New releases this week: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: These archival recordings of two extraordinary live performances takes you back to when New York City was a bohemian magnet, with low rent and spaces where artists could thrive. Recorded in Downtown in December 1985 and June 1984, the late, great Arthur Russell is captured performing at an intimate loft space known as Experimental Intermedia Foundation, which was run by Phil Niblock. Since the recordings are unedited, it does a really great job of simulating the experience and so if you close your eyes, it's easy to imagine Russell in the room right there in front of you. Of the numbers played, Russell's gifted avant-garde approach to cello is brilliantly done on 'Too Early To Tell'. And the spine-tingling, raw and deeply emotional 'That's The Very Reason' is arthouse folk at its finest. It epitomises the raw, spell-binding talent that Russell had to captivate a room. Hats off to those who have immortalized these very special shows.

Review: Deep Valley is a new collaborative work by Australian artists Seaworthy aka Cameron Webb and Matt Rosner and they came together for it during a week-long residency at Bundanon Art Museum in New South Wales. The property which was gifted to the Australian public by artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd in the 1990s offers a unique landscape along the Shoalhaven River and is surrounded by sandstone cliffs and diverse wildlife. Drawing inspiration from Boyd's belief that "you can't own a landscape," Deep Valley combines the inspiration of that setting with environmental recordings, guitars, piano, and electronic processing all of which aim to highlight the transient nature of ecosystems and encourage you to reconnect with the sounds of nature.

Review: Cherry Red's latest four-disc deep dive takes us on an extensive tour of the East and West German rock underground of the 1970s, a time when both countries developed their own distinctive takes on psychedelic, experimental and mind-altering rock music - and of course the decidedly cosmic sounds that would later be dubbed "kosmiche" and "krautrock". Across the four discs (and superb liner notes), they've got it all covered, from the heavy riffs and elongated solos of Massage, the wild psych-blues of Nosferatu and the ambient electronics of Klaus Schulze, to the stretched-out synth epics of Tangerine Dream, the out-there Indian exotica of Conrad Schnitzler, the dubby jams of Faust and the decidedly hallucinatory brilliance of My Solid Ground.