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Artist: AHMED, ILYAS Title: Goner Format: CD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $14.00 |
| "Portland, Oregon bedroom wanderer ILYAS AHMED emerges from the shadows and offers up his first new batch of songs in some time. Over a year in the making, Goner sees Ahmed telescoping his previous acoustic wanderings into fuzzed out rockers and a hypnotic set of beautifully tight knit nocturnes. The whole things kicks off with a massive rush to the head called "Earn Your Blood," which has Ilyas effortlessly channeling any number of stoned out trajectories found in a Topanga Canyon ditch circa mid 70s. Massive waves of hiss still penetrate the mix, and so do the smeared vocal trails, its just that its all a little more in focus this time around. The comedown into "Exit Twilight" with GROUPER at the helm is a haunting broadcast that will for sure knock around in your skull for days. Edition of 1,000 CDs in an offset buff case with maroon ink." -Root Strata. |
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Artist: AXOLOTL/YELLOW SWANS/GERRITT Title: s/t Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $15.00 |
| "Originally released in 2005 as a limited edition CD-R on Yellow Swans JYRK label, this three-way collab now gets a proper run on wax. Recorded in Oakland at the Huffin House before the Swans made the retreat back to Portland. Despite the weight of these players when they rock alone, this jam really never gets into full on white out territory. Instead, its loaded to the brim with wavy neon distortion and soothing low end that occasional drops out into huge washes of emptiness. The opening passage of GMS guitar flecks sympathizing with Karls string wash is alone worth the price of admission. Red vinyl with lime green splatter." - Root Strata. |
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Artist: BARN OWL Title: The Conjurer Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $18.00 |
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"The Conjurer is the latest offering by Bay Area duo BARN OWL. This new long player finds EVAN CAMINITI and JON PORRAS finally (by way of an actual recording studio) documenting something that is a bit closer to their very heavy live sets, with expanded peaks of white light distortion and enormous valleys of bottom end. Each side opens with a brief funeral dirge to set the mood, a precession of bare bones drum beats and bell like guitar statements that bridge the gap to the wider open spaces of the almost side long "Across The Desert Of Ash" and "Ancient Of Days." It may seem obvious, or even a little overwrought, but it has to be said that these guys really do evoke all kinds of cinematic drama with their music. Apocalyptic westerns, bleak melodramas, mother nature fever dreams, it all seems to come to mind amid the evening guitar passages, incantations, flute tones, and finally, the solo piano that emerges lost among the electric mayhem to close the album. Considering the amount of terrain, The Conjurer is far from being scattered or rushed sounding. The record as a whole moves at a crafted even rhythm, slowly merging from one scene of violence to the next of almost silent recovery, then back up the mountain again. An edition of 500 LPs, half colored deep red, half black. Cover etching by Evan Caminiti." -Root Strata
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Artist: BARN OWL Title: The Conjurer Format: CD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $15.00 |
| "The Conjurer is the latest offering by Bay Area duo Barn Owl. This new long player finds Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras finally (by way of an actual recording studio) documenting something that is a bit closer to their very heavy live sets, with expanded peaks of white light distortion and enormous valleys of bottom end. Each side opens with a brief funeral dirge to set the mood, a procession of bare-bones drum beats and bell-like guitar statements that bridge the gap to the wider open spaces of the almost side long Across The Desert Of Ash and Ancient Of Days. It may seem obvious, or even a little overwrought, but it has to be said that these guys really do evoke all kinds of cinematic drama with their music. Apocalyptic westerns, bleak melodramas, mother nature fever dreams, it all seems to come to mind amid the evening guitar passages, incantations, flute tones, and finally, the solo piano that emerges lost among the electric mayhem to close the album. Considering the amount of terrain, The Conjurer is far from being scattered or rushed sounding. The record as a whole moves at a crafted even rhythm, slowly merging from one scene of violence to the next of almost silent recovery, then back up the mountain again. Cover by Evan Caminiti." - Root Strata. |
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Artist: BONUS Title: On Earth Format: CD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $12.00 |
| "On Earth , is the first studio document created by the group, recorded with Marcelo Spinna at the Space in May 2006 with production assistance from Pete Swanson (D. YELLOW SWANS). While previous CD-R releases were entirely improvised, On Earth is comprised of three untitled pieces composed by the group with elements of restrained improvisation. Musically, each piece has a specific concern, ranging from extremely subtle microtonal shifts to distorted crashes of intervals against one another. On Earth captures the reductive BONUS sound with all the sustained tones and sparkling textures, but with a more focused and succinct delivery." - Root Strata. |
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Artist: BONUS Title: s/t Format: CDR Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $8.00 |
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Artist: BROTHERS OF THE OCCULT SISTERHOOD Title: Preying In The Circles Format: CD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $10.00 |
| "Another transmission from the Australian house of Music Your Mind Will Love You. This one has been a long time coming. Taken from various recordings over a period from 05/06, the core duo of brother and sister Michael and Kristina Donnelly are joined by EON in a killer trio setting. Not as psych-acid as some of the recent BOTOS output. Not to say the group doesnt kick up a good racket, its just way spacious and soft sounding at points, like seeing various twinkling stars through hazy fog. Lots of dreamy moments of quite acoustic strum and subtle synth weirdness. The usual battery of instruments, toy and otherwise, are in effect. And of course, LOADS of percussive implosions...but not at all heavy handed. Sounds like a Sunday morning jam with your best friends outside in a garden just after tea. A joyful noise thats pleasing to the skull." - Root Strata. |
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Artist: CARTER, CHRISTINA Title: Lace Heart Format: Double LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $28.00 |
  "Double LP reissue of a 2005 CD-R released on Christinas own Many Breaths imprint. Six love songs comprised of elliptical bell like guitar phrases, barely there, sometimes even coaxing silence, set behind the extended vowel sounds of voice. Soft gentle performances here, like this whole record was cut very very late at night or in the early hours of the morning. An unhinged nowness is pervasive in Christinas work, and Lace Heart is no exception. There is a very private feeling here, some kinda intimacy that just feels really rare. Lovers of past, present & future all collapse into one. Memories of smells, tastes & textures all channeled into wide open song. No one really does it like this. Three sides of music & and an etching of one of Christinas drawings on the fourth side. Red vinyl with maroon splatter. Edition of 500." - Root Strata.
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Artist: COMMON EIDER, KING EIDER Title: Worn Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| "Now expanded to a four piece, Common Eider, King Eider have crafted yet another blast of high-end wind chill that whips through the empty spaces in your skull. More stories of flora and fauna that hang beautifully in dynamic rooms of piano, strings, voices; and stargazing guitar explosions born of layer after layer of feedback. This ghost world is all gray and black, with a high condensation of loss penetrating throughout. Moonlight occasionally lights the path, but for the most part, prepare to be lost in the woods. Liz Harris (Grouper) and Tom Carter (Charalambides) on the tracks Ennui and Earth Liver add to the overall sense of dread. Includes poster." -Root Strata |
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Artist: DATE PALMS Title: Of Psalms Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $18.00 |
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"Music for the rain forests of the moon, straight out of Oakland CA. Of Psalms is the debut album by Date Palms, the duo of Marielle Jackobsons and Gregg Kowalsky. The two have birthed a suite of slowed-down music of the spheres, with a canopy of glowing fog and a heavy narcotic bass pulse that keeps the whole thing rooted straight into the earth. Its a heady mix of alap paced violin phrases, jewel-toned keys, harp swells, distorted tapes and ever present bass waves all crafted with precision detail in a humid space that leaves a dreamy imprint in the mind long after waking. Although separately Jackobsons and Kowalsky have made inroads into these types of landscapes before (Gregg with his Tape Chants series and Marielle with MYRMYR & Darwinsbitch), nothing really compares the world of Of Psalms that the two created together with its perfect balance of micro and macro, inner and outer, cosmic and earth bound, casting some sort of old world magic on everyone within range." -Root Strata
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Artist: EN Title: The Absent Coast Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $21.00 |
| "En is the duo of San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalists Maxwell August Croy and James Devane, and The Absent Coast is their debut collection of recordings. The pair utilizes a wide range of instrumentation - koto, guitar, vocals, rhodes, melodica, and piano, among other devices - which are processed and refined into rich walls of reverberant bliss. With its hazy atmospherics, microtonal drones, and plaintive tones, the album evokes the type of nostalgia that accompanies the imaginary landscapes of past memory. A diverse and carefully considered album, The Absent Coast is all soaring peaks, shadowed valleys and expansive plains. Edition of 300 LPs." - Root Strata |
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Artist: GOLDEN RETRIEVER Title: Light Cones Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| "Golden Retriever was formed in Portland, Oregon in 2008 by multi-instrumentalists Jonathan Sielaff & Matt Carlson, both long time participants in the citys potent music scene. Focusing on the relationship of two primarily monophonic instruments (Carlson on modular synthesizer & Sielaff on bass clarinet), and utilizing layering with a deft balance of improvisation & composition, the duo has created an infinitely varied approach to their sound world: dense, spacious, overwhelming, soothing and completely alien in equal measure. Light Cones is unique in the Golden Retriever discography as its their first release more akin to their live performances, with each of the LP sides consisting of one extensive track. Both sides find the group exploring the various colors of their pallet. From the electronic bog that opens side A, to the more zoned out meditations of the first half of side B. Sielaffs bass clarinet continues to be an anchor for the duo, with its lower organ-like register providing a wide earthly gravity for the layering of sound." -Root Strata. |
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Artist: GRASSLUNG Title: Sincere Void Format: CD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $16.00 |
| "Grasslung is the moniker of Brooklyn based musician Jonas Asher. Sincere Void is Ashers first major above ground release and were happy to help him migrate out of the dungeon and into the twilight. After a string of small run tapes & CD-Rs that ventured into the outer realms of damaged analog drone, Asher has taken on a whole new vision for his music. The opener Scarred Hands We Drift sets the tone, with lush waves of delayed notes that usher in the records various paths of gauzy atmospherics, piano drift, lost melodies and body rhythms built from static. This music is bare in the best way, with most of the tracks here held together by pings of electricity or faint loops of harmony shot from the other side, all slowly crafted into melancholic tapestries good for keeping you warm during midnight trips to the void. Edition of 500 CDs in offset printed sleeve." -Root Strata |
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Artist: GROUPER Title: Cover The Windows And The Walls Format: CD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $14.00 |
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"First ever CD version of the LP Root Strata originally released in 2007. This one has everything youve come to expect from Portland, Oregon-based LIZ HARRIS. Cyclical vocal vapors and guitar / piano shapes levitate on the surface of hissy atmospherics dense with a feedback that conjures up all sorts of latent images from the subtle body / mind. Lizs songs always seem to be perched delicately between layers of blissful fuzz and her stark, gorgeous song craft. Its a mix that more often than not leads to dazzling results." -Root Strata. Edition of 1,000 CDs in a heavy black & white offset printed cover.
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Artist: HARRIS, LIZ (GROUPER) Title: Divide Format: Book/DVD Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $36.00 |
| "Divide is the long-awaited book of drawings and an accompanying video by Liz Harris, aka Grouper. Harris visual work runs in parallel to her music as Grouper, and often overlaps into the same vision. Divide maps out dense organic patterns, passages filled to the edges with overgrowth and fractured geometry. Minimal strokes are taken to maximal repetitions to form complex mazes in high contrast. Other images float in space like hex symbols from prehistory, portals to some other place & time. The accompanying video (with soundtrack) of black & white Rorschach voids should be familiar to anyone who has seen a recent Grouper show. Book is 7" by 7", 60 pages, soft cover with a color cover & black and white images. DVDR is all regions. Edition of 500 copies only" |
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Artist: HIGUMA Title: Pacific Fog Dreams Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| "Over the past few years Higumas Evan Caminiti (of Barn Owl) and Lisa McGee have slowly evolved their sound from shamanistic acoustic dirges into shimmering metallic blast-off hymns, hair-raising eulogies to the cosmos. Pacific Fog Dreams is a set of seven such songs, all beautifully distant and drenched in layers of earth-toned echo, balanced in dream time between melodies and all out electric whitewash. Delayed strums hang in a beyond background, a ghost world of songs from some other place and time, channeled onto the hiss of a cassette tape to remind you. Caminitis guitar is often on the verge of taking the whole thing down, sporadically billowing into colorful feedback, huge blocks of impenetrable sound. McGees vocals are sometimes discovered, but just as distant smears, or riding the peaks, coaxing out phrases of hidden origin, maybe singing of intimacy, memory, nature or magic." - Root Strata. |
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Artist: MESSAGES Title: Mirage Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $18.00 |
| "Primordial moves and stone cold drones from this New York duo of Taketo Shimada and Tres Warren (Sacred Bones Records). Save for a small long-gone edition of CD-Rs, Mirage is the third full-length release by Messages, recorded in 2008 before their first two albums and has remained unreleased until now. This record documents the duos earliest long-form drone explorations and intonations, most of which were recorded during long sessions in Tres basement bunker in the East Village. Mixing orbits of homemade acoustic instruments, electric drones and percussion, Mirage is a humid transmission sent straight from the womb." - Root Strata. |
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Artist: PAYNE, MAGGI Title: Ahh-Ahh: Music For Ed Tannenbaums Technological Feets Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| ...1984-1987. "The music on this LP was originally composed by Maggi Payne from 1984 - 1987 for the performance group Technological Feets. Formed by video artist Ed Tennenbaum in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981, the group combines dance, live video processing and music. This is the first time these recordings have ever been released on vinyl, and aside from the track Ahh-Ahh (Ver 2.1), the first time any of it has ever been officially released. Composed on an Apple II computer & various early sampling devices, Paynes compositions are a vibrant response to the call from the moving body. Populated with buoyant pulses, graceful analogue swells, dense fog-like drones and cascading rhythms that shift in space, AHH-AHH is a vital document of not only these early collaborations, but of computer based music as well. She studied with many greats in the field, including Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley & David Berhman." -Root Strata. |
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Artist: PITRE, DUANE Title: Origin Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| "The entirety of Origins musical material is comprised of the vibrating strings of Pitres ensemble of bowed harmonic-guitars, which are unconventionally strung electric guitars (utilizing multi-unisons) tuned to intervals corresponding with the Harmonic Series, a.k.a. Just Intonation. No effects processing (pre or post) was used in this recording. All effect-like qualities result from the multi-unison strings (phasing), sympathetic vibrations, combination/difference tones (of the chosen just tuning), and natural acoustic phenomena as such. Edition of 300 LPs." -Root Strata |
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Artist: STARVING WEIRDOS Title: Eastern Light Format: Double CDR Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $13.00 |
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"Fascinating drone/Improv madness from this impossibly obscure Californian combo, with echos of the backwoods psychedelia of the freer end of the free folk scene and the no-fi wilfulness of The Dead C. The group strike a perfect balance between drift and purpose, sprawl and discipline, noise and non-noise. The results are rough but quite gorgeously radiant. "Plastic Gagaku" envelopes an irregular percussive snap, shifting lines of feedback and interjections from plastic toys in a dense fog of reverb. The 20 minute "Friday the 13th Pt II" moves dreamily through a series of vaguely narcotic atmospheres, but with great conviction. There are sections that sound rather like gamelan metallophones played through old 60s fuzzboxes, and if that doesnt pique your intrest, nothing will." -The Wire. Edition of 150.
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Artist: STARVING WEIRDOS Title: Harry Smith Format: One Sided LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $11.00 |
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"The first vinyl side from these Northern California mushroom farmers is a real doozy. A live soundtrack to the silent psychedelic films of American hero Harry Smith, this one sided LP is more free drift than free jazz...taking off from a shot in the dark and never touching ground again. Each one with punk rock paste on black & white collage art." - Root Strata.
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Artist: SWANSON, PETE Title: Feelings In America Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $20.00 |
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"Despite asserting that he quit music in 2001..but kept recording in his basement because it helped him avoid interacting with others, Pete Swanson has been a very busy guy. As half of (the now defunct) Yellow Swans for most of the decade, Swanson somehow found the time to collaborate with scores of folks (see Badgerlore, Maggoted, and Sarin Smoke for starters) while also slowly carving out his own bleak vision of loner sound. Feelings In America is the most recent salvo from Swanson, and its as blown out and muddy as you would expect from a damp Portland basement. Three tracks of guitar & vocals lost in a sea of white hot electronic overload that, according to Swanson, sounds exactly like his old band, but funnier in a depressing sort of way. Edition of 300 LPs." - Root Strata.
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Artist: VESTALS Title: Forever Falling Toward The Sky Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| "Forever Falling Toward the Sky is the first ever release by Bay Area based Vestals, AKA Lisa McGee. A taught set of haunting electric ballads, these five tracks weave together a number of layered guitars and vocals into a smokey tapestry of blown electricity. Rather than the ephemeral drones McGee has been involved with recently, most notably the group-mind ensemble Portraits & the duo Higuma, Vestals retains the clarity of song, with these hypnotic gyms having been slowly carved out over a year of recording & mixing. Filled out with drum machine & bass, Forever Falling Toward the Sky really does have the feeling of a group completely jelled, hammering out feedback in a California basement, high on guitar worship & sunsets. Edition of 300 copies, featuring guest appearances by Evan Caminiti (the Barn Owl dude!) and Trevor Montgomery (Tarantel)." -Root Strata. |
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Artist: YOUNGS, RICHARD Title: Core To The Brave Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $17.00 |
| "With scores of releases both solo & in collaboration that stretches back for more than 20 years, Richard Youngs perhaps needs the least amount of introduction of any of the artists Root Strata has worked with. Were extremely excited to help Richard add another singular entry into his discography. Core to the Brave hits with a shock and never lets up. Composed of what appears to be blown out bass & spastic drum rhythms, these tracks cascade into shimmering loops of distortion, their weight reaching a critical mass that often feels likes its on the verge of ecstatic collapse. Everything is elevated further in & up by that one and only voice, floating over top like a lush wind come down from the mountains." -Root Strata. |
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Artist: ZELIENOPLE Title: Stone Academy Format: LP Label: Root Strata Country: USA Price: $15.00 |
| "Cracked song poems from a basement in Chicago with no lights on. Zelienople create acoustic improvisations that have as much in common with Thuja as they do the late period work of Talk Talk. Slowly drifting guitar tones run head first into blown out harmonium drones and the broken edges of homemade instruments. These songs arent drifting as much as they are lost at sea. Each cover comes with a real photo by Bay Area photographer Dianne Jones. Six different ones in all. Hand numbered as well." - Root Strata. Edition of 300. |