Animal Psi

Sashash Ulz – ‘Nighthouse’ LP 28€ (world)
On Nighthouse Sashash Ulz brings us a collection of synth and rhythm based compositions, sounding perhaps more melodic than ever, yet maintaining the signature primitive feel of his music.

The Voicing of City Ghost – ‘To Alter’ C35 8€ (world)
Deep tape loop drones. Limited to 50 copies.

Lost Harbours/Waterflower split C60 8€ (world)
Transcendental folk songs and soundscapes. Limited to 50 copies.

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Blvck Ceiling – ‘Close’ C32 $7
Producer and musician based in Spokane, Washington, Blvck Ceiling brings us the extended cassette version of 2014’s “Close.” Sample based dark wave and mystic synth loops on the downbeat, Blvck Ceiling’s occult style of morbid nostalgia and drained sampling fondle memories of old VHS and b-rated pop songs. The neon only glows so bright. Limited to 100 aqua cassettes.

Shitao – ‘No Bridge Behind’ C33 $6
No Bridge Behind is another dark and gloomy beat tape by Shitao. Originally released in 2012 as a digital download, the album finally meets its analog format. French beatsmith Shitao lays down 8 tracks that could be a score to their own movie, the delicate touch and somber piano pieces coupled with downtempo beats melts my heart. Limited to 50 lavender cassettes.

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ICR08: Saturn Form Essence – ‘Stratospheric Tower’ £4.5
Ukraine’s Saturn Form Essence comes to Invisible City Records with 85 minutes worth of pure analogue void exploration. From the off, you’re shot out of the airlock and into a black hole. We’re thrown into a spatial void and left to examine the minimal textures left behind. Eschewing the use of digital programmes, Saturn Form Essence creates these beautifully dense soundscapes using amplifiers, synthesisers, guitars and reel to reel tape. This is the sound of deep space. Lonely, harrowing yet ultimately mind blowing. Limited to 40 hand dubbed C90 cassettes. Full colour, double sided 6 panel artwork.

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KIKSGFR020 Knifed Out Of Existence – ‘The Weight of the World (Spread Across the Length of a Year)’ £5
Charred bass electronics, threadbare vocals and smashed metal exposure. Dean Robinson-Saunders has built a proven track record for himself with relentless live schedules around the UK in recent years and is fully capable of smashing a venue setting wide open with as little as a cymbal and a microphone. The raw product of an increasingly honed live setup, ironed out on the road, this tape contains four blazing pieces about standing up with sheer determination in the face of everything that the world has to throw at you!

KIKSGFR Sindre Bjerga – ‘Original Replica’ £4
Earthen crumbled tape spool, chewed up microphones and found karaoke live workouts from Sindre Bjerga. Two sets recorded in Newcastle and Korea in 2014 with a natural room sound. These sounds manage to be textural and immersive and yet retain humor and funk in a unique way, making for an original balance. Weird and serious!!! This tape is going to get increasing air time as the summer sets in. Classic mail art vibes, this one for the underground art heads.

KIKSGFR018 BINNSCLAGG £5
Hardcore underground art emerging from Brighton’s noise and spoken word scenes. Binnsclagg are an extreme Marxist imagist noise/poetry conglomerate brought together around the core of membership of Verity Spott & Karl M V Waugh. Wild, radical, unrestrained, an explosion of repressed energies! Captured happenings featuring poet Keston Sutherland and Sean Bonney, long active spoken word artist, distinguished by the belief that the line “if you meet a Tory in the street cut his throat” is the least violent line of poetry he has written. You get the idea.

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Spectre – ‘Ruff Kutz’
PAN digs into the archives of WordSound label founder Skiz Fernando Jr. (a.k.a. Spectre) to reissue his 1998 experimental hip-hop mixtape, Ruff Kutz, originally released as an extremely limited edition cassette. The early ’90s witnessed a spike in mutant strains of future dub. In Bristol, trip-hop and jungle were on the rise; in Manhattan it was noise and breakbeat. But in Brooklyn, hip-hop experimentation was gaining momentum, led by Skiz’s independent label WordSound. With support from Bill Laswell, WordSound charted the experimental edge of hip-hop and dub, taking equal inspiration from Bronx Rap and Jamaican Roots music as they pioneered a lo-fi sound both primal and futuristic. By the turn of the decade, the combination of dub, ambient, and hip hop aesthetics had been baptized by The Wire magazine as Illbient—a short-lived classification now being exhumed in the form of Spectre’s obscure mixtape, Ruff Kutz. Ruff Kutz revisits the years between 1994-98, a formative era for WordSound and experimen- tal beats in general. The original cassette, according to Skiz, was comprised of alternative mixes, obscure beats, and unreleased tracks and edits. Unsigned material from Dubadelic (supergroup of Bill Laswell, Ted Parsons, DXT, and others), rapper Sensational, Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin’s Techno Animal project, Professor Shehab as his lyrical alter-ego Psycho Priest, Djini Brown, Mr. Dead of the Metabolics, Doc Israel, Scotty Hard, and Slotek all feature throughout this vinyl reissue, fully mastered for the first time from the original DAT tapes in their original sequence. The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on a double 140g vinyl.

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The Fatal Englishman – ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’
Long the only known compositions of their kind, the Ravenglass series has for several years been the object of one of the most intensive research efforts ever made by occultists and outsider musicologists. Recently this research uncovered one more such compilation. A deranged and unsophisticated music, made by a man at the end of his rope, ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’ is unconventional in form, consisting of entries and notes recorded in the margins of newspapers, on the backs of used envelopes, on train tickets, library slips, blank telegram forms, so that the effect is vague, scattered, confused, bewildering.

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Gutter Sound – ‘Gutter Sound’ C30 £4/$6
GUTTER SOUND is music made by two North London idiots, armed with a bass guitar and a drum machine. Improvisatory recordings were cut, skewed, pulled, twisted, stretched and finally pasted into two landscape collages, each lasting 13 minutes. The project is dedicated to the ballsy actions of Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, who on 21 June 1919 took the unilateral decision to intentionally scuttle all 72 ships of the German High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow since the end of the Great War. The British, waking up to the sight of a bay full of captive ships slowly disappearing into deep water, were not best pleased. File under: Balticwave, Prussian Disco, Imperial Drone. C30 (hand-numbered edition of 50, with 18 different artwork variations).

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II037 – braeyden jae – ‘turnings’ C36
inspired by many close listens to light leaving, the classic 2010 cassette release from gkfoes vjgoaf, turnings finds braeyden jae relying less on the dense, blown-out bass distortions of his previous efforts, in favor of sparser electric guitar strums, generous reverb, and warmly looped vinyl crackle. as always, it is intended for both a foreground and background listening experience.

II036 – Orra – ‘Into The Wind’ c39
Orra is a new project out of Oakland featuring members of Ashan and Gossimer. The duo explores the quiet, creaking life of wooden sounds over stormy water with lush synths, broken instruments, and tinkling textures. Orra’s music is meant to blend, slither, emerge, and blend again into whatever environment it is released. It is the long untold night between scenes of folklore, and it is the breath and ridged back of elements unseen.

II035 – Channelers – ‘They are Cloaked in Stars and Rivers’ c35
3am is said to be an ideal time for ritual magic. There is an energetic clarity created when many of the busied and frenetic minds are no long wakeful. There is space. The four compositions on They are Cloaked… are created out of this sense of space. Largely recorded live, each of the four pieces begins minimally and builds to crescendo with the aid of keyboards, guitar, percussion, and field recordings processed through live electronics. This is the first album by Channelers and there are more to come.

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Coppice – ‘Cores/Eruct’
“Cores/Eruct” is the follow-up album to “Big Wad Excisions” (Quakebasket Records, 2013). Its is an album about «what is kept in.». It includes compositions dated between 2009-2012, for prepared pump organ, shruti box, funnels, tape processes, and transmitters.

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GIANT CLAW – ‘SOFT CHANNEL NO. 1’
“It sounds like therapy for a generation who grew up with the internet, where the density and modularity of music has flourished at such a rate that we never get time alone with just one song or idea anymore.” – Adam Devlin, Tiny Mix Tapes. The tendency to treat Giant Claw’s music like a clown-car of impossible ideas of horizontal importance is to miss the cohesiveness of Giant Claw’s output and albums, even if that palate is as big and ever-expanding as…well, the internet. On This track donated by the Columbus, Ohio musician we find Giant Claw tackling extreme modes. Swinging from the playfulness of the synthesized oboe and the cultural significance of punctuating beats with a gunshot. Except this isn’t punctuation. The gunshot kills the track right as it reaches its zenith. Literally. But, in experimental music, unlike American lives, there are second acts and infinite lives. Like all Heligator releases all proceeds go to the Malindza Refugee Camp Library in Swaziland, Africa. There has been some turbulence at the camp, your donations help keep open a library (and pay the stipend of a librarian) that is an oasis of stability and hope in the otherwise turbulent life of a refugee.

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