Inspired by Guy Debord, the detournement of the 1990 album City: Works Of Fiction, assembled twenty-four years later by Hassell, from alternate takes, demos and studio jams, in the same spirit of hip-hop-inspired, dubwise future-funk.
First time on vinyl.
A September 1989 performance at the World Financial Center Winter Garden in New York City, with Brian Eno mixing live.
‘During this period Hassell was inspired by the increasingly innovative production techniques being used in hip-hop, in particular the hyper-collaged sampledelic barrage of the Bomb Squad’s work with Public Enemy, hearing it as a kind of extension of the tape splicing that Teo Macero brought to his work with Miles Davis. He began to incorporate more of this aesthetic into his own music, playing over loops of his own performances and riffing on angular juxtapositions of noise, rhythm and melody.’
First time on vinyl.
‘Very lovely indeed,’ it says in Uncut. ‘For half an hour, fragile pop melodies are drenched in an enveloping haze of guitar fuzz, Liz Harris’ vocals shaped by a heavy reverb aura.’
‘Harris’ low moan is an exquisite performance, her fingers reaching around your heart to exert powerful emotional pressure,’ attests The Wire.
Horse Sacrifice was performed on Danish TV in 1970, as a protest against the Vietnam War.
It hinges on a haunting, fragile song entitled My Dead Horse, with Lene Adler Pedersen accompanied by Bjørn Nørgaard on piano, and HC on violin. This beautiful, sad lullaby is as simple, precious and unusual as anything in Christiansen’s output. Previously unreleased.
Brothers Evgeny and Mikhail Gavrilov from Novosibirsk in Siberia.
You might remember Mikhail’s excellent cassette, Roots, which came out on Hive Mind in 2022, under the name Misha Sultan.
‘A little bit like a collaboration between Metalheadz and Weather Report, to accompany a seventies cop thriller.’
Rough, trippy, live recordings made two years after The Truth. Raw mid-70s psych.
The French avant-garde quartet, four years in, improvising with instruments from Western, African, Middle-Eastern, and Far-Eastern cultures. Recorded for Futura in 1971, this is their sole album. “We just wanted the sound, the raw sound-texture, before being treated and shaped by any cultural code.”
‘The debut album from this Berlin and Edinburgh-based duo is an intricate, robust, unique collection of songs, underpinned by intensely textured, interwoven guitars. It nods to Jim O’Rourke’s lounge numbers and the droll lyricism of Jonathan Richman; to Vini Reilly in its serpentine sparseness; to an unlikely confluence of Tortoise and Weather Report.
‘It opens in a flash of light, like a comet, with Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Passages of density rise up from stilled valleys. It’s easy to imagine the pair looking out over the rolling fields of their garden studio in East Lothian.
‘There is a similar crispness and precision to the percussion-work on A Certain Arrangement Of Atoms — where an old, slightly out of tune piano adds a few expressionist strokes to this pointillism, loosening the tension., till all we’re left with is the bass.
‘Although the album orbits around the pendulum sway of The Older I Get, it’s What Cats Think About that stands out most. It’s a Sun City Girls kind of curveball— warmly engaging, ramshackle, intimate, strange.’
Ignatz is the alter-ego of Belgian musician Bram Devens, who has released a string of albums for labels like (K-RAA-K)³, Ultra Eczema, Fonal, Mort aux Vaches, and Okraïna, over the last twenty years.
Devens recorded this wonderful, haunted music at home in Landen, on the family piano.
There is pervasive, ambient Dub, mesmerically shifting; sometimes aghast. Somewhere in the swirling mist are the guitarist Hans Reichel, and blues pianists like Jimmy Yancey, amongst other ghosts. Time Well Spent even musters a kind of motorik energy, determinedly mis-firing.
It is quite unlike any other piano record.
Beautifully presented, too, to the customary high standards of this label.
Check it out!
The 1982 NYC-post-punk classic, bundling together Can, DAF, PIL and Joy Division.
The sole album released by Factory US.