Dissonant Plane

A year is a long time.  So I have probably forgotten a few things.  But here is what comes to mind as my favorite new releases and reissues that came out in 2009:

• AFCGT - AFCGT (Uzu Audio) LP
• Laurie Scott Baker - Gracility (Musicnow) 2xCD
• L. Berner - Blackout Nights (Zen Enthusia) 2xCass
• Sir Richard Bishop - The Freak Of Araby (Drag City) CD
• Crystal Hell Pool - Wind Blows Through Me (Crippled Symmetry Recordings) CDR
• Dropp Ensemble - Safety (and/OAR) CD
• Luc Ferrari - Labyrinthe De Violence / DANCE (Alga Marghen) 12″
• Ibliss - Supernova (Garden Of Delights) CD
• The Inner Space - Agilok & Blubbo (Wah-Wah Records Sound)
• Demian Johnston - Forever (Dead Accents) Cass
• Demian Johnston - Still (Dead Accents) Cass
• Dave Knott - Sweet Little Guitar Ditties (Not On Label) CD
• R Millis - 120 (Etude Records) CD
• Hiroaki Minami - Obscure Tape Music Of Japan Vol.10: Electronic Symphony No. 1 (Edition Omega Point) CD
• People Band - People Band 69/70 (Emanem) 2xCD
• Eliane Radigue - Triptych (Important Records) CD
• Eliane Radigue - Vice Versa, Etc.… (Important Records) 2xCD
• Matt Shoemaker - The Sunken Plethora Consumes All (Mystery Sea) CDR
• Omar Souleyman - Dabke 2020: Folk And Pop Sounds Of Syria (Sublime Frequenices) CD
• Sperm - Shh! Heinäsirkat (De Stijl) LP
• Sun City Girls - Napoleon & Josephine (Sun City Girls Singles Volume 2) (Abduction) CD
• Akio Suzuki - Ki-date (Ichinomiya City Memorial Art Museum of Setsuko Migishi) DVD
• Giancarlo Toniutti - The Early Tapes Period (Vinyl-On-Demand) 3xLP + 10″
• UnicaZürn - Temporal Bends (uZu Music) CD
• Simon Wickham-Smith - A Seventh Persimmon (Tape Drift Records) CDR
• Zaïmph - Serpent’s Bite (Heavy Blossom) CD
• Various - 1970’s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Sublime Frequencies) CD

We still have a few posters for the Kawabata Makoto performance left.  While supplies last, you can get a free screen printed poster made for us by Broken Press.  All you have to do is buy something by Kawabata or Acid Mothers Temple or make a purchase over $20 and we will give you a poster.  It’s really beautiful and only 50 copies were made.  So rush on down and grab yours before they are history!

FREE IN STORE PERFORMANCEFRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009
7:00 PM
KAWABATA MAKOTO
?ALOS
AERIAL RAIN

Founder of Acid Mothers Temple Soul Collective, Kawabata Makoto has been recording and touring for 30+ years. His projects and collaborations have brought him all over the globe, working with many prolific artists along the way such as Keiji Haino, Mani Neumeier(Guru Guru), Daevid Allen(Gong), Damo Suzuki(Can) and Kinski. From beautiful ambient dreamscapes to full blown psychedelic freakouts by way of sonic experimentation(often in the same song!), Kawabata’s music is as unrestrained as it is inspired.

Where do these sounds come from? Who is sending them out? That is not something for me to know, and neither is there any way that I could find out. I simply believe that they come from the ‘cosmos’.
-Kawabata Makoto

Kawabata Makoto leads prolific psych-rock behemoths Acid Mothers Temple, but on his own he often opts for beatific guitar emanations that suggest a strict regimen of Zen Buddhist meditation rather than AMT’s grandiloquent jamming and sonic holocausts. You could say the man loves his extremes. The INUI series of albums Kawabata’s recorded for VHF Records—as well as I’m in Your Inner Most and Hosanna Mantra—stands as a beautiful, solemn monument to his mellower inclinations, but you should probably bring earplugs, just in case the Japanese ax master gets into one of his ornery moods. Bonus: Dissonant Plane will give you a limited-edition poster to commemorate this event with any Kawabata/Acid Mothers–related purchase or any $20-plus purchase of merchandise.
  - DAVE SEGAL in The Stranger

http://www.acidmothers.com
http://www.myspace.com/kawabatamakoto
http://www.myspace.com/acidmotherstemple

Two very special items from Japan:

Akio Suzuki “Ki-date” DVD & book
A beautiful retrospective of this very special Japanse sound artist.  The 210 minute all region NTSC DVD features live performances on Akio’s instruments such as the Analapos and Suzuki Type Glass Harmonica, as well as exhibition views and field recordings.  The performances are sublime as Suzuki lets loose delicate and magical sounds from his instruments and plays with small objects.  Also in the box is a 190 color catalog with texts in Japanese and English (translations by Alan Cummings) documenting 40 years of sound creation with many lovely photographs.  Also included in this set is a map of the location that Suzuki marked for ‘Oto-Date’.   This on going projects marks good listening spots in urban areas with Suzuki’s whimsical icon combining feet and ears.  This map shows the locations around the museum that Akio liked and the DVD documents these spots.  In a stroke of genius the video faces the opposite direction of any action so that sounds are heard, but the visuals are mostly stationary, yet impart the sense of the place.  The performance recordings on the DVD, these sounds are also recorded by Kuwayama Kijima of Lethe.  Documents of Suzuki’s work are always hard to find and therefore in demand, so don’t miss your chance to pick up this set!

Lethe “Catastrophe Point #6″ CD
Privately released limited edition CD from 2005 packaged on an A4 (about letter size) cardboard sleeve with beautiful artwork by Isao Mizutani.
Nagoya based Kiyoharu Kuwayama has an interest in reverberant spaces, recording under bridges and flyovers as well as in warehouse and Shinto temples at night. Although he occasionally employs cello, his works tends to explore space and perspective in utterly unconventional ways. Typically, he favours objects found in situ to sound the acoustic environment and is as likely to use a chair scraped along the floor as a standard musical instrument. But music this most definitely is. The first piece on offer here foregrounds what sounds like a handful of pebbles being clicked together against a distant backdrop of scraped sheet metal. The thickness of the room’s acoustics lends the whole an almost frightening clarity, and there’s an unreality to the way the two different reverberant layers combine that only adds to the sense of unease. We’re thrown into a subtly heightened acoustic realm, in which scale and perspective are altered, to disquieting psychological effect. The second piece heightens and complicates the acoustic picture even further, and increases the density of the sonic activity. The sound sources here seem to be bundles of sticks, bottles, tea trays and iron girders thrown down lift shafts. Once again the ear tries to make sense of the altered relationships Kuwayama set up between loud and soft, close and distant. Slowly, the piece starts to focus more and more strongly on a huge, dark vibration at the furthest end of the acoustic spectrum, which builds in intensity, racking up the tension and subtly disturbing the mind’s equilibrium. By this point, the music sounds like it’s taking piece in a vast, pitch black aircraft hangar of the soul. - Keith Moline (Wire No. 264)
Volcanic Tongue made comparisons with Christoph Heemann, Sean Meehan and AMM when describing this one.

Over the weekend, Jesse Paul Miller played what he estimates as only his second solo performance.  For this he mixed together field recordings and played them back through 6 speakers surrounding the audience.  It started incredibly delicate and slowly built into a mass of sounds.  I recognized several things as being from Asia as I’ve heard these wonderful self produced CDRs of his recordings from there.  The latest one is “Asia Radio Environments“, a fairly self descriptive title.  However in addition to picking up frequencies in Asian countries, Jesse has recorded the environment around him as he was exploring the shortwave dial.  So the unstable signals are paired with bird singing, traffic and other ambient noises heard in Java, Bali, Lombok, Myanmar, Thailand and Japan.  The results are suprisingly calm.  However, I think the most meditative title he has done is the popular “Asia Archive 2008 Volume 2: Muslim Call to Prayer, Java, Indonesia” which we finally got restock of.  Both discs are quite limited and come in hand numbered editions.

Cool new things on our shelves:

Ambient/Drone:

Taiga Remains / RV Paintings LP  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $18  - lush organic soundscapes; w/Brian of Starving Weirdos

Wada, Yoshi  “Earth Horns With Electronic Drone”  CD  (EM Records)  $20  - 1st release of awesome 1974 drone piece

Doom Metal:

Bong / Quttinirpaaq LP  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $18  - split of doom that sounds like early Skullflower, ltd 300

Grails  “Doomsdayer’s Holiday”  LP  (Temporary Residence Limited)  $18  - guest vocals by Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls)

Experimental:

Bjerga, Sindre & Horton, Robert  “Can’t Go Fast Enough To Get There Early”  CD  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $17  - warm and fuzzy noise drones, ltd. 264

Conrad, Tony & Olson, Tovah  “Let There Be Music”  LP  (Tovinator)  $15  - ltd 200, instantly sold out from the label, one side only

Ichiyanagi, Toshi  “Electronic Field”  CD  (Omega Point)  $26  - wild electronics from Yoko Ono’s first husband

Master Musicians of Bukkake  “The Visible Sign of the Invisible Order”  CD  (Abduction)  $14  - “outsider ceremonial folk masterpiece” w/SCG members

Mechanical Children  “I Rise To Cover All”  LP  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $18  - good industrial noise from Jazzfinger members, ltd 300

Minami, Hiroaki  “Obscure Tape Music of Japan Vol. 10: Electronic Symphony No. 1″  CD  (Edition Omega Point)  $26  - unreleased cosmic analog sounds from ‘76, ltd 500

Moha!  “Jeff Carey’s MoHa!”  7″  (Rune Grammofon)  $7  - white vinyl, 500 copies, different mixes of both tracks

Nurse With Wound  “The Surveillance Lounge”  CD  (Dirter Promotions)  $17  - back to the creaky disturbing sounds of old

Starving Weirdos  “B/P/M Series 1″  LP  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $20  - piano based experimental like earlier NWW, ltd 500

Tomutonttu CD  (Fonal)  $17  - Kemialliset Ystävät guy, re of OOP Beta Lactam LP

Tomutonttu CD  (Fonal)  $17  - Kemialliset Ystävät guy, re of OOP Ultra Eczema LP

Jazz/Improv:

Sun Ra featuring Pharoah Sanders & Black Harold  “Live at Judson Hall”  CD  (ESP Disk)  $14  - ultra rare private press LP + 45 min unreleased material

Rock:

Alvarius B. CD  (Abduction)  $14  - solo wooden guitar by Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop

Deas, Cam  “My Guitar Is Alive And It’s Singing”  LP  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $18  - gorgeous solo acoustic guitar, ltd 300

Deas, Cam / Spoono  “Greetings from the Isle of Man”  LP  (Blackest Rainbow Records)  $18  - gorgeous solo acoustic guitar, ltd 350

Death In June  “The World That Summer”  CD  (NER)  $17  - reissue of goth double LP from ‘86 w/David Tibet

Grouper  “Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill”  LP  (IOG)  $16  - ethereal folky songs with dream production, orange vinyl

Hawkwind  “Space Ritual”  2 x CD  (EMI)  $17  - monster space rock w/pre-Motorhead Lemmy

Inner Space, The  “Agilok & Blubbo OST”  CD  (Wah Wah Records)  $20  - early unreleased pre-Can recordings

Neung Phak  “Fucking USA”  7”  (Abduction)  $9  - great cover of Korean anti-American rock tune, ltd 300

Ong Ong  “5″  magazine & CDR  (Ong Ong Press)  $8  - CDR with private press rarities

Rose, Jack & Black Twig Pickers, The  LP  (Klang Industries)  $19

Sun City Girls  “Jacks Creek”  CD  (Abduction)  $16  - reissue of 1995 LP, absolutely off the wall!!!

Sun City Girls  “Napoleon & Josephine (Singles Volume 2)”  CD  (Abduction)  $16  - the weird volume with theatrical pieces

Walker, Peter  “Rainy Day Raga”  LP  (Harte Recordings)  $16  - lovely mixture of Indian raga & American folk from 1966

World:

Mayet, Hisham  “Palace of the Winds”  DVD  (Sublime Frequencies)  $20  - guitars in Morocco!  limited edition of 1000 copies

Souleyman, Omar  “Dabke 2020: Folk & Pop Sounds of Syria”  CD  (Sublime Frequencies)  $14  - fantastic Arabic pop music that really moves

Various  “1970’s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground”  CD  (Sublime Frequencies)  $16  - infectious Algerian music from extremely rare 7’s