NEW RELEASES WEEK # 46 NOVEMBER 11, 2014

NOVEMBER 11, 2014 (WEEK #46)

1.    …AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD-“IX” (LIMITED EDITION 2-CD) (11/10) 

2.    ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS-“TURNING” (2-CD) (11/10)  (TURNING - A concert film documentary captured during the critically acclaimed tour of Europe by Antony and the Johnsons and Charles Atlas during the fall of 2006, it explores the heart and experience of that series of performances. Through it?s synthesis of Antony?s songs and unfurling video portraiture of the 13 beauties who performed on stage, TURNING creates an intimate and cinematic experience exploring themes of identity, transcendence and the revelation of essence. Also included in the deluxe package is the full TURNING concert recorded live at The Barbican, London, Nov. 2006 and contains songs across the first three Antony and the Johnsons? full length albums along with bonus tracks never before released songs - ?Whose are These? and ?Tears Tears Tears?. The classic lineup of Antony, Maxim Moston, Rob Moose, Julia Kent, Parker Kindred, Jeff Langston and Thomas Bartlett can be heard on these recordings as Charles Atlas? projected portraits of the girls light up the stage from behind the band for the duration of the concert.)

3.    BEDHEAD-“1992-1998” (4-CD COLLECTION) (11/11) 

4.    CHARLIE BOYER & THE VOYEURS-“RHUBARB RHUBARB” (11/11)

5.    LLOYD COLE-COMPILED BY LLOYD COLE: KILLEKTION O2: ROEDELIUS-ELECTRONIC MUSIC” (11/11) (About this Kollektion: British songwriter Lloyd Cole has long since been a fan of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Cluster. For convincing evidence, one need look no further than his 2001 album Plastic Wood, a purely electronic opus which was an unambiguous homage to his musical idols. In 2013, Cole and Roedelius actually joined forces to release their Selected Studies Vol. 1 album (BB 124CD/LP). Cole has now listened through the Hans-Joachim Roedelius solo archives to present his favorite synthesizer or organ pieces in Bureau B's Kollektion series. About Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Hans-Joachim Roedelius, born in Berlin 1934; released his first album 1969 with Kluster (with Dieter Moebius and Conrad Schnitzler). Active ever since as a solo artist and in various collaborations. One of the most prolific musicians of the German avant-garde and a key figure in the birth of Krautrock, synthesizer pop and ambient music. Roedelius entered the world of music in 1967 when he and Conrad Schnitzler founded the Berlin performance club Zodiak Free Arts Lab, thereby launching the careers of numerous "Berlin School" musicians (Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, etc). Schnitzler and Roedelius later got together with Dieter Moebius to record two seminal albums under the name of Kluster. Schnitzler quit the trio not long afterwards, the other two continuing to release albums as Cluster at irregular intervals until 2009. Hans-Joachim Roedelius has also been active as a solo artist and has collaborated with countless musical partners including Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, Michael Rother, Stefan Schneider and Tim Story, to list just a brief selection. He played on around 170 record productions either as a soloist or with band projects. Some 1,600 musical works bear his name, plus a similar number of texts (poetry, prose etc.) Lloyd Cole on Roedelius: "It was 1977. First came Bowie's Low, then Eno's Before and After Science, which led me to Cluster and Eno, released earlier that year. What a year to be 16 years old! Cluster and Eno led me to Can and Neu!, et al, but none of this so-called Krautrock had the je ne sais quoi that was the essence of Cluster. Sowiesoso pulsed and spat and gurgled with warmth and humor which gave it a resonance beyond this otherwise dry and clever music, which at its worst might seem to smirk downwards towards the listener. Instead, Sowiesoso wore a wry, welcoming smile. It said: Maybe we can spend some time together, maybe we'll be friends, maybe we won't, listen to this, see what you think ... I'm still listening. Cluster led me to Harmonia and then Roedelius' solo works which led me to believe that the soul I was finding in Cluster which seemed so absent from their peers came primarily from him. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way I hear it. The melodic sensibility which drew me in is his, for sure. Roedelius' voice is unique, instantly recognizable, and still resonates. Almost 40 years later, here I am curating a Roedelius collection. Which makes me very happy. I hope you enjoy it." --Lloyd Cole, 2014)

6.    CULT OF YOUTH-“FINAL DAYS” (11/11) 

7.    CUT COPY-“CUT COPY PRESENTS: OCEANS APART” (COMPILATION) (11/11) 

8.    VLADISLAV DELAY-“VISA” (11/11) 

9.    DREAM POLICE-“HYPNOTIZED” (11/11) (Dream Police is an American musical production by Nick Chiericozzi and Mark Perro. The project began in 2010 as a reservoir for ideas which had overflowed from The Men's drain pipe. In that same year, a two-song cassette single was self-released, with a follow-up live document in 2011. Most recently, the duo has conceived an LP with longtime sonic partner, Kyle Keays-Hagerman from late 2013 through early 2014. Although the production began using the most conservative rock and roll devices, it slowly plumed into a cloud of future primitive psychedelia.)

10. EX COPS-“DAGGERS” (WITH BILLY CORGAN AND ARIEL PINK) (11/14) 

11. FOO FIGHTERS-“SONIC HIGHWAYS” (11/11) 

12. FOREIGN FIELDS-“ANYWHERE BUT WHERE I AM” (11/11) 

13. GROUPER-“RUINS” (11/11) 

14. HIGH ENDS-“SUPER CLASS” (11/4) (In the second half of 2013, following years of near-constant touring as the front-man of the critically acclaimed BC outfit Yukon Blonde, Jeffrey Innes suddenly found himself in possession of an unfamiliar commodity: free time. With Yukon Blonde on a temporary break between albums, Innes was back at home in Vancouver, but rather than spending his downtime relaxing, he launched the solo project High Ends as an adventurous new songwriting outlet.The resulting ten-song album, Super Class (October 7, 2014) combines the upbeat pop-rock catchiness that Innes is known for with esoteric synth textures. It was recorded with producer Colin Stewart (Dan Mangan, the New Pornographers) at his Vancouver Island facility. During the sessions, Gold & Youth drummer Jeff Mitchelmore handled percussion, meticulously interweaving vintage drum machine programming with live playing. Louise Burns and New Pornographers member Kathryn Calder contributed backing vocals, while Ladyhawk's Darcy Hancock laid down guitar. The desire to make music purely for fun without rules is the driving force behind High Ends. With another busy year ahead of him, a prospective tour underway and his new wildly inventive solo project under his belt, it is clear that for Jeff Innes, 'free time' doesn't exist.)

15. HOOKWORMS-“THE HUM” (11/11) 

16. IAMAMIWHOAMI-“BLUE” (11/11) 

17. OLIVIA JEAN-“BATHTUB LOVE KILLINGS” (11/11)

18. MARK MCGUIRE-“NOCTILUCENCE” (11/11)

19. MOUSE ON MARS-“21 AGAIN” (2-CD) (11/11) (Mouse On Mars' 21st anniversary double CD featuring exclusive collaborations with: Cavern Of Anti-Matter, Tortoise, Errorsmith, Dodo NKishi, Scratch Pet Land, Eric D. Clark, Helado Negro, Siriusmo, Modeselektor (feat. Mr. Maloke), Atom TM, Laetitia Sadier, Schlammpeitziger, Junior Boys, Candie Hank, Machinedrum, Mesak & Claws Costeau, F.X. Randomiz, Funkstorung, Yoshimi, Herbert, and interludes by: Eleni Poulou and Mark E. Smith, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, AGF Delay-Team, Ingrid & Oswald Wiener, David Michael DiGregorio & Sung Huang Kim, Prefuse 73, and DJ Scotch Egg. How many internationally influential pop acts has Germany thrown into the mix? Kraftwerk, of course, followed by Can and the other Krautrock pioneers -- Neu! and Cluster, Tangerine Dream and Faust; after that, Einstürzende Neubauten, perhaps. And in the mid-1990s, Mouse On Mars joined this select group, quickly earning international recognition for their unique blend of concept, experiment and pop. Rare is the festival of electronic or independent music that hasn't welcomed them to the stage, and there are few producers of edgy, intelligent pop music who do not cite Mouse On Mars as a reference. They are feted as rock stars across Japan and North America, and for the past 20 years they have been packing clubs -- and even classical concert halls in European metropolises. Mouse On Mars are a musical phenomenon. After two decades of constant innovation and reinvention, they have lost none of their might and magic. And, just like jazz musicians, the duo seems to be getting ever more seasoned, savvy and uncompromising. The band's anniversary release -- a compilation celebrating 21 years of band history with a bit more than 21 collaborations -- seems like a logical move. Open to outside influences from day one, Mouse On Mars' music and approach anchors a surprisingly malleable methodology to an unwavering vision at the eye of the hurricane. The surface of pop music thrives on change, on constant renewal, and the Mouse On Mars phenomenon fuses this mutability with a myriad of voices caught in a proliferating web of dialogue. And at the heart of these oscillating force fields, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma invariably remain themselves -- curious, critical and even-keeled. In this spirit, Mouse On Mars celebrate their "coming of age" surrounded by 23 of their peers.)

20. NEEL-“PHOBOS” (11/11) (There's a large empty space on your record shelf, in between Nurse With Wound's Space Music and Pete Namlook & Tetsu Inoue's Shades of Orion: a gap between the cold, lifeless experimentations of Steven Stapleton -- space heard as a largely silent void punctuated by the sudden and infrequent arrival of massive objects -- and the romantic imaginings of '90s space ambient which filled space with idealistic longings of earth. There aren't many records to put right between those two. But now Neel has given us one, Phobos, and it's both a lustrous and shadowy beauty. After debuting stellar live performances at MUTEK in Montreal as well as Berlin Atonal, the time to release an album documenting the material has arrived. Phobos is the debut LP from Neel, well-known as the sonic mastermind behind the Voices From The Lake project, together with his fellow Italian DJ, friend, and cosmic joker Donato Dozzy. Neel is a young mastering engineer with golden ears, and through Voices From The Lake, he and Dozzy have brought a level of immaculate sound production to techno which, to be honest, simply hasn't existed before. Alone, however, you might feel Neel sounds even better. Phobos is a carefully-cut gem, reflecting layers of patient detail and filling the full frequency range with a perfect balance. Voices From The Lake is an organic project, with a tight focus on water and life, but Phobos has leapt to the opposite end of the spectrum. You cannot take a sampler's magnifying glass to a place that does not transmit sound -- another kind of imagination and technique is required. The sonic results are a real treat. This album more than most, will benefit from whatever outrageous hi-fi you can swing at it. Don't just play it loud -- play it well. Legend has it Neel constructed Phobos out of an elaborate narrative concerning Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, Fear and its brother Dread, the son of Aries and Aphrodite, the moon which sets twice across the Martian sky each day, and which each century draws closer to its red parent by one earthly meter, in a 50-million year gravitational tease that can only end in destruction. Further investigators will have to tease out the real details of that story from Neel, but for listeners the album slowly traverses through deep space over the course of a single hour-long track, patiently passing slow-turning objects and desolate plains, until the final minutes where it unpacks itself -- presenting all the pent-up emotions from a long trip -- in a blissful moment that marks the end and beginning of this voyage into space alone.)

21. OH LAND-“EARTH SICK” (11/11) 

22. PARQUET COURTS-“CONTENT NAUSEA” (11/11) 

23. PINK FLOYD-“THE ENDLESS RIVER” (DELUXE EDITION) (11/11) 

24. RADIAN & HOWE GELB-“RADIAN VERSES HOWE GELB” (11/11) ("A seemingly curious collaboration. A wrangling and grappling, a confrontation, a quarrel. A checking-out, a weighing of compromises. The Viennese trio Radian has recorded an album with songwriter Howe Gelb from Tucson, Arizona. Here the situation is different: Radian Verses Howe Gelb is primarily a Radian release. In four sessions that were rather freely dispersed over time, Howe Gelb, usually devoting himself to a cosmopolitan rethinking of Americana and desert country in his day job, fed acoustic contributions into the microphone for Radian: piano, guitar, above all: voice -- sometimes as a reaction to material prepared by Radian, sometimes pulled liberally and unexpectedly from his own vast and tangled pool of ideas. The tones of Howe Gelb provided further material for Radian: They were dissected, dissolved, reoriented, mutated and made to fit into their own world. Radian Verses Howe Gelb is the first Radian release with guitarist Martin Siewert, who joined the band in 2011 and here also is responsible for processing and sound treatment. As usual, drummer Martin Brandlmayr was in charge of the selection and arrangement of sounds, and John Norman of the bass. As always with Radian, this record resembles a particularly carefully and cautiously-assembled collage: sounds, tones, noises -- the tracks are busy. They are teeming, quavering, vibrating. As before, the kinds of things that Brandlmayr, Norman and Siewert scrape and tease out of their machines and instruments make up an exuberant buffet of ideas and strangeness. The way the sounds are arranged here however creates an aura of fragility, a lean design. The tones appear to be artfully suspended in space, and you can feel the air flowing between them. You can hear Howe Gelb croaking and whining in the process of disintegration, and the entanglement and fusion with this highly-focused free music. The categories and genres crumble away ? whether it's exploring jazz, intricate tinker-electronics, dub, growling, hissing, bubbling, rock, a lot of things wondrously permeate this music, one that is indeed rather post-everything." --Philipp L'Heritier; Howe Gelb (voice, guitars, piano); Martin Brandlmayr (drums, vibraphone, electronics, synths, editing and arrangement); Martin Siewert (guitars, lap-, and pedal steel, electronics, synths, processings); John Norman (bass).

25. RECONDITE-“IFFY” (11/11)

26. DAMIEN RICE-“MY FAVOURITE FADED FANTASY” (11/10) 

27. ROYKSOPP-“THE INEVITABLE END” (11/11) 

28. RUMER-“INTO COLOUR” (11/11)

29. MATTHEW RYAN-“BOXERS” (10/14) 

30. SKINNY PUPPY-“MYTHMAKER” (REMASTERED IN VINYL AND CD) (11/11) 

31. SUPERFOOD-“DON’T SAY THAT” (11/11) 

32. TAHITI 80-“BALLROOM” (11/11) 

33. TARWATER-“ADRIFT” (11/11) ("The Berlin-based electronic duo Tarwater (Ronald Lippok and Bernd Jestram) formed in 1995. They have prod guced 11 regular studio albums and various collaborations (e.g. with Piano Magic, Tuxedomoon, B. Fleischmann), as well as numerous film and theater scores. Lippok also plays in the band To Rococo Rot. File under: indietronics, neo-Krautrock. Their new album Adrift is an album of voices and rhythms, with an atmosphere that may at first seem reduced, yet further listening reveals a wealth of detail. Adrift was created in 2013/2014 and completed after Ronald Lippok and Bernd Jestram worked together with Maurus Ronner on the soundtrack for the documentary 24h Jerusalem. Tarwater encourage the state of being Adrift. The cover of the album shows the empty field of the former Berlin airport at Tempelhof, photographed by Robert Lippok. Adrift is a dream diary; its characters act not as in fantasy, but reality. Tarwater agree when the album is described as 'somnambulist.' Adrift contains 13 songs, four of which are instrumentals. The opening track, 'The Tape,' is an introduction to the sonic landscape of the album. Drum 'n' bass in slow motion: a recurring hissing sound meets an acoustic bass and associative percussion. The drum kit in the traditional rock format is conspicuous in its absence. Tarwater, who particularly in the British music press are happily and quite fittingly placed in the tradition of the Krautrock of the '70s, tap into a different close relative on Adrift. Robert Wyatt, with his jazz filtered through progressive rock, comes to mind. Adrift is one of the few Tarwater albums not to feature a cover version. Instead there are four assimilations of texts by befriended and esteemed poets: 'Homology, Myself' is by the Viennese-Berliner poetess Ann Cotten, quoted from 'Dichten = N. 10. 16 New (To American Readers) Poets.' She speaks of the impossible task of being a robot. The rhythmic backdrop, in which Tarwater install Cotten's lecture is anything but mechanical. The lyrics to 'They Told Me in the Alley' also come from Ann Cotten and Kerstin Cmelka. The title suggests something rather pastoral, yet we hear as Ronald Lippok's voice travels through different room ambiences. 'Log of the Sloop' and 'The Evening Pilgrims' are takenf from the collection The Man Who Had Forgotten the Name of Trees by Milner Place. Adrift finishes on an ethereal note: 'Rice and Fish' features a cameo by Sabrina Milena alias Milenasong. Milena provides the shimmering background to Ronald Lippok's laconic vocals, alongside psychedelic guitar sounds, electronic loops and a bossa nova rhythm. Minimalism sounds different." --Marek Flohner)

34. 2:54-“THE OTHER 1” (11/11) 

35. WILDBIRDS & PEACEDRUMS-“RHYTHM” (11/11) 

36. VARIOUS ARTISTS-“POP AMBIENT 2015” (11/11) (Since its inception in 2001, the Pop Ambient compilation series has played host to an incessantly growing pool of highly distinctive artists, yet somehow managed to stay focused on its overarching aesthetic ideas. Due in no small part to the series' curator Wolfgang Voigt, each installment was able to create a conclusive narrative, successfully deploying new talent alongside household names. Pop Ambient 2015 is no different, introducing debutant soundsmiths Thore Pfeiffer and Max Würden while welcoming returning Pop Ambient staples such as Leandro Fresco, Ulf Lohmann and Jens-Uwe Beyer. Starting off the selection with dreamy, jingling synth pads, Thore Pfeiffer's "Wie Es Euch Gefällt" turns out to be an instant Pop Ambient classic, followed by Thore's second contribution, a guitar-infused zone-out called "Nero" -- together, these immensely atmospheric cuts not only set the perfect stage for Pop Ambient 2015, but also speak volumes for this young producer's staggering talent. A former ally of iconic project Closer Musik, Dirk Leyers has since forged his own path, displaying a special fondness for blissful melodies and stylistic versatility -- he puts this to good use in the aptly-titled "Daydreamer," an irresistibly nostalgic synth epic sitting comfortably between neon lights and campfires. Meanwhile, multi-instrumentalist and composer Gregor Schwellenbach marries his avant-garde and folkloric leanings with the slow-moving, nonchalantly monumental "Assperg" -- a near-impossible track that feels as massive as it sounds fragile. Returning to Pop Ambient after his much-acclaimed appearance on 2013's installment, Leandro Fresco presents the entrancing "Nada Es Para Siempre," followed by Max Würden, the second newcomer on this compilation. A trained drummer and game sound designer by day, he is responsible for the enigmatic "Container Love," a masterfully composed cut that contrasts its sparse melodies with all sorts of rusty, dystopian sonics -- an inspired choice before Ulf Lohmann fills the air with cinematic washes of reversed sound on the cozy (but ultimately very alien) "Refresh." With Bvdub, Jens-Uwe Beyer and Gustavo Lamas, a trio of Pop Ambient regulars wrap up the class of 2015, and they do so in style: from "In White Pagodas I'll Wait for You" and "Möwen" to "Jovenes/Ambient Remake," all three producers opt for broad soundscapes and floating arrangements, resulting in a highly immersive set of panoramic electronic music and a well-suited closing chapter for Pop Ambient 2015.)