MUSIC

‘The surrealist, psychedelic brain-burps of notorious all-caps-tweeting wind-up-merchant Louis Johnstone aka Wanda Group. Twenty-six congealed morsels of spur-of-the-moment sound-art executed with genuine economy of means, namely… a phone. An impulsive, scatter-brained trip into the inner circles of regional weirdness, secreting a creeping unease which really gets under your skin. Fragments of aural rubble haphazardly cohere into galvanising spacial tones and textures, punctured by Johnstone’s garbled Essex rantings. The long-distance stare of warbled tape loops is abruptly fractured by a drunken sing-along in a care home for the elderly. As hallucinogenic takes on the utterly mundane, there’s an obvious kinship with Lambkin’s nocturnal, straight-to-dictaphone sound-pieces. Dan Johannsen’s splintered classical collages on that PIG tape and the suburban soliloquies of Regional Bears alumnus Russell Walker also feel closely aligned.’ (All Night Flight) With an A4 riso insert.

"Best New Reissue" - Pitchfork (May 6, 2023) Legendary debut album by Junko Tange, originally issued by Osaka’s Vanity Records in 1979. Dadaesque recitations and sparse guitar, piano and electronic meanderings combine for a beguiling, hypnotic dreamworld. Officially licensed from the custodians of Yuzuru Agi's Vanity Records archives, this edition has been fully remastered from new transfers of the original analog tapes by Stephan Mathieu.

Rezzett come hungry for the club with a volley of thizzing ghetto-tech and breakbeat hardcore hot on the heels of their debut album For the DJs, dancers, and anyone needing to extend the pleasures of their eponymous LP, ‘Boshly’ sees Lukid & Tapes’ razz out from a corkscrewing mutation of jungle tekno in the title tune, to thee most febrile takes on ’93 hardcore gnash in the delirious ‘Dots’ and the free-handed jungle of ‘Kermit’, with an appropriate come down in ‘Extra Redundant’, each treated to their patented, astringent tekkerz.

“Originally released on the lauded Green Energy label from experimental maverick Henry Kawahara, Forest Jams is thrilled to present the official re-issue of Nami Hotatsu’s sophomore album – revised and re-christened “Ultra Hyper Cosmic Voice” by the artist herself. Equal parts beguiling and inviting, Nami’s mixture of vocals and driving propulsive beats still sound as fresh and as captivating as when they were originally released in 1994. Now, thirty years later, we invite you to discover Nami’s “perfect world of being” in its totality – awakening yourself to the unknown world inside through what lauded producer Haruomi Hosono hailed as a “shamanistic” vision!” – Hsu Jui-Ting

On this new LP Harry Bertoia shows why he may have been the first industrial musician. Bertoia often referred to his sound sculptures as a "collaboration with industry" and on this new LP Bertoia is intentionally creating heavy, rhythmic music he described as "mechanized," "mechanical" and "factory like." This first edition is packaged in a full color sleeve with metallic inks. Mastered by Tom Eaton at Sounds & Substance. Recorded in 1971, percussion and repetition emulate the pounding rhythms of machinery on this unique pair of conceptual Bertoia compositions. Bertoia utilizes innovative performance techniques to create new sounds unheard in his ouevre. Even in the busy factory of Bertoia's mind, distant stillness rises up as Bertoia exhibits the massive amount of control he possesses over his many looming sculptures. "Mechanization" is just one of the many sonic directions Bertoia took while composing and recording between the late 1950's and his death in 1978. He documented all of his ideas and directions in notes accompanying the hundreds of tapes discovered in his barn.

The new avant-garde isn’t about creating something that doesn’t yet exist, it’s about abandoning and confusing rigid genres. I want to open up, in order to both abolish and reconstruct the musical past.» — Noémi Büchi Noémi Büchi’s album ‘Does It Still Matter’ completes a series of releases whose titles - ‘Matière’, ‘Matter’, and ‘Does It Still Matter’ - place the physicality of music in the center of attention. Büchi’s specific sound structures and aesthetic choices question the state of materiality in a world that is becoming more and more fluid and intangible. From ‘Matière’ to ‘Matter’, Büchi subtly transferred from a focus on substance to questioning the enigmatic core of being, passing from a noun to a verb, and from a single word to an inquiry. ‘Does It Still Matter’ weighs in on the importance of questioning. Her pieces juxtapose multi-layered analog synthesizer textures, crystal clear sounds and almost brutalistic noises, while they unfold in compositional structures akin to pop songs. Driven by an orchestra of myriad parts, her music creates transcendent intonations that resonate deeply with the listeners’ bodies. A daring blend of complexity and accessibility are molded into captivating sound sculptures that challenge and intrigue listeners alike. Deviating from conventional time divisions, ’Does It Still Matter’ immerses listeners in a discordant succession of elements, and guides them towards an eternal present that erases the past with each new revelation, while maintaining it through recurring themes that serve as intimate memories. Büchi’s electronic maximalism questions our linear perception of time, offering a glimpse into a world where the past, present, and future converge into a singular moment. Her avant-garde approach rejects predictability, inviting listeners to immerse themselves fully in the present. Everything starts anew at any given instant. Each musical idea exists for one precise moment, rendering the future unpredictable. ‘Does It Still Matter’ unfolds against a backdrop of collective disaster and biocidal urgency, challenging the very essence of time. Büchi explains: «The world appears to have gone mad. It’s all but impossible to reflect on the meaning of avant-garde in music, considering the future in this sepulchral kind of stability of the human condition.» Her compositions resonate like an infernal machine, questioning the instantaneous dissipation of everything. Finally, echoes and fragments of sounds remain, haunting memories like ghostly companions. ’Does It Still Matter’ is an immersive experience that invites listeners to contemplate the impermanence of our world and the enduring power of sound.

Shomyo of Koya-san & Midori Takada YOU WHO ARE LEAVING TO NIRVANA WRWTFWW Records and MEG Museum (Geneva) are ecstatic to announce a new full length album by celebrated Japanese percussionist Midori Takada (Through The Looking Glass), in collaboration with Buddhist monks belonging to the Samgha group of the Shingon school of Koya-san, led by Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa. You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is available on half speed mastered vinyl LP, housed in a 350gsm sleeve, with OBI, and liner notes, as well as on digipack CD. Recorded at The Premises Studio (London) and in Tokyo in 2019,You Who are Leaving to Nirvana is a majestic work combining a suite of six Buddhist liturgical chants and a musical creation by Midori Takada. The Buddhist chants come from three types of repertoires: shomyo ("Teisan", "Unga-Bai", "Sange", "Taiyo"), but also goeika ("Kannon-Daiji") and mantra ("Hannya-Singyo"). After supervising the recording of the Buddhist chants, Midori Takada added her own compositions, with subtle layers of percussion and the melodies of her beloved marimba, giving full life to the sacred texts. Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa explains: "Shomyo is a form of declamation of sacred esoteric texts, inherited over many generations. The power of words goes far beyond their mere pronunciation. I think there is something that words alone cannot really convey. If I recite prayers in a musical way, the feeling transmitted will be even stronger than if I say it normally, in everyday language. I think that the musicality of a work carries a hidden power that cannot be expressed in words alone. The setting of the music has an additional power for you and for those around you who listen to it. The words of a song are not just words set to music. They carry an additional hidden power that cannot be expressed in any other way. Listening to Midori Takada's musical performance, the words truly seem to come alive." Original recordings of the Buddhist chants are held in the International Archives of Folk Music (IAFM) at the MEG Museum in Geneva. The album sleeve features an artwork by famed Japanese sculptor Katsura Funakoshi selected by Midori Takada. You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is released in conjunction with Midori Takada's Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter, also available on LP and CD on WRWTFWW Records. Buddhist Chants / Environmental / Ambient / Percussion

Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language and that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal.

Acoustic Rhythm & Texture Sequencer Available as C60 Limited Edition of 50 mirror dubs- (same on both sides) + Inserts written and produced by S.Gordon 2024. additional percussion by Islay Spalding - TRK 7, recorded at SFS studios 2024 Synths & Radial - SDGordon. The Radial instrument was designed to explore various material's acoustic characteristics in ways that could only be achieved through mechanical and electronic control. It creates sporadic dense percussive sequences & sharp reciprocating sweeps or can focus in on tiny acute angles to produce deep shaking drones among a host of other planned and unplanned acoustic sounds. Radial uses 5 voltage controlled motors and interchangeable textured cylinders captured via contact microphones positioned within the chassis. The cylinders can be synchronised or independent & the blades are interchangeable allowing the flex of certain materials to skew and augment the movements and sounds and sequences. Playing the Radial instrument is a direct visceral experience. Its sequences sound unlike anything else i have used and the simple design by no means limits the scope of its rhythmical output. After feeling out the controls you arrive somewhere in-between the rubbery juddering fuzz or clockwork blasts of percussion and can step back allowing the physicality of the instrument itself to dictate how things proceed. Minor adjustments can have a butterfly effect on the entire tone inmate rewardingly unpredictable but controllable way. On certain tracks there’s some synth work in a move away from the potential “instrument study” vibe of the release and Islay Spaldings blistering scrap metal percussion on Track 7 was incredible to watch.. Additional thanks to Stephan P Richter “SPR” for the advice and encouragement through the whole build.

Japan’s KAKUHAN deliver a futureshock jolt on their incred debut album ‘Metal Zone’ - deploying drum machine syncopations around bowed cello and angular electronics that sound like the square root of Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’, Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, Beatrice Dillon’s ‘Workaround’ and Mica Levi’s ‘Under The Skin’ - or something like T++ and Errorsmith dissecting Laurie Anderson’s ‘Home Of The Brave’, her electric violin panned and bounced relentlessly around the stereo field. It really is that good - basically all the things we love, in multiples. While "Metal Zone" might be their debut, KAKUHAN are hardly newcomers. Koshiri Hino is a member of goat (jp), releasing a run of records under the YPY moniker, and heading up the NAKID label, while Yuki Nakagawa is a well known cellist and sound artist who has worked with Eli Keszler and Joe Talia among many others. Together, they make a sound that’s considerably more than the sum of its parts - as obsessively tweaked, cybernetic and jerky as Mark Fell, frothing with the same gritted, algorithmic intensity as Autechre's total-darkness sets, stripped to the bone and carved with ritualistic symbolism. The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KAKUHAN follow their 'nuum inclinations, snatching grimey bursts and staccato South London shakes and matching them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place. It's not a collision we expected, but it's one that's completely melted us - welding obsessive rhythmic futurism onto bloodcurdling horror orchestration - the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era. By the album's final track, we're presented with South Asian microtonal blasts that suddenly make sense of the rest of the album; Nakagawa erupts into Arthur Russell-style clouded psychedelia, while wavering flutes guide bio-mechanical ritual musick formations. It’s the perfect closer for the album’s series of taut, viscous, and relentless gelling of meter and tone in sinuous tangles, weaving across East/West perceptions in spirals toward a distinctive conception of rhythmic euphoria with a sense of precision, dexterity and purpose that nods to classical court or chamber music as much as contemporary experimental digressions. Easily one of the most startling and deadly debuts we’ve heard in 2022; the louder we’ve played it, the more it’s realigned our perception of where experimental and club modes converge - meditative, jerky, flailing genius from the outerzone. Basically - an AOTY level Tip.

CHBB was a project by Beate Bartel and Chris Haas that developed from their collaboration in 1981, while working on the self-titled album 'Liaisons Dangereuses‘. They released their music only on four limited cassettes. This compilation presents the complete works of CHBB, including all recordings from their original cassettes alongside previously unreleased tracks produced by both artists.

Kristin Hayter sheds her Lingua Ignota guise for the debut release under her Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter project. ‘SAVED!’ is inspired by American religious music of the god-fearing past, Southern gospel, and various strains of pre-rock folk and country. It picks up where ‘Sinner Get Ready’ left off, applying degraded audio and stripping the instrumentation down to the barebones minimal of twangy guitars, piano, and her haunting vocals. Imagine a countryfied, infernal spin on the murder balladry of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and Nico, and you’d get this magnificent album.

Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language and that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal.

Very pleased and grateful to announce this ‘Home Comfort’ reissue by Mark Glynne and Bart Zwier, originally self-released in 1980. Maybe a bit of an unexpected title to appear in the LSD catalog but my love for this album goes back to my late teenage years and has had an addictive effect since, like a spleen infused magnet. With this album Glynne and Zwier, based in the Netherlands and connected to the Ultra scene, drew an insular blend of intimate post-punk and chamber (bedroom) songs with surreal scenic reflections. Probably its naked singularity defying categorization has left it so unnoticed, even 43 years after the making. It also features a reciting Marlène Dumas still quite unknown at the time. With biggest gratitude to Mark Glynne who instantly felt confident with my proposal to reissue this silent witness of lasting beauty. My long time Japanese friend You Ishihara (White Heaven, The Stars) who bought the LP when it came out in 1980 still considers it as one of his all-time favourites. This is what he writes about ‘Home Comfort’:“Resignation and fear in a desolate mental landscape. This album, which exists like a shelter for those who have quietly escaped through the backdoor of the world, vividly reflects the inner depths of the devastated Amsterdam of the early 80’s. A beautiful and sad, unmistakable masterpiece.”

Very pleased and grateful to announce this ‘Home Comfort’ reissue by Mark Glynne and Bart Zwier, originally self-released in 1980. Maybe a bit of an unexpected title to appear in the LSD catalog but my love for this album goes back to my late teenage years and has had an addictive effect since, like a spleen infused magnet. With this album Glynne and Zwier, based in the Netherlands and connected to the Ultra scene, drew an insular blend of intimate post-punk and chamber (bedroom) songs with surreal scenic reflections. Probably its naked singularity defying categorization has left it so unnoticed, even 43 years after the making. It also features a reciting Marlène Dumas still quite unknown at the time. With biggest gratitude to Mark Glynne who instantly felt confident with my proposal to reissue this silent witness of lasting beauty. My long time Japanese friend You Ishihara (White Heaven, The Stars) who bought the LP when it came out in 1980 still considers it as one of his all-time favourites. This is what he writes about ‘Home Comfort’:“Resignation and fear in a desolate mental landscape. This album, which exists like a shelter for those who have quietly escaped through the backdoor of the world, vividly reflects the inner depths of the devastated Amsterdam of the early 80’s. A beautiful and sad, unmistakable masterpiece.”

Caligula is the third studio album by American musician Lingua Ignota, released July 19, 2019 through Profound Lore Records.[1] Recorded after the signing with the record label in 2018, the album features collaborations with several other musicians, a departure from the recording process of her previous album All Bitches Die (2017), which was done alone in a shed in the woods, and features more acoustic instrumentation than the aforementioned record. It thematically explores themes of abuse, misogyny, hate, vengeance and violence in its lyrics, inspired by Hayter's own experiences in Providence, and features influences from both classical and extreme music. The album received universal acclaim from music critics, and made appearances on several year-end lists.

Also known for its collaboration with The Body. Lingua Ignota has reigned supreme over the last few years as the pinnacle of jet-black, anomalous extreme music, and here we stock their unforgettable 17-year debut album, which marks the beginning of a legend! The album is a neo-folk - gospel - modern classical work that passes through post-industrial, and is truly eternal as one of the best albums spawned in the late 2010s.

Synthesised vocal madness from Porto’s Jonathan Saldanha, a founding member of HHY & The Macumbas and a sound artist in his own right, operating in intersecting fields of film, sound design and installation works. On his debut for his Horror Vector label, Saldanha works with vocalists Catarina Miranda and Luísa Saraiva, queering their voices through vintage delay units to generate a time-fluxing signature that's utterly psychedelic, like some unhinged Robert Turman, Robert Ashley x Kara-Lis Coverdale threeway. Originally written to accompany Catarina Miranda's ambitious Boca Muralha dance piece, a duet inspired by ancient Greek deities of vengeance the Furies, this tightly-coiled experiment comes off like Steve Reich in a k-hole. Saldanha makes use of a delay to manipulate and control the two voices, freezing fragments and curving them into slippery vortexes. Raw syllables are repeated, intersected and phased from staccato passages into operatic, rhythmic choruses, time-stretching snowballed clusters of ululations. Theatrical but never overblown, the music is boldly unadorned, preferring to highlight the idiosyncrasies of the methodology than resort to extraneous processing. There's little if any reverb: Miranda and Saraiva's voices sound almost obnoxiously dry, which only serves to further harden their impact. Glassy and cloying, the repetition is taken to extreme levels; Saldanha's usual noisy maximalism is nowhere to be found, but his mischievous streak is omnipresent. The vocals bounce left and right like a Reichian call and response, and while complex rhythms do eventually form as he futzes with the loop points, the music starts to dissolve into a spellbinding purr. At times almost alarmingly unadorned, it’s a brave and supremely mind-altering release from a promising new label. The dream is the dreamer!

A split CD commemorating the Japan tour by MARK FELL, RIAN TREANOR, and KAKUHAN in September and October 2023 is now available!

Known as a giant of electronic or experimental techno music since the 90's, they have released many works on labels such as Mille Plateaux, Line, Mego, and Raster Noton. In recent years, Mark Fell has been going beyond the boundaries of "techno" to offer a truly "modern" sound.
In 2023, NYEGE NYEGE TAPES will release "Saccades," a collaboration with Ugandan/Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and RIAN FELL is creating music at the intersection of club culture, experimental art, and computer music, with new deconstructions and linkages. RIAN TREANOR creates music that involves new deconstruction and interlocking from the intersection of club culture, experimental art, and computer music.
KAKUHAN (Koshiro Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa), who started his activities in 2022 after various collaborations, "stirs" as the name implies, the poles/tunes possessed by various types of music such as "electronic music/strings," "contemporary music/club music," "composition/ improvisation," etc. that the unit is equipped with.
This 9-song split CD, which includes completely new compositions by these three artists, is not a mere "split (mish-mash)," but rather an approach that transcends and melds the boundaries of "physical/metaphysical" on the periphery of music after techno music is evident in each of the compositions. The ongoing attitude of the three artists toward music is truly and casually expressed in this work, which should be listened to beyond genres.

The long-awaited CD version of the album includes two newly remastered bonus tracks that were only included on the cassette tape version! Japan’s KAKUHAN deliver a futureshock jolt on their incred debut album ‘Metal Zone’ - deploying drum machine syncopations around bowed cello and angular electronics that sound like the square root of Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’, Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, Beatrice Dillon’s ‘Workaround’ and Mica Levi’s ‘Under The Skin’ - or something like T++ and Errorsmith dissecting Laurie Anderson’s ‘Home Of The Brave’, her electric violin panned and bounced relentlessly around the stereo field. It really is that good - basically all the things we love, in multiples. While "Metal Zone" might be their debut, KAKUHAN are hardly newcomers. Koshiri Hino is a member of goat (jp), releasing a run of records under the YPY moniker, and heading up the NAKID label, while Yuki Nakagawa is a well known cellist and sound artist who has worked with Eli Keszler and Joe Talia among many others. Together, they make a sound that’s considerably more than the sum of its parts - as obsessively tweaked, cybernetic and jerky as Mark Fell, frothing with the same gritted, algorithmic intensity as Autechre's total-darkness sets, stripped to the bone and carved with ritualistic symbolism. The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KAKUHAN follow their 'nuum inclinations, snatching grimey bursts and staccato South London shakes and matching them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place. It's not a collision we expected, but it's one that's completely melted us - welding obsessive rhythmic futurism onto bloodcurdling horror orchestration - the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era. By the album's final track, we're presented with South Asian microtonal blasts that suddenly make sense of the rest of the album; Nakagawa erupts into Arthur Russell-style clouded psychedelia, while wavering flutes guide bio-mechanical ritual musick formations. It’s the perfect closer for the album’s series of taut, viscous, and relentless gelling of meter and tone in sinuous tangles, weaving across East/West perceptions in spirals toward a distinctive conception of rhythmic euphoria with a sense of precision, dexterity and purpose that nods to classical court or chamber music as much as contemporary experimental digressions. Easily one of the most startling and deadly debuts we’ve heard in 2022; the louder we’ve played it, the more it’s realigned our perception of where experimental and club modes converge - meditative, jerky, flailing genius from the outerzone. Basically - an AOTY level Tip.

Nearly a decade after their last album, Lilacs and Champagne picks up right where that record, Midnight Features Vol. 2: Made Flesh, left off. With bizarre excursions into pillowy, sentimental made-for-TV music – and children's choirs incanting the blackest dread-filled music the band has conjured to date – Fantasy World is both transcendent and traumatic. Despite sharing two founding members of Grails (multi-instrumentalists Emil Amos and Alex Hall) Fantasy World only peripherally resembles their core group. Its most somber tracks, such as “Dr. Why” and “Last Frontier,” approach the morbid loneliness of the beloved Grails series, Black Tar Prophecies. But Lilacs & Champagne have exaggerated their early record's implications and accelerated their mercurial rearranging of music history by deftly incorporating live instrumentation and samples with equal amounts of deference and disregard. Previously existing primarily in a realm adjacent to instrumental hip-hop (J Dilla, Clams Casino, Madlib), Fantasy World exposes Lilacs & Champagne’s deeper lineage as playful tape-collage culture jammers in the vein of legendary sound satirists, Negativland and Severed Heads. It embraces the effect of a child entering a dollar store: the immediate euphoria felt upon discovering the seemingly endless aisles piled impossibly high with novelty toys, utensils, party decorations, and toiletries eventually gives way to the overwhelming realization that they’re actually just a tourist in a perilous mountain of colorful garbage. From those mountains, Lilacs & Champagne mold monuments to curiosity and confusion.

Kakuhan, a unit of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, has released a self-released CD, which has been sold exclusively at live venues, on "Nakid," a hot label run by Koshiro Hino, who is also well known for his activities with goat and YPY and for running "birdFriend," and has released such powerful artists as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Mark Fell & Will Guthrie. The CD is a self-released CD by Kakuhan, a unit consisting of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, which has been sold exclusively at live venues and has won critical acclaim!

The CD includes a live performance by KAKUHAN, a unit consisting of YPY, Hino Koshiro, and cellist Nakagawa Hiroki, at the "Feldman meets freq 2022" event held at Kyushu University in February 2022.
KAKUHAN's first album "Metalzone", released at the end of 2022, was voted the 5th best release of 2022 by Boomkat and the 5th best album of the year by Music Magazine in the best electronic music category. The CD contains a total of six songs, including the previous night's "Prototype," a song from the same album, and includes a song that can only be heard on this CD.
As the unit name suggests, the various elements of both artists' activities-"electronic music/strings," "contemporary/club music," "traditional/contemporary," "physical/metaphysical," "composition/improvisation"-are literally "stirred" in the performance. It is highly recommended to listen to it together with "Metalzone"!

Carl Stone continues his late career prolific renaissance with a new album of sculpted, tuneful MAX/MSP fantasias. Stone “plays” his source material the way Terry Riley’s In C “plays” an ensemble – with a loose, freewheeling charm connected to the ancient human impulse to make sound, melody, and rhythm from anything. Stone’s unique technique simultaneously focuses and sprays sound like a symphony of uncapped fire hydrants. Is this techno, avant-garde, sound art? It’s simply (or rather fantastically messily) Carl Stone.

1st edition of 500 - no repress. Deluxe edition with two booklets. Originally released in 1974. Holidays Records: "Blending Native American references into a body of sonority that draws on free improvisation, experimental electronic music, and spiritual jazz, Pygmy Unit’s “Signals From Earth” - originally self-released by the band in 1974 - forges a singular and almost entirely unknown path, and stands almost entirely on its own in the history of west coast American jazz. First appearing on the San Francisco scene sometime during the early 1970s, almost nothing is know about the Pygmy Unit, a seven piece band steered by Darrel De Vore, who contributed flute, bass, percussion, piano, and vocals to the band's lone LP, first appeared with percussionist Terry Wilson within the psychedelic folk rock band, The Charlatans, who belonged to the legendary Family Dog scene. Jim Pepper, a Native American tenor saxophonist known for being a member of the Mal Waldron Quartet, played with Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, and numerous others, and produced the cult favourite, “Pepper's Pow Wow”, for Embryo Records in 1971. John Celona, who contributes parts on sax, synthesizer, and percussion, would later go on to be regarded as an electronic composer of some note. Of the remaining members, saxophonist Frank Albright, bassoonist Ron Grunn, and percussionist Marvin Kirkland, very little else is known. It seems this LP is more or less all they recorded. While undeniably jazz - riding a remarkable line between avant-garde electronic music, spiritual jazz, and free improvisation - the band was very much a product of the diverse creative ferment that developed in their hometown of San Francisco during the 1960s. Embodying the raw spirit of DIY (many of the instruments used in the recordings were made by DeVore himself, self-described as an “itinerant flute-maker”) the ensemble channels references - via passages of chanting and percussion, as well as conceptual underpinnings - from Jim Pepper’s Native American roots, intuiting them with the soulfulness of spiritual jazz, wild moments of avant-gardism centred around synths and electronic effects, and explosions of wild free improvisation. “Development of new music is a continuous path that grows directionally according to psychoacoustical phenomena available for unification. This record is evidence of that development, containing 12 performance pieces, at 12 separate times in different acoustical spaces with various combinations of musicians and instrumentation. The music is shaped by signals, received and sent by life forms on this planet. It is unwritten, unrehearsed, utilizing new and traditional approaches to energy, motion, and form. Eventually, music develops as a natural extension of the environment in which it exists. It is the aim of the traditions… to signal the universe from the Earth.”