Format: cassette

Abronia - The High Desert Sessions ()

CS Edition  of 150. Release Date – June 30th – Pre-order available – $11 After recording three studio albums (two of which — 2019’s The Whole of Each Eye FTR498 and 2022’s Map of Dawn FTR669 — we were honored to co-release with Cardinal Fuzz), this amazing Portland OR sextet decided to try something different. An experiment. They packed a vanload of gear and headed out to a rural house in Central Oregon with an 8 track recorder. Besides their standard array of axes, they also brought various “little instruments” as well as acoustic strings and percussives of various stripes, then spent three full days jamming from very early to very late.  There was a lot improvisation, instrument swapping and… Read more »

CVS - Ad Hoc ()

CS Edition of 100. bandcamp link $10 Ad Hoc is this Spanish trio’s first release with which they’ve disguised themselves as a popular American drug store chain. There was an earlier cassette issued under the Cunningham/Volt/Serra banner, which is probably a more elucidating name, but brevity being the soul of wit (and all that), it’s surely more modern a choice to go with the acronym they occasionally employ. Acronyms, after all, suggest a kind of sleekness. And the music created by CVS is as sleek as a goddamn otter. The line-up is unusual. Our great friend, Mark Cunningham (of Mars, Blood Quartet, etc.), plays trumpet. Trumpet is also the chosen “axe” of fellow Barcelonan underground musician, Pablo Volt. The third… Read more »

Marcia Bassett & Samara Lubelski - West Coast Live ()

CS Edition of 100. Out of print Digital Available on Bandcamp. Recorded at three dates on a 2019 tour of Western North America, this new release by the reboutable duo of Marcia Bassett (guitar) and Samara Lubelski (violin) is the first trade release of a tape originally done in an edition of 23 to be sold on tour.  The music is as brilliant as it always is when these two stars collide. Marcia’s control of feedback drones is exquisite and pairs perfectly with Samara’s long-tone string work. The three pieces here are uniformly awesome assemblages of harmonic frequencies and textures that flow into each other as though they were poured from a single head. The two shorter pieces on the… Read more »

Niko Karlsson - Its Own Phantom ()

CS Edition of 100. available on bandcamp. Five years after the magnificent Valosta Valoon LP (FTR331), Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Niko Karlsson is back with a new swab of sound that is even more organic than its predecessor. This time out the focus is more on acoustic strings and percussion, with a minimum of machine driven sounds, even when things get cinematically tense (especially on the b-side). But the bulk of Niko’s new tape (which he had first suggested be released sans any artist info) is a mesmeric assemblage of small gestures that feel something like a meditation exercise taking place in the great outdoors. Acoustic strings swirl around your head like a flock of soft ravens, then expand spectral fingers to… Read more »

rootless - What The Truth Leaves Out ()

CS Edition of 100. Bandcamp. $10 Rootless (or, more properly, rootless) is a solo project that’s been going for better than five years now, helmed by Brooklyn’s Jeremy Hurewitz. Two types of sounds are created under this banner — low key electronics is one, and fingerpicked acoustic guitar is the other. what the truth leaves out focuses on the latter. The shared thread between these styles is a highly personal and intimate feel. When listening to rootless, you often get the sense this is music created solely for the pleasure of the artist himself. The aura of introspection is as deep as the night, so it’s possible to almost feel like a voyeur while listening in. But hey, Jeremy sent… Read more »

Donkey No No - BLOOM ()

Edition of 100. pro-dubbed. Mastered by Caleb Mulkerin at Tank 28. Riso-graph cover printed at LOOKYHERE.   BANDCAMP.  $10 Deep new Quarantine Vibes from this hard lovin’ Western Mass trio. Two of the tracks were recorded during Donkey No No’s superb appearance on the QuaranTunes Zoom concert series (Friday May 14, 2021), the third was done three months later at an undisclosed location. The building blocks, as usual, are Omeed’s alternately chipper and fragmentary guitar lines, Jen Gelineau’s fluid viola / violin runs, and the weep & sizzle dynamism of Ted Lee’s Bowed cymbals. If their namesake metal donkey was harmed at any point during these sessions, you won’t prove it by me.  There is a bit less of rural… Read more »

Myriam Gendron - Ma Delire ( / )

SECOND PRESSING – Quebec City edition. 2LP. Bandcamp link. $32 / CD Edition of 800. $10 / Cassette Edition of 200. $9 2nd Edition  – It has been a while since the release Myriam’s acclaimed 2014 debut album, Not So Deep As a Well (FTR 148). The intervening years have brought a smattering of live performances, a bouquet of children, Trump’s Pandemic, and much more. For someone who likes to read and ponder as much as Ms. Gendron does, there has been plenty to mull over. Different concepts for a new album were broached, but the seed of Ma Delire was planted when Myriam recalled a paper she written in university. It was about Leonard Cohen’s recording of “The Lost… Read more »

The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol - Biker Smell ()

CS Edition of 100. Pro-dubbed. Included DL with CS. Risograph covers printed at LOOKY HERE. $10 New cassette issue of the third LP by TBWNIS. This was the final album recorded by the original quartet iteration of the band during the Fall and Winter of 2009 in Ottowa. 100 copies were released by Birdman Sound in 2010, then Cardinal Fuzz did another edition of 100 in 2018, apart from the 100 to be included in the anthology box, II.  The band at this time was Mark McIntyre, John Westhaver, Bill Guerrero and Nathaniel Hurlow, and they were throwing down brain-thunderous instrumental thug-psych juice like maniacs. You can pick up small glimmers of lifted riffs in spots, but playing this album… Read more »

Delphine Dora & Jackie McDowell - The Dream of Change ()

CS Edition of 150. OUT OF PRINT The initial collaborative seed for The Dream of Change was planted back in 2016 when Delphine Dora invited Jackie McDowell to release some of her solo work on her now-defunct micro-label, Wild Silence. This invitation resulted in McDowell’s masterfully crafted drone-folk song cycle, New Blood Medicine. Fast forward two years to when Dora was immersed in the process of recording, L’inattingible, her most ambitious and highly orchestrated full length, and she once again reached out to McDowell to provide some vocal arrangements for a few pieces on the album. Given their affinity for wide-reaching folk songcraft and avant composition, along with their shared interests in poetry, literature, nature, and inner inquiry, Dora and… Read more »

Tashi Dorji - dead cities lie buried / lift comrades, lift comrades! ()

CS Edition of 100 OUT OF PRINT This new tape by Asheville NC’s Tashi Dorji is a hard-edged suite for solo acoustic guitar recorded in the depths of the Plague. Because I’ve been listening to Remko Scha a lot lately, it’s impossible for me to not-imagine the music here (especially the title track) as an extension of the marvelous Machine Guitar works by that great Dutch artist.  Tashi is known for creating harsher acoustic tones then many of his contemporaries, but that often seems more based on his decisions to constantly disrupt melodic expectations inside his work. On “dead cities lie buried…” his approach has a massive circular logic, in which small sonic events take place behind a revolving, repetitive… Read more »