For the 58th outing of the Wrecks anthology the label welcome new Argentinian producer Gaston Cabrera to the ranks. With his unique, energized and atmospheric productions he seems like a prime candidate one of our favourite nightclub imprints. The 'Prohibido' EP doesnt waste anytime getting to the point, a snarling beast that goes straight for the jugular. Spooky techno tropes mix with the best of yesteryear electro house stylings, it's a sound that feels new and exciting yet at the same time very familiar. Both raw and musical, the 4 song record could soundtrack either a long lost John Carpenter horror or a Tron-esque retro sci-fi movie; or, of course, a nightclub scene straight out of Total Recall. Recommended! 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Klasse Wrecks are on a roll at present, dishing out hardcore, prog, and technoid torpedoes like there's no tomorrow. This high voltage, acidic EP from Gaston Cabrera buzzes with electricity whilst its intriguing chord progressions and sound design also lend itself to more electro-disco and cosmic dancefloors.

TRACK LISTING

1. DJ Paranoia
2. Prohibido
3. Braseando
4. Playa Fantasma

'Ajomasé' is the groundbreaking debut album by legendary Nigerian percussionist Gasper Lawal. Originally released in 1980 on his own label CAP, Strut are proud to now bring this unique album back to the racks. Lawal’s style was forged through decades of high-level percussion work with the likes of Stephen Stills, Barbra Streisand, George Clinton & Funkadelic, Manfred Mann, Alexis Korner, Vangelis and Ginger Baker’s Air Force band. Dissatisfied with existing genre labels and production norms, Lawal began recording his own album in 1976 at Vangelis’ own studio in London’s Marble Arch before switching to long, drawn-out night shifts at Surrey Sound Studios, using downtime between The Police’s sessions for Outlandos D’Amour.

Lawal meticulously self-produced, composed, and overdubbed the album over four years, assembling an elite group of musicians from both Nigeria and the UK. The instruments used were often hand-built, including a powerful one-of-a-kind drum carved deep in the Nigerian bush. “This music is not about trends, about what is commercial or a “sound” of a particular moment,” explains Lawal, “it is about music to be felt, that gives pleasure. It is nurturing and meditative." Although record executives didn’t know how to categorise Ajomasé, the people responded.

Legendary DJs like John Peel and Janice Long gave it UK radio play – a rarity for African records at the time. Demand skyrocketed and, with Rough Trade stepping in to distribute the vinyl, the album found an international audience. In 1982, Peter Gabriel personally invited Gasper to perform at the first WOMAD Festival, leading to a new era of live performances and global recognition. Yet despite its impact, 'Ajomasé' has never been reissued – until now. This new edition brings a spiritually resonant, rhythmically rich and genre-defying work to a new generation of listeners. featuring liner notes by Gasper himself and audio remastered from original tapes by Whitfield Street Studios and The Carvery.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jeka José
2. Kita Kita
3. Eronu
4. Ajomasé
5. Awon Ojise Oluwa
6. Oro Moro
7. Saikoskro

In the wake of the Louisville–via–Chicago late-millennium post-rock explosion, Mercury Program arrived at an amorphous “scene” in transition, vibraphone in hand. From 'The Vapors of Gasoline'—their 2000 album for Tiger Style—was hardly a sophomore slump. Its ten cerebral and dissonant jams coyly answer the never-asked query: What if new age and post-hardcore bought a house in the suburbs?

This 25th anniversary remaster reveals the genius of an overlooked triumph in startlingly vibrant detail, providing atmospheric color for erstwhile reptile and periodic table fans alike.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Sea Is In Here
2. Highways Like Veins
3. Re-inventing A Challenge For Machines
4. Leaving Capitol City For Good
5. Nazca Lines Of Peru
6. Every Particle Of The Atmosphere
7. From The Vapor Of Gasoline
8. Fastest Way Through The South
9. Down On Your Old Lung
10. The Vortex East

Back from the undead is this new pressing of the first of all Gastr del Sol records, ‘The Serpentine Similar’. It is one of several distinct initiators of a definitive musical drift in the 1990s, and a drift all of its own, to boot.

At the time, this album was largely heard within an underground whose boundaries were clearly defined - but if today’s sound-pool of ‘commercial’ music is deeper and wider than it was back then, it is without a doubt due to the cracking open of certain doors of perception by Gastr del Sol, alongside their esteemed others.

The year was 1992. After a bruising run of tour dates the year before, the final lineup of Bastro, a power-trio of David Grubbs, Ken (Bundy) Brown and John McEntire, retired, exhausted. Shortly thereafter, they were rebirthed, sans drums, via a new set of ideas composed in the cut-down configuration of Grubbs on guitars, keyboards and vocals and Brown on bass. Playing in duo format opened up sound and intention, leaving the need for speed (and the stock in rock) out, while letting in an expanse of brooding, droning acoustic space that highlighted the songs’ serpentine shapes. This was something so radically different as to require a new calling card: henceforth, Gastr del Sol.

Signing to Teen Beat, Gastr del Sol completed ‘The Serpentine Similar’ in late 1992 for release the following year (the Drag City reissue came in 1997). In the final rendering, ‘The Serpentine Similar’’s roof-rent, white-sky execution was attenuated with several percussion appearances from the prodigal John McEntire. Over the next five years, his cameo presence was a constant in Gastr del Sol’s steadily-evolving tradition of significant breaks from tradition at every turn. There would be an even more significant tradition-breaker onboard for all this; following the release of ‘The Serpentine Similar’, Jim O’Rourke joined Grubbs in Gastr as Brown exited (to focus on Tortoise, with McEntire et al). For the new Gastr duo, a world of new directions in music awaited, the future became the past, and the music of Gastr del Sol emerged from the thin air, then returned there.

Now, ‘The Serpentine Similar’ has been returned to vinyl from the temporal streams of contemporary music listening, a glorious rematerializing of all its spatial details and available to independent retailers on LP for the first time in 20 years.

TRACK LISTING

A Watery Kentucky
Easy Company
A Jar Of Fat
Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis
Eye Street
For Soren Mueller
Serpentine Orbit
Even The Odd Orbit

Drag City present an awesome new vinyl pressing of Gastr del Sol’s ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’, just in time for its 29th anniversary.

Way back when, ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’ was the umpteenth release from the individual and collective forces of David Grubbs (known then for Bastro, The Red Krayola, Codeine, Squirrel Bait) and Jim O’Rourke, whose further history has since numbered at least another umpteen or so essential listens.

As part of its time-traveling function, ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’ is a return to roots, but not always necessarily Gastr’s. They were more than happy to stand on branches up above other folks in order to see any next thing worth leaping for.

Opening at their most incandescently impressionistic, ‘Our Exquisite Replica of “Eternity”’ has no precedent in the Gastrlog, and few in most others, either. ‘Rebecca Sylvester’ uses vocal harmonies to sharpen their singular, gamelan tone poem song form into something resembling a pop reverie at the finish. With undeniable (albeit oblique) comedy, ‘The Sea Incertain’ comments upon Crookt, Crackt, or Fly’s ‘The C in Cake’, with the presence of cracked electronics here and elsewhere taking a more forward position.

The stentorian chamber piano sound introduced on ‘Mirror Repair’ is still in full effect throughout ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’, but the bluesy rattling of finger style acoustic has the last word, with a tranced-out reading of John Fahey’s version of ‘Dry Bones In The Valley’, weaving guitar, piano and Tony Conrad’s trademark droning violin together to close the proceedings with an ingenious, slow-acting bang.

In addition to Tony Conrad, Gastr del Sol drew upon a memorable spectrum of players for the sounds of ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’, including Anthony Burr, Steve Braack, Gene Coleman, Mats Gustafsson, Terri Kapsalis, John McEntire, Günter Müller, Jerry Ruthrauff, Ralf Wehowsky and Sue Wolf. When issued, this combination of players, parts and play - packaged in an impressively broad tip-on Stoughton gatefold sleeve emblazoned with Roman Signer’s instantly iconic ‘Wasserstiefel’ image - became the fastest-moving Gastr del Sol record to date.

A delightful result, to our way of thinking, of the band’s ability to push at the far boundaries of their music while consolidating upon pleasure points within sounds and songs. Gastr used these polarities to compulsively draw the listener intimately close with sudden injections of g-force and an uncanny interpolation of space.

TRACK LISTING

Our Exquisite Replica Of “Eternity”
Rebecca Sylvester
The Sea Incertain
Hello Spiral
The Relay
Crappie Tactics
Dry Bones In The Valley (I Saw The Light Come Shining ‘Round And ‘Round)

POP – the album that has become widely recognized as the defining moment in which Wolfgang Voigt brought us into a clearing of his deep, psychedelic forest. A landmark release in the GAS odyssey that drew international attention, POP was originally released in 2000 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint MILLE PLATEAUX. POP was heralded by Pitchfork at the time of release as being “an exercise in sonic texture… pure sonic velvet, the layered drone radiating a palpable warmth.”

POP has since been reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX” (now out of print) and finally now, POP is released on KOMPAKT – for the first time in its original artwork.

At the latest with the release of the albums "Zauberberg" and "Königsforst", in the mid-1990s, one associates GAS, Wolfgang Voigt's very own artistic cross-linking of the spirit of Romanticism and the forest as an artistic fantasy projection surface, with intoxicatingly blurred boundaries of post-ambient infatuation and the impenetrable thicket of abstract atonality. The distant, iconic straight bass drum marching through highly condensed, abstract sounds taken from classical music by the sampler or modulated accordingly, and the enraptured gaze through pop art glasses into the hypnotic thicket of an imaginary forest, manifested over the years this unique connection of audio and visual, which to understand fully, then as now, would be neither possible nor desirable.

Quite the opposite. The album GAS - DER LANGE MARSCH once again invites us to follow the deep sounding bass drum, to give in to its irresistible pull into a psychedelic world of 1000 promises. In the process, the journey leads us past stations of memories sounding from afar, from "Zauberberg" to "Königsforst" and "Pop", from "Oktember" to "Narkopop" and "Rausch", back and forth, now and forever.

Way. Destination. Loop. Forest loop.

No beginning. No end.

Kompakt is proud to announce, finally, a reissue of the first, self-titled GAS album. Originally released on electronica imprint Mille Plateaux back in 1996, it’s been unavailable in its original form ever since – the version of GAS included in 2008’s Nah Und Fern box featured several different tracks. Here, however, GAS is restored in all its glory, the debut full-length from Wolfgang Voigt’s most enigmatic, quixotic project.

There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up.

But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions.

GAS feels, also, like a more pliable hint at what’s to come, as the GAS concept really solidified on its successor, 1997’s Zauberberg, and reach its apotheosis on Königsforst and Pop. Those three albums share a very similar palette – blurred, hazy samples, often of classical music, stacked and cross-thatched across a muted 4/4 thud. GAS, then, is an outlier of sorts: it’s more expansive in its remit, lighter in its mood, perhaps more fleet of foot. This, of course, is part of its charm.

In clearing space for Voigt, by preparing the terrain, GAS sits both at the edge of the forest, and at the verge of an expansive, wide-eyed future; one where GAS would become truly eternal.

ZAUBERBERG – Wolfgang Voigt’s most fundamental (and foreboding) release under his alias GAS and perhaps of all in his untold discography – finally stands alone once again and is released in the way its original splendour.

Originally released in 1997 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint Mille Plateaux, and then reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX”, ZAUBERBERG is now released on his own label KOMPAKT on 180 gram vinyl in its original.

Though this narcotic symphony is not the first release under the GAS moniker, ZAUBERBERG is the first to disclose the true nature of Wolfgang Voigt’s unified sound and ideology as GAS. Layers of ominous intensity supported by muffled kick drums as classical music loops incessantly swirl with no direction, ZAUBERBERG is the definitive GAS album and a perfect starting point for those not familiar with his music.

KÖNIGSFORST – following the 1997 release of ZAUBERBERG (KOMPAKT 370.1), Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project returned with KÖNIGSFORST, a full length that has stood the test of time as a template for introducing fundamentals of 90’s techno into the principles of contemporary electronic music.

Originally released in 1998 on the iconic Frankfurt imprint Mille Plateaux, and then reissued in 2016 as a part of GAS “BOX”, KÖNIGSFORST is now released on his own label KOMPAKT on 180 gram 3LP vinyl in its original artwork.

KÖNIGSFORST brings glimmers of light into Voigt’s dark, magnificent forest. Melodic strings and brass are added to his signature layers of ominous intensity. The forest path is laid out by muffled kick drums as classical music loops incessantly swirl with no direction.

OKTEMBER is the second EP release under Wolfgang Voigt’s mythical GAS project (it follows "Modern“ on Profan, 1995). The 2 compositions were originally released in 1999 on Mille Plateaux, and then reissued partially in 2016 on GAS “BOX”. OKTEMBER is finally released on Voigt's own label KOMPAKT, pressed on 180 gram vinyl in its original artwork.

This reissue features “Tal ‘90“ (instead of the original A side) – a predecessor to the GAS project originally recorded in 1990 under the alias TAL, it was released as a part of the Pop Ambient 2002 collection. With its sampled strings, horns and guitars, "Tal 90” soundtracks a more uplifting side to what is typically accustomed to being the sound of GAS. The title track “Oktember” is a dense, hypnotic affair that conjures a unique vision of dub techno that few have been able to replicate.

A monumental soundtrack to uncertain times.

Rausch with no name / My beautiful shine / You are the sun / This is where I want to be / Rausch with no morning / This is where we burn / The Stars sparkle / In a sea of flames / Horns and fanfares / Fanfares of joy / Fanfares of fear / The wine we drink through the eyes / The moon pours down at night in waves / Careful with that axe Eugene / Personal Jesus / No beginning no end / Eighteenth of Oktember / The night falls / The king comes / The hunt starts / Freude schöner Götterfunken / The long march through the underwood / Trust me there’s nothing / Once upon a time there was a bandit / Who loved a prince / That was long ago / Spring Summer Fall and Gas / There is a train heading to Nowhere / Drums and Trumpets / Future without mankind / Warm snow / Alles ist gut / The bells toll / You are not alone / The murmur in the forest / The murmur in the head / Light as mist / Heavy as lead / Music happens / To flow like gas / A clearing / Heavy baggage / Debut in the afterlife / Death has seven cats / World heritage Rausch / Finally infinite

Wolfgang Voigt 2018

This title explores a key hip hop album marking the cross over point where the streets and the charts collided. Contradiction the simultaneous existence of two competing realities and larger than life persona are at the core of "Nas' Illmatic". Yet Nas' identity - as an inner-city youth, a child of hip hop and a Black American - predicts those philosophical quandaries as much as it does its brazen ambition.

The artistic impact of Illmatic was massive. The record finds its place in the greatest transition in hip hop up to that point. Along with the Wu Tang Clan's debut from the previous year, Illmatic put New York back on the map after a long period of West coast, G-funk dominance.

Nas also mapped out the laid-back lyrical style that would usher in the modern era of hip hop. 

Like a bolt echoing back from the blue, We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging the listener (that’s us!) back into the maelstrom of their all-too-brief (-but-ultimately-long-enough-to-change-everything-incisively) passage of 1993-1998 via an assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live material.

Gastr del Sol’s music was of the transformative variety – or was it transfiguration they were up to? Or transmigration? Flux was key, to be sure. David Grubbs formed Gastr from the final lineup of Bastro; on Gastr’s del Sol’s debut, The Serpentine Similar, Grubbs, Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire downshifted from a thrashing electric outfit into a droning, acoustic-based one. Following this, the lineup shifted again, decisively – Brown and McEntire departed to focus on the project to be known as Tortoise, and Jim O’Rourke arrived, pairing with Grubbs to make a sequence of unpredictable leaps across genre and practical approach alike, over three LPs and a pair of EPs that threatened the passage of musical time as we knew it in the mid-90s.

We Have Dozens of Titles contains nearly an hour of previously unreleased live recordings, alongside another near-hour of studio recordings culled from previously uncollected singles, EPs, and compilations. At long last, vinyl purchasers will hear the full range of “The Harp Factory on Lake Street”, “Dead Cats in a Foghorn”, “Quietly Approaching” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” for the first time EVER on vinyl – all of it, live and studio alike, lovingly mastered and remastered by Jim O’Rourke, and packaged in a three LP box set with a wicked Roman Signer image on its removable lid, interior printing on the box bottom and inner sleeves for each LP with performance credits for all the songs.

As much as Gastr del Sol’s albums showcase a group eminently at home in the studio, they were inclined to thoroughly reinvent their compositions in performance. While reviewing live tapes for this compilation, the studio versions of most things felt more and more definitive, with the exception of the live takes included here, which essay startling new qualities in pieces that have been in the public ear for several decades.

The majority of these live performances come from a miraculous find in the CBC archive – a broadcast-quality recording of Jim and David from the 1997 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville. This was the last time they performed together as Gastr del Sol, during which several still-gestating Camoufleur pieces were presented in radically different forms and Jim played organ on a track from David’s first solo album, the concert-closing, band closing (and now album-closing) version of "Onion Orange”.

The studio recordings included were originally released by the Red Hot Organization, God Mountain, Table of the Elements, Sony Japan, Teenbeat and Drag City. Studios utilized in the making of the material were Idful Music Corporation, Kingsize Soundlab and steamroom. The extended company of players on these numbers includes Jeb Bishop, Bundy K. Brown, Steve Butters, Gene Coleman, Thymme Jones, Terri Kapsalis, John McEntire, Günter Müller, Bob Weston and Sue Wolf – a virtual “what’s who wha'?!?” of Chicago’s hothouse scene in those times.

We Have Dozens of Titles revisits the slow-burning incendiaries of Gastr del Sol, finding, once again and after so much time elapsed, another, further set of reinventions from a group who continues to change the way we hear music.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Seasons Reverse (live)
2. Quietly Approaching
3. Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis (live)
4. At Night And At Night
5. Dead Cats In A Foghorn
6. The Japanese Room At La Pagode
7. The Bells Of St. Mary’s
8. Blues Subtitled No Sense Of Wonder (live)
9. 20 Songs Less
10. Dictionary Of Handwriting (live)
11. The Harp Factory On Lake Street
12. Onion Orange (live)

Like so many of the most essential rock bands, The Gaslight Anthem have a rare gift for finding glory in the inescapable pain of being alive. On their new album History Books—their first new music in over nine years—the New Jersey-bred four-piece bring their soulful breed of punk to ten thrilling songs exploring everything from mortality to mental illness to the more precarious dimensions of human connection. In the tradition of their seminal sophomore album The ’59 Sound, The Gaslight Anthem’s sixth full-length ultimately achieves the tremendous feat of hitting every raw nerve while endlessly inspiring wildly triumphant singing-along.

“A lot of this record is questioning all the bad stuff we see in the world and the difficult things we go through in life, and asking how to deal with it,” says vocalist/guitarist Brian Fallon, whose bandmates include drummer Benny Horowitz, bassist Alex Levine, and lead guitarist Alex Rosamilia. “I think the answer is that we’re all in this together and that somehow makes it okay, even when it’s anything but easy. The main message of the album is empathy.”

The first release from their own Rich Mahogany Recordings (a label distributed via Thirty Tigers), History Books finds The Gaslight Anthem working with acclaimed producer/engineer Peter Katis (The National, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie) and recording at his Bridgeport, CT-based Tarquin Studios. Featuring a guest appearance from longtime Gaslight Anthem champion Bruce Springsteen, History Books matches its unfussy yet gracefully crafted sound with the force-of-nature energy that’s defined the band since getting their start playing basement shows back in the mid-aughts.

“Making this album clarified that we want to keep doing what we’ve always done—because no one else can do it in quite the same way, and that’s something I’ve started to become very proud of,” says Fallon. “At the end of the day it’s just rock-and-roll music, but I really do believe it can have a positive impact on people’s lives. I think there’s so much beauty and magic in that.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Spider Bites
2. History Books
3. Autumn
4. Positive Charge
5. Michigan, 1975
6. Little Fires
7. The Weatherman
8. Empires
9. I Live In The Room Above Her
10. A Lifetime Of Preludes

“Without doubt one of the most beautiful and soulful recordings I have ever heard” - Brian Eno

“It sounds for all intents like music from another world” - Los Angeles Times

A widely acknowledged classic by the undisputed master of the duduk, a traditional woodwind instrument from Armenia. A double-reed instrument of ancient origin and noted for its unique, mournful sound. Originally released in the Soviet Union in 1983, Brian Eno came across the musician during a visit to Moscow in the late 1980s and subsequently introduced the record to Western audiences via a reissue on his Opal label.

Available on vinyl for the first time in 33 years, restoring the original 1983 artwork to its former glory, this is a unique and powerful musical statement that has had a lasting cultural impact.

TRACK LISTING

A Cool Wind Is Blowing
Brother Hunter
Look Here , My Dear
I Will Not Be Sad In This World
Little Flower Garden
Your Strong Mind
The Ploughman
Dle Yaman

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

Gaspard Auge is releasing his Debut Album “Escapades”, out in June 25th.

He is best known as one half of Justice, the duo that united rock and rave and whose dancefloor smashes defined a generation.

Gaspard made an instrumental album whose sound will be familiar to Justice ’s fanbase, echoing some previous works & inspirations of the cult duet.

Escapades sounds like a UFO landing from another galaxy, or time, a baroque masterpiece that reimagines European classical music for this century.

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

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.

“No other bands sound quite like the duo of Buke & Gase.” - NPR Music

‘Scholars’ is Buke & Gase’s third album and their first in six years. The New York duo have reinvented themselves, emerging with a more concise, electronic and emotional sound, in sync with our most forward-thinking contemporary artists.

Since 2013 the band have served as hand-picked opening act for The National, Battles, Lou Reed, Shellac, Deerhoof, Owen Pallett and Mike Patton’s metal supergroup Tomahawk.

For fans of Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, James Blake.

TRACK LISTING

Stumbler
Scholars
Derby
Pink Boots
Temporary
Wrong Side
Grips
Qi Ball
Flock
Eternity
No Land
Ranger

ZOMBY, one of the UK’s most enigmatic electronic producers, underscores his already illustrious succession of releases with his latest EP “GASP!" ZOMBY’s ability to effortlessly shift aesthetics across his career has firmly stationed him as a producer that can’t be boxed, and “GASP!" sees him altering his often jungle-driven sound yet again, furthering him as a sonic chameleon among an ever-increasing landscape of musical similitude.  In his signature spirit of cryptic variety, “GASP!" explores another tectonic revision in ZOMBY’s style. A shift forward indeed, the compact, 3-track EP is a relentless, hardware-driven behemoth of beats and breaks that fit somewhere between a chugging steel factory and a darkened dancefloor.

TRACK LISTING

A1. GASP!
A2. ZKITTLEZ
B1. ZPRITE

‘Drinking Gasoline’ was released in 1985, consisting of four songs from the legendary ‘Gasoline In Your Eye’ videocassette. These songs rank among Cabaret Voltaire’s more infectious compositions.

‘Gasoline In Your Eye’ is now included as a DVD together with both the CD and the LP of ‘Drinking Gasoline’, featuring videos shot and edited by groundbreaking director Peter Care and Richard H Kirk.

All audio remastered from the original tapes.

Vinyl cut by Stefan Betke aka Pole.

‘Gasoline In Your Eye’ DVD includes ‘Sensoria’ and promotional videos for ‘I Want You’ and ‘Just Fascination’.

Cabaret Voltaire, alongside Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Fad Gadget and The Normal, were at the forefront of the UK electronic movement of the late 1970s. Way ahead of their time, Cabaret Voltaire’s blend of dance music, techno, dub, house and experimental made them, without a doubt, one of the most influential acts of the last 35 years.

Gastr Del Sol emerged from the remains of Bastro in 1992 with the brooding, mostly drumless album, ‘The Serpentine Similar’. This represented an unlikely evolution from the fury of Bastro, but evolution was only getting started - and ‘unlikely’ was one of the ongoing principles in Gastr Del Sol’s approach. Before the sessions for the second album, Bundy Brown left the group and David Grubbs asked Jim O’Rourke to come play. 1994’s ‘Crookt, Crackt Or Fly’ tangled the clean lines of the original band in the writing, playing and editing of the music. This was all very fascinating, but it wasn’t until the five songs of ‘Mirror Repair’ that the compelling space of Gastr Del Sol could be fully perceived.

‘Mirror Repair’ was rife with guitar interplay, but Gastr coloured the palette with piano, drums and a sudden and rattling variety of woodwinds, all evoking the obsessive pull of a deep-seeded conviction, an insistent image that one cannot forget in a dense atmosphere with riffs patterning over each other and fading into landscape. The quieting of Gastr Del Sol had been dialling down since the start; here the silences were as essential a part of the sound as the sound was. In a fast five song mini album, length and depth were impossibly extended as part of the many moods of Gastr Del Sol. Albert Oehlen’s cover art provided a perfect counterpart to the sounds within, providing also a shout out to The Red Krayola, where David and Albert met during their mutual involvement with Mayo Thompson.

The best in this vein was yet to come - but with ‘Mirror Repair’, Gastr had made something definitive. Now, the bold sounds of nearly twenty years ago are back in the groove, freshly cut for 21st ears to hear. You need ‘Mirror Repair’.

“On each of their releases to date, Buke & Gase have never been anything less than absolutely thrilling” - Pitchfork

For fans of DIY art-rock bands like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors, Tuneyards, Shellac, and possibly progressive metal, such as Tool.

Buke & Gase garnered new levels of attention when NPR Music showcased them in their live webcast from CMJ. Smart music lovers around the world were blown away by the band’s uncategorizable sound. One commenter dubbed them “fiery metal-infused indie rock,” while another suggested an “avant-folk duo.”

The band’s second album, ‘General Dome’, finds them evolving their already innovative sound. The band rented a cavernous empty room in between heavily used railroad tracks and the Hudson River to set up a temporary recording studio. The recordings have hints of their surroundings, such as natural reverb, train horns, rumbling annoyances. The size of the new space led to a grander songwriting style. As per usual, the band recorded and mixed the album themselves.

Another radical set of ska-core punk missiles from The Suicide Machines, back with their fifth album "A Match and Some Gasoline". It matches the intensity and creativity of their early work allied to a new confidence that takes the intensity a step further. It encompasses a bunch of new styles - hardcore, harder edged thrash, punk, reggae, ska all put into a blender.

Recorded in Reading during one week in September 2001, Matt, Jon, Gadge and Jay are taking the US sound and dragging it kicking and screaming to Berkshire. Double CD from these lads due to be seen on tour with 4ft Fingers, Caffeine and Mr Zippy.

In Cuba's fine tradition of duet singing, Compay teams up with Khaled, Cesaria Evora, Antonio Banderas (?!) and many more latin vocalists on this super album.

A 12 track explosion of atomic charged '65 era power soul melded with Gasoline's own high octane brand of maniacal post '01 tuck'n'roll devastation.