Fabulous cassette from European artist/sound poet Ludo Mich. The A side pitches him with Japanese improviser Kiyoharu Kuwayama with Mich’s vocals – by turn disturbing and hilarious – given an eerie post-production job by Kuwayama complete with high ghostly reeds and thin veils of electronics. Over on the flip Mich performs “The Fluidium – Superstrings And Strings Travel Together To The Singularity Of The M-Dimension” at Gallery Dagmar De Pooter in Antwerp with his exuberant free vocals and extreme body soundings accompanied by Kris Wanders on sax and Maarten Tibos and W. Ravenveer on synths. One of Mich’s best. Comes in full-colour screened fold-out cigarette-box package. Edition of 100 copies. 

Stunning and stunningly presented picture disc that bundles recent work (2007-2010) from the French composer Francis Dhomont, his first appearance on vinyl since his 1982 LP on INA-GRM Sous Le Regard D’un Soleil Noir: Birthdays presents a series of radical, scalpel-sharp workings dedicated to fellow-thinkers like Bernard Parmegiani, Oscar Wiggli and Annette Vande Gorne. Dhomont uses haunting vocal manipulations and rigorously edited concrete sound to generate dense noise works and skittering drones, with wormhole electronics sunk deep in constantly shifting tonal environments. “Denature Parme sons” utilises the first sound of the first movement of Parmegiani’s 1975 work De Natura Sonorum, blurring it into a series of heavenly metallic resonances. “Le Flux De Sons” touches on similarly eviscerated sound-sources but with sudden bursts of digital violence that could almost be Coil. The 8 track tape piece “Forte-piano” expands these contrasts with anxious electronic activity cut-up with moments of serene deep-sea drone and flat-lined tone while “Quelques Eclats” combines inverted and smeared vocal fragments with an hallucinatory depth-of-scene and an uncanny atmosphere that again, inexplicably, touches on aspects of late period Coil. This is a revelatory set, a rare outing for this major composer, packaged with a one-sided LP screen printed on the flip and stored inside a plastic slipcase with additional commentary from the composer. Highly recommended!

Fascinating unearthing by Beniffer of a document of this short-lived experiment in free improvisation that came into being as an off-shoot of the Humber College Ensemble For Experimental Music in 1976: Convergence existed between 1976 and 1980, progressing from performing written pieces to total free improvisation under the directorship of Michael Horwood, the father of Bennifer label owner Jacob Horwood. The instrumental line-up is singular: percussion (including steel drums, a first in improvised music?), piano, trombone and trumpet and the group walk the line between free jazz, avant classical performance and weirdo communal freak with considerable aplomb. There are long periods of silence subtly bisected by cranky tones and elongated brass statements leading into heady percussive voids that touch on the NNCK/Embryo collaboration Embryonnck while giving the nod to some of the St Louis Black Artist Group experiments . Although they came out of an academic establishment there’s less of a pointillist Spontaneous Music Ensemble feel to the music and a little more garage band grit,. The steel drums really work to wonk the music, locating it in some kind of fourth world conservatory where it’s possible to get down as much as it is to take off. An excellent exhumation and another thrilling chapter in the secret history of 20^th century free music. Recorded live at the Music Gallery September 18, 1979, screenprinted sleeves. Recommended. 

Limited cassette from Lieven aka Dolphins Into The Future with a side each inspired by a classical landscape painter, Jacob Philipp Hackert and Caspar David Friedrich. This tape kinda represents a departure for Lieven in that the pieces feel less ‘ambient’ and more fully inhabited, with the Hackert side possessed of a great early Radiophonic/Joe Meek electro atmosphere that’s so obsessively layered that it feels like picking out the movement of figures in an endless landscape or the play of the light in the distance. The Friedrich side is a bit heavier on the gravitas, with omming pools of drone surrounded by modal keyboards and zoned electro atmospherics that could almost be a fully plugged-in Organic Music Society. Lovingly assembled/screened fold-over card sleeves too. Edition of 150 copies. 

Brand new cassette from one of the greatest bands on the planet, Turner Falls’ Flaming Dragons Of Middle Earth. Led by wheelchair-bound ‘band shaman’ Danny Cruz and consisting of a rotating group of non-musicians, psychedelic drop-outs, teenage metallers, kids with Down Syndrome etc, Flaming Dragons play a form of super crude/sophisticated free rock ala The Godz or even a punk-primitive Arkestra but with Cruz’s stunning, oracular vocals giving them a mainline to the freak flag style of prime Captain Beefheart, Roky Erickson and Wasa Wasa-era Broughton. Cruz’s instant lyric inventions are as mind-boggling as your favourite medium while the group lurch around on staggering brokedown rhythms somewhere between early-Sabbath, Robbie Yeats of The Dead C and The Shaggs. This one features a bunch of amazing material, from stripped-down raps through lumbering psychedelic rock, including their amazing theme song as well as free-form freakouts w/lyrics that obsess over murder, bloodshed, astral creeps and, uh, Joni Mitchell... indeed Cruz makes most ‘sound poets’ sound like children’s entertainers. Packaged in moulded plastic cases with silkscreened sleeves, highly recommended, as is everything by this unique group. Cool back cover snap of Ozzy trying to regain kudos by hanging w/the band. It ain’t working bozo. Edition of 98 copies. 

Edition of 300 copies picture disc with art on the flip presenting one of Jan Anderzen’s most psychedelic and hypnotically rocking sides. This self-titled collection, originally commissioned by the Aanen Lumo Festival for New Sounds, starts off like an early Sonic Boom side with fast tremolo guitar and padding motorik rhythms beneath hysterically modulated and extended vocals eventually locking-down into a fantastic eternal groove. But soon the whole thing devolves into what sounds like a chopped and screwed Arkestra tackling “The Satellites Are Spinning”. Obsessively constructed psychedelic electronica, set to stun. Recommended.