Massively unlikely re-stock of this limited jukebox 7” from Australian underground gods Mad Nanna, only ‘officially’ available direct from the label in an edition of only 150 copies: the A side is a wildly staggering track recorded live at Kof, Flemington in February 2011 and matches classic Tori Kudo stumble punk isms with vocals that come straight out of the Pip Proud songbook and massively crude VU-isms. On the flip we catch them live in their spiritual home of New Zealand at Loons Bar in Lyttelton in May of 2011, with an even choppier VU-addled approach with chord solos and one note testifying over expiring, last-man-standing vocals and the kinda inspired avant garage energies that would give Vacuum a run for their money. Simply cannot get enough from this amazing group, very limited supply tho. Highly recommended!

Beautiful limited to only 100 copies CD-R from a one-off Australian super group featuring members of Mad Nanna, Sky Needle and MYMWLY: this is a fantastic series of open-ended improvisations, spontaneous song-forms and free folk freakouts with a great variety of tone and attack. Some tracks have that classic Godz jamming in the Swiss Alps with Sergius Golowin vibe while others are pretty much defined by the Sky Needle invented instruments and free female vox sound. Elsewhere there are uncannily beautiful free jazz moments that somehow channel the atmosphere of Anthony Ortega’s classic New Dance via a communal Organic Music Society set-up and classic rural/country stone that could almost pass for the MV & EE Orchestra. Playing time is lengthy so there is plenty of boo for your buck. Highly recommended!

Edition of 300 copies 7” from big VT faves, Australia’s Mad Nanna: this one works as a ‘companion’ release to the group’s Unwucht single of the same title, with the same songs given radically different renderings. Here the group envision a form of rock music that is in a permanent state of collapse, welding VU chords and stumpy rhythms onto the kind of deeply personal rock song stylings of Jandek or Alastair Galbraith. File next to The Shadow Ring and The Garbage & The Flowers in the part of your shelves dedicated to stumbling to satori. Edition of 300 copies. Highly recommended. 

Stunning edition of only 200 copies full-length LP that culls a series of confoundingly beautiful jams from an Australian underground supergroup that features members of Sky Needle, Greg Boring, The Lost Domain, Mad Nanna, 6majick9, Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood et al: No Guru were working cover for an itinerant group of musicians in the late 2000s in Brisbane based around a crumbling old mansion that Joel Stern (Sky Needle/Greg Boring et al) describes as closer to a halfway house, populated by musicians, artists, druggies, alcoholics and dysfunctionalists of all stripes. No Guru were essentially a jam band for everyone who lived in the building or passed through, functioning as a creative ground zero for the next wave of the Australian underground. Their formative inspiration was one Jeremy Nuske, who plays on the album and who appears on the cover, and who Stern describes as “a very awkward but brilliant weirdo and a great budding scholar of folk music from around the world, especially Javanese gamelan, which you can hear come through on the record”. Tragically Nuske dropped out of the scene and eventually committed suicide in 2010, after which No Guru never played again. This is a stunning memorial to one of the truly great short-lived groups of the era with recordings culled from a single night’s session in 2006 and featuring Nuske and Stern alongside Ian Wadley (Lost Domain/Mad Nanna), Chelsea Charlton (Brainbeau), Eon Phyre and Michael Donnelly (6majik9/Brothers Of The Occult Sisterhood). No Guru beautifully transmute and deform world folk music styles without any sense of awkward appropriation, filtering it through their own very specific underground aesthetic. The basis is percussive and melodic – hence the gamelan aspect – but the specific contours of the instrumentation, from invented DIY constructs through guitar, thumb piano, bass, keyboard, electronics, trumpet and walls of thrifty percussion touch on so many totemic sources – Moondog, The Godz, Tori Kudo, The Shaggs, International Harvester, even an electro-acoustic Sunroof – while sounding quite unlike any of them. The opening brass salvo is truly beautiful, like an orchestra of weeping Kaoru Abe’s hymning the country brass bands of old and from there we move through hypnotic half-familiar melodies that are always just slightly out and circuitous enough to be endlessly slippery. The guitar is super-poignant, inverting nagging melodic fragments ala Albert Ayler even as it’s sighing through broken down free rock constructs. No Guru made music that was as futuristic as it was primitive, as optimistic as it was heart-breakingly sad, as sophisticated as it was naive and now all we have left are the recordings. But what a memorial: very highly recommended!