Bloodlust!

B!168 Sleep Museum – ‘Forschung’ 5CD
A BloodShop! webstore exclusive — This set will not be available from record stores, webstores, distros, etc. Pre-orders now available with T-Shirt size selection function. At the bottom of the webstore listing you will be given the option to select a T-shirt size from Adult Small to Adult XXXL before you add the set to your shopping cart. Pre-orders will close on (or before) AUGUST 15, 2013 (based upon availability), at which time the shirts will be printed. Anticipated to ship in early September. In the works since late-2010, BloodLust! is pleased to finally make the “Forschung” set available. “Forschung” is the darkest and most experimental Sleep Museum material to date. On the five CDs in this box set, Sleep Museum launches itself into the abyss, exploring questions of identity/non-identity, death, suicide, pain and despair, through a series of tracks that use intense analog synthesized music, dark ambiance, noise, and vocals, to summon the chasm inside. The music on these five albums is most closely related to the long-form synth recordings included on each of the four previous Sleep Museum CDs on BloodLust!: “Core,” “Anasthesia,” “Replica,” and “Home,” however, Sleep Museum’s Robert Anthony has ventured much further into the abyss, this time around. These are very experimental compositions and might not be for the faint of heart. Those looking for minimal-synth-by-numbers might be advised to search elsewhere! Limited Edition of 100 sets.

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777 was 666

777-021 Psycodrama – ‘Live at the Asylum’ CDr
The very first and rare live audio release by Nazi Scum ZZ Top, PSYCODRAMA featuring Ms. Lisa Carver. Also includes 2 unreleased tracks by SUCKDOG. Pro-CDR housed in a printed cardboard sleeve. Comes with artwork insert. Limited to 100 copies. America is Homosexual.

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Fabrica

AERONAUT – ‘Your Space Transmissions Listening Kit’ CD
aeronautcdAeronaut is Steve Fors, a multi-instrumentalist and composer from Brooklyn, NY. Also member of the Chicago-based drone/noise outfit, The Golden Sores, he’s been experimenting with long-form song structures since 1995. In his current work, he is interested in exploring the relationship between sound and time; specifically how sustained fields of sound can alter our temporal perception and physical awareness. A perfect follow-up to 2012’s “Coronal Mass” limited-edition cassette which quickly sold out upon release, “Your Space Transmissions Listening Kit” is comprised of four 15-minute pieces depicting the journey of a lone astronaut into deep space, as imagined by a 7 year-old boy. The album is meant to be a document of the past, specifically of his past as a boy imagining the perils and grandeur of space travel. Each song is a sonic expression of a moment in the spaceman’s travels: Preflight/Launch, My First Spacewalk, Through the Oort Cloud, and Into the Magellanic Stream. Audio mastered by James Plotkin. Professionally duplicated CD edition of 100. Comes in a four-panel wallet with anaglyph and 3d glasses.

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Divorce Records

JFM – ‘JFM’ LP
ynn6_dimentias_1JFM is the solo electronics project of Toronto sound and visual artist Jesse Matthews. A nomadic creator, he navigates the outer sound waves, plucking bits and pieces of junk noise from the sonic ether as he drifts. Sure, he is traveling light: just a sampler full of useless memories from the radio, birds from the park where he slept, dudes at a party, squealing feedback to stab at your ears, bass and drums lifted off a dance club from way down the street at weed alley, whatever. Everything has changed, you know? Now it’s all just electronic music for time gamblers and backwoods tweakers. I mean, Jesse and our pal Evan recorded some of this album from a remote control toy boat in a duck pond. Can you hear the black flies swarm as the sun comes up on their all night jam? It’s right there. Watch their eye lids gently close as those rays of light start beating down. Will you wade into J fm’s mind and feel around as he dreams music into colour, taste and matter? THE DOOR IS OPEN. Edition of 300 vinyl copies.

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Spring Break Tapes

Auxiliary Priest $7
Space travel is hard on sound. Bellows crackling, synthesizers on their last legs and found sound recordings stretched way past their breaking point. Are those gamma burst transmissions in the aviary? We think of sound as waves in space, but it’s also a living record of events. Maybe you remember. The shared sensory memory of the universe exists as background noise, captured by magnetic tape. Listen carefully. We’ve been down this path. Auxiliary Priest. Extending humanity’s reach into space and time. (Headphones recommended) Edition of 100. Comes with digital download. SBT009. First 20 orders come with a classic black patch, hand stamped in silver with the Auxiliary Priest logo.

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Like Young

Working Girls – ‘Your Voice’
1Languid synthpop is nothing if not the go-to aesthetic for lo-fi bedroom artists toiling in relative obscurity, and the new EP from Working Girls titled Your Voice follows in this musical terrain. However, Lousiville, Kentucky native Nathan Dickinson has found a sweet spot between 80′s-inspired dreampop and more modern variations of shoegaze, blending ominous keyboard washes with reverb-drenched vocals that drift in and out of the listener’s consciousness. It’s all appropriately moody and downbeat, but Dickinson layers the atmospheric ebb and flow like a seasoned pro. /50 Clear w/ Gold Liner.

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AUN – ‘Alpha Heaven’ [Review]

12 Jacket (3mm Spine) [GDOB-30H3-007}The becoming-duo AUN (Martin Dumais with Julie Leblanc) have made droning dark ambient music on a number of labels including Important, Crucial Blast, Alien 8, and now, Denovali. With a imaginative moodiness similar to Aidan Baker, AUN sets its own course away from the guitar-centered sound to traverse the modular tones of Oneohtrix Point Never and the silted production of Grouper. Aquatic and upbeat, the Montrealeans embrace a European sense of purposeful music, in particular, the “chillout” as a context not of dread and reflection, but recuperation and enhancement: while opener “Koenig” resembles the submerged cathedrals of Black Swan, from this murk appears a very real harmony of warm tones with undertones of playful glitch. Similarly, “War is Near,” while seeming to resemble the politicized aphorisms of neighboring artists at Constellation Records or Alien 8, in fact takes more of a mystical premise, with wisps of Leblanc’s voice providing a siren’s song to the lattice-tones of numerous pulsing lights. Other tracks, like “Viva,” “Voyager,” and the 11-minute finale “Return to Jupiter” flirt with the hard edges of analog percussion; compared to so many other works of ambience, these fibrous inclusions give body and organic detail to the disc as a whole, while ratcheting the intensity of each individual piece. Particularly in juxtaposition with “Floodland” (the track which precedes it), with its looping laughter and Buddha Machine-able melody, “Return” builds a focused and ferocious narrative befitting John Carpenter soundtracks and prog-metal alike: chords soar and sputter as percussion pounds as a furious monorail, in and out of reflections from the womb like fuselage that ‘Alpha Heaven’ becomes. Unfortunately exclusive to the CD, these two tracks capstone the bridge of an already stellar arch of music. Recommended.

Denovali LP/CD
16€/13€
HERE

Lighten Up Sounds

JOHN ZUMA ST. PELVYN – ‘Lost Masters of the Shortwave Choir’ C46
Zuma smallDigging deep trench with well rusted spade, Saint leans hard and delivers explosive manifestation of supreme destructo-beauty. Followers of the imprint may recall the previous transmission from John Zuma Saint Pelvyn a while back, now Minneapolis archtop guru triumphantly returns with trademark six-string froth and delicate bliss wobble. Long form diatribe via whammy chops vocabulary provides much needed escape from this perpetually oppressive sphere. Edition of 100 pro-duplicated and imprinted clear shell Type II chrome cassettes come elegantly packaged w/ full color translucent “stained glass” artwork featuring original collage by M.H. and hand-cut circular art paper insert. Hold to shining sun for maximum tranquility through focused devotion. Sun-stroked feedback and elevated fingerpick shimmer physically rips tattered holes through the very fabric of time itself. A beautiful document, pristine and invisible.

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The Harmony Society

Pittsburgh Track Authority – ‘Now’s Tomorrow’ 12″
HSOC-05-photo-small3-song 12inch EP showing off the diverse styles of the dance music production crew Pittsburgh Track Authority with deep house, a disco edit, and abstract techno. Preslav Lefterov, Thomas Cox, and Adam Ratana had been making names for themselves creating, engineering & DJing music for years on their own, but just over 2 years ago, the trio got together to begin the Pittsburgh Track Authority project. They have since released 9 EPs, 2 CDs, and a number of compilation tracks on many highly respected labels (Further, Uzuri, Work Them, Argot, Rotating Souls, Got2Go, Love What You Feel, Pittsburgh Tracks…), and toured the US & Europe. They put their considerable knowledge of & passion for music of every genre to work, banging out anthems in deep house, techno, 2-step, electro, disco, dub, hip hop, R&B… Limited, vinyl-only pressing of 550 copies in hand-numbered, hand-stenciled jackets.

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Intangible Cat

Dog Hallucination – ‘Serving Two Masters’ 3″CDr/DL
cat19_sThis is another “downpayment” in what D. Petri and “Doggy P. Lips” intend as a progressive advance toward an actualization of some sort of ‘new experimental-psychedelia’, or at least a uniquely new flavor, as imagined by the duo; a sort of existential/mystic, psych/non-psych, transportive, incendiary, visual music/audio that is achieved by specifically designed tonalities, texture sculpturing, rhythms, and compositional structure either of individual pieces or entire recordings. Serving Two Masters is a humble, Earthy and psychedelic work of distinct immediacy. A brief collection of personal, guitar-centered, psychedelic, dreamy, dramatic, visionary vignettes & quasi-monumental ruminations, the 6 piece stream of Serving Two Masters fills only a handful of seconds less than the full 24 minutes of a 3″ cd. Despite the comparitively small duration, it’s coherence, complexity, and feeling of closure is of the type provided by many well-realized full length albums. The pronounced guitar-with-effects experimentalism here is of its own searching style, but listeners may find similarities to the approach or moods of the instrumental sides of Main, early Mercury Rev, early 90’s Flaming Lips, Ashtray Navigations, James Plotkin, or Christian Fennesz’ guitar treatments, as these have all been inspiring or influential for Dog Hallucination. Other possible touchpoints may include Z’ev, Swans, and Brian Eno, but the group has distinctive angles that weave through many halls and levels of influence, not the least of which being their lifetime being raised and living in small towns in the mid-western United States. This recording is of a relatively naked earnestness, not so much seeking the far out as it is seeking relatability of presumably universal thoughts on life and death. Otherworldliness is used here to sensitively point in some important directions, rather than to bind and command, though at times the effect may be a subtle hypnotism. By coupling restrained abstract structural forms and manipulations with carefully chosen melodic elements and tonalities, the aforementioned emotional and/or intellectual “distinct immediacy” is arrived at. Also of note: This 3″ e.p. is a segue and prelude to a long-labored and delayed full length album slated for release late summer 2013, to be called Mitzi, which deals in similar emotional, textural, and instrumental territories. High quality, specially designed, hand cut / folded, home printed paper envelope w/ high quality printed disc, inserts, beet leaf-dyed fabric & pressed sage leaf from D. Petri’s garden. Limited to 50 copies.

Gushing Cloud – ‘Beat Wings In Vain’ CD/DL
cat18_sGushing Cloud follows up his debut 2010 EP, Prism Shelter, with the strikingly colorful full-length CD Beat Wings In Vain. This album is infinitely more focused, complex, and heady; the result of 3 years of heavy experimentation and honing of creative and technical craft. It’s a fascinatingly varied patchwork of colors, ideas, and strong musical character spread over realms of groovy electronic, thoughtful ambient, and noisy/experimental/progressive rock music. Collaborations are featured throughout the album, with song writing and instrumental additions from Dog Hallucination’s D. Petri, Lovely Little Girls’ Alex Perkolup, and Cheer-Accident’s Thymme Jones and Jeff Libersher. GC places these characteristically flavorful contributions in a uniquely conceived context that harmonizes the electronic and organic elements with genuine style. While some comparisons to the sound and spirituality of forward thinking electronic acts like Boards of Canada or Four Tet might be made, to some people Gushing Cloud’s songs may feel more like groovy electronic instrumental step-grandchildren of Brian Eno’s non-ambient albums of the 70’s or the first four classic Faust albums. Kumo/Bengtsen playing saxophone in the avant-art-rock group Lovely Little Girls has perhaps rubbed off a bit onto parts of the album, as has being in the experimental electronic quartet Amalgamated and occasionally playing with the Chicago experi-prog-rock mainstays Cheer-Accident. Also spending 9 years in the guitar-heavy experimental-dreamy-art-noise-rock band Rebekah’s Tape shows in many of the guitar parts. Influences are inevitable, and can of course be discerned, but there is an organic earnestness of personality in this music that is difficult to pigeonhole. Melodies on guitar, saxophone (alto, tenor, and baritone), synth, piano, and trumpet are engaging and hooky, yet off kilter with subliminals. Multi-tracked synthesizers, various weird laptop manipulations, bass guitar, poly-rhythmic drums, odd-ball samples, funk grooves, noisy guitar, and zither are utilized in the earthy-technological infrastructures jutting up around and sprawling out beneath. Beat Wings In Vain is rife with complexities, and will bear innumerable listenings for audio scrupulizers, while holding a good deal more than sufficient emotional, festive, groovy content to fulfill the lusts of enthused weirdo dance floor inhabitants or thoughtful household head-nodders. Mastered by James Plotkin. 9 tracks on CD, bonus track w/ download (CD comes with download code) – (Either way, you get the extra track.) Beat Wings In Vain comes in a high quality digipak, with according high quality collage/painting/photography artwork, psychedelic and mystical. First 50 copies sold receive a complimentary 11×17 poster of artwork related to the album.

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