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Thursday, July 29, 2010
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ARTIST: NADJA
TITLE: Autopergamene
LABEL: ESSENCE
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| DESCRIPTION: Call it drone-doom-dirge-shoegaze or any other in vogue nomenclature you like. It doesn’t matter. The music is so sublime and superb that we consider a waste of time trying to further categorize the spiraling sounds exhaling from a NADJA album. They are simply the true originators of this bred of blissful, seriously intense and ominously ethereal heavy sounds and one the few acts – along with the genius solo work from the duo’s main composer, Aidan Baker – we are truly obsessed with these days. That said, we are more than glad to welcome the Canadian duo to Essence Music with an immense masterwork!
Autopergamene – a spell or charm wherein you write in blood, on a fragment of skin, what you wish to happen – finds NADJA at the peak of their sonic language of slow-blooming, heavily nuanced ambient guitar constructions and slow motion, lush, epic heaviness.
Divided in three colossal movements, the album starts with the blissful, paced and almost orchestral – much aided by three guest members on strings and Aidan’s trombone, flute and piano – “You Write Your Name in My Skin”, travels through the straight up, super distorted and fuzzed out rumbling sludge riffages of “You Write Your Name in My Head” and its semi-growling processed vocals to finally unfold the nearly half-hour long “You Write My Name in Your Blood” that gracefully starts with delicate, lush acoustic guitars glacially giving birth to an enormous, shimmering and heavily layered symphonic wall to then submerge and bring in a hazy, sparkling and almost passionate, yet twisted, duetto of Aidan-Leah’s male-female voices. Breathtaking.
Lavishly assembled in a custom 6-panel digisleeve packaging housing a 6 cards set with beautiful watercolor paintings and artwork by the gifted Portuguese artist L Filipe dos Santos. Superb mastering via James Plotkin. |
| ITEM NUMBER: 11242 |
FORMAT: CD STANDARD EDITION |
PRICE: $17.39 |
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ARTIST: PHAENON
TITLE: His Master’s Voice
LABEL: MALIGNANT
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| DESCRIPTION: After the well received debut Submerged, Phaenon follows things up with an even deeper immersion into a world of bleak, isolationist sounds. Whereas Submerged was one long and infinitely expansive drone piece, His Master’s Voice is broken up into four separate, but flowing tracks of sprawling and spacious ambient drift, laced with interstellar disturbances, probing, alien tones and icy shards of celestial debris…a whirling specter of darkness and void-ic space, thematically based upon the 1968 novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem, which is centered around the efforts by scientists to decode, translate and understand a series of extraterrestrial transmissions. As a whole, His Master’s Voice represents a logical progression in Phaenon’s sound and is the ultimate in headphone listening. In gorgeous 6 panel digipak. |
| ITEM NUMBER: 11251 |
FORMAT: CD |
PRICE: $11.99 |
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ARTIST: CRISIS (DEATH IN JUNE)
TITLE: Hymns of Faith
LABEL: LA VIDA ES UN MUS
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| DESCRIPTION: EXPECTED TO ARRIVE BY THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, 2010. PRE-ORDER TODAY. Any regular in-stock items ordered at the same time (in the same shopping cart) will be held aside and sent with your pre-ordered goods as one shipment. Orders with multiple pre-orders will be sent as one order, when all of the items in the order are available. If you want an order to ship immediately, or want your pre-ordered items to be sent out as soon as they arrive here, rather than in a group, you must order them separately. We won't charge your credit card until we ship the order. Please make sure your card number and expiration date are up to date when before you complete the check-out process. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- La Vida Es Un Mus re-release for the first time on vinyl, since its original release in may 1980, the seven track album from seminal radical and political punk/post punk band Crisis. "Hymns of Faith" was Crisis at their more reserved. The guitar was more innovative than on the punk anthems on their earlier singles, but the lyrics were just as politically bitter. Lyrically the album deals with subjects such as television, violence, totalitarian Russia and European terrorist organizations. This was their final effort, as things had begun to fall apart for Crisis around this time, and people in the band were going in different directions. Luke Rendall went on to Theatre of Hate. Tony Wakeford and Douglas P. went on to Death in June. 30 years since i's release "Hymns of Faith" still sounds vital and honest. LP PRESSED ON BLACK VINYL.
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| ITEM NUMBER: 11259 |
FORMAT: LP |
PRICE: $22.09 |
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