Category Archives: UPDATE

Loner Deluxe – ‘Snowed Under’
Rusted Rail is proud to announce the release of “Snowed Under” by Loner Deluxe, the winter sequel to the summer release of “The Coast is Clear”. “Snowed Under” is home to three free/name-your-price songs on Bandcamp and this Digital Cassingle finds Loner Deluxe delving deep into extraterrestrial grooves, sonic space and UFOlk – staring at the night sky in hope. The cover image of this release is a sequel to the image of “The Coast is Clear” – its the same lake that Loner Deluxe is gazing at but the warm summer waters have turned to ice. Lead track “Winters Last Fire” had the honour of being included on Volume 7 of An Taobh Tuathail compiled by taste-making broadcaster Cian Ó Cíobháin, nestled alongside such artists as Sufjan Stevens, Colleen and Nils Frahm. This is the first time the song has been available on its own, but its not alone as its in good company with “Holding Pattern” and “We Saw No Stars” combining to make up “Snowed Under” – cosmic electronica with a human touch.

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PROMUTE/HOMOGENIZED TERRESTRIALS – ‘INFRARED DYNAMO’ C30 $5
C30 cassette, hand-painted & numbered. Limited to 50 copies. Homemade instruments drinking sunshine in a light-less labyrinth of sound. These tapes are the second pair of a series of 8 tapes. All cassettes are hand-painted and numbered and come with download codes.

CARL KRUGER/NJ9842 – ‘1/11-GR opal’ C30 $5
C30 cassette, hand-painted & numbered. Limited to 50 copies. Gurgling wooden golems reciting stuttered fragments of form. These tapes are the second pair of a series of 8 tapes. All cassettes are hand-painted and numbered and come with download codes.

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La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela – ‘Dream House 78’17″‘ LP
This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the 70s. La Monte Young, widely acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, is one of the most influential contemporary composers. Yet he has strictly monitored his own discography and his music is rarely heard. Born in a log cabin in rural Idaho in 1935, Young became a key figure in the New York underground art scene of the early 1960s. He made vital contributions to the Fluxus movement and initiated the use of lofts as performance venues. Most important of all, his exploration of sustained tones, unorthodox tuning, high volume and long duration changed the course of twentieth-century music and ushered in new ways of listening. This LP, initially issued on the French Shandar label in 1973, is a crucial document, preserving two manifestations of Young’s pioneering creative imagination. Each side stretches out to the standard length of an entire long-playing record. Listening to the sounds captured in each groove you are lifted out of routine temporality into a prolonged and personal here and now, an intimate kind of time that no clocks can measure. On the first side is a performance by the Theatre of Eternal Music, the group which Young formed specifically to realise his radical musical conception. The name was coined in February 1965 to indicate that this ecstatic droning music had neither beginning nor end, that it came from and returned to a state of silence, where it lingers in its full potential until some musicians play its component tones once again. The group’s line-up, which changed over the years but always featured Young and his partner Marian Zazeela, boasted such luminaries of new music as Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and John Cale. Cale carried lessons learnt from Young into his work with the Velvet Underground, and through that seminal group to new generations of indie rockers and noise experimentalists. On this recording the voices of Young and Zazeela are combined with the trombone of Garrett List and the trumpet of Jon Hassell, now more widely known through his work with Brian Eno. Although the immediate impression created by the music is that it changes little, close listening reveals intricate activity in the high harmonics where unexpected patterns and phantom melodies skitter across the surface of the music’s enveloping drone. Young and Zazeela developed their vocal technique through intensive study with North Indian singing master Pandit Pran Nath, and traces of that influence can be heard in their subtle ornamentation of the sustained tones. Sine waves provide the basic threads that hold together The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys. Sine waves unadorned form the Drift Study on the second side of the LP. Such pieces were conceived as continuous sound environments. Since 1962 Young has nurtured the notion of a Dream House, in which such work might be installed, playing continuously and taking on a life of its own. To a seated listener this Drift Study appears a very pure form of minimalist musical drone, but move around the space in which the piece is playing and you will hear dramatic variation in the loudness of different frequencies, while your movement will itself alter the structure of air molecules in the room, affecting the way the piece is heard. It’s a fascinating probe into the nature of sound, hearing and spatial awareness. The Shandar label, under the musical direction of French musicologist Daniel Caux, produced a small but select catalogue. It includes recordings by Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, Philip Glass, Cecil Taylor, Steve Reich and Charlemagne Palestine. During the early 1970s this was the cutting edge of new music, and today these recordings are still challenging, uplifting and revelatory. This reissue preserves the original artwork, an integral part of that special Shandar magic but also a fine example of the design sense and calligraphic grace that Marian Zazeela has brought to the presentation of La Monte Young’s singular music. ‘My own feeling is that if people aren’t carried away to heaven I’m failing,’ La Monte Young in 1966

Steve Reich – ‘Four Organs/Phase Patterns’ LP
This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the 70s. In recent decades Steve Reich’s music has been presented internationally at major venues, performed by high-profile musicians including the Kronos Quartet, guitarist Pat Metheny, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. But in 1970, when the music on this LP was recorded, Reich’s audiences gathered in museums and art galleries to hear his work interpreted by the composer himself and a group of friends. ‘I am interested in perceptible processes’ Reich had written in 1968. ‘I want to be able to hear the processes happening throughout the sounding music.’ Four Organs is a radical realisation of this goal. Against the steady rattle of maracas, individual tones within a single chord are gradually lengthened. No changes of pitch or timbre occur, and the drawn out nature of the process provoked outrage at some early performances, when audiences found themselves caught up in a decelerating loop, being dragged towards stasis. Phase Patterns, composed a month later, relies on a phasing technique developed during Reich’s earlier experiments with magnetic tape recordings, which he allowed to drift out of sync. Identical figures initially in unison shift out of phase, generating unexpected patterns. When these pieces first appeared, on the adventurous French record label Shandar, they were regarded as defining works within a musical movement that had developed during the late 1960s. Reich was seen as a pioneer of minimalism, along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, whose music also featured in the Shandar catalogue. With hindsight the term is inadequate and inappropriate when applied to much of Reich’s subsequent oeuvre, which includes rich and varied works such as The Desert Music for voices and orchestra, Tehillim – a setting of Psalms, and his multimedia opera The Cave. But these two works from 1970 are purely minimalist, in a way that the visual artists and sculptors who formed Reich’s early audiences would have recognised. These pieces may have clear affinity with conceptual art as well as the minimalist aesthetic, but Reich’s allegiance is to making music rather than sound art or acoustic research. Characteristically, after creating Four Organs Reich looked for antecedents in musical history, and found them in the medieval organa of Léonin and Pérotin. His subsequent work has found acceptance and a substantial following within the established institutions of composed music. He has become a major composer. In the same year that these Four Organs and Phase Patterns were written Reich travelled to Ghana to study with a master drummer. On his return to New York he started work on Drumming, an hour-long distillation of his interest in African and Balinese music and their polyrhythmic processes. It forms an impressive culmination to his use of phasing technique and is widely acknowledged as a minimalist masterpiece. But if it is the radical edge of uncompromising hardcore minimalism that you are after, this reissue of Four Organs and Phase Patterns delivers two key examples. ‘Obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy’ Steve Reich in 1969.

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bm09 – SAMMARTANO – ‘Low Pitched Italy’ LP
“Low Pitched Italy” is Sammartano’s debut album. Already known as the drummer of the cult Italian act Cannibal Movie and as well part of Black Moss team for his precious support on stage for our Donato Epiro’s “Fiume Nero” live set. Son of the outskirts, cellars and ruined buildings of Taranto, maybe the toughest and weirdest city in South Italy, he tells stories that talk about dreams (nightmares?) of new migrations, ancient legends of travelships foreword the “old” America, visions of giant women like the Statue of Liberty which breats originates flares and fireworks that light up the night, and tons and tons of humans that raise dust only. A post atomic music where Hip Hop scrap stand out on a raw low-fi industrial dub arrangement. Imagine Industrial Records commission a Rap album to James Ferraro and Spencer Clark’s Skaters… or Wolf Eyes jamming with Wu Tang Clan. limited to 300 copies.

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Shadow Band/King Darves/quit/Human Adult Band 7″ $5
This is a group owned compilation made by bands and artists brought together in the eclectic underground of New Brunswick, NJ after the turn of the century. A collective spirit brings brand new tracks by each artist/group. Side A offers the folk side of the spectrum. Side B offers the rock side of the spectrum.

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Eaton Flowers CS
A limited engagement involving five installments aimed at highlighting an eclectic selection of artists operating in Portland, Oregon. Notably singular in their respective approaches, these artist were chosen as much for their distinct points of view as for the shared root idiom from which they project. Only 25 copies of this release exist. Each is numbered, in print, on the cassette B side label, and on the inside panel of the j-card.

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FH060 ‘Half A Decade of Chrome: Field Hymns Comp Majeure‘ 2CS $12
It’s a future best-of-best-of: 26 unreleased tracks by members of the Field Hymns family, available here for the first time. Who needs a collection of past hits? NOT US. Bring us the future, man.

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Alizter James & the Plastic Uno (band) – ‘SPICY SESSIONS’
Represents Alizter James’ compilation and mixing of tracks recorded for the great, conceptual & unreleased PLASTIC UNO (band) album, SPICY TIMES IN TACO TOWN. Will the UNO set ever see the light of day? No one knows…more than two years of recording, mixing, and dreaming have gotten the UNO gang no where…we reckon every group has their own “Smile” to contend with and this is ours…

Alizter James – ‘ALIZTER’S ALBUM’
is a collection of songs, demos, and experiments. James loves to comically pander to the rawk crowd every now & then…thus the “classic” 90s vibe…

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Head Of Wantastiquet/Dire Wolves split CS
DIRE WOLVES (San Francisco) were manifested in 2008 by Jeffrey Alexander (Black Forest/Black Sea, Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Iditarod) to explore the thick freerock krausen borne of a deep history of electronic folk experimentation. Joined by travelers from Fever Witch, Caroliner Rainbow and Faun Fables, The Dire Wolves Absolutely Perfect Brothers Band brew an overblown kosmische folk improv, “splicing the DNA of MV & EE, Pharoah Sanders and Sonic Youth, honing in on the heavy kraut psych of early 70s Amon Duul II, in a way that neatly bridges the gap between Burnt Hills’ profound freeform primitivism and Desmadrados Soldados de Ventura’s enlightened groove-locked chaos” (Psi Lab). HEAD OF WANTASTIQUET (Berlin) is Paul LaBrecque’s (Sunburned Hand of the Man, Astral Blessing) solo shaman body melt unit. The music is a thoroughly Modern/NOW take on the early minimalist experiments of John Cale’s Sun Blindness tapes, projected through a prism that refracts into hallucinatory images of Andrew Wyeth and Caspar Friedrich, the temporal finality of Altamont and Kenneth Anger, the bare feet grounded to the soil of Träd Gräs och Stenar, and the beautiful desolation of Doc Boggs’ early 20th century Appalachian hollers.

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BOND007: The Mothership Collective – ‘Ghetto Galactic’ C76 $6
The Mothership Collective is back with their second tape Ghetto Galactic. It is the follow up to their critically acclaimed cassette All Nigga Radio. Be prepared to have your tape decks and MP3 players invaded with futuristic hip hop, funktech and alien soul. Features Rhymes by Mothership Collective Members and guest Emcees!

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