Animal Psi

Bent Knee CD $10
This self-titled album by Bent Knee is one with a shifting and highly effected rock and electronically inspired sound scape. The bass and drums become a flash of noise during “urban circus” and the soaring violin and vocals morph into muffled and screeching sirens throughout this album. The packaging is made by hand with various stamps, thin lyric sheets, a wax seal, the cd, and yarn. This indie band hand-folds, stamps, and assembles each album for a more intimate experience with the music.

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Ali Helnwein – Strange Creations
Spring Break Tapes has teamed up with Ali to release Strange Creations on limited edition cassette. Each cassette includes an mp3 digital download and features cover art by Mercedes Helnwein. Limited to 100 cassettes.

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NATURAL SNOW BUILDINGS – ‘NIGHT COERCION INTO THE COMPANY OF WITCHES’ 4LP boxset/3CD $40/$7
Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches is the first domestic release by France’s mythic Natural Snow Buildings, a band revered in experimental music circles despite self-releasing most of their albums in ridiculously limited runs. The original Night Coercion… CD from 2008 was an edition of only 22 copies, so finally, the intense music that Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte create on these tracks can be widely heard and appreciated. Fans of Popol Vuh raga drones, Flying Saucer Attack distorted bliss, The Dead C’s intuitive chaos, and Islaja’s oblique folk, take note. Natural Snow Buildings make melodic, orchestrated, droning compositions with layers of guitars, chants, woodwinds, percussive bells, distortion and delay. On Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches, they push to extremes, producing layers of stereophonic sound both nuanced and grandiose. This record is the ideal introduction to the band’s sound, building harmonies upon noise upon harmonies, and providing a clear explanation as to why their albums (even the ones that aren’t so limited) sell out so immediately upon release. For the Ba Da Bing release of Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches, there are two physical formats. Like the original version, the album is available as a three-CD set, this time at the low price of a single CD release. Additionally, the limited four-LP box set has a new mixing job, done by the band to fit the record’s new vinyldom. Digital download with vinyl purchase.

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Charlatan Meets the North Sea C36 $6
Edition of 100. RIYL: Jurgen Muller, Ursula Bogner, weather beaten analog skies. Impromptu post-speakeasy jam session, recorded at the witching hour by two of the the scene’s most reclusive noise cats around. They got down and burned all the heat out of the studio with some serious synthesizer blowouts, each getting in their own licks. Charlatan’s mellow moods converge with the harsh wailing of the North Sea, faithfully laid to tape (in the midst’s of tension) by Green Country’s chief engineer Brad Rose. These cats might not break it down ever again, but for one magical night it got crazy.

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FATHER FINGER s/t CS $5
Providence, Rad Islander Kylie Lance aka Father Finger synthesizes solo synth-voice-sequencer-drum-machinery into unexpectedly twisted yet elegant curvatures of glassy, avant digital-mystic post-pop, of which the four frameworks found on her self-titled debut cassette stand as some of her most gleaming achievements to date. “Temper” and “Separation Anxiety” pulse, prowl, and groove under a glowing ozone of evocative vocals (ranging in mood from minimal wave to fever dream), washed out waterfalls of wind instrument keys, cryptic samples, and backwards echo FX; fractured lyrics about “the hottest heat ever” and “cardboard boxes” and “man’s frustration” conjure an inner world of scorched cities and drugged desires. The B side flowers a more baroque synthesizer terrarium: “Fauna” and “Italy” bubble, scrape, and slide through 96 tiers of graceful, liquid arpeggiations, new neu wave hypno-melody, and ebbing, colorful arcs of psychic voice. A stunning set of songs by one of our favorite new solo heroines. Currently on tour coast-to-coast with Maria Minerva. Pro-dubbed grey tapes in full-color double-sided J-cards with sex-shop Dollywood cover illustration by ideal visualist Christine Jones. Edition of 125.

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ROBUST WORLDS – ‘Emotional Planet’ CD/LP
Chris Rose’s Robust Worlds has impressed us since first glimpse. He was actually barefoot, if you can believe that, and his set had the feel of a way more lysergic Kevin Ayers. It was freezing fucking cold and I’m pretty sure he wore a Hawaiian shirt. His debut LP is called Emotional Planet, and it’s deceptively simple. Voice, guitar, some noisey shit, whatever. His playing is sick — fluid, unforced, warm, soothed and soothing. It’s a bath you don’t want to exit. Seriously, if yr going to play guitar, play it like he does. With a trick in his back pocket and a Heavy Moon on his mind, Rose utilizes the sort of neo-noir narratives that you hear thru Neil Michael Hagerty, James Jackson Toth, Kurt Vile and other keen observers. Handguns, b&e, two-lane black tops, love, lust, and hard drugs. Life: summed up !

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(pyr061): ?alos – ‘ricamatrici’
?alos is musician/experimental performer stefania pedretti’s solo project that began in 2003. her performances blur the lines between performance art, experimental music, improvisation, video art and force the audience to actively participate. the feminine figure and its role in history and contemporary society is at the heart of her performances. ?alos’ second album for pan y rosas is a fragmented concept album that takes its inspiration from industrialized garment production. seamstresses, women who spend their lives sewing in factories and basements – leaving their dreams and aspirations behind. sewing machine as sound creation. electronics. blindfolded piano played by instinct, touch, feeling, listening. full songs and small fragments of sound narration – alarm clock, pen, snippets of piano denote times and places – advance the narrative, the journey of a seamstress. arrival in the city via train. hopes and dreams to be crushed. departure and a new start in a new town. more now wave noise but shifting towards doom.  ricamatrici was originally released by bar la muerte records in 2009. this is the second of three ?alos reissues.

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DVVLLXNS EP
Shelter press is pleased to introduce the first EP by DVVLLXNS, aka Jon Porras (one of the two kings of the californian Barn Owl kingdom). With his new electronical project DVVLLXNS, Jon Porras opens the thresholds of burning galaxies, celestials thoughts and dark planets. Like a twisted elegy to Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, the folded beat of an empty motel room with a distant Tv whisper, like crispy snow falling in july, a car race in the magnolia night, Litany predicts some cosmogonic catalcysm that a muted Cassandra could mime.  Feel the hurricane, the speed, the devotional speed of geometries, the language of signs.

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‘Destruction at 2013’ is an album which really wants to be heard.  The first by Lord Fyre (Seth Mahern of Apache Dropout, John Wilkes Booze, and the Magnetic South community), and one of the last from Emperor Jones, this set of recordings has apparently been reissued twice so far, and is fast approaching a collision with the actual date of its title, initially spit-balled over 7 years ago.  Not an indicator of its ultimate value, but I can’t say I see why the campaign to keep this record in press.  The set of seven tracks, oscillating between freak improvs and psychedelic rock fits, captures the best of its zeitgeist (think circa 2005: Religious Knives, Shackamaxon, Pelt, Sunroof!, and on), while apparently lying just off the grid in Indiana.  So outside of an undisclosed illness we’re funding, my guess goes to the ‘We did this thing and no one noticed’ credit-recoupment scheme which has historically proffered healthy dividends for understated records.  It certainly has with me, as I listened to all that stuff, but never Lord Fyre.

And as an indicator of its quality, that’s a shame: attesting to its durability, the relatively-brief disc holds its own amongst stalwarts like Human Adult Band and Warm Climate.  Starting with the 7.5 (out of 30) minutes of “Drinking Away Demons”, the disc fakes you out from go, as the slow-burner shakes and ragas its way to a frenzy of watery effects – the demons aren’t going but coming! – yet conspicuously disjointed from the proper jam “109^th & Amsterdam,” which features the most boosted riff between Radio Birdman and The Hives.  Small and Siltbreezy, the track has an adorable lo-fi reservation, smartly-layered with stupid technology.  Mahern’s vocals feature the snotty posturing and self-importance which embolden the best of his lineage – Suicide, Iran, Horrid Red – but take this in hand with the total vacancies which straddle such tracks, and truly bizarre things bloom: “Vintage Violins” on its own is a Hive Mind edit, slithering silent between the record’s pops; “The Night Before” like a reading of Pavement lyrics to an empty room where someone can’t figure out where to set her guitar, still abuzz; and then the finale, the title track, jogging backwards from its initial release to a Jad Fair sort of indie nostalgia for the paternalism of the 60s, with news sampling and a dusty diorama of clattering atomic aftermath.  Where the aspiration went to rock, and where the inspiration came from to sess, that is the mystery.  That it turned out so well is the motive for the mystery.   93 copies in hand-printed sleeves with multiple paste-ons – until the next reissue!

Auris Apothecary LP
$15
HERE