Philip Glass, the great American composer, was already in his mid-30s before his first album appeared, and then only because he produced the double LP himself. 'Music With Changing Parts' was the inaugural release on his own Chatham Square imprint in 1971.

At this point, Einstein on the Beach, Glass’ first opera, was still five years away. Yet in 'Music With Changing Parts', one can already hear much of his vocabulary in full bloom: the buoyant arpeggios, the melding of electronic and acoustic instruments, the elongated drones of human voice, the primary emphasis on pulse (an interest he shared with fellow composer Steve Reich) and the ecstatic potential inherent in repetition.

The album features the original Philip Glass Ensemble—the composer himself, along with Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Art Murphy, Steve Chambers and Robert Prado—playing Farfisa organs and woodwinds as well as Barbara Benary on electric violin.

As Glass describes in his memoir Words Without Music, he secured a $500 interest-free loan for the recordings’ initial release from the Hebrew Free Loan Society—an organization intended to help immigrants from the Old World upon arrival in the US. Though Glass was merely the grandson of immigrants, the venture wasn’t far off the society’s charter as Changing Parts helped usher in a new world of sound that would become known as Minimalism.

Chatham Square went on to release albums by other composers in Glass’ circle, including Gibson and Landry. The label was named after the Manhattan intersection where Landry had a studio and the ensemble rehearsed.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass first moved to New York to attend Juilliard at just nineteen, having already graduated from the University of Chicago. A staple of the Downtown scene, he can perhaps be appreciated as akin to the likes of sculptor Richard Serra or filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: mavericks who became major cultural figures entirely on their own terms.

This first-time vinyl reissue reproduces the original sidebreaks and gatefold sleeve.

TRACK LISTING

1. Music With Changing Parts

'Generic Flipper', the debut album by Flipper, remains the most absorbing full-length LP to emerge from the early San Francisco punk scene. A constant source of imitation for so-called “noise rock” bands, it has yet to be surpassed in its nihilistic glee.

Recorded between October 1980 and August 1981 and released in 1982 on the indispensable Subterranean Records, this album functions as a chaotic, sticky mass of individual personalities: the magma-like bass eruptions and dual vocals of Will Shatter and Bruce Loose, Ted Falconi’s icy guitar scraping and the relentless beat of drummer Steve DePace. At times playful and taciturn, paranoid and absurd, Generic charts a deliberate path that willfully chances destruction.

In early ’80s punk, when the hardening default was “faster-shorter-louder,” Generic subverts the nascent hardcore scene with a strictly applied regimen of turgid-slowerheavier. The lyrics are bleak, yet unnervingly beautiful. 'Ever' sets the tone with trademark restraint—“Ever wish the human race didn’t exist? And then realize you’re one too?”—while closer 'Sex Bomb' is a churning, 8-minute epic with looping bass, saxophone accompaniment and electronic effects of dropping bombs.

Tons of indie bands have attempted to recreate Flipper’s mix of acidic guitar, metallic bass sludge and sardonically brilliant lyricism, using the seemingly effortless template they pioneered; however, the effect usually drives listeners right back to Generic. While most of their contemporaries wilt under direct comparison, No Trend, the Butthole Surfers, feedtime and Church Police are a few who can stand the frigid heat.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ever
2. Life Is Cheap
3. Shed No Tears
4. I Saw You Shine
5. Way Of The World
6. Life
7. Nothing
8. Living For The Depression
9. Sex Bomb

Luciano Cilio was born in Naples, Italy, in 1950. He studied music and architecture and, in the late ’60s, collaborated with local artist Alan Sorrenti, American expat Shawn Phillips and various avant-garde theater groups. A virtuoso guitarist and self-taught composer, Cilio released only one LP before his untimely death at the age of 33.

'Dialoghi Del Presente' (1977) is a work like no other, one that sounds both ancient and ahead of its time. Produced by Renato Marengo, it features a series of muted tableaux for strings, woodwinds, guitar, chorus, piano and percussion. Cilio carves out a space where subtle, repetitive phrases yield—almost imperceptibly—to breathtaking silence.

As Jim O’Rourke writes, “These recordings sound as if they were to please no one but himself; they feel self-contained, introspective, and determined ... You can feel in the music a sort of necessity that can be rarely found, like in
This Heat’s debut or Nick Drake’s 'Pink Moon'.”

While each subsequent “quadro” grows more abstract, Cilio draws the listener into an expansive, pastoral soundscape. The closing piece, 'Interludio', begins with a plaintive guitar, which is joined by haunting strings and woodwinds before concluding, poignantly, as the album began, with Cilio and his guitar, alone once more.

Recommended for fans of Johann Johannsson, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, Arvo Part and Popol Vuh.

TRACK LISTING

1. Primo Quadro - Della Conoscenza
2. Secondo Quadro
3. Terzo Quadro
4. Quarto Quadro - Dell’Universo Assente
5. Interludio

Archival release of lost Phoenix, AZ band from 1982. Featuring former Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker and members of Sun City Girls.

“Difficult as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Sun City Girls did not exist. Prior to the Bishop brothers teaming up with drummer/shaman Charlie Gocher to form SCG’s classic trio lineup, there were various ad-hoc assemblages of local Phoenix-area freaks and weirdos—groups which existed only long enough to play a single gig, open mic or house party before disbanding without a trace. Hatched from this milieu was Paris 1942, a short-lived band formed by guitarist Jesse Srogoncik that included Alan Bishop, Richard Bishop and former Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker.

“Paris 1942 would play only four shows in as many months, but between April and August of 1982, the band would gather several times a week in Tucker’s living room, where the group feverishly wrote and rehearsed with a kind of quotidian discipline. While P42 didn’t release anything during their brief tenure, a 7” EP and LP (both self-titled) surreptitiously surfaced on the Majora label in the mid to late ’90s. Until now, those two titles—as well as an appearance on Placebo’s Amuck comp in late ’82—would be the only documented evidence that this improbable, serendipitous and magnificent band ever existed.

“While those expecting P42’s music to sound like a tantalizing combination of Sun City Girls’ iconoclastic hoodoo havoc and the Velvets’ primal drug-chug certainly won’t be disappointed, Paris 1942 more often than not transcends even these nearly impossible expectations. Srogoncik’s songs, in particular, are a revelation, displaying as much in common with the exuberant raunch of The Gun Club and the chapbook punk of Peter Laughner as they do any of the more obvious touchstones.

“The group’s foresight to document and capture this meeting of musical minds—a meeting as unlikely as it was short-lived—provides a missing link between the Velvets and the Voidoids, between the Dead Boys and the Dead C, between ESP-Disk’ and DNA. Far more than a historical curiosity, Paris 1942 provides a fresh perspective on an embryonic and sadly vanishing US underground. It is music that blinks at the past and anticipates a thousand possible futures.”
— James Toth (excerpt from the liner notes).

TRACK LISTING

1. Paris 1942
2. Hex
3. Headhunter
4. Radar
5. Damon
6. Ancient Time Foretold
7. Animale
8. Move Out Of Wichita
9. Catherine
10. Life Is A Killer
11. Conversation With My Girlfriend
12. Voodoo Blues
13. Pontius Pilate
14. Lions Paw
15. Boy From The North Country
16. Fossil In My Pants
17. What I Think I Mean
18. Lisa’s Whip
19. Southwind

'Model Express' a collection of B-sides and lost hits, first appeared as a self-released edition of 100 gold cassettes. The arch, filmic drama of Cindy Lee's songwriting – realized with keyboards, guitars, aching voice and collaged, lo-fi production – traverses a wide range of emotional and sonic terrain. The red velvet psych-pop of 'What Can I Do' gives way to the fluid 'Diamond Ring' like radio bursts from space. 'Model Express' finds Flegel at both their most experimental and immediately melodic, and this first-time vinyl release recognizes the collected tracks as a pillar in the Cindy Lee catalogue.

TRACK LISTING

1. Kromax (Theme From Kromax AKA Real State)
2. A Cold Fog Is Still Descending (KCP Sound Collage)
3. Model Express
4. Who You Want I'll Be
5. What Can I Do
6. What I Need (Alternate Version)
7. Dry Dive
8. Burning Candle
9. Left Hand Path
10. Are You Lonesome Tonight?
11. Don't Let Me Down
12. Diamond Ring
13. Be My Shining Star (Instrumental)

Cindy Lee is the diva alter-ego of singer / guitarist Patrick Flegel, the one-time captain of heralded Canadian experimental guitar pop act, Women. In Flegel’s working on / as Cindy Lee exclusively over recent years, their songwriting makes a move toward high atmospherics, often achieving a mysterious sweetness rooted equally in beauty and ache.

As Cindy Lee’s third long-form statement, 'Act Of Tenderness' makes use of antipodal themes to create a living sound: static with grace, distortion and sugar, all masterfully arranged with crooked nods toward pop classicism. The layered vocal on 'Power And Possession' creates a palpable haunt, bringing historical girl-group lament to choir-esque heights. The feedback shriek and industrial grind of 'Bonsai Garden' provides near-operatic damage, yet never stumbles into the irrevocably grave. These snowy pieces give the album a decidedly cinematic feel, albeit one bent more towards Eraserhead. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Act Of Tenderness
2. Power And Possession
3. What I Need
4. New Romance
5. The Last Train's Come And Gone
6. Operation
7. Quit Doing Me Wrong
8. Fallen Angel
9. Bonsai Garden
10. Miracle Of The Rose
11. Wandering And Solitude
12. A New Love Is Believing

Originally released as an edition of 50 lathe-cut LPs housed in silk-screened jackets in 2020 (fast on the heels of 'What's Tonight To Eternity'), 'Cat O' Nine Tails' has long intrigued die-hard Cindy Lee fans with its combination of the classic songwriting that would dominate 'Diamond Jubilee' a few years later and an actual suite of classical songs under the title itself.

Opening with the gothic soap opera theme of 'Our Lady Of Sorrows' into the manic exploration of 'Cat O' Nine Tails', onto the dusty western walk through Patrick Flegel's lovely guitar work on 'Faith Restored', the album seems to soundtrack the coolest movie the late '60s ever produced. All of this builds to the lush and sweeping ballad of bruised hearts that introduces that beautiful voice via 'Love Remains'.

Side Two sees 2024 live show closer 'Cat O' Nine Tails III' complete the suite to epic effect, before introducing the absolute showstopper that is 'I Don't Want To Fall In Love Again'. It is tender and fragile in that way that only Flegel can make both familiar and unique. Closing with the ethereal soul shuffle stomp of 'Bondage Of The Mind', the album showcases nine songs from an essential time in the Cindy Lee evolution.

TRACK LISTING

1. Our Lady Of Sorrows
2. Cat O' Nine Tails
3. Faith Restored
4. Love Remains
5. Cat O' Nine Tails II
6. As I'm Stepping Through The Gates
7. Cat O' Nine Tails III
8. I Don't Want To Fall In Love Again
9. Bondage Of The Mind

Cindy Lee is the brainchild of singer/guitarist Patrick Flegel. While some may know Flegel from his time spent in Canadian experimental indie band Women, Cindy Lee has spent the past four years crafting songs that push and pull in opposing directions – from tales of tragedy laced with haywire distortion to moments of breathtaking beauty.

On 'Malenkost', Flegel combines everything that makes Cindy Lee so essential: heart-wrenching romantic pleas, rough shards of noise and twilit ballads. Featuring the lo-fi pop single 'A Message From The Aching Sky', Malenkost sounds like Deerhunter playing The Supremes or vice versa.

TRACK LISTING

1. No Worth No Cost
2. Always Lovers
3. Hopeless In A Trance
4. Cash Money
5. I've Seen His Face Before
6. Gallows Smile
7. A Message From The Aching Sky
8. Coroner Of The State
9. Claim Of Vanity
10. Prayer Of Baphomet
11. Death Sentence
12. Hash Angel

Chickasha, Oklahoma is not a place known for producing a lot of original proto-punk bands. In fact, there is, to our knowledge, only one: Debris’. Formed in 1975 by bassist Chuck Ivey, guitarist Oliver “Rectomo” Powers and drummer Johnny Gregg, the trio created some of the most art-damaged outsider rock ’n’ roll this side of MX-80 Sound.

When a local studio offered the package deal of ten hours for recording and mixing as well as pressing 1,000 LPs and two-color jackets, Debris’ came in well-rehearsed—nailing all eleven of their songs in just one take. In April 1976, the same month as Ramones’ debut album, Debris’ would release their lone record onto the world.

Opener “One Way Spit” could easily be mistaken for a lost KBD single—from Chuck’s bizarre count-in to the band’s trashy startstop rhythms, unfurling a Dadaist flag around Johnny’s visceral vocals. On “Tricia,” a reference to the then-current Patty Hearst trial, Oliver’s gruesome groans are sardonically juxtaposed with an electric saw. These LSD-tinged tunes are a potent mix of Beefheart-ian controlled chaos and the genuinely weird avant-rock associated with the mid-’70s Cleveland scene. Enhanced by analog synthesizers and electronic effects, the album sounds like Eno-era Roxy Music or Stooges’ Fun House buried deep in the red Oklahoma dirt. While punk would spark a handful of bands who boldly straddled the line between the primal and the experimental, the relatively unsung Debris’ were one of the first to do so.

Debris’ had a standing invitation to play New York at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB in 1976, although they never made it out of Oklahoma. The private-press edition of their self-titled album (also known as Static Disposal, which was actually the label name printed on the original front cover) has since become a collector’s item and is even namechecked on the infamous NWW list.

TRACK LISTING

1. One Way Spit
2. Female Tracks
3. Witness
4. Tricia
5. Boy Friend
6. Leisurely Waiting
7. New Smooth Lunch
8. Manhattan
9. Flight Taken
10. Tell Me
11. Blue Girls

In October 1987, four months after the release of their critically acclaimed 'Sister' LP, Sonic Youth showcased their latest work in a blistering set at Cabaret Metro, Chicago. The concert was introduced by Big Black’s Steve Albini (who at the time was banned from the venue) and subsequently released as a semi-official bootleg under the title 'Hold That Tiger' on writer/provocateur Byron Coley’s impishly Geffen-baiting label Goofin’ (years later the band would use this nom de guerre for their own imprint).

'Hold That Tiger’s sterling reputation among the Sonic Youth faithful is well deserved. In fact, it isn’t a stretch to suggest that the album is to the first handful of SY releases what 'It’s Alive' is to the first three Ramones LPs - a feral and liberatory public snapshot of a band’s blossoming imperial phase. Indeed, HTT is the sound of a group at the peak of their powers, presenting new songs alongside a handful of older ones with the kind of wild, cathartic enthusiasm common to rock ’n’ roll’s most revered live albums.

Taking nothing away from 'Sister' - inarguably one of indie rock’s first true masterpieces - it is reasonable that many fans prefer the live versions heard on 'Hold That Tiger' to their studio counterparts. On HTT, Sonic Youth is a spiky, pummeling and confident force, alternately mammoth and meditative. Sister and its predecessor 'EVOL' notably added an airy, dreamlike reverie to the band’s turbulent doom-lurch, a stylistic evolution that seems to crystallize on HTT. Throughout, Kim Gordon’s sinewy, sumptuous bass and Steve Shelley’s propulsive, tom-heavy percussion provide the bedrock groove for Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s ferocious barrages of noise-guitar crunch.

By 1987, the band was confidently articulating their dual lexicon of punk-noir dissonance and supernal, psychedelic sonic calligraphy - bending their jagged, streetwise gnarl into balloon animals of dazzling and beautiful songs. This collision of splendor and chaos would become a hallmark of the group’s singular alchemy as well as provide a blueprint for the post-SST American underground they would help invent and ultimately nurture.

'Hold That Tiger’s encore - four songs by the band’s beloved Ramones, which Thurston would later astutely compare to “the perfect pudding after a hearty meal” - serves as a reminder that, like any true punks, Sonic Youth never could resist a good, rousing anthem to send the kids home with their ears ringing, their hearts hot-wired. This first-time reissue comes with gatefold jacket. Mastered by Bob Weston from the original tapes. Recorded by Aadam Jacobs. Audio repair/editing by Aaron Mullan.

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Schizophrenia
3. Tom Violence
4. White Kross
5. Kotton Krown
6. Stereo Sanctity
7. Brother James
8. Pipeline/Kill Time
9. (I Got A) Catholic Block
10. Tuff Gnarl
11. Death Valley ’69
12. Beauty Lies In The Eye
13. Expressway To Yr. Skull
14. Pacific Coast Highway
15. Loudmouth
16. I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You
17. Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World
18. Beat On The Brat

Originally released in 1974 on Shandar, Dream House 78’17” is the second full-length album by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This first-time US edition reproduces the original gatefold sleeve with beautiful calligraphy by Zazeela and liner notes by Young and French musicologist Daniel Caux.

Side one was recorded at a private concert (on the date and time indicated by the title) and features Young and Zazeela’s voices against a sine wave drone with Jon Hassell on trumpet and Garrett List on trombone. This work is a section of the longer composition Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young’s group The Theatre of Eternal Music). The piece evolves with the oscillator changing pitch and dictating an ornate pattern over the course of the performance. Side two is an example of one of the sets of frequencies sustained in the Dream House, the composite sound environments conceived by Young and Zazeela. The composer suggests listening while seated—to experience how the sound interacts with the room and other perceptions of its arrangement—as well as while walking.

As Young states, “The frequency ratios are monitored continuously as lissajous patterns on the oscilloscopes and, in spite of the great stability of the oscillators, the phase relationships of the sine waves gradually drift which causes their amplitudes to add and subtract algebraically. Not only does the sound become a bit louder and softer, but at very loud levels, one actually begins to have a sensation that parts of the body are somehow locked in sync with the sine waves and slowly drifting with them in space and time.”

Prima Materia was a vocal improvisation ensemble, founded by Roberto Laneri in 1973. Composed entirely of vocalists with no academic training, the group developed various techniques—revolving mostly around the use of overtones—that would embody their unique sound. No instruments nor electronic manipulations were ever employed within the group’s physiognomy, which was realized purely through the human voice. La Coda Della Tigre, the group’s sole album, was recorded in 1977 by Alvin Curran and released on Ananda, an artist-run label founded by Laneri, Curran and Giacinto Scelsi. As the original liner notes state, “The music of Prima Materia may sound radically new, yet at the same time it is likely to ring some distant bell and evoke ancient emotions. This is not due to chance: indeed, the very name of the group points to a specific path, namely, the unfolding of the potential implicit in the alchemical symbol as embodying a process of transmutation of consciousness.” Prima Materia’s four members (Laneri, Claudio Ricciardi, Gianni Nebbiosi and Susanne Hendricks) combine voices to create a singular, beautiful drone that is (as the group’s name suggests) both impossible to define and fundamentally simple. This first-time standalone reissue is recommended for fans of La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Disques Ocora

Allez-Téia, the second album by French guitarist Richard Pinhas under the Heldon moniker, was originally released in 1975 on the artist’s own Disjuncta imprint. Far from the band’s prog-tinged trio lineup, Allez-Téia features a menagerie of guitars, Mellotron and analog synthesizers. While opening track “In the Wake of King Fripp” pays homage to King Crimson in its title, the album’s heady textures and rhythmic meditations are more reminiscent of the German Kosmiche movement (Cluster, Harmonia, et al.) and post-rock experimentalists, such as Jim O’Rourke and Gastr del Sol. Acoustic guitar even makes a rare appearance - on the beautiful and melancholy “Aphanisis.” With front cover artwork depicting the events of May ’68 in Paris (by renowned photojournalist Gilles Caron), these dark ambient sounds make Allez-Téia perhaps the most revolutionary release in Heldon’s influential catalogue, foreshadowing Pinhas’s incredible solo work for decades to come.

TRACK LISTING

1. In The Wake Of King Fripp
2. Aphanisis
3. Omar Diop Blondin
4. Moebius
5. Fluence
6. St-Mikael Samstag Abends
7. Michel Ettori