilty country punk, enough slide hooks to cut hands, sad songs to walk down dusty roads to with the blood moon hanging low in the sky, (part of the ttp classic olympia reissue project) // 50 blue foil tapes, color covers, inert.

Corpulent Cranium/Mole People/Swindlella/Llung split C20 $5
4 weird bands playing weird music for 5 minutes each on 1 tape. mole people hiss black metal love song, corpulent cranium brings a voodoo ceremony, llung sings sadly as the coffin closes, swindlella threatens to explode. // 100

Minthill – ‘Mintville’ C22 $5
ghostly enchanting songs, keyboreds on melancholia, machine thumping, warped loops, windy vocals on an autumn night, cloud and rain looming. (part of the ttp classic olympia reissue project) // 100 blue foil tapes, black/white cover, insert.

Blood Lake – ‘I Sincerely Want To Move To The Mountains’ C57 $5
sad, haunting casio tracks from florian edge of continent. gillman reaches for the pretty girl in 1950 black and white movie, ocean crashes in, drowned microphones, mermaid escapes. // 100 white tapes, black/white covers.

Mole People – ‘Mole People’ C20 $5
first mole people tracks, the screams echo off the tunnel walls and downwards as the guitars beat you down, dark days and the search for light begins, dreams start here. // repress of 100 black tapes, silk-screened cover, lyric sheet.

Rubella – ‘William Whale (10-year anniversary)’ CDr $5
the grave of the actual man, william whale, inspired this album, it follows the struggle of man and beast and their way down, physically and emotionally. // limited edition of 20 silver cd-rs with color photo/lyric book, numbered color insert and a small bag of soft lake erie sea glass.

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rawmean – ‘SELFSAME FORMS’ C15 $3
Album art courtesy of the esteemed Jay Bonner. rawmean is the live-looping project of San Francisco-based musician Ramin Rahni (duckyousucker). Contact mic’d tupperware clicks, thumps, and loops like a soulful drum machine, while heavily processed guitars and found sounds sing synthetic. Out of these textures, grooves materialize, like familiar shapes emerging in the clouds.

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RASHAD BECKER – ‘Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I’ LP
‘Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I’ is a devastating display of potential which ensures a journey unlike any you have encountered. In the vast world of electronic music, where sounds, signifiers and gesture’s are recontextualized to a numbing degree it is increasingly rare and refreshing to encounter a release as perspective distorting as the debut full length release by Rashad Becker. The album is a masterpiece of focussed non-referential electronic environments. It is is both warm, alien, paranoid and exhilarating. Sounds are stretched in the most unusual manner, foreign bodies are frequent and the structure is simply bewildering. Split into ‘Themes and Dances’, the 8 tracks guide the listener through Becker’s brave new world. Despite being entirely synthetic there are sounds which appear like a distortion of the world around us, on occasion ‘voice-like’ sounds are present, elsewhere there appears the sound of cicada’s, only these cicada’s are made of mercury and swim through time. The end result is beautiful in a way only a unique work of art can be. PAN is proud to present the outside from within. The LP is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g vinyl. It is packaged in a pro-press color jacket which itself is housed in a silkscreened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas.

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HEL006 Corduroi – ‘Jangala’
Fractured beats & pleasant melodies from Austin, TX’s Cody Wilson.

HEL007 Moonlets/Ben Q Best split
Meditative rhythmic ambient music.

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Love Cop – ‘2 True/2 Real’
Prolific lo-fi pop princes, Love Cop, return with their third album of 2013 and it’s their best, clearest, and most sinister release to date. After two prior high selling tapes for Gnar, “2 True / 2 Real” has been released by the esteemed Burger Records and contains hit after hit after hit of burner-boy love pop. Love Cop is a duo from the shadowy warehouse rows of the Central Eastside Industrial District of Portland, OR. Born and raised in New York, then relocated to the Northwest, Duffy Rongiiland and Phil Salina are creating some of the best stoner goth, beat-brat, dark pop happening now. Like a beautiful mutt child of Beat Happening, Television Personalities, and The Jesus and Mary Chain albums, Love Cop’s newest swooner, “2 True / 2 Real”, is a bedroom pop masterpiece of dark and romantic intentions. Toning down on the cheeky and manic themes of their prior releases and dialing down the distortion for a more open-hearted and focused set of headphone-pop love songs, Love Cop prove on this one that they are as diverse as they are determined. This is for all the dark ones out there getting dreamy this Summer.

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Bridgetown #100 Kevin Greenspon + Former Selves – ‘Betrayed by the Angels/Apropos of Golden Dreams’ split LP
For their second split release together, Kevin Greenspon and Paul Skomsvold have written and recorded a pair of miniature albums that seamlessly fold into each other, serving as the definitive work by both artists. Together, the two halves embody the spirit and structure of classical scores and film soundtracks using the vocabulary of ambient, new age, harsh noise and the various other experimental genres the artists have operated within for the past several years. Arranged over the span of a year, Greenspon’s “Betrayed by the Angels” is a personal reflection on finding where one belongs in the chaos of leaving. The story is told by an intimate orchestra of guitar and synthesizer voices singing out against a backdrop of crackling rumble. Emerging from the wreckage, Former Selves presents three of his finest compositions yet. Each piece that comprises “Apropos of Golden Dreams” is a graceful dive into the timelessness of hope and beauty, reenacted by the comfort of piano keys and a dizzying whirl of euphoric melody. Both sides are driven by emotional experiences in the search for a feeling that can’t be found on the outside and ends with the ultimate realization that the root of happiness and growth comes from within. Limited to 550 12″ vinyl records with metallic silver labels, packaged in extra thick heavyweight jackets with matte UV finish. Includes digital download card.

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Cubs – ‘Perpetual Light’ 3″EP
Rusted Rail is proud to announce the release of “Perpetual Light” a ten-track 3inch extended player by folk voyagers Cubs. Recorded in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England and Sweden, “Perpetual Light” emerges as a loose sequel to their “Willowfield” EP from 2012. Traversing territories and sonic space, inhabited by ghosts, birds and bells, this 3” EP is housed in a hand-assembled and hand-stamped card sleeve featuring a cover photo of a Super8 still from a film by Cecilia Danell.

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Terence Hannum – ‘Dread Majesty’ CS/newspaper
Terence Hannum’s solo work and Locrian output has put him in the conversation as one the most exciting artists creating dark experimental music today, and his newest solo effort out May 7 underscores that further. ‘Dread Majesty,’ the second installment in Hannum’s cassette/newspaper series, drifts into rhythmic territory and is denser than last year’s ‘In The Sign,’ also released on Accidental Guest. The two pieces on ‘Dread Majesty’ concentrate on textures that build up within this 20 minute cassette. A-side, “The Idea of the Sacred,” begins with a rhythmic loop that explodes into menacing synths. Hannum continues to explore new territory on the B-side, “Up to the Threshold,” which draws influences from the avant spectrum of black metal and bits of modern composition. Hannum finds the right balance somewhere between Beemask, Ramleh, and Ildjarn to create something completely new on this cassette. ‘Dread Majesty’ is a triumph and a highlight in Terence Hannum’s growing discography. ‘Dread Majesty’ features a selection of magazine collages done by Terence Hannum that juxtapose excised heads of hair over sutured summits and icy landscapes. Their enigmatic titles “The Immaterial”, “Architecture of the Air” and “Artificial Infinite” harken towards the classic conceptions of the sublime as a place where enormity erases identity. In “Dread Majesty” this classic conception is revisited and updated with the imagery of faceless and anonymous heads floating over immense extreme nature scenes to isolate the vastness and isolate the individual experience.

No Paris – ‘Cimmerian’ CS
‘Cimmerian’ is the debut release by No Paris. The music here occupies a space between nervous tensions and a mind drifting into an abyss. It’s not too far off from experiencing moments in a David Lynch film where the camera takes you into an isolated crevice creating a claustrophobic effect that is as much terrifying as it is exhilarating. The opener “Deep (End)” takes a pulsating bass sequence and bounces the delays between your ears, constantly building in dynamic. It’s a bit like Steve Reich if Music for 18 Musicians was written 100 years into the future. The minimal/ambient arrangements work great against harsh subway commuting or long stretches of highway, but, if you are the adventurous type, try listening to a track like “Expectation” late at night, in the dark, with the volume turned way up. The damp brooding atmospheres take on a punishing doppelganger appearance, familiar, but much more sinister. No Paris slowly pulls you in until you realize you’re all alone, staring into the void and if there’s something out in the dark, it’s staring directly back at you.

S.W.I.M. – ‘Harm Reducer’ CS
SWIM’s artworks are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. SWIM’s works sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. By manipulating the listener to create confusion, SWIM formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages.
SWIM’s works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, he creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used. SWIM’s works are notable for their perfect finish and tactile nature. SWIM’s is of great importance and bears witness to great craftsmanship. By focusing on techniques and materials, he tries to create works in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.

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