| Impulse! – B0030157-02 116.28MB FLAC/.CUE files |
Saturday, March 19, 2022
Black Sabbath - (2021) Black Sabbath Vol 4 Super Deluxe 4xCD
Rhino Records – R2 643817 |
CD1 290.16MB FLAC/.CUE files
CD2 175.96MB FLAC/.CUE files
CD3 349.87MB FLAC/.CUE files
CD4 474.39MB FLAC/.CUE files
Friday, March 18, 2022
Psychosis - (2019) Mandatory Acid Trips For Problematic Toddlers
Self Released – none
Enigmatic Whanganui recording artist Psychosis has been enthralling open-eared listeners with a hypnotic trickle of tunes emanating from his home studio HQ. He's now thrown open the doors of perception with a mind-shattering seven track debut album, the snappily titled Mandatory Acid Trips For Problematic Toddlers. Collecting together such previously released bangers as 'Show Me The Receipts', 'Vanilla Isis', 'I Refuse To Be Cursed', and the logic-defying 'Hedgehog On The Beach', there should be enough material here to keep fans buzzing for a while. While all tracks go uncredited, it seems clear the album is likely the work of a key member of super catchy Dunedin group Coyote, get stuck into Mandatory Acid Trips For Problematic Toddlers
Claypipe - (2021) Sky Wells
C/Site Recordings – C/S041
After seven years New Zealand’s Claypipe return with a new full-length album, Sky Wells. Claypipe was formed in the early 2000s when, after years of record trading, North Islander Antony Milton and South Islander Clayton Noone came together. Their musical chemistry was immediate and a slew of excellent cassettes, CDs and lathe cuts followed. They carved out a niche with a sort of pastoral psychedelia that brought to mind the forest as much the sea, the acoustic guitar as much the battery powered amplifier This earlier work culminated with their debut album A Daylight Blessing being released on MIE Music in 2014.
Work for Sky Wells began back in 2015 at the kitchen table of Noone’s home in Dunedin, his daughter Olive and her cartoons can be heard bleeding into these tracks, giving them a dreamy and surreal feel. Much of Sky Wells contains this quality; tactile percussive croaks find equal space with pulsing drones, haunted vocal moans and tape hiss saturated psychedelics. The album is harnessed in a sort of delicate balance. Despite the other worldliness of most sounds on songs like “Jericho” and “I Want To Run With The Trees,” reality remains intact with the simple pluck of an acoustic guitar or the definitive human-ness of repetitious spoken vocals. Even further balance is struck with the incorporation of utterly catchy songwriting. Sky Wells is bookended by “Colours, Dreams and Food” and “Bomb Lover,” which along with “Ultimate Violence” help to draw a connection to their homelands’ Flying Nun lineage - through a truly experimental lens, of course.
The Clean - (1981) Boodle Boodle Boodle 12''
Merge Records – MRG779
Featuring classics like “Anything Could Happen” and “Point That Thing Somewhere Else,” The Clean's Boodle Boodle Boodle EP arrived two months after the “Tally Ho!” single, peaking at #5 and staying in the NZ Top 20 for nearly six months. Recorded on four-track by The Clean’s childhood friends Chris Knox and Doug Hood, its five hugely influential songs provided a roadmap for the “Dunedin sound” that would soon follow. Boodle Boodle Boodle was awarded the Classic Record distinction by New Zealand’s Taite Music Prize in 2017.
Maxine Funke - (2013) Lace
Not On Label – none
For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details.
Lace was originally released as a CDr in 2008 on Alastair Galbraith's Next Best Way label. Imagine the just-so arrangements of Josephine Foster and the knowing quotidian eye of Sibylle Baier meeting the realism of Funke's compatriots Turiiya or the acoustic textures of the Kiwi Animal and you're nearly there – but in that gap lies the undeniable pull of Funke's music. Short songs for nylon string guitar, violin, piano, incidental snippets of bird song and furniture creaks, brief instrumental interludes in the vein of Funke's regular collaborator Galbraith: this is the realest of deals.
The metaphysic of Second Hand Store cuts to the uncompromised heart of this record, a rejection of the idea of ownership in favor of communal chance, the ragged comfort of things lived-in and passed on, a searching with no need to find, let alone possess.
Indeed, as much as these recordings suggest the close quarters and warmth of a small home, Maxine Funke makes music for traveling, providing accompaniment through the rough, unfeeling vectors of a disenchanted world and, as she does on the last song of Felt, imagining it differently. As the titles of these albums suggest, Funke's is a tactile art, as warm and tangible as the tape hiss bathing it, her words and music rescuing everyday moments from traps of distraction and defeat. Following limited edition vinyl reissues in 2016 - a swansong for Nemo Bidstrup's sorely missed Time-Lag Recordings imprint - we're happy to make Felt and Lace widely available.
Maxine Funke's music, immediate and entirely unpretentious, suggests a world in which Katherine Mansfield rubs shoulders with Liz Harris, or Vashti Bunyan grows up on the Flying Nun catalog. Absolutely essential.
Alastair Galbraith - - (2021) Loss
Self Released – none
Alastair Galbraith is a musician and sound artist from Dunedin, New Zealand.
Galbraith's first band was The Rip, which he formed with Robbie Muir, and Mathew Ransome and later Jeff Harford (of Bored Games). They released two EPs on the Flying Nun label. Later he formed Plagal Grind, with Robbie Muir and David Mitchell (of Goblin Mix and 3Ds) and Peter Jefferies of This Kind Of Punishment and Nocturnal Projections.
Galbraith's solo career has included numerous early cassettes and 7"s on Bruce Russell's Xpressway label, as well as albums on labels such as Siltbreeze, Emperor Jones, Time Lag Feel Good All Over and Table Of The Elements. He has also recorded ten albums with Bruce Russell under the name A Handful of Dust. In 1999 he began a collaboration with Matt De Gennaro, where the two toured New Zealand Public Art Galleries converting them into giant soundboxes by stroking tensioned wires fixed to the buildings' structural supports.
Galbraith's first band was The Rip, which he formed with Robbie Muir, and Mathew Ransome and later Jeff Harford (of Bored Games). They released two EPs on the Flying Nun label. Later he formed Plagal Grind, with Robbie Muir and David Mitchell (of Goblin Mix and 3Ds) and Peter Jefferies of This Kind Of Punishment and Nocturnal Projections.
Galbraith's solo career has included numerous early cassettes and 7"s on Bruce Russell's Xpressway label, as well as albums on labels such as Siltbreeze, Emperor Jones, Time Lag Feel Good All Over and Table Of The Elements. He has also recorded ten albums with Bruce Russell under the name A Handful of Dust. In 1999 he began a collaboration with Matt De Gennaro, where the two toured New Zealand Public Art Galleries converting them into giant soundboxes by stroking tensioned wires fixed to the buildings' structural supports.
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