Indierock | Alternative Tape Sale 30 Items

Bendrix Littleton is the writing and recording project of Nashville-via-Dallas musician and producer Bennett Littlejohn. The self-aware, malaise-filled songs on his debut LP 'Deep Dark South' are imbued with the painful beauty of the modern American South, including themes of drug and alcohol abuse, and the dissolution of relationships. Bendrix wrote most of the album on a vintage Harmony H162 acoustic guitar that he found at a flea market in Kentucky and restrung with higher pitched strings (a 'Nashville tuning'). After running the tracks through a Tascam four track cassette recorder, which sped the songs up ever so slightly, Bendrix added layers of lap steel, dobro, and pedal steel. 'I tried to pair instruments that typically aren't used together--one's that I've shied away from after playing them with uninspired country music.' 'Deep Dark South' conjures the feeling of wonder one gets from looking up at the vast Southern night sky.

First time to cassette for 2006 album, yellow cassette & yellow norelco box, limited edition of 100.Limited edition reissue of the final Brandtson album, Hello, Control. Features previously unreleased alternate mixes from album producer Ed Rose and marks the first time the 2006 album will be available on vinyl and cassette. Presented with all new artwork. A pivotal release and the closing chapter on over a decade of making music for the Cleveland quartet. The first album with longtime friend and collaborator Adam Boose joining on bass, and the fifth release with producer Ed Rose. From the dusty lull of album opener "A Thousand Years" a new Brandtson begins to emerge. Putting a ready for the floor sneer to the road worn hallmarks of their back catalog, and taking a decided step into pop territory on singles, "Nobody Dances Anymore" and "Earthquakes and Sharks". The alternate Ed Rose mixes were curated from the bands archives and have been previously unreleased in any format. Originally released by The Militia Group in 2006. The 2022 reissue of Hello, Control was mixed by Ed Rose, mastered by Adam Boose, and lacquer masters cut by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service.

Sorrow Wave duo BRING HER return with their second LP and first album since 2019, Comfort In The Shame. Based out of Pittsburgh, BRING HER play a distinctive brand of somber darkwave, defined by haunting and magnetic vocals over pounding and obsessive drum machines, penetrating guitar chords, and eerie and harrowing synths. Using DIY recording methods coupled with sound shaping, heavy layering, and meticulous editing the new album sees the two-piece at a new height, adding to the urgency and crushing weight of their already brooding sound. Elements almost industrial in nature shine through these 10 new tracks, yet the duo stays as gloomy and dismal as the self-described Sorrow Wave moniker implies.

The newest longplayer from Tio'tiá:ke/Montreal staple Cedric Noel lands with a stunning sense of surety and self. Hang Time stands as a high water mark for a songwriter who's spent the past decade quietly expanding the borders of his music. Longtime fans will recognize the fluid elements of the album's open-ended rock formations: reflective strumming, soaring choruses, searing guitar lines, subtle bass grooves; all occasionally dissolving into pools of pure ambience. New listeners will find surprises throughout: threads of folk pop, ambient and sound collage fasten the foundations of this expressive whole. However, what's most striking on Hang Time is Noel's newfound sense of voice, both literal and metaphorical. Written primarily in 2017-18 during an intense period of self-reflection, this collection of songs finds Noel wrestling profoundly with his sense of identity, self and place. Born in Niger, adopted by Canadian and Mozambican/Belgian parents, he spent his youth moving around the globe with his adoptive, multi-racial family, eventually landing in Fredericton, Canada for university. While studying, Noel embedded himself in a predominantly white indie rock community that left him feeling, as a Black man, both seen and unseen in complicated ways; both welcome and not. This tension would follow Noel through a move to Montreal in 2016 wherein he found himself again moving within predominantly white music communities. This (dis)placement would encourage Noel to find respite in Ottawa, holed up temporarily in a family home, studying the pieces of himself and putting them to place in music. Listening to Hang Time, one can feel the tensions of this process being held and released, as if being allowed to breathe for the first time: forms open and close, surfaces are seen through, feelings go supernova. The album's material was captured faithfully at The Pines, a beloved downtown Montreal studio whose doors shuttered shortly after amidst the strain of the pandemic. Noel worked closely and patiently with friend and engineer Steve Newton, ensuring the songs had the time and space needed to come fully to fruition. Hang Time features subtle rhythm work from drummer Liam O'Neill (suuns) and guest spots from Brigitte Naggar (Common Holly), Ella Williams (Squirrel Flower) and Tim Crabtree (Paper Beat Scissors) among others.

Owing to a focused period of growth as a home recordist and producer, there is a distinct, refreshing current that charges outtakes from “bad summer”, the latest full-length album from Philly-via-Portland’s cool original (fka cool american). What under other circumstances might have been a string of homespun indie rock songs is instead an energized pop-focused collection of tracks born from what Nathan Tucker describes as “the contrast between total formlessness and rigid claustrophobia”. As heard almost immediately on album opener “monad, no windows”, an electric atmosphere envelops outtakes from “bad summer”. Pitch-shifted vocal samples and previously-scrapped drum recordings fill out the overture, setting the table for a patchwork of repurposed, resampled ideas shaped into songs that rarely end up in the same place they started. The unhurried and sentimental “i just need a second” boasts the full spectrum of cool original’s songwriting prowess: foregrounded, infectious melody over subtly chopped and screwed drums comprise the foundation for Tucker’s own take on a classic road song—a marked contrast to “breaking my own rules”, an experimental pop number unlike any previous cool original work. Similar contrasts abound throughout outtakes, making for a listening experience that’s equal parts rejuvenating and unpredictable.

Documa is the multimedia project of longtime Northwest Indiana musician Bobby Markos. Markos began writing and releasing music on his own, using analog production methods at home. The project debuted with a collection of songs called “The Color of Documa.” Around the same time, Documa began performing live, marrying audio and visual aspects to create an almost movie-like experience for audience members. The sounds of Documa are heavily influenced by music from the 60s and 70s, documentary soundtracks, and field recordings. The music incorporates fingerstyle guitar playing, as well as electronic compositions and samples to create ambient productions with country-western cadence. Markos relies on a home studio consisting of old reel-to-reel tape machines, VCRs, and cassette decks to engineer Documa recordings.

To integrate a longtime love of film, he founded Documavision, a production company focused on collaborating with other artists, visualizers, and motion graphics. The visual aesthetic focuses on film equipment and methods of the past as well, often using analog cameras, televisions, and VCRs to produce videos.

To close out 2020, Documa has partnered with Flesh & Bone Records to release a series of EPs, starting with the digital release of the EP “3.” and now a cassette release of "Lo-Fi One Two Seven".

RIYL: Duster, Bowery Electric, Codeine, Slowcore meets Downbeat, Tortoise.

Ghost Bitch, like most suburban-bred "American" girls, has followed the traditional Britney Spears to Rowland S. Howard trajectory. On her 10th birthday, her wish came true when she was given an electric guitar, but she somehow managed not to learn a single chord (by her estimate) for the next 13 years. That did not stop her from beginning to perform in "Olympia, WA" on her own and in the short-lived punk band KZV, and later, Desire Complex, Di.Or. and Babyface Evil. What originally started (Ghost Bitch!) as a solo noise project and an outpouring of grief has slowly transformed into a poetic yet primal force of rock-n-roll while maintaining the touch of an exorcism, of late, a danceable one nonetheless.Ghost Bitch's new album Blood and Honey was recorded in six hours by Capt. Tripps Ballsington at High Command in October 2021. It was written in "Olympia" during the pandemic while long awaiting a move to Naarm ("Melbourne, Australia"). Blood and Honey is brutally romantic and funny the way a Baudelaire poem is funny, reveling in turning things upside down, most of all- beauty, yet this time spoken from the mouth of the razor-sharp, decaying Venus herself.

Born and raised in small Texas towns, the members of Good Looks met and began playing together in Austin. Songwriter Tyler Jordan grew up in a South Texas coastal town dominated by the petrochemical industry, his childhood steeped in the tension between nature and industry, exploitation abundantly present and the wealth gap on full display. His father's church, described by Tyler as "cult-like in its intensity," was homebase and where he learned to sing. Tyler eventually met lead guitarist Jake Ames in the late-night song-swap circles of the Kerrville Folk Festival campground (where they would also meet Buck Meek and Adrienne Lenker pre-Big Thief). They shared their mutual love of the Texas hill country canon (Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt, and Willie Nelson), a love of cheap diner food, thrift store baseball caps, and a healthy dose of harmless shit-talking. They began playing in bands together, backing up other songwriters and taking turns in the spotlight. They sought out producer Dan Duszynski (Loma, RF Shannon, Jess Williamson) to engineer their debut album. What would form was Good Looks, a blue-collar political indie-rock band with healthy doses of Replacements swagger and shimmering, desert rock riffs not unlike The War On Drugs.

Hanni El Khatib’s first idea for his “Savage Times” project was to do something he’d never done before. Instead, he ended up doing …well, everything he’d never done before. He’d be playing new instruments, writing in unfamiliar new ways, opening himself up to an unrelenting stream of ideas and dedicating himself totally to pure musical instinct. And the result? 19 best-of-the-sessions songs,

Presenting Howlin Rain’s grand-scale new studio album: The Dharma Wheel, a six-track, 52-minute dive into a joyous fantasy realm. A sonic travelogue of prog funk, psychedelia, bygone West Coast jam music and watermelon rock. The triumph of a working band!

On the night of April 3rd, 1980, the iconic post-punk band Joy Division descended upon the intimate stage of the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, London. The venue, dimly lit and shrouded in an aura of mystery, provided the perfect backdrop for the band's melancholic and atmospheric sound. The raw power and emotional intensity of their performance served as a testament to their artistry, leaving a lasting legacy that continues to inspire generations of musicians and fans alike.

For their Drag City debut, the enigmatic duo expand into eight-armed wonder; all the better to reach ever-deeper into their bag o' tricks. Slinky and sliding elegantly, the kids forge tunes with a harmony of ambiguity and nostalgia, effortless yet precise, and rounded with thick bottom - a dancing clash of cognition and dissonance!Since 2015, Kamikaze Palm Tree have been a relative mystery. Now, in times no less mysterious, Drag City welcomes them, celebrating the energy of their second LP, where KPT play their offbeat strain of 21st century rock.Making MINT CHIP, Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner reach deeper into their bag of tricks than ever before, dialoguing with an absurd shared intent they haven't yet paused to question. The off-center pieces gathered together for Good Boy have given way to pulsing aquatic compositions on MINT CHIP. Cole's guitar tones, wire thin, bell-like, bluesily downtuned, slinky and sliding elegantly, arc purposeful around their peripherals. Dylan's kit work, effortless yet precise, grounded with heavy bottom, drives and interacts organically with all the emerging structure, nailing down finely detailed frames and canvases to backdrop her singing and the unremitting landing of melodies and songs. With the addition of Josh Puklavetz, things that didn't make sense before - like bass - are now on the beach, fully lotioned, essence to essence. Violin and clarinet (Laena Myers Ionita and Brad Caulkins, respectively) round out the tonal spectrum. All strung together in the foothills of Altadena's Wiggle World Studios with Hartling back in the engineer's seat and Tim Presley producing the proceedings!

•Slime green cassette shell •Dolby B noise reduction •Download card •Will have some cool on-body printed design when we come up with it… you know, we always do.

LAKE's 2009 album Let's Build A Roof [KLP213], produced by Northwest legend Karl Blau, is sweet, funky and nostalgic - a paragon of psychedelic pop. Originally, this landmark album had overlooked sonic anomalies now corrected by REMASTERING. Five bonus songs have been added to the DIGITAL ALBUM, creating a whole new Let's Build a Roof.Let's Build A Roof is LAKE's most popular album with many fan favorites, though every track is unique. After extensive touring in 2009, LAKE entered Dub Narcotic Studio (Olympia, Wash.) to record fresh with their live energy. In the studio they were able to fill out their jingly pop aesthetic, enhanced with the vintage sounds of instruments available at Dub Narcotic and the local community. Blazing synth solos, timpani, flutes, saxophones, cello, and marimba, are just some of the featured sounds on Let's Build a Roof.Some of the album's most requested songs: "Madagascar," a dubby, slow-groove track; "Christmas Island" a surfy Phil Spector-sounding song used as theme music for the television in show Adventure Time; and "Don't Give Up", an upbeat motivating dance song with Blau performing the hook on harmonized saxophones; "Gravel" is the first single and has that a driving intensity that we can all deeply relate to - trying to keep up.

LIFE are anchored by their hometown; the geography, history and community has always been the inspiration behind their creativity and on their third LP, North East Coastal Town, the band pay homage to Hull and its folk. North East Coastal Town is mature; it finds the band at the height of their powers as they carve-up a wide-screen, brooding body of work that is drenched in a sense of belonging and reflection but still impressively maintains their trademark swagger and ear for pop sensibilities and guitar hooks."Hull and the surrounding area runs through our DNA and has shaped us, weathered us, empowered us, embraced us and made us feel accepted. North East Coastal Town is our love letter to the city. The album is an ode to kinship and relationship with its musical and lyrical spine picking out themes of love, desire, beauty, horror, chaos, pride and most importantly the sense of belonging. Upon writing and recording this album it was important to us that this sense of belonging was also reflected in the album's craft and therefore we used locally based studios, equipment, gear, and the community around us to establish what it means to belong in a North East Coastal Town."When the pandemic gripped the world in March 2020, LIFE were in the midst of promoting their acclaimed second album - A Picture Of Good Health (Sept 2019); they had just completed an arena support tour with Kaiser Chiefs in the UK, a triumphant main stage appearance at Rockaway Beach and flown to New York for New Colossus Festival ahead of a packed SXSW and a US tour with IDLES. They scrambled home on the last plane back from New York on 17th March.The album was BBC 6 Music's Album Of The Day, BBC Radio 1's Album Of The Weekend and was one of BBC 6Music's Albums of The Year; all four singles from the album were play-listed at 6Music, and the band were nominated for two AIM Awards 2020 - Best Live Act and Best (Difficult) Second Album and they played major UK festivals including Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading Festiva...

Access, The Second Album By Major Murphy, Is An Album Born Out Of Being At A Crossroads. It's Also, Without Question, An Album To Blast At An Unruly Volume To Soundtrack An Experience Onemight Have Standing At That Crossroads. It's Remarkably Cohesive - A Striking Relic In An Age Where Ardent And True"Album-Making" Is A Fading Art Form - Full Of Heavy Rock'n'roll Sounds And Textured Atmospheres Fused Withpro-Idea, Hyper-Creative Jittery Warmth. In Nine Songs, It Somehow Takes A Listener Backwards And Forwards Atonce, Reckoning With Intrinsic Anxieties While Conceptualizing A Fantastical And Vibrant Happening, Soothing In Itsfamilia Familiar, Occasionally Childlike Tone.Behind The Sturdy And Poetic Architecture Lies A Story Of New Parents, Navigating Uncertainty And Seeking A Senseof Agency In The New Unknown. Throughout Access, Songwriter Jacob Bullard Recounts Memories Of Teaching Hisyoung Son To Breathe Through His Nose And Laments Missing His Son And His Partner And Bandmate Jacki Warren.On "In The Meantime", Bullard Expresses The Timeless Anxiety Of Recent Parenthood, Written In The Wake Of Theterrifying Experience Of Their Son Suffering From Lead Poisoning. While The Title Track "Access" Is As Much Apersonal Plea For Patience And Humility...

Everything about Stefano Pilia’s spiritual journey always seemed to point directly towards ‘Spiralis Aurea’, his astounding 2022 release for Die Schachtel, a deeply resonating piece of art that intertwines traces of sacred geometry, collective experience and elusive connections between nature and human kind. ‘Spiralis Aurea Trio’ adds an extra layer, an opera of sheer beauty and execution, will, force and composure. The original cycle of compositions live and breath, adapted and transformed, taking their initial meaning and depth to new heights, while maintaining the concepts of ‘divine geometry’ and their sacred mystique intact, displaying a deep resonance with works by La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Terry Riley.

Temir Alcy (producer Enir Da - Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm and multi-instrumentalist Charles Lmx) is at the junction of spherical textures of acoustic clouds and shapeshifting forms of immersive electronic percussive patterns. By intertwining etherionic atmospheres and organic moods to magnetic and hypnotic rhythms, Temir Alcy explores the mysteries of the future and the unknown through a journey of sensory trance, where whispers and melodies of voices strike a vivid contrast between emotions’ fragility and sound’s solidity enhanced by a downtempo, leftfield and erratic kraut’s feel.

My Heart Is An Open Field is a confident, deeply beautiful debut album from Chicago four-piece Tenci. These songs are filled with nuance-- breaths of saxophone and flute, and touches of cello, piano, and pedal steel are hung on the sturdy folk songs of Jess Shoman, whose voice and range cuts through these dreams like a loved one's voice. There is enough new rawness to separate the music of Tenci from other artists working in similar genres. Ultimately these songs feel magically formed, the hazy post-snakebite psychedelia of "Serpent," the childlike wonder and xylophone on "Joy," the heartbreaking imagery within "Forgot My Horse's Name." Even the recording of Shoman's grandmother at the end of "Blue Spring" is something achingly refreshing.

Turbo World is the sunny and shady brainchild of co-conspirators Stephe Cooper and Caroline Bennett. Best known as the mastermind behind avant-prog boppers Cloud Becomes Your Hand and a member of Guerilla Toss, Cooper continues to stand out for his madcap compositions that embody the spirit and ethos of avant rock groups Aksak Maboul & Slapp Happy. Joining forces with Bennett, the manic scribe, singer, and multimedia wizard of digital hardcore duo Stice, their debut album, My Challenger, is an experimental prog-opera that leads listeners on a surreal, animated jaunt through the world of organized crime. The album’s north star is Joey the Hitman aka Max Kurschner, whose 1973 interview on The David Susskind Show, forever immortalized on YouTube, serves as inspiration and source material.

It's Tempting To Think That You Have All The Answers, Screaming Your Gospel Every Day With Certainty And Anger. Life Isn't Quite Like That Though, And The Debut Album From London Four-Piece Tv Priest Instead Embraces The Beautiful And Terrifying Unknowns That Exist Personally, Politically, And Culturally. Posing As Many Questions As It Answers, Uppers Is A Thunderous Opening Statement That Continues The Uk's Recent Resurgence Of Grubby, Furious Post-Punk Music. It Says Something Very Different Though - Something Completely Its Own. Four Childhood Friends Who Made Music Together As Teenagers Before Drifting Apart And Then, Somewhat Inevitably, Back Together Late In 2019, Tv Priest Was Borne Out Of A Need To Create Together Once Again, And Brings With It A Wealth Of Experience And Exhaustion Picked Up In The Band's Years Of Pursuing 'Real Life' And 'Real Jobs', Something Those Teenagers Never Had. Last November, The Band - Vocalist Charlie Drinkwater, Guitarist Alex Sprogis, Bass And Keys Player Nic Smith And Drummer Ed Kelland - Played Their First Show, To A Smattering Of Friends In What They Describe As An "Industrial Freezer" In The Warehouse District Of Hackney Wick. "It Was Like The Pub In Peep Show With A Washing Machine Just In The Middle_" Charlie Laughs, Remembering How They Dodged Star Wars Memorabilia And Deep Fat Fryers While Making Their First Statement As A Band. Unsurprisingly, There Isn't A Precedent For Launching A Band During A Global Pandemic, But Among The General Sense Of Anxiety And Unease Pervading Everything At The Moment, Tv Priest's Entrance In April With The Release Of Debut Single "House Of York" - A Searing Examination Of The Monarchy Set Over Wiry Post-Punk And Fronted By A Mark E. Smith-Like Mouthpiece - Served As A Breath Of Fresh Air Among The Chaos, Its Anger And Confusion Making Some Kind Of Twisted Sense To The Nation's Fried Brains. It's The Same Continued Global Sense Of Anxiety That Will Greet The Release Of Uppers, And It's An Album That Has A Lot To Say Rig...

As children we are disturbed from inner grace and mused, bored or threatened into awareness of the outside world in these recordings patterns emerge and are interrupted like a conversation in a garden, logic gates, and my directives mingle in importance. Responsibility or force is avoided. Primitive homemade analog computers were used to make electronic sounds and manipulate acoustic instruments in free running chaotically generative programs that are written by patching logic gate clusters with wires. Theres is no machine "memory" aside from the patches themselves, and the equations the circuits reliable math but audio-rate accidents spilling out of hashed streams of data. The same primal state of polarized data pulses build into the complex horrors of culture, finance, and communication we think we recognize on our devices. Yet electricity itself retains it's mystique, animated not by our will but by still poorly understood natural laws that transcend human concerns.

Leader of the punk-rap awakening, Wu-Lu pulls inspiration from personal hardship and the underrepresented on his latest for Warp entitled 'loggerhead'. Miles Romans-Hopcraft based his artistic moniker on the Amharic word for water, “wu-ha”. True to his fluid sound and nature, he decided to change it to something that felt more liquid. He ended up with Wu-Lu, a name he has been using since 2015. His first record Ginga opened the floodgates to a career that would take him to various places, people, and genres. From breaking bones at skateparks as a teenager, to DJing as one of the original members of Touching Bass, and eventually getting signed to Warp in 2021.

As an artist, Wu-Lu seems concerned with feeling and communicating the full spectrum of human emotion. Throughout his varied discography, he touches on disparate themes and sounds, straddling a divide between blissed-out beats and grungy guitar dirges, and often mixing both into one amorphous, unclassifiable sound of his own.

On ‘'loggerhead'’, Wu-Lu hones his unique sound. On ‘Take Stage’, a despondent spoken word intro opens with sombre strings and underlying bows dragged delicately across them. Then the lights flicker to life on ‘Night Pill’, and the mosh pit with them - the bassline approaches like a hungry shark and the guitars snarl with a homemade 90s grunge energy. This grunge drawl and punk spirit is peppered with dry old-school drum sounds of classic hip-hop, with laid-back beat-oriented tracks are spread amongst those with intermittent growls, scratches, and shrieks. Sonic elements are constantly rearranged and juxtaposed throughout the album, like on ‘South’ where the fluctuating pitch of squealing guitars and screaming vocals is contrasted with the steady flow of Lex Amor.

Listening through the album you are constantly greeted with about-turns, and through the element of surprise and deft use of contrast 'loggerhead' sits at an exciting point in Wu-Lu’s genre-defying artistry.