Label
Welcome to the Label section of No-Fi...
All of these releases are available to buy direct here - cds and lps are £7, 10"s £6, 7"s £4.
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Shops and mail orders, please get in touch for wholesale rates.
You can also buy digital versions of many of our releases via www.diogenesmusic.com
PLEASE NOTE: the Flower Corsano-Duo and Sir Richard Bishop 7"s are temporarily out of stock.
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Released : Mon 7th December 2009
Please note: this album is currently available only digitally via www.diogenesmusic.com - the cd is scheduled for release in March 2010.
2008 saw Anglo-American duo Cath & Phil Tyler release their debut album ‘Dumb Supper’ to great critical acclaim across all divides of the modern folk landscape – as Plan B rightly noted, “Dumb Supper is one of those rare modern folk albums that will find a home both in the longstanding ‘traditional’ music community and among those attracted to the form’s more experimental and lo-fi possibilities”.
And so it was that they were feted by a bewilderingly multilateral mix of critics from The Wire to Mike Harding to Brainwashed to Bob Harris (for whom they recorded a session too). Fiona Talkington of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction was especially ardent, even arranging their performance at the Royal Opera House, this similarly contrasting with their underground UK tour in the company of Finnish jouhikko player Pekko Kappi.
And the only thing that stopped them fulfilling their booking at 2008’s Green Man Festival was the early arrival of their son Byron…
With this their follow-up album, Cath & Phil Tyler further enhance their reputation for raw and powerfully emotive folk music that goes direct to the source, mining through their own contacts and treasure troves such as the Anne & Frank Warner Collection and the Sacred Harp song book, re-interpreting or adding their own music, and surfacing with pure gold.
And while they continue down their own thrillingly sparse furrow, this second album brings with it an added assuredness in their craft that shows how they’ve grown in stature as performers and players. So fully engrossing and fulfilling is their minimal sound, for example the voice and guitar on Dearest Dear, that when the accordion comes in on the song’s later stages, its as affecting and rewarding as if it were an entire orchestra.
While many of the lyrics have been unearthed, the majority of the music has been composed by Cath & Phil. Tracks such as Golden Ace (which segues into the starkly contrasting Courting Is A Pleasure) and Whip Poor Will highlight their divine union of the joy they take in playing and their sublime ability to do so. Phil’s banjo playing provides an indestructible backbone to the songs it features on, while his guitar playing darts, dips and flourishes joyfully – listen to the teasingly abbreviated The Wind That Shakes The Barley or the way his dancing strings vie with the fiddle on Golden Ace.
Phil is an exquisite guitar and banjo player, and layered with Cath’s earthen voice and their haunted harmonies, plus Cath’s barebones fiddle playing, makes for an exquisitely minimal, beautifully scything delivery.
Whip Poor Will, a Tyler-penned instrumental, sounds like a soundtrack to Where The Wild Things Are that should have been, conjuring a sense of child-like theatricality and anticipation that truly highlights Cath & Phil’s compositional skills, brilliantly breaking up the rhythm of the surrounding ballads and throwing something unexpected into the album’s emotional make-up.
Fittingly, ‘The Hind Wheels Of Bad Luck’ was recorded over a long weekend in Morden Tower, the ancient and legendary miniature music venue built into Newcastle’s old town walls that has hosted everyone from Allen Ginsberg and Basil Bunting to The New Blockaders and Sir Richard Bishop. The album was produced by Newcastle-based producer Andrew Gardiner. There’s something very fitting about a place that’s been a (largely unsung) cornerstone of Newcastle’s cultural evolution, and even older than many of the stories told on this album, being the place for this album to be made. Morden Tower holds a timeless and undying magic for those who’ve been there, its enigma preserved through the centuries. Similarly, Cath & Phil Tyler have brought us some ancient musical diamonds, added some of their own sorcery, and created something profound and wonderful for the folk of today.
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Released : Mon 7th December 2009
Please note: this album is currently available only digitally via www.diogenesmusic.com - the cd is scheduled for release in March 2010.
Herb Diamante, occasional member of Leeds’ seminal Vibracathedral Orchestra and the underground’s favourite lysergically-altered chanteur, comes on like the locked-away offspring of Scott Walker and Marc Almond throughout this album. And, like the chemically altered lounge lizard that he is, on each track on A Spoonful Of Yeast, he’s able to summon the artistry of a host of fantasy house bands to back his deranged suaveness.
First off we have Seattle’s legendary Sun City Girls – the band that become ever more revered as time passes, even though they’ve been defunct since drummer Charles Gocher died in 2007. Mr Lonely was intended for the Harmony Korine film of the same name and was recorded by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth) – its an aching, almost humorously self-pitying ballad originally made massive by Bobby Vinton, and with the help of the Girls, plus Eyvind Kang and Jessica Kenney, Herb also delivers the song to grandiosity in his own wonderfully skewed way. For all its weirdness, it’s really quite a moving appeal, exacerbated by the expertly understated strings and backing vocals.
From this grandstanding beginning, Herb then guides us through a drunken crawl of all that’s good about unhinged and underground rock these days. The line-up of collaborators he assembles is the free rock festival of your dreams. In addition to the legendary SCG, we also have Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Dialing In, At Jennie Richie and the Caroliner-affiliated Diatric Puds.
A Spoonful Of Yeast swings (in many senses) between the nightmarishly paranoiac (the tracks with Dialing In and At Jennie Richie especially), the insistently uneasy gait of the Sunburned track, 808 bossa balladry with Diatric Puds, and swirling eastern-tinged mushroom mantra in the company of the ever great Vibracathedral Orchestra.
The word ‘Lynchian’ has been used by several preview listeners to describe this album , and coincidentally Bobby Vinton did also write the song Blue Velvet. Herb has certainly travelled from party turn to fully formed concept with aplomb, providing us all with a knowingly humorous take on all things we love and laugh at simultaneously – mostly ourselves, our own pretensions and those moments where we’ve all failed so hilariously to keep our act together. To do that as well as producing a great album with an all-star cast – that’s got to be an achievement, right?
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Released : Mon 2nd February 2009
"Ohio's Emeralds cross swords with the fearsome Pain Jerk on the consistently strong No-Fi imprint, contributing one recording each. The two pieces compliment one another beautifully, though you'd imagine the two acts to make uneasy bedfellows: Emeralds' half-hour of blissful analogue motion ('Landlocked') faces off against the grotesquely noisy 'Beserker' (a "noise/voice/aktion showdown" according to its author, Pain Jerk), but it all fits together brilliantly, with the former's stately washes of vintage synthesizer and delay-saturated guitar lowering your heart rate to the point where the latter's skull-shattering din seems all the more powerful. They're both incredibly successful compositions/improvisations in their own right (and the Emeralds piece alone would be worth the price of admission) but together they constitute an album that far transcends the 'merch stand filler' factor that tends to characterise tour CDs. Excellent." Boomkat
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Released : Mon 4th May 2009
‘Brokebox Juke’ is the first collaborative recording by Alan Courtis and Aaron Moore. Aaron Moore is best known as part of Volcano The Bear, described by The Wire as "producing some of the finest, wildest British music of the last 10 years on record and on stage”, and revered for their peerless releases on labels such as Beta-Lactam Ring and Nurse With Wound's United Dairies. He's also one third of Amolvacy (along with Dave Nuss of No Neck Blues Band), and the Paris-based Textile Orchestra. Alan Courtis was of course an integral part of the infamous Argentinean band Reynols, and has been involved in countless collaborations with names such as Pauline Oliveros, Kawabata Makoto, Campbell Kneale, Lasse Marhaug, Dylan Nyoukis and countless others. You’d never guess that this album was recorded by correspondence between Buenos Aires and Brooklyn, as the sound of a full multi-faceted band in a warm room rises from the vinyl. Alan Courtis and Aaron Moore throw down delicious rhythmic textures, mariachi-tinged improv, brooding desert psych and more. The range of instruments illustrates the breadth of Courtis/moore’s palette, with tools including drums, guitars, violin, trumpet, beard trimmer, homemade violin, synth, processing and much more. And the whole package comes housed in a beautiful gatefold sleeve, with photos by Moore.
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Released : Mon 6th April 2009
Daniel Padden’s The One Ensemble began as a solo project and quickly morphed into a quartet with the recruitment of Chris Hladowski and Aby Vulliamy of Nalle, and Peter Nicholson. With Padden’s leadership, they developed a curious and strident brew of Eastern European folk, chamber music, a pinch of Robert Wyatt and some kind of earthy psychedelic primitivism. Padden has been fortunate in recruiting a band of such polymath virtuosity, giving room for his grand designs to be realised gloriously, both on stage and on record. As The One Ensemble Orchestra, their sound is given the blaze of full technicolour glory as they expand to a septet, exacerbating their collision of the formal and the tribal and oftentimes recalling the soundtrack and mood of The Holy Mountain. They originally expanded to a seven-piece for a commission from Bristol’s Venn festival in 2007, and consequently recorded these tracks at Padden’s studio. The extra members mean the Ensemble’s already rich sound is given further depth and added gravity, while losing none of their dextrous transitions or delicate passages. But when they hit those vocal incantations or rhythmic cascades that fans of their sound love so much, there’s undoubtedly an extra magic and drive that is a delight to behold. At times, the Ensemble come on like a mediaeval A Hawk And A Hacksaw, other times a chamber quartet ambushed by Balkan folk terrorists, but they always sound unquestionably themselves, channelling a thousand delicately unrefined, rough, raw and dreamlike voices. Like your favourite meal super-sized, The One Ensemble Orchestra is the esoteric treat you’ve been promising yourself.
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Released : Mon 7th December 2009
Please note: this album is currently available only digitally via www.diogenesmusic.com - the cd is scheduled for release in March 2010.
Jackal Blade is the collaboration of two of the more original practitioners in the New York noise wave of recent years – MV Carbon and Carlos Giffoni.
Carbon is one-half of female electro-skronk duo Metalux, famed for their releases on the Load label and their part in NO-FI’s Free Noise tour that shook the UK in 2007.
She’s also increasingly broadened her live actions of late, abusing her cello and reel-to-reel solo and in collaboration with the legendary Tony Conrad, with whom she played at London’s Tate Modern last year to much fanfare.
Carlos Giffoni is the Venezuelan-born synth-fetishizing noisenik who is also the face behind No Fun, the festival and the label. No Fun has of late spread its wings of late, with versions in Sweden and elsewhere, and the label continues apace too, while Giffoni still somehow finds the time to produce his own recordings.
Of course, both players appeared on the infamous Smegma/Metalux/Carlos Giffoni surreal mash-up released on No Fun and Lid is a similarly reckless and chaotic assault, laced with equal parts humour and venom. The vintage nature of the equipment used combined with Carbon’s unhinged improv chops and Giffoni’s Japanoise-inspired squeals and caterwauling, make for a record that, in texture at least, could have been made any time in the last 20 years. But it’s the unique combination of Carbon and Giffoni’s divergent yet equally splattering approaches to sound abuse and abstraction that make Lid such a treat.
Apparent reference points veer between The Theater Of Eternal Dreams, Airway and Incapacitants, but infused with liberal doses of analogue squiggles and squirts that bring a tinge of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Disembodied voices rise in and out of the mix and the whole record is a glorious and ecstatic barrage of stream-of-consciousness noise-flinging.
Plans for the duo to tour the UK any time soon are currently roadblocked by crammed diaries and irrational fears of UK airports, but in the meantime you can revel in this glorious catharsis of Lid.
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Good Cop, Bad Cop
Derek Bailey, Tony Bevan, Paul Hession, Otomo Yoshihide
NEU011 | CD | Album
Price : £8 - Add it to your Bag
Released : Mon 6th April 2009
Recorded at Frakture festival in Liverpool, 2003, ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ beautifully documents this tantalising meeting of 4 giants of improvisation, each universally revered in their own field. Bailey and Otomo have famously sent shockwaves through international notions of improvisation over the years, and Bevan and Hession are rightly regarded as part of the very backbone of the UK’s free music scene. Together, their sum even exceeds the promise of the parts, Hession’s rhythmic shards and rumbles throwing angular riddles against which the various species of sax, guitars and electronics each argue their troublesome cases. The recording begins with the full quartet, breaks down and careers exquisitely through the possible duo combinations before the quartet reassembles like some devilish and rhythmically spasticated Optimus Prime. This cd on the burgeoning NO-FI label marks the coming together of 4 legendary performers for an outstanding set that is essential listening for anyone with an interest in musical freedom. Recorded by Chris Trent. Mastered by Patrick Klem. Sleeve designed by John Wiese.
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Released : Mon 7th April 2008
The ultimate East coast/West coast soundclash as Oregon’s Yellow Swans and Brooklyn’s Mouthus present a smouldering document from their onstage interactions on their Fall 2006 US tour. The sound of Mouthus’s splat&clatter percussion and sheets of severely altered guitar and voice noise paired with Yellow Swans’ raucous axe-mangling and sublime noise processing make for a gargantuan oil tanker of sound that can’t avoid enveloping the listener. ‘Live On Conan Island’ is a range of monstrous caverns of free electro skronk, alt-percussion and wailing guitars from live collaboration between two of Load's hottest noisemongers. Gigantic!
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Released : Mon 4th February 2008
Blood n guts folk from the Anglo-American duo. The Wire says “The twining harmonies…recall the heyday of English pastoral folk song”. Plan B says "Dumb Supper is one of those rare modern folk albums that will find a home both in the longstanding 'traditional' music community and among those attracted to the form's more experimental and lo-fi possibilities". Most of the tracks are re-discovered and adapted by the Tylers, their searing harmonies and sparse, vital instrumentation breathing new life into timeless tales of love, loss and death.
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Released : Mon 7th April 2008
Another instalment in NO-FI’s vinyl catalogue, this 7” sees the head-on collision of two major acts in the European noise circuit. Norway’s Jazkamer is the electronics and guitar duo of Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, best known for their ‘Metal Machine Music’ death metal concept album but also for the searing blasts of electricity that typify their more noise-oriented work. For this release, they also recruit fellow Norwegian and multi-tasking guitar-mangling prodigy Anders Hana (Noxagt, MoHa!) - as if they needed any help to kick out the jams on this jawdroppingly raucous live recording. In contrast, the flip side is significantly more serene from Mark Durgan (who you may also know as Putrefier and who is rumoured to have been part of the mystery line-up of The New Blockaders at Thurston Moore’s All Tomorrows Parties). Subsonic rumbles and birdsong dominate the surface of this track, but the devil’s in the detail – poke your attention through the thin surface ice and you’ll easily fall through to hidden depths.
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Released : Mon 9th June 2008
Another vital instalment in NO-FI’s growing and collectable vinyl catalogue, this 7” sees Massachussets’ freestyle kraut funketeers Sunburned Hand Of The Man condense their name and a whole album concept into 7” of vital vinyl. Side 1 is inhabited by the murderous bossa nova of ‘Smokescreen’, with its loping bassline and trapped-in-a-box vocal paranoia. Then flip over for 7 more unhinged instalments, through the found-sound and minimal psych of ‘The Queen Of Midnight’, the faux cult frenzy of ‘Jesus’, oddball sampledelia and a looseness that conjures a mental image of the band simultaneously lauding and ridiculing out-rock’s greatest clichés. This is a slice of classic Sunburned, with their trademark lo-fi stylings and added low-rent Moondog-esque rhythm programmes giving it the air of a secretly recorded jam session at the Manson ranch. Or is it a spoof? Or a spoof of a spoof? You never quite know… This is another of NO-FI’s trademark hand-stamped jukebox sleeve 7”s, with classic centre label art by Sarah O’Shea.
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Released : Mon 9th April 2007
Second in the series of six 10"s from C. Spencer Yeh, launching immediately into a giant feedback epic that slowly reveals delicate harmonies beneath a sea of howling distortion. This edition comes with insert insert design by John Olson (Wolf Eyes).
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The Undisputed Dimension
Flower-Corsano Duo
NEU003 | 7" | Single
Price : £TEMP OUT O - Add it to your Bag
Released : Mon 5th February 2007
The sublime union of Vibracathedral Orchestra's Mick Flower on shaahi baaja and everyone's favourite drummer Chris Corsano. Two tracks of furiously transcendental ecstasy from our favourite live act.
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Released : Mon 5th February 2007
First in the series of six 10"s by C. Spencer Yeh entitled 'Mes Soldats Stupides 96-05'. Hard to find reissues on vinyl for the first time. Includes insert with design by guest artist Robert Beatty (Hair Police). "Three very different but equally captivating electronic pieces, this may be some of the most focused work Spencer has produced to date." (Rock-A-Rolla magazine)
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Released : Mon 6th November 2006
The ever-unpredictable Volcano The Bear in a 7" splice n jam mash-up of live-in-the-studio and post-processing delirium. Ever more revered and recognised as the ground-breakers they always have been, 'Birth Of Streissand' illustrates perfectly why The Wire describe them famously as having "produced some of the finest, wildest British music of the last 10 years on record and on stage…”. Or, as Losing Today puts it, “No one sounds, has sounded or will ever sound quite like Volcano the Bear.”
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Plays Sun City Girls
Sir Richard Bishop
NARC001 | 7" | Single
Price : £TEMP OUT O - Add it to your Bag
Released : Mon 12th June 2006
Sir Richard Bishop live at Newcastle's legendary Morden Tower in July 2005 - not only that but he's performing two of Sun City Girls' greatest tracks, namely 'Esoterica Of Abyssinina' and 'Space Prophet Dogon'. Recorded live by Andrew Hodson and mastered at Dubplates & Mastering. NO-FI's first release - what a way to start!
