Author Archives: John Lithium

Phil Western – The Escapist (Map Music)

Posted by John Lithium on

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Label Description:

“The Escapist” was Map’s fourth CD release, Phil Western’s solo debut, and a genre-busting mind-bender designed to satisfy people whose musical tastes don’t fit in boxes.

Originally released on Map on CD in April 1998, and available on Phil’s Bandcamp page, we are honoured to have this album back home in the Map catalog, 26 years to the day after its first release. And also kinda cool is the fact that Phil was 26 when he wrote and produced this music.

To thank all of you who already have this in your collection, and to entice those of you wanting to possess it newly, we’ve added two very special bonus tracks that will be gifts for album buyers. From the upcoming special Phil Western tribute compilation I’m including my remix of the Melodium track “California”, the “Pastoral Psychedelicism Remix” (previously unreleased), and Phil’s remix of Cooldown’s “Absolute”, from their Map Music album “Ether”, released in 1999, and lovingly remastered by Martin “7D6” Granger.

The majority of the proceeds go to the fund for Phil’s daughter, Mora Western.

Various Artists: Genome 4 (Point Source Electronic Arts)

Posted by John Lithium on

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Label Description:

Electronic musicians create with many tools, and one of the most versatile among them is sampling. Like spliced genes in a laboratory, sampled sounds can be rearranged and mutated, giving rise to entirely novel and unexpected compositions.

Every year, we invite our friends in the community to join us in our ongoing musical experiment, Genome. The songs heard here are all derived from a provided set of samples, sharing a common sonic lineage but each emerging as something new and unique.

With purchase and download of this album, receive access to a bonus sample kit of over 1,100 drums, synths, loops and all sorts of other sounds. Use them to create a track for next year’s edition. These sounds are provided royalty-free, so you can also use them in your own work. See the attached pdf booklet for more information.

credits

released April 5, 2024

Mastered by Alex Stilts at Orbit Room Audio

Illustration by Marc Brinkerink

Design by Mike Slansky

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Civerous – Maze Envy (20 Buck Spin)

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Label Description:

Upon hearing ‘Decrepit Flesh Relic’, the first album from Civerous, one was left with a feeling of intense suffocating weight and agonal(sic) prostration in the service of bone-breaking death hymns. With the towering new album, ‘Maze Envy’, LA’s most creatively destructive Death / Doom ensemble let loose a freshly evolved but no less brutal conflagration of immersive horror and morbid lamentation.

Where Death / Doom may often stay in safe and unadventerous realms of narrow focus, Maze Envy’ presents a more far-reaching breadth of ambition, where unusual technicality, progressive atmospheres, string flourishes and chaotic mysticism radiate a purple light of the soul’s ascension from the black oceans of dread Civerous inhabit. Chain-dragging dirge, blackened blasting, and the savage ferocity of Lord Foul’s hellish vocal exorcisms exalt ‘Mazy Envy’ with a hellish grandeur within its myriad paths to oblivion.

With a massively crushing sound, ‘Maze Envy’ is end times music for an age in which that reckoning feels unfathomably close. Civerous batter the senses into a state of labyrinthian turmoil from which emergence is ever more implausible.

Editor’s Note: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Filmy Ghost & The Implicit Order – Horrorlands (Self-Released)

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Label Description:

In 2022 Sábila Orbe AKA Filmy Ghost cut-up and rearranged I/O’s entire discography in a wonderful and creepy out of this world way. Filmy Ghost does The Implicit Order better than The Implicit Order on this album.
Original source material by The Implicit Order.
Cut-up, disarranged and reassembled in the digital domain by Filmy Ghost.

credits

released February 27, 2024

Filmy Ghost is an experimental, ghostly music project from Rancagua, Chile, created by Sábila Orbe. LINKS:
hearthis.at/filmy-ghost/
archive.org/details/fav-sabila_orbe02
open.spotify.com/artist/0POUvA4r7hzETPMnrn59My
hearthis.at/filmy-ghost/:
A quick Google search will tell you everything you need to know about Sabila Orbe and Filmy Ghost and the other work of this talented Chilean artist. Please support them in their work.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – of the Last Human Being (Avant Night)

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Label Description:

After thirteen years of hibernation, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the most gloriously uncategorizable American band in existence, has emerged from stasis to proudly announce the imminent release of their fourth studio album, of the Last Human Being. The album marks the first release of AVANT NIGHT – a new imprint headed by Nick Ohler and facilitated by Joyful Noise Recordings.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, comprised of multi-instrumentalists and rotating vocalists Nils Frykdahl, Carla Kihlstedt, Michael “Iago” Mellender, Matthias Bossi, and Dan Rathbun, plays an arsenal of instruments ranging from the somewhat standard (drums, electric guitars, bass, electric violin) to the rare (bass harmonica, nyckelharpa, marxophone) to the homemade (Slide-Piano Log, Electric Pancreas, Pedal-Action Wiggler). The group has consistently evaded easy categorization, garnering accolades from across the aisles of contemporary classical music, prog rock, industrial music, metal, avant-garde improv, and more. Their music, inturns bashing and bucolic, enveloping and unsettling, tends towards long-form epics interspersed with mysterious field recordings.

“As this slow-rolling planetwide Anthropocene Extinction event deepens, Sleepy- time’s work has only grown more…  more

credits

released February 23, 2024

Most of these recordings were started at Polymorph in Oakland, CA in 2010-11. Additional overdubs in the intervening years were done at Polymorph and in home studios across the land. S.P.Q.R. was entirely recorded and mixed at Polymorph in 2004 and previously released as a 7” on Dephine Knormal Musik. (Hi, Moe!) “Hush, Hush” and “El Evil” were recorded at Polymorph and home studios in 2023.

All songs: Sleepy Time Gorilla Press Music, BMI, except Hush, Hush and Silverfish (Broca’s Fold, ASCAP) and S.P.Q.R. (Rough Trade Music)

Mixed by Dan 2023 ~ Produced by SGM ~ Mastered by Todd Rittmann

Art by Per “Ward C. Picnic” Frykdahl
Design by Jenya Chernoff and Nils
Logos and lettering by Nils
Photos and film stills from the film “The Last Human Being: A Critical Assessment,” directed by Max Baloian, featuring Shinichi Iova Koga

~ Ministry of Revivification ~

Meredith Yayanos – Special Ambassador, Ordained Symposiarch Of The John Kane Society
Mallory McAvoy – Diplomatic Liaison, Bailiff Of The Guild Of Bards
Erik Carter (an uncle) – Futurist Coordinator
John Karr – Audial Conveyist And Evidence Hoarder
Scott Crowley – Moving Picture Husbandry and Conservation
Jenya Chernoff – Head Of Propaganda and Graphic Design
Gregory Scharpen – Imagist, Disinformationist
Nicholas Ohler – Patron Saint of Fucked-Up Music
Karl Hofstetter – Locked Groove Stasis Enabler
Robert S. Meitus – Disentanglementalist

Boundless gratitude to our families, our friends, and our vast community of independent artists, musicians, and makers of all sorts. Thank you to Penelope Allman, Max Baloian, the Bossihlstedts, Steven Clark, Merlin Coleman, Sean Crawford, Dawn & the Faunettes, Thor Harris, Gooby Herms, the Kihlbossis, Shinichi Iova Koga & inkBoat, Claire Mack, Michael McCamish, Simon Miller, Lara Miranda, Dominique Persi, Nieves Rathbun & Jasper, Greg Scharpen, Janice & Gordie Shaw, Free Salamander Exhibit, Kitka, Rabbit Rabbit Radio, and Dr. Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators. Nick & Anya from AVANT NIGHT would like to thank the Joyful Noise Recordings team and Kramer & Valerie from Shimmy-Disc for their friendship, mentorship, and assistance with making this album a reality.

Endless props to the one-thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty-two generous people who helped us “SAVE THE LAST HUMAN BEING!” on Kickstarter. Boundless gratitude to all who volunteered time and energy to those buck-wild LHB film shoots oh so many years ago. Bottomless cheer to each and every member of the John Kane Society whether living, dead, or liminal.

Truly, it is all of you who have made this complex revivification possible. Rock against rock, and rejoice!

Christian Fiesel – Analogy (Self Released)

Posted by John Lithium on

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Label description:

From the archives Part 2

Originally release on Studio4632 Candy Lozier 17th January 2018
What a great time this was being support by the ever helpful Candy. Some of my best albums face the ears of the world over there.

This a different type, even more sinister, somber and dark as my current works with a complete instrumental set-up (to be honest, most of the used synth I don’t even remember anymore).

It was dark, it was ambient and it was experiemental.

Feel free to serve yourself as long as free downloads are available.

credits

released February 27, 2024

(P)+(C) 2018/2024 Christian Fiesel

Mika Vainio – Revvity [Torn] & Ydin (wavetrap)

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Label Descriptions:

Revvity:

recorded in Berlin 2005

credits

released December 12, 2006

all tracks by Mika Vainio
cover art by Elina [surname unknown]
mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering

Ydin:

released September 1, 1999

all tracks by Mika Vainio
cover art Leif Elggren
mastered by country masters

Our Final Invention – It’s Late (Fog & Lime)

Posted by John Lithium on

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Label description:

the debut 8 song Mini-Album by Our Final Invention is a swirling electronic indie and pop and multimedia experience bringing classic Manchester post-punk and electronic sounds right into today.

OFI is Mark Gill & Richard Nancollis.
Formerly of The Rain Band.

Cassette released by Fog & Lime (NYC)

See the incredible video for “Parasite” here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=px5RlY7LkYA

All the elements on screen were generated
entirely using Runway AI Inc software.

Directed and edited by: @Voltaine (FIT DIGITAL)
Creative Direction: Mark Gill for @thechasefilms
Additional Editing: @Bledar Bujupi

credits

released December 1, 2023

Music: Richard Nancollis, Mark Gill (Our Final Invention)
Label: Syed T. Hoda (Fog & Lime)

Various Artists – Anniversary (Bromtol Largesse)

Posted by John Lithium on

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Label Description:

So It’s Everywhere – Dates , Letters and sounds
Clues, as it were ( KLEWS as JR. would yell )
Like cats under the furniture, like eyes creeping out
from behind the dew,

A Certain fabric for Dawn, A Certain tale to tell ~
Late in the Behinds but here for the foreverafter

A Brilliant yet bilinding moment

Scatter few, Over whiffle
The Unburnt toast
Scatter few, Over whiffle

credits

released February 25, 2024

All Tracks .by the respective artists

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed and made this album the stunning monolith that it is

Text = Bromtol Largesse

Image = {AN} EeL

About the Cover –

This is a photo from the ” Barefoot Ballroom ” In Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It is a very interesting location & while I’ll stop short of calling it haunted, there was certainly something haunting about it – More information for the curious here – onlyinark.com/places-and-travel/the-basin-park-hotel-barefoot-balls-gangsters-and-vortexes/