Kranky has announced three more new releases for the coming spring. The first album of new material by Charlambides is on the schedule along with the third Loscil album and a full-length record from Brent Gutzeit. Images are already available but sound samples should hopefully arrive some time this weeek. So what's the mystery Krank065 catalogue number reserved for? Stay tuned and find out.

I.D.E.A.L describe their music festival as "unclassifiable, surprising music—hard to find but essential stuff with eclecticism as the rule." In the same spirit, the I.D.E.A.L Festival proposes exclusive projects to its artists to be premiered in France. Invited to this year's festival, Jack Dangers has been set the 'task' of creating a new original soundtrack for the classic, cult Sci-Fi-er, "Forbidden Planet." Jack Dangers will present his interpretive film score in live performance against a theatrical screening on Saturday, March 6th (8:30 P.M). at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France. For more info: http://www.lelieuunique.com/accueil/accueil.html

The rumors are true. All four members of Throbbing Gristle are currently in the studio, recording and practicing new material. The new music will be heard at the upcoming RE:TG festival and a new studio album may follow. Details are still being worked out. In the meantime, Mute has information of the remix album Mutant TG now on their website at mute.com.

Danny Hyde, the long time collaborator and sometimes co-writer of Coil, is working on his first album. It is planned to contain reworkings of some Coil tracks that he co-wrote (such as "Nasa Arab", "First Dark Ride" and "An Unearthly Red"), an interesting cover of Devo's "Mongoloid", and new songs including some vocalised by John Balance. Danny hopes to have it ready for release by July 2004, and it will be a limited edition release. A website will appear for the album in due course. Those who would like to be kept informed of the pending release should email dannyhyde at hotmail dot com with Subject="Album".

Normally is the first Hafler Trio on Soleilmoon the since the 1996 release An Utterance of the Supreme Ventriloquist. The two-disc set is based on the voice of Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld. No More Twain, Of One Flesh: 11 unequivocal obsecrations on Nextera is the third and final part of The Hafler Trilogy. The CD album is packed again in "deluxe" embossed paper wallet with special transparent wraparound.

Foundation Rockers is the brand new full-length release from former LPD bassist/drummer/guitarist Ryan Moore. It features collaborations with Big youth, Mykal Rose (from Black Uhuru), Luciano, Ranking Joe, Brother Culture, and Aswad Horns. In addition, there are two new 10" dub plates named Deeper Roots: one with Luciano and one with Big Youth.

24 recordings by 22 artists are now downloadable from http://uhfest.underground.hu/, recorded at the Ultrahang Fest 2003 in Budapest & Szeged, Hungary. Performers include Kid 606, Dwayne Sodahberk, Larsen, AGF, Vladislav Delay, Frank Bretschneider, Goem (half), Luomo, Kim Cascone, and many more. (It has been noted that bitrates are mostly 192.)

Important Records is very excited to introduce the Arts and Crafts series. Each installment in will marry sound art with physical art handmade by the artist on the recording. The Arts and Crafts releases will host a varied array of artists and each release will be strictly a limited edition. Jad Fair was willing to create 500 paper cuts on different colored paper for the first Arts and Crafts release. This record is pressed on clear vinyl with 3 exclusive tracks from Jad and is housed in a clear mylar jacket with a hand made 7 inch by 7 inch paper cut monster lurking ominously behind the vinyl. These are limited to just 500 copies worldwide. This second installment in Important Records Arts and Crafts Series is a limited edition 7 inch by The Dresden Dolls. Pressed on white vinyl, each record contains the single "Good Day" from their self released full length debut album and an unreleased B side titled "A Night At The Roses" produced by Sean Slade (Fort Apache/Pixies/Radiohead). Inluded is a sepia toned photograph of the Dolls taken by Riessen Kinghorn and signed by Brian and Amanda. It is also limited to 500 copies.

From Mute's press release:

Throbbing Gristle'TG+' (10 CD box set) - TGCD15
Mute in association with all the original members of Throbbing Gristle and founders of Industrial Records (Chris Carter, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti & Peter Christopherson) announce the release TG+.
TG+ contains CD releases of the final ten live Throbbing Gristle shows and is the companion to the legendary TG24 box set, released on CD for the first time last year. [don't you have to wait more than a year to claim something as "legendary"—Ed.]
All ten CDs (listed below) are available for the first time on CD and have been remastered by Chris Carter. The CDs come packaged in a hand made box that will also include a very limited edition TG+ branded object.

IRCD30 Oundle Public School, UK. 16th March 1980 57:29
IRCD33 Sheffield University. 10th June 1980 55:11
IRCD36 SO36 Club, Berlin, Germany. 7th November 1980 75:10
IRCD37 SO36 Club, Berlin, Germany, 8th November 1980 48:07
IRCD38 Kunsthofschule, Frankfurt, Germany. 10th November 1980 42:39
IRCD39 Rafters Club, Manchester, UK. 4th December 1980 61:58
IRCD40 Heaven, London. 23rd December 1980 60:43
IRCD41 Lyceum, London. 8th February 1981 55:52
IRCD42 Vetrans Auditorium, Los Angeles, USA. 22nd May 1981 58:53
IRCD43 Kezar Pavillion, San Francisco, USA. 29th May 1981 65:48

Having recieved stock of this release early at Mute Bank, this offer is an exclusive for Christmas and will not be available officially until January 26th 2004.

An hour-long interview feature with Peter Christopherson that aired on the Canadian radio program Brave New Waves back in May is now available via RealAudio on the BNW website: www.bravenewwaves.ca/bnmedia/archive_i_coil.shtml.

The Songs of Norway LP Despite the Cloak is now available. It comes in a vinyl only edition of 500 with the first 200 featuring a limited edition 7" of Songs of Norway and Earth Trumpet. The LP vinyl is pressed on super chunky 220 gramme vinyl and comes in a delightful full colour sleeve with 2 inserts , the 7" comes in a picture cover. Price is £12 plus £3 p&p in the UK (postage rates outside the UK differ, please email Volcano for details) There is also an incredibly limited art edition of the LP. There will only be 20 copies of these, 8 for sale from VTB (we're keeping 2 for ourselves) and 10 from Beta Lactam Ring records in the USA www.blrrecords.com. (Songs of Norway began 6 months before the forming of Volcano the Bear in 1995 and consists of Aaron Moore (drums, percussion, trumpet, voice)and Nick Mott (prepared guitar, violin, saxophone, percussion) primarily, with the part time addition of Stewart Brackley (double bass, trumpet, voice). The LP also features a guest appearance of Daniel Padden (VTB) on clarinet.

The proposed 7" of "Pathfinder" is set for release on the Vienna-based Klanggalerie label. "Pathfinder" is 'Cyclobe pop' - something you can clack your claws to. The B-side, "Remember, Archangels Protect Us..." is a pre-echo of the next Cyclobe album proper, which they hope will be completed early 2004. Pathfinder is due for release end of November, beginning of December 2003, in a limited edition of only 200 copies, 100 black vinyl and 100 white vinyl both with insert, available from www.klanggalerie.com. In additional Cyclobe news, Cult Epics are releasing George Barry's bizarre and beguiling 1977 horror movie Death Bed: The Bed That Eats on Region 1 DVD in November. It features title music by Cyclobe and sleeve notes by Steve Thrower, detailing the lost-and-found saga of the film's history. More information is available at the Cyclobe web site and www.cultepics.com.

Flesh Eating Ants is releasing the Legendary Pink Dots album Nine Lives to Wonder on LP for the first time. Like the Tanith and the Lion Tree release (and a number of other LP releases) there will be bonus material on a fourth side of the double record set. The expected release date at this point is November. It will be limited to 400 hand numbered copies.

The German label Italic has announced the first full-length album from Little Annie in over a decade. Little Annie and the Legally Jammin' is set for release on October 24 and is described by Italic as "spoken word, beat, bass, and fat soul-electric harmony feat. Khan, Jendreiko, Jammin' Unit and Kid Congo Powers. New York Style!" Brainwashed hopes to provide images and samples soon. More information will hopefully also be posted soon at italic.de.

There will be a special launch party for the new book EYEBALL COMPENDIUM, edited by Stephen Thrower of Cyclobe (and formerly Coil) on Friday (the 17th) at The Horse Hospital in London. From the FAB press release:

"Since 1989, Stephen Thrower (author of FAB Press's acclaimed Beyond Terror) has edited one of the smartest and most stylish magazines on alternative, cult and art cinema: Eyeball. Hugely influential, Eyeball kick-started the now wide-spread admiration for Euro-horror. Now every issue of Eyeball is available in a single book, along with a vast amount of new material!" British horror author Ramsey Campbell calls it: "A feast of insights into the cinema at its most obscure, excessive and marginalised, and also a great deal of fun."

Contents include:
Interviews with Alejandro Jodorowsky (THE HOLY MOUNTAIN), Paul Morrissey (FLESH, TRASH, HEAT), Gaspar Noé (IREVERSIBLE), George Barry (DEATH BED), Paul Mayersberg (screenwriter, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH), Andrzej Zulawski (POSSESSION), Ulli Lommel (TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES). Plus features on Dario Argento, British Underground Cinema, Czech and Slovak Surrealism, Lucio Fulci, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, and a vast collection of individual film reviews. The book is available to order now from FAB Press at http://www.fabpress.com

Brian Conniffe reports: The next Nurse With Wound album is tentatively titled Angry Eelectric Finger. Angry Eelectric Finger is to be a triple album. An albums-worth of original raw material was given to three different artists: Jim O'Rourke, Irr. App. (Ext.), and Cyclobe. Stapleton told them to use the material in whichever way they want, but with an emphasis on making radical changes to original sounds. The result was three totally disparate album-length pieces of work, for Steve to manipulate and release.
The Jim O'Rourke (there's no other Sonic Youth member appearances) disc is an extremely dark and melancholic work which is stunningly beautiful in its precision. The album by Cyclobe is currently in the last stages of completition and is reportedly immensely trippy, hallucinatory, and astonishing. The version Irr. App. (Ext.) contributes differs greatly from the other two. While O'Rourke and Cyclobe radically reworked the source material into utterly distinct forms, Matt Waldron stuck very much to Steve's original material, adding textures and new elements in a highly subtle yet incredibly precise manner. The result of this is that each disc is vastly different from each other, in tone, mood, style and execution. Also, the Irr. App. (Ext.) re-interpretation of the lost LP Insect and Individual Silenced will be released very soon on United Dairies.

"Angry Eelectric Finger" will act as something of a milestone, and the next Nurse With Wound album after this one is going to be a major change in direction. The next NWW project, which Stapleton is working on at the moment, is going to be a hip-hop album. It will also feature a very talented female rapper.

Steve has also just completed a remix of material by the group Sperm (one on the infamous Nurse list), to be released on an upcoming Sperm reissue/anthology. The remix features distinctive hip-hop elements.

From the Mute web site:

Defixiones, Will and Testament
La Serpenta Canta Two Double Album Releases - Out 24th November 2003
Plus Rare Live Dates in London and Glasgow - October/November

Diamanda Galás releases two double albums on 24th November, her first releases since 1998's Malediction and Prayer. For both of these albums, Galás continues her forensic acts of identifying long buried hurts.
One, Defixiones, Will And Testament, investigates the little known Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923, with the singer articulating the anger and sorrow of the dispossessed through the words of exiled poets and writers alongside her own texts. La Serpenta Canta (aka The Serpent Sings) is a song recital recruiting blues, R&B, Motown, southern soul, Country & Western and her own "Baby's Insane" (from This Sporting Life, her duo album with John Paul Jones) in Galás's ongoing campaign against forgetting. Between the two albums, Galás covers a whole lotta dying ground in a babel of languages (Defixiones alone sets poems by Belgian writer Henri Michaux, Romanian-Jewish Paul Celan, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, French symbolist Gérard Nerval, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, Armenian Siamanto, Syrian Adonis, Assyrian poet-martyr Dr Freidoun Bet-Oraham and more) and traditions spanning Eastern Orthodox liturgy, American roots and the rembetika songs of Greece and Asia Minor.
Both sets are sung by Galás accompanying herself on piano, tape and a minimum of electronics, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that there are more of her out there coming at you from all sides, as her formidable voice rises to its full power and rattles the walls with its reverberating echoes. "My voice," she said in 1988, "was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies. An instrument of truth." With its much-touted three and a half octave range, Galás's voice is the most powerful weapon in her self-designed musical armoury.
Diamanda Galás will perform Defixiones, Will And Testament on Friday 17th October at the Royal Festival Hall in London as part of their Mind Your Head 2003 - Exploring new meanings in Sacred Music series.
A second date has been announced on Sunday 2nd November at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall as part of the city's Glasgay Festival. Frenzy: Concert For Aileen Wuornos is dedicated to Wuornos, who was executed on death row last year. The performance will include new arrangements of Galás' older recordings, plus songs from the new album La Serpenta Canta as well as brand new songs.
Friday 17th October - Defixiones, Will and Testament
8.00pm at Royal Festival Hall, London. Tickets available from the Box Office: 020 7960 4242 or book online at rfh.org.uk
Sunday 2nd November - Frenzy: Concert for Aileen Wuornos
8.00pm at Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow. For ticket information, check www.glasgay.co.uk - 0141 353 8000

The Legendary Pink Dots were deeply saddened by the departure of Martijn de Kleer and Bert Nijmeier in Spring 2003. Martijn, who originally joined the band back in 1991, wants to concentrate on making folk music and on playing shows in and around his home town of Nijmegen. Bert maintained the Pink Dots merchandising stall and operated the lighting console over the last few years. For Bert it was simply the time for a change. He is presently looking for openings in theatre companies in The Netherlands . The new face in the Pink Dots belongs to Erik Drost. Erik endured a real baptism of fire performing in front of a packed house in Moscow last August. Erik had never played outside his home town before this debut with The Dots, and spectators could be forgiven for thinking that the blood on his guitar at the end of the show was the result of heavily chewed fingernails. More detailed information is available at the LPD website.

V/Vm are pleased to report that the site has gone a complete overhaul. Some of the new features inclue over 150 free MP3s from back catalogue material to download and a fully automated mail order (now in dollars, pounds and Euro's) using PayPal. New titles include three new releases: a 2xCD/2x12" compilation "It's Fan-Dabi-Dozi!," (featuring Kevin Blechdom's love song to the brainwashed founder), Version 4 of "helpaphextwin," and "The Missing Symphony" by V/Vm which utilises the work of Dimitri Shostakovich. All the new releases can be MP3 previewed and preorderd at the site now. Look for an expanded gallery, live footage and short videos in the near future. Daisy the V/Vm cow says, "the classical is intense - and helpaphextwin is a big pisstake - especially after drunQs hit the bar and had to settle for a 0-0 scoreline.......,"

Brainwashed dot com is proud to announce that Important Records has joined the family. This small label and store is still in its infancy with some awesome recordings from Dresden Dolls, Hafler Trio, Merzbow, KK Null, Acid Mothers Temple, Genesis P-Orridge, Muslimgauze, and some other completely whacked out stuff that follows no rhyme or reason. Please give a warm welcome to them and wish them the best of luck. Recordings from their catalogue can now be heard integrated in Brainwashed Radio (which is now up to 433 hours of unrepeated music and 4,976 songs - we'll have a big party when we hit the 5,000 mark!).