Long-time coming collaboration between The No-Neck Blues Band and original ethno/jazz Kraut caravan Embryo. Embryo made some great recs in the early 70s, including the super-heavy Bremen 1971 and members of Embryo played alongside Conrad Schnitzler et al at the Zodiak Free Arts Lab and as members of the free-improvising think tank Eruption. Their commitment to guerrilla folk/art actions, their whole get-in-the-van ethos and their multi-disciplinary approach to improvisation makes em ready bed-fellows with NNCK and anyone who has seen that amazing Embryo Eurasian tour documentary will already be fully aware of the parallels. This big band set is heavy on the percussive side, with miniature hand/glock/throat rituals giving way to moments of sublime melodic clarity that have a touch of eastern European klezmer music to em (especially reminiscent of that beautiful Khevrisa set on Folkways) along with a little Marion Brown/Gunter Hampel. Elsewhere there's an almost Sun City Girls level of mutant lip along with touches of contemporary psych units like Dungen although that particularly lop-sided percussive swandive that they invariably tumble into and Michiko's great vocal interjections mean that the whole deal is unmistakably NNCK. NNCK have always done a great job of drawing attention to the crucial breakthrough role played by various non-canonical freaks working well below the radar and this is another swell public service event. And it sounds great. Comes with a booklet with tons of great pics and liners. Highly recommended.

Album from this fantastic free jazz action trio featuring Matt Heyner (NNCK et al) on bass stunts, Matt Lavelle on trumpet and Ryan Sawyer on drums. Moves through great, pounding drums/trumpet face-offs that sound like a more martial take on Cherry and Blackwell's Mu to three-way time fluxing and wildly abstract silence/motion. Highly recommended.

Massive limited edition LP on NNCK’s imprint documenting a series of recordings from this ambitious American/European big band that unites Dave Nuss of The No-Neck Blues Band with Spencer Clark and James Ferraro of The Skaters alongside Jan Anderzen of Kemialliset Ystavat, Jonna from Kuupuu, Stellar Om Source, Mik Quantius from Embryo and Tiitus Petajaniemi and Jari Koho of Uton/Keijo. The whole entourage toured through Europe in the spring of 2007 and this LP collects the best of the jams. Three long tracks and one fragment, including two pieces recorded at VPRO Radio. The sound takes off from the kind of free goof blueprint of The Godz, with a lots of percussion and odd rhythmic dunting while The Skaters work lush keyboard parts and a wall of ululating vocal drone deep into the backdrop. Quantius supplies vocals that are somewhere between Don Van Vliet and Alan Bishop and the whole thing proceeds into this kind of weird ethno-zone where fragmented world rhythms and sounds are twisted to dark, psychotropic ends. But the real gravy is the side long fourth track, the most convincing update of the monochord bass/drum confusion of Skip Spence’s “Grey/Afro” ever improvised in real time, combining sublime vocal highs with a hypnotic bottom end. Highly recommended.

Third instalment in this thrilling on-going series from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band/K-Salvatore/Malkuth with each LP associated with an astrological attribution taken from Decimus Magnus Ausonius (310-395). 2 feels like an extension of the ancient/future ritual appeal of 1, with swathes of electronics moving in mysterious whorls that flatline into dense beams of light before phantom melodies that are somewhere between arcs of classic al strings and devotional kosmische start to rise to the surface. Imagine a heady gothic ritual ala Hermann Nitsch or The Cosmic Couriers but with a deranged High Mass appeal and a cracked post-Whitehouse/Buchenwald atmosphere. Edition of 250 copies in silkscreened sleeves. Massively heavy and highly recommended: can’t get enough of these Decimus sides.

Stunning double LP from the duo of Pat Murano (The No-Neck Blues Band/Decimus et al) and Mark Morgan (Sightings). This is wild a-formal low level Industrial/electronic minimalism that has all of the toxic appeal of Relay For Death with sidelong works that evolve from sputtering electronics and pugilistic drum machines into towering alien structures that touch on aspects as diverse as early Whitehouse, Faust and Conrad Schnitzler soundtracking a Hermann Nitsch aktion. Given full sides of vinyl to spread out on, the duo build the tension by the subtle addition of all sorts of subliminal laminal detail until the whole thing is suspended on screaming metal drones, arcs of flamethrower melody and scrambled alien vocal broadcasts that sound like modulated EVP. This makes a great companion to the recent run of killer Decimus sides and it’s a classic slice of austere death drone from a pair of heads with an instinctive feel for the blackest of psychedelics. Edition of 270 copies. A massive set: highly recommended. 

New edition of 300 copies private press LP from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band, part of a series of 12 LPs visioned as reflections on the zodiacal attributions of Decimus Magnus Ausonious. 3 presents a set of scalding cracked electronics and automating ghost tones that’s somewhere between Conrad Schnitzler and some of the more ritualistic early-80s Industrial experiments. The rhythmic feel is really odd, with thin sheets of high feedback tone shuffling like sandpaper over thundercracks of doomy percussion and fuzz while a celestial almost Sonny Blount-style keyboard solo pilots the whole thing through your third eye. Amazing bleak psychedelia in the classic cold//austere European tradition but cut w/enough wig to make it a trip. Hand-painted sleeves. Recommended. 

New edition of 300 copies private press LP from Pat Murano of The No-Neck Blues Band, part of a series of 12 LPs visioned as reflections on the zodiacal attributions of Decimus Magnus Ausonious. This one is radically different from much of what has come before in the series, with a set of almost baroque synth work that at points comes off like the cosmic solo album that Ayler sideman Call Cobbs never made in the wake of Love Cry, with almost-harpsichord stylings circling around early music motifs while a planetary scale drone drags the whole deal over the event horizon and into an endlessly reflective/fragmentary zone where ghost tone bounce off each other again and again creating a delirious music box/hall of mirrors style that just keeps  on peaking. Wow. Certainly the deepest and most disorientating outing yet from Decimus. Hand-painted sleeves. Dedicated to Rabbi Hiya. Recommended. 

Beautiful new solo guitar album in the vein of Sonny Sharrock’s Guitar, John McLaughlin’s My Goals Beyond, Loren Connors’ Hells Kitchen Park and Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack from Anders Nilsson, the guitarist with the amazing Sabbath Assembly. Released on the No-Neck Blues Band’s private imprint, Night Guitar moves from stark solo electric guitar treatments that run the voodoo down with alla the liberated post-blues tongue of “Blind Willie” through to massive sculptural agglomerations of overdubbed strings on strings that make for screaming metal monoliths. The atmosphere moves from forlorn picking and sighing single notes to the kind of de-sanctified 70s satanic rock of Sabbath Assembly but it’s Sharrock’s solo work alongside aspects of Last Exit that are pushed most to the fore. Nilsson has that same combination of being rooted in blues guitar traditions while having the vision to push them somewhere else entirely with the help of inspired free-associative asides and explosive, iconoclastic melodies. A great companion to the Sabbath Assembly LP and a singular statement of modern fully-electrified guitar soli. Recommended.

Crashing in with the kind of overloaded electricity of the early Moslang-Guhl sides or even Aaron Dilloway’s tactile contact mic work, the new album from the duo of Pat Murano (NNCK/Deimus et al) and Mark Morgan (Sightings) is a classic of bloody-minded electronic minimalism. Together the duo work clanging repeat-cells of steel tone and marching men rhythms into a dizzying storm of metal-on-metal. As the tectonic klang starts to peak all sorts of phantom aural spectra take shape until it sounds like a spectral Borbetomagus advancing out of the fog with dark, arcing chords and horn tones that have alla the endless magisterial violence of a Penderecki composition. Spectacularly beautiful Industrial electronics at an avant/classical high. Edition of only 200 copies. Recommended.

Much-anticipated follow-up to the earlier Ytiu LP, once more released on Pat Murano of NNCK/Decimus’s private Kelippah imprint, this time in an edition of 500 copies. CINo51 takes up where Ytiu left-off with a triumphal explosion of cymbals that leads into another section of “Daisy Chain For Richard Wright” where the mutant swamp/jazz jam gets into a kind of serpentine groove dominated by a heavy organ sound that could almost be Xhol Caravan dragged through a wormhole w/Terry Riley time-lag treatments before the whole thing starts to move vertically w/aspects of Popol Vuh’s Affenstunde giving way to a magisterial organ/percussion piece that comes over like the Hermann Nitsch orchestra plays Arzachel’s Garden Of Earthly Delights. The atmosphere is heady and devotional, with a dark, dramatic/gothic aspect that is profoundly effective. This gives way to the stunning second side which starts out with a minimal piece of tonefloat – “Prelude” – that sounds like a zonked out-take from Skip Spence’s Oar with the alien percussion sound from the original Sun Sessions recording of “Blue Moon” – style the most lunar of early rock/roll performances – married to wraiths of feedback tones and dark constellations of variously bowed non-identifiable instrumentation building to the amazing “The Danube” a piece of brain-stormingly devolved garage rocker complete with twin fuzz guitar euphorics and that classic Shaggs-meet-Siloah Nuss-style rhythm. No one has done more to join the dots between primitive Americana, outer space improvisation and avant garde art than NNCK and this is a flawlessly executed work that sustains a defiantly arch atmosphere across both sides while nodding like your favourite rock behemoth throughout. Pretty much everything you could want from a NNCK record in here and that final triumphal fuzz blow-out is one of the signature moments of their entire back catalogue. All copies come with individually hand-painted w/iodine sleeves. Highly recommended!