Bis Aufs Messer Weekly news Oct 2023
Hi, welcome to another newsletter — Fall just started a couple cool new releases arrived like the fantastic new MARJA AHTI - Tender Membranes LP, COSMETICS - Baby LP, MARTIN DUPONT - Hot Paradox LP re issue, SONIC YOUTH w/ JIM O'ROURKE - Invito Al Cielo LP restock, the first two SHADOW RING LP re issues …
We also got restock of the PHAROAH SANDERS BOXSET, ANNA ST. LOUIS - In The Air LP restock
We also started taking pre orders for the ZORN - discography DLP which will released via AUDIOLITH records.
We also down to the last JAZZ Sweaters and T-shirts. The Caps are gone again
And we also added ( adding) a few more second hand LPs and 7“s to our discogs
https://www.discogs.com/seller/XMESSERX
Thank you as usual
Til then thank you for all your orders & support.
Robert & Norman
mailorder@bisaufmesser.com
www.adagio830-records.bandcamp.com
7“
COSMETICS - Pillow Talk / Tell Me (Alt. Versions) 7“ (minimal / cittrax - Cititrax is delighted to announce two new releases by Cosmetics, a Vancouver-based synth wave duo formed by Nic Emm and Aja Emma in 2008. Cosmetics reappeared in 2022 after having been relatively quiet since its very memorable releases on Captured Tracks in 2010. In 2023, the band returns with a phenomenal full-length LP entitled ‘Baby’ and a 7” single entitled Pillow Talk / Tell Me (Alternate Versions). Their music is sultry, minimalist, and atmospheric, backed by lush analog synths and sparse drum machines. Aja’s seductive vocals cut through the perfectly crafted dark synthpop forming a filmlike narrative that draws us in. The ‘Baby’ LP will have you listening on repeat and the single featuring alternate versions of two songs from the album will bring you from your bedroom listening to the dance floor. Cosmetics continue the lineage of Minimal Wave into the present day. The ‘Baby’ LP will be pressed on 160-gram ultra clear vinyl and presented in a spot gloss LP sleeve accompanied by a photobooth strip of the band. The Pillow Talk / Tell Me 7” will be pressed on black vinyl and presented in a 6-panel fold-over sleeve, limited to 500 copies.) 16.00
LP
ANNA ST. LOUIS - In The Air LP (woodsist - back in stock - WHITE VINYL. Born of a thousand nights lost in a surrender to stillness and contemplation, In The Air is Anna St. Louis’ second full length album and her most considered work yet. St. Louis’ debut If Only There Was a River seemed to emerge fully formed out of the recesses of her mind; a gritty, mesmerizing affair, filled with jagged edges and ghostly apparitions. The type of record that announces a new voice; one haunted by what has come before. But this time, St. Louis is no longer concerned with what could have been and sets her sights to exploring what could be. It’s an outlook on the world that was formed when her immediate one was small. The intervening years since her last album found St. Louis in a small one-bedroom cabin in the middle of the woods of upstate New York with a new love and time to think of what she wanted to express with her music. For weeks on end, the only trips she took were to and from her job as the front desk clerk at a nearby hotel. The previous years she had spent on tour and performing constantly in the venues of Los Angeles felt like they had occurred in another lifetime.) 27.00
COSMETICS - Baby LP (minimal wave - Cititrax is delighted to announce two new releases by Cosmetics, a Vancouver-based synth wave duo formed by Nic Emm and Aja Emma in 2008. Cosmetics reappeared in 2022 after having been relatively quiet since its very memorable releases on Captured Tracks in 2010. In 2023, the band returns with a phenomenal full-length LP entitled ‘Baby’ and a 7” single entitled Pillow Talk / Tell Me (Alternate Versions). Their music is sultry, minimalist, and atmospheric, backed by lush analog synths and sparse drum machines. Aja’s seductive vocals cut through the perfectly crafted dark synthpop forming a filmlike narrative that draws us in. The ‘Baby’ LP will have you listening on repeat and the single featuring alternate versions of two songs from the album will bring you from your bedroom listening to the dance floor. Cosmetics continue the lineage of Minimal Wave into the present day. The ‘Baby’ LP will be pressed on 160-gram ultra clear vinyl and presented in a spot gloss LP sleeve accompanied by a photobooth strip of the band. The Pillow Talk / Tell Me 7” will be pressed on black vinyl and presented in a 6-panel fold-over sleeve.) 30.00
DORAN SPENCER - Season: A Letter To The Future (Original Soundtrack) DLP (Composed and produced over the course of nearly three years, Spencer Doran's original soundtrack for SEASON: A letter to the future underpins the highly-anticipated atmospheric adventure game in which the main character must save memories of a civilization on the verge of collapse. A lush collection of transmissions from this warmly fading world, we hear a culture and ecology through the sentimental ear of their last witness.Doran was an early collaborator in the making of SEASON, helping define the game's imaginary world and emotional tones. His past work in music has taken many forms including site-specific audio installations, compiling the acclaimed Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, and his own humanely futuristic work as half of Visible Cloaks. Each pursuit found relevance within the soundtrack of a video game that takes place in an invented culture living out its final days.SEASON is about what it feels like to be alive in a certain time and place, and to capture that feeling for the future. The protagonist of the story, Estelle, is a photographer and sound recordist, working with her microphone, camera, and journal to uncover the complexity of an environment facing erasure. This documentation is not mere salvage anthropology, but a key to understanding Estelle's own past, and also a meditation on our present.Sound and music factor heavily into the interactive and narrative aspects of SEASON; the character is equipped with a free-form audio recorder used to capture and playback any sound heard in the game and trigger revelations about the world around her. These sounds are at times musical, and we hear them interwoven with Doran's score throughout the soundtrack: an organ played by mountain air, a ratchety mechanical music box echoing out communal "sleep music" for a village, an aeolian harp played by gusts of valley wind, imagined exotica cranked from the hi-fi of an old monk.Rather than simply composing songs and placing them into a 3D context, Doran worked with SEASON's audio team to arrange the soundtrack for an abstract and evolving experience within Audiokinetic's Wwise, a software designed for managing complex systems of audio for gaming platforms. Within SEASON, the environmental music uses what Doran refers to as a "Venn Diagram model" for tonal layering, where "different modular layers of various pieces are dispersed across wide areas and overlap with each other as you traverse the landscape, with randomized elements creating continuously different combinations". The score functions as "musical wind" - sound fragments that drift and swirl around with the same behavior as the acoustic biome of the landscape. As a composer writes for each instrument in an orchestra, Doran writes with the voices of landscapes, gusts of wind, esoteric imagined instruments, and drifting radio broadcasts. The music renders an unplaceable specificity of feeling, like German Fernweh or "far sickness": a homesickness for somewhere you've never been before. We can hear the influence of early 20th century impressionism, Ravel, Satie, Debussy, Déodat de Séverac, particularly in the piano pieces. Elsewhere, other historical instruments are heard: viol, harp, flute, portable organ (petite orgue), celesta - all within the crisp hyper-real space Doran is known for exploring in Visible Cloaks.Boundaries are blurred between the natural world and the non-diegetic score, functioning not as a superimposition on the sound world but rather an extension of it, drawing from composers that worked adjacent to the field of acoustic ecology like Hildegard Westerkamp and R. Murray Schafer, as well as research by Steven Feld and José Maceda about, according to Doran, "the mirrored reflections of the natural world heard within traditional music forms."Condensing these rich, changing networks of sound into a traditional soundtrack release presented a challenge to Doran, but this is music to live in and explore, regardless of the format it is expressed. The songs seep into your bones.) 38.00
GRATIN CARNIVAL - Such December LP (client transistor - Alien Transistor is proud to announce a reissue of Such December, the fourth album by Japanese indie folk-pop artist, Gratin Carnival. Listeners might already know Gratin Carnival from their appearance on the Alien Parade Japan compilation of indie pop groups working with brass and woodwind; compiled by Markus Acher of The Notwist and Saya of Tenniscoats, it introduced this beautiful genre to the wider world. Gratin Carnival’s “Just Watching” was one of the many highlights of that compilation, and its gentle bossa-folk glide reappears on Such December. Originally released in 2020, Such December captures beautifully the happy-sad charm of Gratin Carnival. The project of Koreyuki Mitsunaga, Gratin Carnival started in 2011; Mitsunaga had been home recording for some time and decided on the name as an umbrella for his music-making. Mitsunaga’s main instruments are guitar, which he uses to great effect throughout, his gorgeous acoustic playing reminiscent of players like Ueno Takashi of Tenniscoats or João Gilberto, and alto saxophone and clarinet. Those three instruments make up the core of Gratin Carnival’s sound, along with Mitsunaga’s charmingly doleful singing.
) 26.00
MARY LATTIMORE - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada LP (ghostly international - Through evocative, emotionally resonant music, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, the new LP from American harpist and composer Mary Lattimore, speaks not just for its beloved namesake — a hotel in Croatia facing renovation — but for a universal loss that is shared. Six sprawling pieces shaped by change; nothing will ever be the same, and here, the artist, evolving in synthesis, celebrates and mourns the tragedy and beauty of the ephemeral, all that is lived and lost to time. Documented and edited in uncharacteristically measured sessions over the course of two years, the material remains rooted in improvisation while glistening as the most refined and robust in Lattimore’s decade-long catalog. It finds her communing with friends, contemporaries, and longtime influences, in full stride yet slowing down to nurture songs in new ways. The cast includes Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Meg Baird, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Roy Montgomery, Samara Lubelski, and Walt McClements.) 28.00
MARJA AHTI - Tender Membranes LP (blank forms - »Tender Membranes« is the the label’s first release from Swedish-Finnish sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Marja Ahti. Active for a decade in the Finnish underground music scene, in recent years Ahti has developed a distinctive approach to patiently unfolding electro-acoustic constructions, documented on a string of solo releases and collaborative projects with Judith Hamann and her husband Niko-Matti Ahti. Working with concrete and instrumental sounds, field recordings, and electronics, Ahti favours neither disjunctive collage nor monolithic consistency; rather, her work is composed of organically unfolding sequences of details and textures, which, as she says, ‘can stretch out or cut fast as long as they have a sense of inner stillness’, a sense that she connects to moments of heightened attention in everyday life. »Tender Membranes« consists of four lengthy pieces, partly inspired by the image of the senses and mind as membranes allowing for the passage between inner and outer spaces, sensation and its causes, creating a world. Ahti’s unhurried pacing encourages this sense of listening as an opening or surrender to sound, which can often create the impression that the listener is moving through a space zooming in on details. The opening »Shrine (Aether)« exemplifies this aspect of Ahti’s approach: a bell clears the air with a single long tone, followed by the ambience of outdoor spaces, crackling electronics, an archival recording of a horsefly on a windowpane. Dozens of these moments, varying in length, density, and intensity, move past the listener’s attention, momentarily brought into focus then slipping away. Like those of the masters of the French musique concrète tradition, Ahti’s sounds are not often recognisable, though they might suggest proximity or distance, open environments or closed spaces, the urban or rural, day or night. In Ahti’s work, we do not encounter spectacular metamorphoses à la Parmegiani but rather a state of ambiguity where the listener is often unsure what is organic and what is inorganic, where the careful productions of the synthesizer might end and sounds discovered in the environment begin. What Ahti calls her ‘poetic way of experiencing and organising the familiar and the unfamiliar’ is sustained throughout »Tender Membranes«, but each piece has its own character. On »Dust / Light«, human presence is more overt, as what appear to be whispers, singing, and distant speech thread between high frequencies, untraceable drips and pops, and metallic shimmers. In all this there is a melody that you can sing and to which you may dance makes more prominent use of musical instruments, gaining a sombre beauty from half-buried piano chords and organ tones. On the closing »Oh Fragrant Witness«, a delicate cloud of subtly bending pitches is repeatedly disrupted by a resounding, almost ominous mass of low tones, at once a strange detour from much of what has gone before and an almost classical finale. Arriving in a sleeve reproducing contemporary Finnish photographer Sini Pelkki’s fragmented visions of the everyday, »Tender Membranes« is a balm to reawaken tired ears.) 28.00
MARTIN DUPONT - Hot Paradox LP (minimal wave - We are honored to present the first vinyl LP reissue of French legends Martin Dupont’s seminal album from 1987, ‘Hot Paradox’. Martin Dupont was originally founded by Alain Seghir in Marseille in 1980. He enlisted numerous collaborators throughout the years, including Beverley Jane Crew, Brigitte Balian, and Catherine Loy. Martin Dupont was immensely talented with a rare dynamic between its varying members that was likely inspired by a combination of their magnetic personalities, creative vision, and the home studio where they recorded. Their music was colorful, enthusiastic, delicate, melancholy, and mysterious. A mixture of hot and cold, light and dark. They created electronic music that incorporated guitars, clarinets, and saxophones and is described by many as New Wave yet truly transcended genres. Aside from having been released as part of ‘The Complete Collection: 1980-1988’ 5-LP box set, the ‘Hot Paradox’ album hasn’t been available on vinyl since 1987. It is one of Martin Dupont’s most exquisite albums, illustrating the band’s mastery of synthesizer work, drum programming, and vocal duets. The album is vibrant and emotive, simultaneously somber and bright, theatrical and danceable. It is an essential album in the French cold wave, new wave, and minimal synth scenes, and in recent years, has finally received the recognition it deserves beyond any musical categorization. The Hot Paradox album reissue is pressed on 180-gram black vinyl, is accompanied by the original insert/lyrics sheet, and is housed in a heavy-weight sleeve featuring art by Yves Cheyne) 30.00
MARTINA BERTHER / PHILIPP SCHLOTTER - Matt LP (hallow ground - Martina Berther and Philipp Schlotter are prolific in their respective ways, having been active in pop and jazz music, respectively, as well as playing in bands and exploring the outer fringes of sound art or composing music for film. Their first joint album »Matt« was recorded over the course of four days in a church in the Swiss village after which the album was named. Berther and Schlotter worked with the buildingʼs organ as well as synthesizers and electric bass to follow an experimental approach that oscillated between composition and free improvisation. The five pieces, recorded directly to tape by Flo Götte without any additional overdubs, are characterised by an intimacy and rawness that calls to mind the introspective atmosphere of Hallow Ground label mateʼs FUJI||||||||||TA or mastering engineer Lawrence Englishʼs latest album for the Swiss label. »Matt« is the result of two versatile composers and musicians executing minimalist ideas by giving them plenty of space to unfold. The album opens with »Unruhe,« a composition that is based on the twelve-tone technique. Using a stopwatch to ensure the adherence to the pre-determined temporal intervals between the individual notes, Berther and Schlotter used the church organ and synthesizers for an ominous piece that traverses different moods and levels of intensity throughout its 14-minute run time. »LFO1« and »LFO2« are different variations of the same concept: Based on a synthesizer preset and structured by an organ drone, two tone generators slowly fall silent, resulting in elegiac pieces that call to mind the work of Éliane Radigue. »Frachter« and »Gallia« put more emphasis on percussive elements. Again working with organ as well as Bertherʼs prepared electric bass, this improvisation comprises interlocking textures that sound almost menacing on »Frachter,« while they create a very different atmosphere on »Gallia.« These notable discrepancies in sound and mood are even more astonishing if you consider that the two pieces are based on the exact same recording, played at different speeds. As two variations on the same idea with very different results, these two pieces perfectly represent how the duo effectively creates emotionally affective sound worlds with very few means. Berther and Schlotterʼs conceptual minimalism yields rewarding, multi-faceted aesthetic results. »Matt« is an intimate album, marked by a sense of vividness and spontaneity, but also the product of compositional conciseness. ) 27.00
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO - Ongaku Zukan LP + 7“ (wewantsound - Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the release of Ryuichi Sakamoto"s classic LP "Ongaku Zukan", originally issued in Japan on his own School label in 1984. The reissue will replicate the original Japanese release which offered two versions: a normal edition featuring the LP with a bonus 7" EP, and a limited edition which includes a 3-track 12" EP in place of the 7". Remastered by Saidera Mastering in Tokyo the reissue boasts the original gatefold artwork plus an extra 2-page insert with new liner notes by Andy Beta.) 36.00
SEKUNDERNA - Tiden Är En Dröm LP (rockstar - Ah, the joy of sadness. Who invented it? The power pop punk rockers from Umeå! This is where this unique combination of melancholy, joy, too much snow and danceable melodies was born after all. It first arrives unsuspiciously and disguised as a simple band from the garage from around the block, but then it‘s more fun than a buttery croissant in the morning and it is more substantial than a freshly grated cereal. But simple my ass. 6 new songs. I love them all. If you like your punk rock poppy and your sadness hidden behind too much melody, if you like to carry your beer and your heart in cans, Sekunderna‘s second release on Rockstar Records is more than a rich breakfast. I guess I was hungry when I wrote this) 15.00
THE SHADOW RING - Put The Music In It's Coffin LP (blank forms - Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book. Recorded in summer of 1994 at S.H.P studios (frontman Graham Lambkin's parents' home), the group's sophomore record Put the Music In Its Coffin is a more sinister, saturnine affair than their debut City Lights. Coffin was many listeners' introduction to the Shadow Ring, who had hitherto self-released their music, courting a steady stable of international fans through the magazine and mail-order catalog Forced Exposure. For their follow-up, the duo reached out to the ascending Philadelphia label Siltbreeze, whose eclectic roster of sneering, low-fidelity rock and noise connected disparate subterranean scenes from rust-belt America to the English Midlands, Dunedin, and beyond. As luck would have it, Siltbreeze proprietor Tom Lax was already a fan of the band's first record and arranged to release both a 7" and their "difficult second album." The connection proved to run deeper than vinyl_within six months, Lax would pick up the pair from the airport for their spring 1995 US tour. This episode marked not only their first trip to the States but their first live performances at all, formally introducing the Shadow Ring to the American underground and solidifying the allure of the Folkestone pair. From the get-go, the record has a menacing, vile ambience. Its opening track "Horse-Meat Cakes," inspired by an anecdote by pulp author Philip K. Dick about how he and his wife subsisted off low-grade pet food when he first arrived in San Francisco, sets the tone lyrically and sonically. Subsequent tracks are filled with Rabelaisian body horror and sinewy, haptic diction. "I try to pass out vital organs, convinced that they are waste," intones Lambkin in "Heart, Liver & Lungs," before a chorus of detuned guitars kicks in, nearly drowning out the speaker's account of consuming chevaline intestines. Later songs similarly detail vernacular cooking ("Caribbean Porridge," about a cornmeal hangover cure), bodily processes ("Nocturnal Middle Rumbles," about nighttime defecation), and creaturely conflict ("Crystal Tears" and "Spin The Animal Dial"). The album's makeshift percussion and teenaged rawness resembles the verve of City Lights, while its screeching strings and gnarly distorted vocals give it a sparse, miasmic atmosphere that look towards the uncompromising, otherworldly experimentation of the band's Hold Onto I.D. (1996) and Lighthouse (1997), making this one of the Shadow Ring's most distilled musical statements.) 30.00
THE SHADOW RING - City Lights LP (blank forms - Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book. Recorded and self-released by the group's own Dry Leaf Discs in 1993, City Lights is the debut record of the then duo Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris_an assured arrival statement teeming with stripling angst and ambition. Lifelong chums Lambkin and Harris were barely nineteen and living at home in the seaside town of Folkestone, Kent, with few overhead expenses. The two were freshly employed as a forklift operator at a hardware store and an aide at a home for children with disabilities, respectively, affording them the time and funds to commit to a proper full-length release. Frontman Lambkin describes the album as a "microscopic examination of leisure activities, this time centered around a nightclub," a conceit surging through its lyrics, song titles, cover art (depicting an audience of cats and mice at the Leas Club, a Folkestone fixture), and flip side (replete with fictional bandmates and pseudonymous liner notes). On a recently-acquired secondhand guitar, Lambkin plays repetitive, brooding licks that form the record's backbone, weaving in and out of sync with Harris's free-form percussion and the pair's sing-song poetry. Tracks range from unraveling nursery-rhyme ditties to extended jams awash with Casiotone and toy piano noodling. The duo's musical hobby-horses work themselves in: the influence of Mark E. Smith's breathless deadpan, the headless outer-edges of ESP-Disk's back catalog, the eerie atmospherics of Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, and the deconstructed rock tunes of the Dunedin scene are all detectable, although there is a sui generis quality to the Shadow Ring's artless temerity. "I've got to see and taste those city lights," intones Lambkin on the album's title track_indeed, this is a record of naked drive and pent-up desperation, and a shimmering glimpse of what's to come. For Fans of The Fall, Royal Trux, The Dead C, Shirley Collins, '70s British progressive rock, Dean Blunt.) 30.00
SONIC YOUTH w/ JIM O'ROURKE - Invito Al Cielo LP (syr - Why not Jim O'Rourke, and for that matter, why not Sonic Youth? The third in SYR's series of EP's brings the patented O'Rourke touch of calm to Sonic Youth's well-known rock El Nino, with three tracks of blackened experimental sound. Kim kinda gurgles a bit during some of it. All text written in Esperanto. Eye-fucking cover art.) 27.00
SUFJAN STEVENS - Javelin LP (asthmatic kitty - Each track on Javelin starts intimately: the trickle of an acoustic guitar, the patter of a lidded piano, and the cascade of a coruscant arpeggio. And then, of course, there is that disarming voice, the throughline in one of the most eclectic catalogs of any songwriter this century - soft but strong, as if the very scenes of hurt and hope it is about to share have only galvanized it through the decades. Javelin pairs musical sweep with emotional breadth, an entire lifetime of feeling woven into 42-minutes. On Javelin, Sufjan, as you may know him best, returns: offering gorgeous if pained glimpses of himself, so that we may see ourselves more fully. This album is classic Sufjan. A must own.) 28.00
THE TACKS - The Tacks LP (rockstar - restock - The Tacks‘ self-titled album immediately shines with the band‘s inherent wonderful sound of melancholic joy in darkness in general. The mix of goth, dark wave, post punk and the best of 80s college radio can confidently be subsumed under Dark Punk - if you need something like pigeonholes for it. Glassy guitars, an enchanting voice, bubbling basses and driving melodies to a catchy beat - that‘s The Tacks from Christchurch, NZ.) 17.00
