Baba Yaga's Hut Playlist

Ex-Easter Island Head - Mallet Guitars Three
Low Point 2013

Mallet Guitars Three is the eagerly awaited third release by Liverpool-based ensemble Ex-Easter Island Head.

Following on from 2012’s critically acclaimed Mallet Guitars Two / Music for Moai Hava, Mallet Guitars Three is a thirty minute, four movement summation of the group's singular approach to creating music for solid bodied electric guitar, percussion and other instruments.

The album was written over a period of eighteen months and refined during performances alongside contemporaries including Barn Owl, James Blackshaw, Oval and Grumbling Fur, in venues as diverse as a library on the Scottish Isle of Iona to London's Union Chapel. Recorded live in a former nursing home turned group headquarters, the piece expands the open-tuned, guitar-struck minimalism of previous releases into an ambitious suite of impressionistic, propulsive electric chamber music.

Utilising four prepared ‘Third Bridge' guitars and three players, the group's signature interlocking rhythms are configured into a dense array of clicking call-and-response patterns and droning down-tuned strings. The treated guitars create a complex array of choral overtones and crystalline harmonics, sounding in unison with an array of handbells and prayer bowl percussion.

From moments of intimate amp-hum ambience to clattering polyrhythms, the piece exploits the possibilities of metal-bowed strings to create radiant microtonal passages of harmony and discord.

Resulting in an otherworldly progression through melodic stasis and resolution akin to the vocal works of Ligeti and the infinite drones of the Theatre of Eternal Music, Mallet Guitars Three is the most definite statement of the group's unique vision for experimental guitar music to date.

Ex - Easter Island Head - Mallet Guitars Three First Movement

Artist: TOMAGA
Album: Futura Grotesk

HITD 023
Limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl (w/ mp3 download voucher)
 Release date: 12th November 2014

Label, orders: www.handsinthedarkrecords.com

:::TRACKLIST::: 
Side T
1. Alphabet Of Night (03:51)
2. Long Term Green (03:29)
3. Malintesi (02:31)
4. Futura Grotesk (04:18)

Side M
1. Taste The Indifference (03:26)
2. Mountain Opener (07:51)
3. Days Like They Were Before (04:38)

All tracks composed, perfomed & recorded by TOMAGA
during winter 13-14 in Hackney, London
Artwork by Ross Adams
Mastering by Chris Potter

TOMAGA is Valentina Magaletti (Drums, Vibraphone, Percussion, Mystery Objects, Voice) & Tom Relleen (Synthesizers, Bass guitar, Organ, Mbira, Drum machine, Phonography, Recording & Production)
www.tomaga.bandcamp.com/

TOMAGA - Futura Grotesk

Taken from the album 'Mirrors Fold', out now on Tigertrap Records.

Gum Takes Tooth - White Fear

The first single to be taken from the forthcoming album, Upper Hell, released worldwide on Howie B's HB Recordings label on April 27th.

Album Release: ‘Upper Hell’
Release Date: 27th April 2015
Label: HB Recordings

“ timeless,organic and quite simply beautiful “ – Norman Records - 10/10

“ an enlightening, everlasting album” – The List - 5/5

“a quiet, emotional power” – The Scotsman - 4/5

“Deliriously inventive” – Clash Magazine 

'Album of the Month’ – Monorail Records

“…Ela Orleans is a revelation. Both utterly timeless and of the moment…” Rough Trade 

“She is Moondogmatic in her intransigent commitment to producing compositions of subtlety and incongruent beauty. These are polysemous confections which make you feel that you are listening to pop music for the first time again” – Time Out NY

‘Upper Hell’ is the sixth album to be released by pop noir collagist Ela Orleans. Produced by Howie B, it’s due out on 27th April 2015 and will be released on his new label, HB Recordings. Howie was introduced to Ela’s music by his sister and was so wowed that he offered to produce an album for her. She is also the first artist signing to HB Recordings.

Inspired by Dante’s ‘Inferno’, ‘Upper Hell’ is an intriguing, cerebral body of work that sees Orleans push her pastoral pop roots into more cinematic terrain, experimenting with carefully considered sound art segments and complex electronic textures.

Ela has been flirting with the dance aesthetic for a while under another moniker TRACT so Howie’s offer to produce this album allowed her to explore that further with this album.

Orleans is a Polish musician now based in Glasgow. She was a member of the genre defying Glasgow band Hassle Hound, has played with various luminaries of the New York experimental and noise scenes and is a composer for the screen and theatre.

During her career this hugely prolific artist has released five solo albums and collaborated on several more. Her 2012 album ‘Tumult in Clouds’ won the Mercury alternative the Dead Albatross Prize in 2013 and her work has won her admirers in The Pastels, David Lynch, Thurston Moore and Ian Rankin.



Ela Orleans - The Sky and the Ghost

Arriving in 1975 on own label Hearthan, Pere Ubu’s debut seminal single was initially written during the short-lived early days of Rocket From The Tombs. When the group disbanded David Thomas was eager to release ‘Final Solution’ and ’30 Seconds Over Tokyo’.

Taking its name from a Ted Lawson and Robert Considine book about the 1942 Doolittle Raid the song is about a World War II bomber squad’s “suicide ride”. “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” is “seven minutes of apocalyptic synth storms, metallic guitars and unnerving vocals” Tom Pinnock - Uncut Dec 2015.
Written during a rehearsal, ‘Heart Of Darkness’ resulted in ‘Final Solution’ getting axed from the B-side.

Limited to 1000 copies this special release for Record Store Day 2016, these tracks are as vital today as they were forty years ago.


Unleash The Misery

Evil Blizzard