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08/30/2024

Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz - The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990

The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 compiles an unheard, previously unreleased body of recordings by Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz, dissidents from diametric backgrounds who met during the heady days of Downtown New York in the 1980s.

This collection reveals the creative and life partners’ radical shared vision of avant-garde pop in all of its boundary pushing freedom, combining Deyhim’s singular approach to vocalization, Horowitz’s invention of new musical languages, and touchstones of traditional music from around the world, creating a new music that ultimately retains a voice entirely its own.

Today we share a first listen to the collection in the form of “craving your embrace,” accompanied by a video compiled from Mitsuru Hiyashi’s 1988 film In Search of Desert Equations and footage from a 1987 performance of Azax Attra 1 and 2 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in NYC.

08/23/2024

Gregory T.S. Walker's Minstrels & Minimoogs - Out Now!

Gregory T.S. Walker’s Minstrels & Minimoogs marks Freedom To Spend’s fourth release in uncommon¢ (uncommon sense), a series that focuses on the deeper/weirder/most unknown corners of our collective interest. It’s out now, and it’s a doozy.

Originally released as a small run LP in an edition under 100 copies in 1988, and available exclusively at performances at the UC Boulder Fiske Planetarium from a motley crew of student pranksters dressed up in renaissance faire appropriate garb. The band, assembled by Walker (check the FT$ site for his story — it’s wild), used all technologies available to them at the venue — music, dance, lasers, film projection — to tell these tales of a fictionalized past held by different class, caste, and religious tensions.

On Minstrels & Minimoogs, we land in a place where there are certainly songs and music somewhat in the original venue appropriate style of planetarium psych pop, but to get there, we go through a fair amount of electro-fried baroque prog moves and avant-electronic blips backing in-character storytelling. It’s as niche as it sounds, but it also sounds truly original and full of weird, wonderful life.

FT$ is happy to be getting this record out to a slightly larger public who might be interested in the hot cyber-prog soundtrack to the robo-renaissance festivals of 2089. And we’re grateful to Greg, the monk pictured below, for allowing us to shoot this shot. Look out for some live performances of M&M this year!

08/22/2024

Dialect presents a mix of influences

“Music has opened up so many avenues of thought for me – to politics and literature – so in that sense the most important thing it can do is to give listeners access to the different ways that the world can be. that’s the gift of any imaginative art.” Andrew PM Hunt, aka Dialect, speaking with Abi Bliss for The Wire Magazine.

Andrew created a mix of influences, which is streaming now on The Wire’s site, including selections from Nasta Stepanović, Candace Natvig, Paul Dresher, David Behrman, and many more.

Photograph by Emma Case

08/21/2024

“A New Medallion for Egypt” from Gregory T.S. Walker’s Minstrels & Minimoogs

Ahead of Friday’s release on Freedom To Spend, we offer “A New Medallion for Egypt,” the closing track from the reissue of Gregory T.S. Walker’s Minstrels & Minimoogs, a cosmic-futuristic foray into oblique pop and baroque subversion conceived for a domed simulacrum and memorialized on a micro LP pressing in 1988.
Minstrels & Minimoogs is the fourth entry in Freedom To Spend’s uncommon¢ (uncommon sense) series, an open-ended endeavor that provides new meaning for rarefied recordings from music’s outermost fringe. We’re moving right through this small, hand assembled edition, so pre-order a copy before it’s gone.
08/15/2024

Discovery Zone on Audiotree Live

A few months back, Discovery Zone stopped by Audiotree to record a six song set highlighting some tracks from their latest record Quantum Web. Joined by Dave Biddle on sax, the duo explore DZ’s outer pop sounds and muse on the influence behind it. Check out the session on all platforms or in video form on Audiotree Live.

08/13/2024

Dialect Shares New Single + Video for "Born Through"

“Born Through” is the luminous second single emerging from Atlas of Green, the new album from Dialect, aka Andrew PM Hunt, and a spirited encircling of the album’s new mythic forms, imagined from the fragments of allegorical ruin. Saturated with the light of folk-like elation and a capsule of mechanical warmth, “Born Through” emanates the chimes and winds leading towards a possible new world. As Hunt notes about the album, “This is an alternative future to the one of endless growth but one which still holds space for hopes and dreams.”

“Born Through” is accompanied by a video directed by T Isom and Dialect. “I’ve always liked the idea of cartoons as a carrier signal for the ideas of the day, and perhaps also as a way of squeezing old stories into a more contemporary shape,” says Hunt. “For this video we dug through old archive documentaries about the origins of mankind to find imagery which spoke to our need to understand the world at an empirical level and then superimposed animation from a 1964 film about the World Fair to reflect our desire to dream and reimagine our past.”