Avant Music News

On April 13th, AUM Fidelity will release Throat (AUM061), the full-length debut from the Brooklyn-based quartet, Little Women. The group, featuring Travis Laplante (tenor saxophone), Darius Jones (alto saxophone), Andrew Smiley (guitar) and Jason Nazary (drums), works as a collective to create extended suites renowned for their dynamic, hard-hitting amalgam of jazz, punk, metal and noise. Throat, its second recording following the 2008 EP, Teeth (Sockets/Gilgongo), documents the band’s latest suite, a seven-part, 41-minute work meant to be heard in a single listening. The music will be available in three formats: digital download, CD and limited edition LP. Little Women will celebrate the record’s release with an 11-date tour of the Northeast and Midwest in early April followed by a week of dates in Western Europe in early May.

Love Cry Want Self-Titled 2xLP

Nearly 40 years after its creation, Weird Forest is proud to release this seminal jazz album for the first time ever on vinyl. The incendiary grooves captured in this wax defy description. It is not free, funk, fusion or fire music — it encompasses all of these sounds and then blasts far beyond them. Featuring the late great organist, Larry Young (Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew, Tony Williams’ Lifetime, etc), this album is mandatory listening for fans of Miles Davis’ “Live Evil” fusion era, Young’s own “Lawrence Of Newark”, Sun Ra’s cosmic explorations and even Japanese guitar terrorists like Keiji Haino and Masayuki Takayanagi. Beautifully packaged, Weird Forest-style, in a deluxe double-gatefold cover and remastered for vinyl by Weasel Walter, the Love Cry Want 2xLP is an essential document of a criminally unheralded group.

Sam Goldberg Current LP

Sam Goldberg is a Cleveland, Ohio multi-instrumentalist/ composer who has been running in the garage rock/electronic underground circles for the last half of the ’00s. He also curates and operates the Pizza Night cassette label, one of the most beloved underground cassette headquarters of the midwest as of late. Unique, timeless, and clever constructions of sound created with many instruments like synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and electric guitars provide a wide scope of varied colored tones from release to release. This debut record, Current, is an early document of Sam’s solo guitar work. Side A consists of a hazy and humid melodic stasis that may be known from the Emeralds/Sam Goldberg 2007 tour cassette. An untitled piece that evokes a sense of longing and discontent while simultaneously hitting the deep and raw channels of the subconscious past that bring an understanding to the spaces between experience and memory. A gorgeous wash of clouded, ringing guitar not unlike Glenn Branca’s “Symphony No. 2.” On the flip side another phantom composition played only a few times live and recorded over a year ago in a similar weightless, sky guitar fashion rounds out the double side long debut. “Carol” is a great example of massive tone landscapes that can be born with minimal processing and careful compositional dynamic.

Maurizio Bianchi M.B Das Platinzeitalter 2xLP

’Dark ambient’ barely captures what is engraved in these grooves. Loops from the history of dust, ancient as the catacombs and spectral like the last rays of hope. There’s an eerie calmness to all four sides of this LP. Timeless and inevitable as the setting sun, as if this music has always been here. Which it has. It was up to Bianchi to find it. This recording captures the never-ending decay of beauty at the point when it is realized that resistance is futile and the metamorphosis has begun. There are not many musicians who can distill this essence: early Zoviet France, Nature Unveiled-era Current 93, Lustmord and Andrew Chalk/Mirror to name a few, but Das Platinzeitalter sounds like it comes from hallowed grounds, the once sacred is now profane. It forces your head to turn toward the abyss. It’s up to you to open your eyes and look.