First new studio album from America’s one and only post-Velvets avant/metal goofball action unit in over 10 years and it sounds real fine, reconciling the kind of beautifully extended single notes of pure E-Bow electricity and wailing lead spurt of off-shoots like O-Type with their trademark black/cracked deadpan humour, Tee-Vee cut-ups and Lou Reed on ludes-style monologues. Includes a fabulous downer/perversely moving version of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re An American Band”, backing vocals by Angel Corpus Christi and some great – and at moments somehow poignantly dumb – ruminations on life beneath the counter in America that carve out a singular space somewhere between Jad Fair, Dave Alvin and Rick Potts. There most lugubrious and endlessly rewarding set to date? Well, yeah. Recommended.

Intense free jazz/hardcore moves from this Chicago trio set to almost Swans-levels of personal immolation via explosive flesh-rending strategies, rigorously thought-out compositional violence, guest soprano sax from Martin Belcher (Unstable Ensemble) and visceral, interrogating word of mouth from Eugene Robinson of Oxbow.

"Debut collaboration of New York artists and long-time duo partners Alan Licht and Aki Onda, whose combined history connects artists straddling the pop and experimental worlds, including Fennesz, Loren Connors, Takemura Nobukazu, Lee Ranaldo, and Toriko Nujiko. In the past decade their montage-inspired solo work -- Licht's permutational guitar and tape pieces on Rabbi Sky and A New York Minute, Onda's field recording recontextualizations on Bon Voyage! and Ancient & Modern -- has co-existed with their experimental sound/visual projects Text of Light (Licht) and Cinemage (Onda). Everydays is five grandly formed soundscapes that mix Onda's poetic/textural cassette sounds and the rhythmic/lyrical pull of Licht's guitar. Morphing from recognizable structures to dissonant hammered chunks and rapid cut-ups, the album perfectly weaves their signature applications of sound diaries, minimalism, grainy fidelity, looping and free blues into a dynamic and ambitious statement." FV.

First album in almost 10 years for these old brothers in arms, saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Randall Colbourne. Over the past decade or so Colbourne had virtually given up the drums in order to focus on the clarinet but the beautiful force with which he commands tonal time signatures is immediately recognisable. It’s a studio set, recorded in April 2007, and as such the dynamic is a little more thoughtful and specifically nuanced from track to track, with Flaherty’s alto work touching on the kind of austere muscular style of players like Julius Hemphill or even Ornette as much as the more referenced post-Ayler fire music gambits. It’s probably the most overtly compositional performance of Flaherty’s I’ve heard since his last solo album on the same label and there are some extremely beautiful sections where Colbourne skirts the very edges of Flaherty’s inventions, implying almost orchestral extrapolations and all sorts of phantom melodies. This is a great side from two hard-thinking free musicians and it’s a blast to hear em back locking heads.

First full-length album from the duo of Glenn Donaldson and Loren Chasse since 2004: one side recorded outdoors, one indoors. The indoor stuff orbits the eccentric English avant/folk orbit plotted by players like Richard Youngs and Robert Wyatt, with smudged vocals and intricate, drug-inflected arrangements, while the outdoor material is more expansive, with reverberating electronics and wind instruments recorded in a cavernous hall in the side of a sea cliff. Edition of 500 copies, comes with a free download coupon.

New solo album from one of the major contemporary fire music voices, saxophonist Paul Flaherty, who has worked with everyone through Chris Corsano, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, Randall Colbourne, Spencer Yeh and Bill Nace. This one presents four long improvisations recorded across 2007. Flaherty is at his most lyrical when playing on his own, carving intricate blues-based speed-of-thought instants straight into the air while bolstering them with enough emotional and melodic muscle to make them really seem to speak. Recordings of single instrument improvisations can often be grueling but there’s a focus and a drama to the bulk of Aria Nativa that makes it an absolute pleasure to revisit. Edition of 500 copies with free MP3 download. Recommended.

Jailbreak is the duo of pedal steel/vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock/roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the ‘New Weird America’, where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina Carter for a quartet show that took the roof off the building and the skin off their fingers. Since then Corsano and Leigh have worked together as part of Taurpis Tula and as members of Thurston Moore’s Dream/Aktion Unit. Jailbreak play improvised music that dispenses with traditional notions of call and response or dialogue in favour of a profound simultaneity that would birth instant forms from the application of high energy strategies. Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar sources and deforms them with overdriven electricity, playing a form of future-blues exploded by super-charged currents. Corsano detonates time, literally blows it to pieces, in favour of a profound polyrhythmic feel that would confuse past and future. Yet the whole thing rocks like it hasn’t a braincell to spare, re-connecting avant garde tactics and ass-whooping rama-lama with alla the revolutionary fanfare of the most radical counter-cultural two-chord punk. Their debut LP is called The Rocker. It’s all you need to know.  “For those of you who've been worried that the Free Power Noize scene has become a little too tame, (and seriously who isn't somewhat concerned about that), a new screamin' creamin' duo -- Jailbreak --explodes to the rescue. The world's wildest free drummer (Chris Corsano: Cold Bleak Heat , duos with Mick Flower, Bill Nace etc.) and the world's wildest free steal pedal guitarist, (Heather Leigh:, Dream Aktion Unit, Jandek, etc.), pits two of the landscapes most intense pyromaniacs against each other in -- "The Rocker" -- a blast-furnace of blisteringly joyous witch-howling assaults on the essence of whips and chains and repressive injustice gone legal.  Both of these magisterial musicians are capable of extreme dynamics and subtleties, but those concepts don't get in the way of this monster-truck of a record. And why should they when drums and guitar can slash and burn in a riotous electric smash fest like this crazed merry madcap of an album.  Over the top ... Way! As the full frontal music rips through my naked and defenceless eardrums, images emerge of an old and demented grandmother, strapped into her rocking chair by disciples in heat. (ooooohhhhh yyyeeeaaahhhh!!!)  The more she violently rocks and chants with insane exhilaration, the more the treacherously imprisoned souls of Hell claw at their walls of liquid fire, desperately trying to free themselves from chains of Human and Sub-human limitations.  It sounds like 100 pall-bearin' viciously possessed drummers lifting 100 gone-bonkers zombie lovin' guitarists into another realm of escape, one that reality hasn't presented as a release, until now. The 1st time Heather & Chris played together, (a first meeting improve 4tet performance -- Babes on the Loose), I watched in disturbed horror as Heather crashed her steel pedal to the stage and sliced her hand while trying to play upside down. Then she passed out.  Corsano rushed to her aid, but had to stop and bandage his own bloodied digits, as rivers of crimson soaked the frightened platform.  (They obviously survived).  This recording picks up where that chaos and bedlam left off, and if possible, lifts the ante higher, into a maelstrom of American psychotic pandemonium gone-a-hunting in Scotland. A catch-and-release band for sure that attacks the jailers and frees the innocents ... just before the death penalty can be brutally administered. I liked it.” – Paul Flaherty. Highly recommended!

Limited CD that restores a really obscure real people/disobedient kid/nascent punk rocker cassette that was issued as part of a prodigious run of weirdo documents recorded by an out-of-control 10 year old in Elma, Washington in the mid to late 80s. This is the first full release of his best known cassette, Thunder Hips And Saddle Bags, the release that put him on the weirdo radar after it made it through to tastemakers like Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop. The Skab recordings are much more interesting than just some maniac kid goofing off. His lyrics are funny, sharp and often inspired and there’s a precocious confidence and energy to the tracks, with inventive non-musical settings and primitive interventions on various instruments and household appliances. This album features a buncha classic tracks, including “John Wayne Is Dead”, “Throwin’ Rocks At Windows”, “PLayin’ Guitar Best I Can” and “We Need To Destroy The Soviet Union”. The whole package comes with liners from a bunch of heads, including the Skab himself who contributes an extremely poignant version of the Human Skab story based around the track “Dead Baby Blues” – you won’t be able to listen to it again without cracking up. Think of a pre-Red Cross/Redd Kross goof-off by a teen OD-ing on hamburger culture and with a precocious grasp of the DIY ethos and energy jag of punk rock. CD edition comes with a bonus Human Skab radio special from 1987.

Limited LP that restores a really obscure real people/disobedient kid/nascent punk rocker cassette that was issued as part of a prodigious run of weirdo documents recorded by an out-of-control 10 year old in Elma, Washington in the mid to late 80s. This is the first full release of his best known cassette, Thunder Hips And Saddle Bags, the one that put him on the weirdo radar after it made it through to tastemakers like Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop. The Skab recordings are much more interesting than just some maniac kid goofing off. His lyrics are funny, sharp and often inspired and there’s a precocious confidence and irresistible energy to the tracks, with inventive non-musical settings and primitive interventions on various instruments and household appliances. This album features a buncha classic tracks, including “John Wayne Is Dead”, “Throwin’ Rocks At Windows”, “Playin’ Guitar Best I Can” and “We Need To Destroy The Soviet Union”. The whole package comes with liners from a bunch of heads, including the Skab himself who contributes an extremely poignant version of the Human Skab story based around the track “Dead Baby Blues” – you won’t be able to listen to it again without cracking up. Think of a pre-Red Cross/Redd Kross goof-off by a teen OD-ing on hamburger culture and with a precocious grasp of the DIY ethos and energy jag of punk rock.

Great teen garage/post-Velvets trio primitivism from a buncha heads with connections to Bloomington Indiana’s since-departed John Wilkes Booze. The sound matches the kind of inspired re-think of American rock/roll styles initiated by The Modern Lovers with a stripped down teen appeal that forsakes any kind of flash or progressive tendencies for the kind of sub-gulchural smarts of hallowed no-counts like The Screamin’ Mee-Mees, Mike Rep & The Quotas, Chinaboise et al. The lyrics are pretty smart/funny while the vocals get pretty wild and there’s even a non-ironic tribute to playboy record collector Johan Kugelberg – “God Bless You Johan Kugelberg” – that underlines their rock fandom credentials. Something beautifully non-contemporary about this particular brand of hunch. 

Exact repro reissue of this Midwestern punk/new wave classic: “Family Vineyard reissues an obscure and sought after punk/new wave treasure. Dow Jones and the Industrials' 1981 sole 7-inch EP, originally issued on the Hardly Music label, is immaculately re-mastered from the original tapes and now available on audiophile vinyl. Dow Jones and the Industrials of West Lafayette, Indiana existed from the late 1970s into the early 80s amongst a stylistically matchless state-wide scene that included The Gizmos, Zero Boys and Dancing Cigarettes. This EP -- of which original copies have swapped hands for more than $200 -- contains the often bootlegged and covered anthem "Can't Stand the Midwest," along with "Let's Go Steady" and "Indeterminism." This record was the second and final release from Dow Jones after the 1980 split LP with The Gizmos on Gulcher. The four member DJI combined jagged rock 'n' roll songwriting with emerging electronic instrumentation and smart-ass collegiate humour into a wild new wave sound that won them immediate popularity among Indiana's punks and co-eds of the day and has remained in the hearts of record collectors these past 30 years. Includes exact reprints of the two different versions of an insert included with the original record. Family Vineyard will be reissuing the complete recordings of Dow Jones and the Industrials later in 2011.Edition of 600 copies.” – FV. 

New album from guitarist Chris Forsyth, also a member of Peeesseye. This is a full-band recording, featuring members of D. Charles Speer, Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Mountains, and it expands on Forsyth’s great private press album Dreams, with a vision of electrified Americana that’s somewhere between Glenn Jones and Cul de Sac’s re-visioning of the music of John Fahey through a more overtly Minimalist take on the kind of euphoric guitar exchanges of Television, all assembled in hypnotic instrumentals that take off on vertical ascensions of microtone-heavy euphoria to the point that the marching hallelujah melodies morph into dense vibrating structures that flash in front of you in the air. The addition of pedal steel and organ situate the music deep within a roots-music background that, combined with Forsyth’s guitar tone, sounds a lot like Richard Thompson circa I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight. Indeed if you can imagine Fairport scholars Television’s live rips through The 13^th Floor Elevators’ “Fire Engine” denuded of vocals and re-scored in the studio for maximum psychoactive effect then you’re close to the kind of endlessly riffing American Primitive appeal of this great LP. And unlike so much of the name-dropping that has happened in the wake of his passing, the dedication to Jack Rose on “New Pharmacist Boogie” makes a lot of sense.

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.