All proceeds from the sale of this release will go to Tom Carter. Read more about the appeal here: http://www.volcanictongue.com/tomcarterappeal

Edition of 214 one-sided LP with blood red silkscreened flip. Looped and live collaged ritual atmospherics and crude guitar/drum psych stand-offs that orbit a similar zone to early NNCK from a group that feature Tom Carter of Charalambides, Shawn McMillen (Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast), Brian Smith (Iron Kite et al) and Blake Carlisle. Less drone-focussed than previous releases and deeper into a kind of savant ESP Disk Godz/Fugs séance style.

Duo project from Tom Carter of Charalambides and Marc Orleans of Sunburned Hand Of The Man. If you’ve caught any of the recent solo blats from Tom Carter since his relocation to NYC then you’ll know that that these days his guitar is fully set to shred and this is a stunning document of two string-thinkers working with maximal freedom and organic rhythms. The opening “Eyes Of Jewels, Mirrored Bodies” marries Orleans great fingerpicking style – which comes from a similar place to Glenn Jones – to Tom’s wild west coast style. Later tracks explode the blueprint even further, marring a 90s underground feel for squeal with an immolating post-Sonny Sharrock aesthetic. Easily one of the wildest sides either of these guys have cut. 150g vinyl with download. 

All proceeds from the sale of this release will go to Tom Carter. Read more about the appeal here: http://www.volcanictongue.com/tomcarterappeal

Limited benefit CD-R arranged by the Hebden Bridge squad in less than 24 hours after Charalambides were forced to cancel their show there due to Tom Carter’s sudden illness, all proceeds going directly to Tom: tracks from Ashtray Navigations, Neil Campbell, Spider Stacey, Dylan Nyoukis, Bridget Hayden, Astral Social Club, Rick Tomlinson, Konntinent, High Aura’d, Listening Mirror, Will Bolton, Isnaj Dui, Kyle Bobby Dunn, The Failed NASA Experiment and Caught In The Wake Forever. 

All proceeds from the sale of this release will go to Tom Carter. Read more about the appeal here: http://www.volcanictongue.com/tomcarterappeal

Excellent new jukebox 7” from the duo of Tom Carter (Charalambides) and Marc Orleans (Sunburned Hand Of The Man), here joined by Betsy Nichols (Michael Hurley) on vocals and Michael Evans on drums for a full-band sound: very different in tone and attack from their Northern Spy LP, this is fantastic set of vaguely country-tinged hunch and European psychedelic volk. The a side is a gorgeous composition by Tom with his and Betsy’s vocals intertwining with alla the beauty of Gila’s classic Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee before Tom makes with a wild psychedelic fuzz solo. Orleans’ track on the flip has a fantastic sepia-toned early SF feel that’s somewhere between the original Charlatans, the International Submarine Band and early Dead. Totally great. More please!

All proceeds from the sale of this release will go to Tom Carter. Read more about the appeal here: http://www.volcanictongue.com/tomcarterappeal

Original CD edition of this 2005 release from Badgerlore that saw them operating as a quartet featuring Tom Carter of Charalambides, Ben Chasny of Six Organs Of Admittance, Pete Swanson of Yellow Swans and Rob Fisk of 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. Tracks move from the kind of staggered blues/bliss ragas originally formulated by Charalambides through all-vocal murk ala Skaters/Gyuto Monks.

New duo album from Tom Carter of Charalambides and Pete Swanson of Yellow Swans et al: this is a great melding of the two’s respective styles. Tom is sounding more and more like Sonny Sharrock circa Last Exit or even Tisziji Munoz these days, with a testifying melodic style that trades fuzz for feeling and here he tears through some iconoclastic melodies that scrape the lining off the goddamn sky over chugging shots of electricity. Swanson’s more into the kinda chord solos and devouring wah gravity that would trade Tokyo-isms for Dunedin-isms, and he combines fuzz-choked repeat chords that are straight out of the Lou Reed fakebook with spidery, single note ascensions and chugging infinite-repeat punk. All proceeds from the sale of Vent go towards the Tom Carter recovery fund. 

Stunning set of haunted blues from ‘Venusian’ guitarist Loren Connors and free vocalist Suzanne Langille: each copy of this single comes with a hand-numbered piece of original mixed-media artwork by M P Landis. Both sides were improvised in the studio, with the first side featuring lyrics from a poem by Denis McCarthy, while the flip features a re-write of a drifter country theme. As with all of Loren’s work, there’s a deeply affecting/lonely aspect to the way he bends single notes and the combination of Langille’s forlorn, beautifully ‘out’ vocal stylings and his muzzy/devotional guitar playing makes for an extremely potent blend. Indeed, this fantastic set pretty much takes off where we left the duo at the end of the classic Hell’s Kitchen Park, pushing the amazing storytelling aspect of the music and voice into new expressionistic realms of free blues. Very highly recommended, as is everything from this inspired pairing. Comes with a download. 

New studio album from the starcrossed duo of outer space improvising vocalist Suzanne Langille and Venusian guitarist Loren Connors: I Wish I Didn’t Dream is a suite of works inspired by the paintings of M P Landis and it features some of Langille and Connors’ most intuitive duo work this side of Hell’s Kitchen Park. Langille has never sounded quite so possessed, obsessing over lyric fragments and pushing into levels of vocal possession that touch on both Patty Waters and Diamanda Galas. Connors is at his most impressionistic, moving from extreme FX-saturated soundings to elegiac single note hymnals with the slightest flick of the wrist. There’s an intense atmosphere of psychodrama throughout, a sense of heightened emotional tightrope walking that makes for a uniquely compulsive listen. Amazing at this stage of the game that Loren can sound both new and yet timelessly himself. Comes with a booklet featured colour reproductions of Landis’s paintings and liner notes. Recommended. 

Edition of 700 copies LP reissue of one of Connors’ most beautiful sets, originally released in 2002 as a CD: intended as the first part of a trilogy inspired by Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly”, The Departing Of A Dream sees Connors starting to incorporate all kinds of percussion sources into his guitar sketches in a way that makes them seem more like spiritual brothers to the visionary environments of American meta-musician Harry Partch.  As is so often the case with Connors’s work, the overriding atmosphere is one of intense melancholy, with little moments of rapturous abandon weighted down with fuzzy guitar chords that fall like sleet.  It’s quite a fractured performance from Connors who holds back on the blues logic that often underpins his work, favouring a more textural approach that allows heavy single notes to tumble to the ground under their own gravity.  Although earlier passages are dominated by the extensive use of a wah-wah peddle, as the dust starts to clear Connors begins to re-introduce those clear-eyed, sighing notes that he can break your heart with every time.  The last two tracks, “The Silence” and “The Sorrow” are dedicated “For NY 9/11/01”.  Comes with a download code. 

Limited edition of 100 copies documenting a live solo show from Marcia Bassett that took place 6/6/06 in Hasselt. 28 minutes of thick, frozen air, slow brain-bloating highs, and thunderous ecstasy peaks. One of the darkest/densest blats from Marcia to date and highly recommended. Comes in wraparound colour pro-printed sleeves.

New solo album (first ever 'real' CD release after a bunch of limited CD-Rs) from Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards/Hototogisu/GHQ et al, released on Domink Fernow of Prurient's label. A real departure from her last few releases, Sexual Infinity has a darker, almost documentary-style atmosphere, with the low malevolent hum of late night, neon-illuminated streets (a hint of William Bennett's Bradford Red Light District in some of the more nocturnal 'field' style passages) cut up with the roar of jet engines, seedy, auraless orbits of cracked drone-tone, lurching blown-out synth violence that could almost be a field-recording of the aftermath of a Suicide riot and the most evocatively placed globes of murky drone. All held together with almost Haino-esque stabs of epic repeat chord runs. Highly recommended.

“When spinning this dark velvet cloak a door opens to clouds of smoke shooting out the windows sills of the shell of old library like ink plumes while smokes leaps like black cats between the curtains. Stone and concrete crumble and fill the air with gray gas showering the maze of shrubs in the courtyard with a dark veil of soot. Marcia Bassett has tread the waters of noise psych drone and continues to defy the categories. A dark psychedelic guitar wash peaks its head out of the smoldering coals that could have been released on the mighty slaughter productions death industrial temple from Italy. Further morbidity croaks from the slicing vocals of a distraught entity being ripped from one dimension to the other... and rather enjoying her ordeal. Light the candles and burn the incense....Limited to 300 copies.” – NFP. Already sold out at source.

The first ever release from the Hototogisu duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards) that even approaches being ‘generally available', Green is a real CD - not a CD-R - pressed up for the group by the sainted Ed Hardy of Eclipse records and available in an edition of 1000 copies complete with a suave full-colour booklet reproducing a bunch of the duo's art. Anyone whose mind was blown by the vision of this pair powering their way through one of the most magical/unforgiving sets of Subcurrent 2005 will find plenty to drown in here. Tracks are shorter than on previous releases, though even more obsessively detailed. There are points where the cacophony is so insanely oversaturated that the noise starts to sound as if it's spontaneously giving birth to language: you start hallucinating words and sentences, almost as if the film protecting you from a constant bombardment of information-heavy environmental radiation has been blown apart. Green also features some of Hototogisu's most straight-ahead death/doom metal moves. Although they're not quite Skullflower, the first track features snatches of classic death metal riffs alongside the stomach-punch of a cheap drum machine and on their theme song, the beautifully ferocious “Heavy Blossom”, Mick Flower of Vibracathedral Orchestra plays drums. Alongside all the iron first action, there are some beautiful moments where Marcia and Matthew's voices melt into ribbons of pure white light and the whole thing floats to the ceiling. A modern classic, and possibly the best Hototogisu album to date. Highest recommendation.

Live album from the American Psychotropic trio of Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Hototogisu/Zaimph), Pete Nolan (Magik Markers/Vanishing Voice/Virgin Eye) and Steve Gunn (Moongang). Recorded at Goodbye Blue Monday January 27th 2006, this one ditches the more rural/raga bent of their earlier recordings (tho still scarred with that devotional/Popol Vuh feel) for a deep smoke of eye-lolling choral vocals, heavy psychedelic guitar solo and a murk of drone. Very beautiful and possibly their best set to date.

Brand new full-length recording from the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof et al) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph/GHQ) features a more rock-reverent take on the kind of vertical screens of impossibly detailed overtone that defined their earlier albums, with Marcia's viola slow-burning fluttering afterimages of neon spirals deep into the air while Bower's guitar/microphone worship generates repeat-ascensions of overloaded ecstasy tone. Something grittier, more immediately tactile, that makes this their most dramatically meat-based orbit of hallucinated space/time vectors to date. Highly recommended.

Hand-numbered edition of 200 copies LP on Manuel Mota’s private Headlights imprint documenting a heavyweight duo set from Marcia Bassett of Zaimph, Hototogisu, Double Leopards, GHQ et al and improvising Portuguese bassist and guitarist Margardia Garcia. Garcia is one of the major new generation European free players, coming out of the same scene as Mota, and she’s just as capable of generating Swans-style Industrial entropy as she is playing explosive fire music. Here Bassett uses keyboard and guitar to create austere arcs of Industrial-strength drone that Garcia anchors with tactile, questing strings, giving the whole thing an odd avant-classical backbone. 

Limited edition of 550 LPs from Carter Thornton compiling a few years worth of mail collaborations with players like Burning Star Core, Alan Dubin (Khanate, Gnaw, OLD), Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph), David Shuford (NNCK, Enos Slaughter), Pigeons, Kuwayama Kiyoharu, Marshall Avett (Zandosis), Greg Wildes (Gas Tank Orchestra), Carl Smith / Derek Phelps, Darwin Smith, Smith Harrison and Dr. Mijin Kim. Buncha styles devoured and regurgitated, from scattershot drone explosions and spare percussive strategies through laminal flashes of rainbow electronics. Plus it’s all compiled and programmed in a way that is totally maximalist, giving it the feel of some weird Euro art/rock obscurity in the orbit of Futura/Red et al. Excellent.

Massive new album from Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/GHQ/Hototogisu et al) aka Zaimph, the debut release for her new private press imprint Yew: Imagine Yourself Here... moves away from Bassett’s previous post-Taj Mahal Travellers-style outer-space drone and into a more rigorous, compositional zone that factors in aspects of occult geometries and psychogeography, mapping the night-time spaces of the city via two side-long pieces. The first side consists of a collage of many different recordings which came out of a period of working on a soundtrack to a film and that utilises ExiTrip, an obsolete transmitter for iPods. The feel is of a city under surveillance, paranoiac, with a nexus of ghost voices and virtual sonic environments conjured from straight out of the air. Strafing neon drones cut-through the fuzzy darkness while inchoate electronics jump-cut between time-lines. There are aspects of Peter Christopherson’s ambiguous tape work in Throbbing Gristle and Coil as well as Alan Lamb’s alchemical translations of faraway wires before the second half opens with Marcia breathing wordless angel vox over skittering electronics and various low-level percussive sounds while the crackle of pure current feeds into a high keyboard  mass and arcs of torrential fuzz, with the disembodied voices providing a psychotic, mind-loosening finale. It’s a stunning work, a complex and deeply atmospheric soundworld that has little parallel outside of perhaps the tape-work and hermetic nocturnal soundings of New Zealand’s Omit, especially Quad, the monster three CD set that Bruce Russell put out via Corpus Hermeticum. Over on the flip there’s the most profoundly alien of live one-take solo guitar pieces of Bassett’s career, arcing with all of the lunar majesty and outer space energies of Solstice/Musick To Play In The Dark-era Coil, with six strings processed until they sound like an orchestra of backwards harmoniums hymning the heavens. Imagine Yourself Here... represents a major evolution of sound for Zaimph and comes very highly recommended! 

Massive new side from Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards/Hototogisu et al: this continues in the dense, paranoid, late night cityscape style of her recent releases, with a broken Rhythm Master sounding weird dunting sub-aqueous tones while circuit boards pull voices straight out of the air, with the feel of scanning nocturnal airways and picking up snatches of barely decipherable conversation or machine noise. Later tracks go heavier on the electro rhythms with a weird Coil/Thought Broadcast appeal that says Vanity Records like nothing else. Loving Marcia’s recent form and this is another major instalment. Instantly sold out at source.

Fantastic art edition LP in a run of only 250 copies on 200g virgin clear vinyl from the duo of ex-Coil/Psychic TV Drew McDowall and Tres Warren of Psychic Ills/Messages (whose LP on De Stijl blew a whole bunch of minds). This one sort of takes off on a post-Time Machines/Eternal Music vibe but with an exacting minimalist logic that would locate distant Morse Code tones and blurry EVP sightings on the very fringes of liminality. There are vague, nagging melodies that could almost come out of the Goblin/Suspiria song book alongside long passages of single tone narcosis that feel like transports to the other side. The label describes them as using “automatic composition, drone and concrete music to create subterranean explorations on the nature of signals and time” and the whole recording has that indefinable/occult atmosphere that marked out the more exploratory Coil sides. A beautifully spooked modern minimalist classic, highly recommended.

Portugese bassist Margarida Garcia remains one of the most distinctive improvising voices on her instrument even as she moves well beyond contemporary improv praxis with an umbilical that runs deep into the contemporary psychedelic underground. This new LP, released in an edition of only 200 copies on guitarist Manuel Mota’s Headlights imprint, sees her exploring some darkly dramatic arco drone space with enough F/X to sink the Titanic. The territory is murky, sub-aqueous, giving the nod to her recent collaboration with Marcia Bassett (Zaimph et al) while moving into the kind of occult headspace previously occupied by Tokyo zonesters like Toho Sara, Keiji Haino’s Nijiumu et al. There’s a magisterial arc to the sonics that means it has as much to do with Conrad Schnitzler’s mile-high cello work on the first Tangerine Dream album as it does with William Parker and the way she bridges huge gulfs of silence with distant tectonic fragments and single weighted notes will have you lining this up next to Yasushi Ozawa’s Some Fragments Of Bass Performance for maximum drone dislocation. Recommended.