Releases

Big Blood - Operate Spaceship Earth Properly ( / )

CD Edition of 300 $10 Our last Big Blood release was the idiosyncratic Ant Farm (FTR 241), Colleen and Caleb’s collaboration with the late composer Elliott Schwartz, which presented music designed for a museum installation. With Operate Spaceship Earth Properly, Big Blood return to the vast universe of strangeness they explore inside their own skin. Now fully incorporating the vocals and guitar of their daughter Quinnisa (previously a “secret weapon” unveiled mostly at live shows, as the Dictators once did with Handsome Dick Manitoba), Big Blood sound nutsier and wilder than ever. Spaceship Earth is a massively psychedelic investigation of science fiction, science fact and the mythic spot where they reconcile. Specifically referring to the work of writers such as… Read more »

Blood Quartet - Until My Darkness Goes ()

LP Edition of 250, Download included. Joint release with Gandula Spotify Bandcamp ajazznoise OUT OF PRINT The second LP by Mark Cunningham’s current Spanish outfit marks a directional shift from their 2016 debut LP, Deep Red (FTR283). On Darkness the quartet abandons pure instrumentalism, including a few vocal takes by drummer Cândid Coll strewn amidst the album’s various tangles. There is also a much more aggressively rockist focus shown at times. Rumor has always been that this is a firm part of the band’s live trip, but recorded evidence of it has thus far been scarce. Of course, most of Darkness is in the same great vein as Deep Red. Noirish trumpet drifts across a rotten cityscape, batting down noise… Read more »

Eugene Chadbourne - Solo Guitar Volume 1 1/3 ()

LP Edition od 400. Includes Download Slip. Rock and Roll Globe  Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized it would take scholars decades to decode them. Volume 1-1/3 is the first of four LPs devoted to documenting some of the music Dr. Chadbourne was creating during the years he was based… Read more »

Lauri McNamara - Knobby Knoll ()

LP Edition of 200. Includes Download slip. Lauri McNamara is one of the crazies who makes the New England sub-underground such a richly interesting universe to inhabit. She worked off and on with the late, lamented Egg Eggs, but her main focus has always been on solo performance, accompanying herself on ukelele. A few other people make the presence felt on her debut LP, Knobby Knoll, but let’s not get bogged down in their details. ‘Cause really, this is Lauri’s show, no matter who else might be sitting in. Unlike the many idiots who play uke, emphasizing its child-like qualities, Lauri handles the little axe like an adult. In her hands the instrument is just a guitar with a more… Read more »

More Klementines - More Klementines ()

LP Edition of 124 Co-Released with Twin Lakes Records Vinyl District Review OUT OF PRINT!  Back in the dawn of one era or another there was a Connecticut trio known as Myty Konkeror. In 2011 they cut a heavy-ass lathe LP called I Miss the Future. The album was full of loud guitars and textures that scraped your face if you put it too close to the speakers. But that was a gentler time. Now we are in the age of rage, and the three gentlemen who once ruled as Myty Konkeror have changed direction entirely. Their new moniker is More Klementines, their new album is entitled More Klementines, and their new sound is designed to smooth rather than ruffle… Read more »

Bryan Gillig - Limited Grace ()

LP Edition of 200. Includes download code. Cover art by Loren Burke. Limited Grace is a lyrical hitchhike expedition through a psychedelic rural universe where time is nebulous and navigational tools are frowned upon. Through words, voice and sound, Gillig take us through cosmic swamps, ghostly clearings, mountain tops at night without a tent, shacks built along riverbanks but without running water, and dark desert highways soaked in silence except for the sound of a gas tank running on little more than fumes. Using the imagery of small, concrete moments, he tells us unique yet epically familiar stories without the frills of any particular plotline. While his first release, Cave Trilogy (FTR 188), was a 3LP set of songs recorded… Read more »

Tarp - Part ()

LP Edition of 300. Comes with Download Slip. Co-Released with There Is No Trouble In Denmark In 1975, the critic Lester Bangs was seen moaning in the pages of Creem about the anti-emotionalism of the German band, Kraftwerk, and their whole concept of the man-machine. Skip ahead 43 years. Bangs is long dead, and the man-machine is thriving. As proof of this, one need look no further than the new Tarp LP, Part. Trapped inside its insanely lovely cover art (courtesy of Greta Svalberg), one finds the two hulking man-machines (Conrad Capistran and Joshua Burkett) attempting to figure out if it’s okay for robots to hug each other in public. Right in the center of the highway, even. Heard in… Read more »

Arkm Foam - Bloodroot Spitball ()

LP Edition of 200 with download code. Vinylization of a CDR released by Josh Burkett’s Mystra Records by this great cassette manipulator, who was long a central part of the Boston Whitehaus scene.  Bloodroot Spitball is a bit different from Foam’s other releases (such as Ftrcs/Cdr342, among others) since it incorporates a bunch of “real” instruments into the mix. There’s even another player, when Andy Allen joins a track to play clarinet. That track, “Clarimello,” may be one of my faves here because the friction between live music and taped/manipulated music is always a treat to hear when it’s done well. And this is. The second side is a suite, recorded on the street in Greenfield, while doing something or… Read more »

Jerman Barnes - The Finger’d Remove ( / )

LP (45 RPM) Edition of 200 with Download Code. OUT OF PRINT Jerman Barnes sounds like fancy men’s shoe brand, but it’s actually a duo comprised of two of the American underground’s most prolific wanderers — Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes. Jeph had explored everything from primitively brilliant free jazz with Blowhole to deep electronic explorations under the name Hands To, although in the latter part of the ’90s he shifted his focus to music made with found natural objects. Tim Barnes entered our consciousness as fluent master of experimentally canted percussion before he threw us a curve by joining Matt Valentine’s Tower Recordings ensemble and going deep-prole for a while. Regardless, he and Jeph started releasing duo recordings almost… Read more »

Wendy Eisenberg - Time Machine ()

LP Edition of 250 with Download Code. OUT OF PRINT Time Machine is a reissue of a 2017 cassette, and represents the first vinyl issued by Wendy Eisenberg, a peripatetic improviser and composer currently based in Amherst Mass. We first heard of Wendy when they were playing with a blasted quartet called Birthing Hips, whose NNA cassette was an instant classic. Since then Wendy begun a solo career that branches off in a lot of directions simultaneously. They have an album of post-form noise-metal (in trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith) due soon on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Wendy has an LP of acoustic guitar improvs coming up on Steve Lowenthal’s VDSQ imprint. And then there’s Time Machine —… Read more »