In 2012, Ipecac released the first three Tomahawk albums as part of a limited edition Record Store Day Box Set. Then in 2013, they released the fourth album, Oddfellows. All have been out of print for the past ten years, until now.

Tomahawk is the rock supergroup featuring Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle), Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), John Stanier (Battles, Helmet) and various bassists including Kevin Rutmanis (Melvins) on the debut album, and Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle) on Oddfellows.

This is the first time Mit Gas and Anonymous have been available individually outside of the box set.

TRACK LISTING

1. Birdsong
2. Rape This Day
3. You Can't Win
4. Mayday
5. Rotgut
6. Capt Midnight
7. Desastre Natural
8. When The Stars Begin To Fall
9. Harelip
10. Harlem Clowns
11. Aktion 13fh

Multi-dimensional duo divide and dissolve present an intense package of reworkings taken from their highly acclaimed ‘gas lit’ album.

the ep includes remixes from chelsea wolfe, moor mother and one tba. “collaboration for us means resonance. a means of achieving a deeper understanding” the band explain as to the origins of the project. chelsea wolfe and moor mother add full vocals to their respective reworks.

TRACK LISTING

1. Far From Ideal (Chelsea Wolfe Remix)
2. Mental Gymnastics (Moor Mother Remix)
3. Track 3

Originally released in 1980 on short-lived Oregon label ‘Match Box Recordings’ and unearthed for BBE Music by The Mighty Zaf, ‘Burnin’’ is the only album recorded by Portland jazz/funk band Carl Smith And The Natural Gas Company. At the time of the release of this album, Carl Smith’s band had already been performing for almost two decades, starting out as the ‘Carl Smith Orchestra’ in 1959, fusing 40s and 50s big band styles with rock’n’roll, before gradually morphing into the more compact jazz / funk influenced outfit you can hear on Burnin’.

"Carl had this bright red delivery van he bought from the natural gas company. He got a hold of that thing and that’s how we went on the road. When we’d roll up to the gig they’d see this big van full of musicians and on the outside it said “Natural Gas Co.” Then out comes Carl Smith and it’s all over." - Lee Bradford (trumpet, flugelhorn)

The orchestra that Carl Smith founded was a Portland institution for about 50 years all-told, becoming an essential training ground for young musicians on the come-up; even the later Grammy-award winning trumpeter Chris Botti passed through at the age of 17 and Jefferson Airplane’s Signe Anderson was a long-time collaborator. It was “hard to find many jazz players around here who haven’t played with the band” said Smith in a 1980 interview with The Oregonian. They performed at festivals, universities, nightclubs, dance studios and even military bases from Portland to Seattle and everywhere in between, opening for Dave Brubeck, Buddy Miles and Johnny Ray among many others. The story of this album's recording has gone down in infamy among the remaining band members and Carl Smith's daughter Carlee (who performed lead vocals on ‘Love Won’t Let Me Go’), all of whom recall a fraught, rushed recording process, led by a producer who had no musical experience and was nothing more than a puppet for the somewhat shady label owners. This led to the album being cut too fast and accidentally pitched up a key, so if you want to hear it as the band intended, pull the pitch control down a little on your turntable.

"Turns out the whole thing was backed by a bunch of farmers from central Oregon who were looking to take a loss… So here we were playing out and selling records. As soon as we were about to hit one thousand copies sold, their plan was to stop promotion so it would die...but we didn’t know that." - Peter Piazza (trombone, electric violin, euphonium).

TRACK LISTING

1. Livin' A Dream
2. Gotta Be Willin' To Lose
3. Azz A Rite
4. Get It Right
5. Dig A Little Deeper
6. Love Won't Let Me Go
7. Left Overs
8. You Take The Time
9. Rosas
10. Stuff Like That

Multidimensional duo Divide and Dissolve release their third full length studio album ‘Gas Lit’ on Invada Records, produced by Ruban Neilson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

Divide and Dissolve members Takiaya Reed (saxophone, guitar, live effects) and Sylvie Nehill (drums, live effects) create instrumental music that is both heavy and beautiful, classically influenced yet thrillingly contemporary and powerfully expressive and communicative. Their music has the ability to speak without words and utilises frequencies to interact with the naturally occurring resonance.

‘We Are Really Worried About You’ presents a formidable saxophone sound giving way to a surge of crushing percussion and heavy guitar riffs. ‘Denial’ is a potent blend of Takiaya’s ominous and unsettling sax that blows wide open into riff city for almost eight glorious minutes. Both tracks encapsulate the message behind the music: to undermine and destroy the white supremacist colonial frameworks and to fight for indigenous sovereignty, black and indigenous liberation, water, earth and indigenous land given back.

For fans of James Baldwin, Osa Atoe, Adrienne Davies, the ocean and freshwater, breath/breathing, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Afro futurism, indigenous futurism, indigenous sovereignty, slavery abolition, resistance, the forest, bodies of water, being submerged, the railroad and Ai Ogawa.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: At no point throughout 'Gas Lit' do you come away with the impression that they're just having a good time. This is a visceral and intense, but entirely enjoyable fusion of neo-classical timbres with metallic heft and shoegazey walls of sound. Towering and impeccably constructed.

TRACK LISTING

Oblique
Prove It
Did You Have Something To Do With It (ft. Minori Sanchiz-Fung)
Denial
Far From Ideal
It’s Really Complicated
Mental Gymnastics
We Are Really Worried About You

Imagine if you could listen to the nervous whirling of methane and helium, that's what this album sounds like - at least in the mind of experimentalist Conrad Schnitzler. The Berlin artist first released these recordings on a small American cassette label. An uncommonly rhythmical vortex, we would suggest.

Conditions of the Gas Giant reflected the atmosphere associated with the music, clouds of manifold colours, whirling nervously above a gaseous planet. A methane and helium tryst in sonic form - fireworks, pyrotechnics for the eyes, like the surface of Jupiter, just as Schnitzler's tracks are pyrotechnics for the ears.

Third album from Soap&Skin, the working moniker for the Austrian musician and producer Anja Plaschg. Her first record in six years.

The album belatedly follows the release of ‘Lovetune For Vacuum’ in 2009 and 2012’s ‘Narrow’ (an Austrian No 1) but in that time in between the artist has been busy, not least with the birth of her daughter and subsequent motherhood but as well with many other creative works such as composing for theatre and film productions, as well as film acting.

Encompassing a range of musical allegiances, the album is infused with tranquil electronica, militaristic percussion, whilst coupled with choral ambience and earthy ethereal grandeur. This is an expansive, stunning, wide-reaching piece of dynamic beauty.

Recorded mainly at her home in a quiet leafy corner of Vienna, the album is not only self-produced but selfplayed.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Encompassing the beautiful, softly spoken vocals of Rozi Plain or Icelandic electronic genius' Múm, Soap & Skin tread a fine line between choral ambience and soaring modern-classical, often within the space of a minute or two. A bogglingly competant, and ridiculously diverse smörgåsbord of sound.

TRACK LISTING

This Day
Athom
Italy
(This Is) Water
Surrounded
Creep
Heal
Foot Chamber
Safe With Me
Falling
Palindrome
What A Wonderful World

In the body of work of Cologne artist Wolfgang Voigt – who, like few others, has informed, shaped and influenced the world of electronic music with countless different projects since the early 1990s -, GAS stands out in particular, a saturnine sound cosmos based on heavily condensed classic sequences. Even after nearly 20 years, the sound of GAS doesn’t seem to have lost any of its luster, as shown by the commanding success of Kompakt’s fall 2016 re-release of the essential back catalogue as a 10xLP/4xCD box set.

The overwhelming feedback from a loyal international fan community and worldwide media outlets attests once again to the sheer timelessness of GAS. Which is why it will feel like hardly a day has passed since the release of the last official album “Pop” nearly two decades ago, when Wolfgang Voigt resumes this specific creative path with the upcoming new full-length NARKOPOP.

Even in the here and now, the unmistakable vibe of GAS immediately hits home, taking the listener on an otherworldly journey with the very first sounds, drawing him or her into an impervious sonic thicket, down to the depths of rapture and reverie. From wafts of dense symphonic mist emerges a floating and whirling feeling of weightlessness, before the listener steps into an eerily beautiful forest of fantasy, pulled in by the allure of a narcotic bass drum.

While earlier GAS tracks were often based on the hypnotic effects of looping techniques, the 10 new pieces on NARKOPOP unfold their magic in a more entwined manner, sometimes with the sonic might of an entire philharmonic orchestra, sometimes as subtle and fragile as the most delicate branch of a tree with many. A main characteristic of Voigt’s oeuvre, the coalescence of seemingly contradictory stylistic aspects such as harmonious and atonal, concrete and abstract, light and heavy, near and far is also a decisive feature of NARKOPOP.

In accordance with the transgressive spirit of his collective work, Voigt carries the aesthetic conceptions of his music over to the realm of the visual. Based on his abstract forest pictures, the GAS artwork addresses Voigt’s artistic affinity to romanticism and the forest as a place of yearning. For the first time, a closer look at the cover of NARKOPOP reveals signs of architectural fragments which hint at another, maybe parallel world behind Voigt’s forest. Truth is the prettiest illusion.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Obviously, Voigt is an ambient legend. We all know this, and here he is in his GAS moniker. What we get treated to is dubbed-out atmospherics, static crackle and cataclysmic filtered pad swells. As full-bodied as ambient ever gets with the emotional range and swooning light-headed joy of modern classical chucked in for good measure. Predictably, a triumph.

TRACK LISTING

01. A1. Narkopop 1
02. A2. Narkopop 2
03. B1. Narkopop 3
04. B2. Narkopop 4
05. B3. Narkopop 5
06. C1. Narkopop 6
07. C2. Narkopop 7
08. D1. Narkopop 8
09. D2. Narkopop 9
10. E. Narkopop 10

F. Narkopop 11 (vinyl Only)