Been two years since the release Rawskulled. Six years since The Totemist. (N.B. both on Akuphone). And 13 years since their first tape surfaced from the sand, recordings we unfortunately have never heard. Maybe a year or so since this project broke TikTok.
In that window, we’ve come fans of this mysterious project, purportedly from Texas, though their personas suggest our dystopian future fully realized.
Their show at Union Pool on 11.06.25 was genuinely something and conducted in full character, until the very last minute before the applause died down and one of the duo said: “No encores. These costumes are hot as shit.” And this Lp continues to break that fourth wall.
As the elliptical one-sheet describes, “Harvesting the psychic weight of migration, abandonment, and geopolitical limbo. A half-broken oud, double-reed pipes, a battered hurdy-gurdy, and self-built spike fiddles […] strings [were] detuned to unstable microtonal chaos, reeds soaked in questionable desert-sourced liquids, and instruments were kept outdoors to absorb ambient dew, dust, and wild temperature swings, ensuring every take carried an unpredictable, haunted instability. Vintage cassette decks and reel-to-reel units were powered through erratic, low-voltage setups (literally dying generators) which introduced random voltage drops, speed fluctuations, and ghostly dropouts mid-take -- turning tracking into unpredictable spirit interventions.” And this only describes the pre-studio preparations.
After the sessions, the label writes, “Spiritually Unemployed is the resulting artifact -- a sonic border autopsy where enlightenment arrives not as a sealed doctrine but as an open infested wound.”
Meta-Ritual?
Cracked ethnography?
Performance art?
Agit-prop activism?
Parody?
Satire of Sun City Girls 30 years after their debut?
Some combination?
You decide b/w Psyched for this release.
Some of our favorite cover art in the business, from Canadian Matt Sidney!!
First some background, as Tarozzi has collaborated with a host of inter-generational shop favorites:
“Silvia Tarozzi is a violinist, composer and improviser. The oral transmission of music and the form created through a deep immersion into the sound are traits of her musical research. She has been in a duo with Italian cellist Deborah Walker for about 15 years, and has been the violinist of the French Ensemble Dedalus since 2006. She has closely collaborated with and performed work by composers such as Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Pascale Criton, Cassandra Miller, Martin Arnold, Pierre-Yves Macé, Philip Corner […]
Silvia started composing and improvising at the same time, starting from her experience as an interpreter and through a process of opening up to more creative musical approaches. In 2009 she began to write songs inspired by Italian poetress Alda Merini which became the album Mi specchio e rifletto […]
Since 2011, Silvia has also coordinated, with Giovanna Giovannini, the activities of the children choir Piccolo Coro Angelico. This project focuses on vocal research and experimentation, bringing children to an open and creative approach to music since the beginning of their musical experience. We conceive that art is a inclusive concept that depends only minimally on technical competence and which instead helps children to develop their skills and talents.”
As to this album, “Lucciole is Silvia Tarozzi’s luminous follow-up to the intimate reflections of Mi specchio e rifletto and the deeply rooted folk dialogues of Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore with Deborah Walker. Here, Tarozzi draws together voices, memories, and musical lineages to create an album where avant-garde composition, personal narrative, and collective resonance exchange freely.
The album opens with a radiant brass ensemble—chosen for its popular, celebratory, spiritual sound—and closes with the Piccolo Coro Angelico, the children’s choir she has worked with for over fifteen years and calls “my best school of composition and a constant gym of hope.” Between these bookends, Tarozzi’s songs trace life’s transitions with a rare tenderness: childhood into adolescence, health into fragility, presence into absence.
Two central songs—her own ‘Lucciole’ and a glowing live-in-studio cover of Milton Nascimento’s ‘River Phoenix’—honor a beloved friend whose life and presence evoke new horizons. ‘Corallo e perle,’ inspired by a dream her grandfather had after her grandmother’s passing, becomes a gentle, dreamlike meditation on the persistence of love.
The strings, voices, and melodic contours that define Mi specchio e rifletto reappear here with new warmth and depth. Produced by Tarozzi in close collaboration with Marta Salogni, who engineered and mixed the album, Lucciole carries a clarity, intimacy, and sonic generosity that reflect their shared journey through the recording process.”
A beautiful and rewarding double album. Each listen reveals subtle and soft-spoken compositional depth. Highly recommended!
From the one-sheet:
“Re-Make Re-Model is the result of a five-year dialogue between Norway and New Zealand sound artists Lasse Marhaug and Bruce Russell.
What first started as a friendly challenge during the Covid19- lockdown to re-work selected works from each other’s catalogue – using different techniques and experimental approaches, challenging each other to go to extremes – extended to what is now a double-CD and a 100-page book package of writings and photos.
Each CDs has eight tracks, a total of 100 minutes of music. The book has extensive notes to each track (often with comments by the corresponding artist).
In addition there’s a lengthy essay by Bruce Russell on the project’s origins and the nature of collaboration and noise making; a photo series by Lasse Marhaug; a series of stills by Bruce Russell taken from a video piece; as well as cover artwork and biographical notes.
“It quickly became apparent to me that the distinguishing aspect of this collaboration wasthat it was a competitive exchange, an ongoing game of ‘one-upmanship’ in which we each sought to outdo the other in terms of the inventiveness; the baroque and pointless complexity; or the sheer bloody mindedness of the studio processes which we were inventing to transform the other’s work into something ‘rich and strange’”
– Bruce Russell from his essay
100 pages. 20 x 21 cm
Hardcover with open spine
Offset CMYK printed on 150 gsm Munken Lynx paper
2 x CDs in paper wallets glued into the endsheets
Limited edition of 300 copies.
From the one-sheet:
“The definitive story of The Clean in their own words.
Now, you said it was yesterday, yesterday’s another day /Heading round in make believe, I don’t know if it’s you or If it’s me oh, / I don’t know, I don’t know / Tally ho, tally ho!
In 1978 in Dunedin , New Zealand, the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980, the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years.
The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, ‘Tally Ho!’; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo.
Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle – fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 – this is the band’s history as it unfolds.”
Highly Recommended!!!
Signed and stamped by the authors on July 24, 2025, North Brooklyn DIY-style!!!
Revelation Records Books, publishing arm of Revelation Records, is proud to announce the reissue of Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music, an essential and long-out-of-print book that helped define the cultural legacy of American hardcore.
Originally published in 2008 by MTV Press/powerHouse, the new 2025 expanded edition has been meticulously restored from the original source files and features rare and never-before-seen material from the genre’s most pivotal moments and figures.
“Born from a partnership between designer Nathan Nedorostek and writer/musician Anthony Pappalardo (In My Eyes, Ten Yard Fight) back in 2003, the original idea for Radio Silence was created from a shared frustration: why did so many punk histories leap from The Ramones straight to Nirvana, leaving behind the radical visual and sonic subculture that thrived in between? Determined to tell that story, the duo spent five years on a grassroots journey across the country—pre-social media—tracking down photographers, flyers, record sleeves, merch and stories from across the landscape of American hardcore.
Now back in print after more than a decade, the updated edition includes unpublished images and ephemera from The Germs, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, SS Decontrol, Die Kreuzen, Youth of Today, Minor Threat and many more.
As hardcore has grown from a niche underground movement into a globally recognized and celebrated mode of expression, Radio Silence remains a vital archive of its origins on the fringes of the underground. Incorporating music, design, fashion and fury in equal measure, this book offers a comprehensive window into the ethos behind the early hardcore movement.”
Follow-up to a shop favorite from this century, Lasse Marhaug’s PERSONAL BEST (2011-2024). His latest turns a page, though not an entirely new chapter, on what we appreciate most about Lasse’s work.
8090 VÅG
Like PERSONAL BEST, 8090 VÅG includes long-form interviews with a wide range of top-tier artists, innovative photo portraiture and imagery, artwork and design.
Plus, no ads or pay in advance, pre-order b/w crowd sourcing [sic!!] then something may or may not show up years later.
Lasse does it right and all above board!
Issue 1 of 8090 VÅG includes interviews with:
Government Alpha: Japanese noise musician, Yasutoshi Yoshida, Xerxes label founder
Ronny Wærnes: Norwegian noise artist
Mental Overdrive: Per Martinsen, R & S artist
Fredrik Nilsen: LAFMS artist and photographer
Stina Stjern: Norwegian omposer and performer
Jérôme Noetinger: Thymolphthalein (Editions Mego), French curator and artist
Jim O’Rourke
Ralf Wehowsky: German, Permutative Distortion, RLW, this century collaborations with Andrew Chalk and Kevin Drumm, among others
Michèle Bokanowski: amazing French Paris-based electroacoustic music composer
and a survey on Metamkine’s 1990’s Cinéma Pour L’Oreille 3”CD-series, which may be the 10” format of the early digital age!! But no shade from us, Metamkine is a great label, 3” or naught!
88 pages offset, CMYK (with Pantone on cover), sewn-glued binding with a 9mm spine, and folded flaps cover
Highest Recommendation!!
Used In - Japanese edition of Current 93 in early neofolk mode. Includes a 7” of live tracks from Tokyo, insert and photo. This edition numbered 282 of 1000. Pristine copy.
So pleased to stock the last Sightings show ever, Stavanger 30.4.2013, issued on tape by the Norwegian Drid Machine imprint back in 2015!
We’ve said it before, Sightings remain the greatest band of the era that brought about the Brooklyn brand, though Msgrs Hoffman, Lockie and Morgan had no part in the beards, the button-downs or Vice magazine. That said, they did circle with Andrew W.K.
Here is the setlist, total heat, drawing heavily from Terribly Well (Dais, 2013) and Amusers and Puzzlers (Dais, 2015):
CC
Take It In Trade
Mute's Retreat
Rivers Of Blood
13
Bucket Brigades
Bundled
The Loafer
Highest recommendation (and we don’t even like the tape format that much)!!
From the personal collection of David Grubbs, this exceptionally rare tape compilation on Holocaust Tapes features a row of first generation UK and EU Anarcho punk. No sales history on Discogs or any other secondary market.
This compilation features songs with titles like “Fight for Justice,” “Fight for Freedom,” and some outliers like “System of War” and “Violent Pride.”
Xeroxed cover on a TDK tape that has been fully rewound and appears unplayed.
Near Mint for Autonomous Youth!
Tracks include:
01 - Criminal Justice - The Race Is On (For N.A.T.O.)
02 - Political Asylum - System Of War
03 - Political Asylum - Autonomous Youth
04 - Blood Robots - The Valley
05 - Blood Robots - Poppies
06 - Abductors - Your Decision
07 - Deceased - Realisation
08 - Deceased - I Don't Wanna Die
09 - Self Abuse - Teenage
10 - Self Abuse - Beirut
11 - Stress - State Of Decay
12 - Stress - Fight For Justice
13 - Flux Of Pink Indians - Left Me To Die
14 - Diabolists - Devil Surrounds Me
15 - Diabolists - Ashes To Ashes
16 - Kulturkampf - Violent Pride
17 - Kulturkampf - General Instigators
18 - Shrapnel - Fight For Freedom
19 - Shrapnel - Missile
20 - Impact - Law Of The Land
21 - Impact - Your Decision
22 - Legion Of Parasites - Savages -
23 - Legion Of Parasites - Hypocrite
Tape is numbered
November 17, 2023: After more than a decade, our Dystopian t-shirt has been put to rest. The cheeky irony sits less well when living through our own spotty patch of history. Yesterday we spotted two burned out cars on the street in just one commute home. The spirit of Rollerball lives on even if the t-shirt design is no more.
To right/re-write the tone of our last t-shirt a bit, we borrow from an iconic avant-garde luminary who is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Everyone is crazy for Robert Ashley these days, so many voices doing the voices.
We’ve decided to appropriate what’s appropriate too, so here’s our Automatic Ashley design!
Acquired these direct from Bill Orcutt during his March 20, 21 and 22nd residency at Roulette. The Four Louies night on 3.21.26 was extraordinary, especially the performance of that Fake Estates Lp. And the other nights featured an amazing cast of fellow artists, some on PALILALIA, and among others:
Wendy Eisenberg
Chris Corsano
Shane Parish
Cyrus Pireh
Ava Mendoza
Kris Gruda
…. and even an appearance from shop favorite William Winant!
We only have a few of each size, so please act fast.
Selling it a smidge cheaper than the Orcutt’s merch table, as not appear like we are in on the grift.
Grateful to have these in the shop.
From Palilalia.com:
“Few sounds in music are as instantly recognizable as the searching sting of guitarist Bill Orcutt and the cyclical propulsion of drummer Chris Corsano. At the same time, every single performance or recording I’ve heard by the duo has been markedly different, discovering new paths with a given set of tools. For more than a decade now they’ve been meeting up to instigate visceral sonic journeys without a map, engaging in elliptical dialogues with one another, but more often conjuring twinned excursions that occur with a kind of telepathic independence. They don’t need to plan or discuss what will happen when they get together. They simply jump in and see where things go, pushing and pulling when necessary, yet more often letting each other roam freely with the knowledge that they’ve a rapport that can weather all storms.
The performance captured on Play at Duke was taped at the von der Heyden Studio Theater in the Rubenstein Arts Center on the campus of Duke University. The set closed out a three-day festival celebrating the 21st anniversary of Three Lobed Records, and the music they made feels utterly galvanic, a fitting conclusion by turns triumphant and bloodied. The set clocks in at just under 26 minutes but there’s nothing lacking, nothing slight. The best performances fuck with time, as this sublime encounter does. The duo were in an obvious flow straight out the gate, with Orcutt unleashing fat, fragmented arpeggios that morph from anthemic chords to flickering long tones—tense moments of repose that anticipate some new digression a la Hendrix. In the first of the three Play at Duke the duo packs in so many discrete ideas and dialogues that it’s hard to believe they only needed eight minutes to get it done.
Orcutt and Corsano sets are thrilling, in part, because we don’t know what will happen. Will they gel, butt heads, or get cranky. The guitarist sometimes delves into his Harry Pussy roots and unleashes a post-hardcore sally to shake things up, whether it seems necessary or not, but with this particular set there’s no doubt that the pair is sync. Ideas, motifs, needling lines (shadowed, of course, by Orcutt’s wordless falsetto screamed out into the air) pile up with pure compositional logic, each new melodic theme or textural divot flowing out of the previous one with remarkable ease and fluidity. Both musicians can access all sorts of traditions at the blink of an eye. The second piece opens explosively, with Corsano delivering a singular kind of flailing energy that’s nevertheless completely liquid, while Orcutt jerks between post-no wave skree, ominously prescient chords that channel the aggression of AC/DC and Hound Dog Taylor, and upper register stabs that that both tap into some primordial wellspring of the blues and fling clusters of sound at gravity, seeking to be free of our planet’s limitations. The album’s final piece begins with repose, a breath-catching reset of contemplative tenderness that gradually opens up, the duo teetering at the edge of an explosion that never really arises, as a lyric quality manages to ride the cresting wave of energy, cutting back- and-forth into a sudden, crystal-clear denouement that feels like destiny.”
We always credit when the writings not ours, especially when the prose reads so swimmingly.
This from Orcutt’s resident writer:
“Another Perfect Day is Bill Orcutt's first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous Bill Orcutt. While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt's computer and guitar music on Music For Four Guitars and last year's How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt's first work with a proper score (courtesy of Shane Parrish).
All of the above makes 2025 the perfect year to reacquaint ourselves with Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string rather than a mouse, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through Cafe Oto's tattered Fender Twin (the cover model for the aforementioned How to Rescue Things) rather than a pair of ancient NS-10s. Indeed, this 2023 performance at Oto, East London's finest music establishment, boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double- picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of the last few solo records into the dustbin.
In other words, this may be Orcutt's most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago. It's an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player—angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass.
Another Perfect Day is, ultimately, something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic iteration, impossible crescendos (check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on ‘For the Drainers’) breaking into—a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record—soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of ‘A Natural Death.’
Another Perfect Day returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest records while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player, who's been going, what—four-plus decades now? And when he taps his roots, it's a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about Orcutt's playing in the first place."
—TOM CARTER (Nov 2025)
From the one-sheet:
“For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt's electric records, which chart a course from Quine's choppiness to Thompsonian/Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten-year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey. But what's maybe more surprising is that Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt's earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On Ittreads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as 'The Life of Jesus' and 'In a Column of Air' that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt's trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brickwall short). While you won't mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not if taken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener.”