Guy Mercier's Empty Mall

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Original 2025 t-shirt design by renowned artist Kerozen aka Stephane Prigent who runs the publishing outlet and space FLTMSTPC . This is the front design of the Mer Changeante 2xCD by Supermalprodelica and Blason. Silkscreened in white over Black

T-Shirt by Kerozen (Mer Changeante)

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Tori Kudo — Studio Village Hototoguiss 2007-2022 (Bruit Direct Disques/Archeion)

The elusive Japanese artist Tori Kudo visited the birthplace of haiku in the late aughts, setting up shop in a psychiatric hospital-turned-recording studio known as Studio Village Hototogisu. He visited the studio, run by a man named Mr. Tsuru, on a regular basis for 15 years. In his words, “About once or twice a month, I randomly select an instrument or device from his vast collection, gathers whoever happens to be around, usually his family, and in about two hours, we record and mix a piece.” This 45-track compilation presents the results of that collaboration, a document of extraordinary range and diversity.

Tori Kudo is well-known within the Japanese avant-gard, primarily as a founding member of the band Maher Shalal Hash Baz but also for solo work and collaborations with his wife, the poet Reiko Kudo. (Two really good interviews can be found at Toneglow and Moone Records.)

It's not clear what the connection between this music and the haiku form might be, except that the studio was named for a magazine founded by the acknowledged father of the modern haiku, Masaoka Shiki. Perhaps there’s no real link, although the tracks tend to be brief and evocative, getting their point across, like the 17-syllable poem, with a minimum number of notes and embellishments.

And yet, the second you make an observation about this music, it falls apart. Most of the cuts are quite concise, but hallucinatory “Fridays” runs on delicately, translucently, for eight full minutes. A large number are in the warped and eccentric folk idiom that Tori Kudo is best known for, but “What If I Never Speeded,” is frenetically raw rock and Jaki, a tribute to the Can drummer, Jaki Leibezeit, nods towards jazz with its wandering acoustic bass line. And most of these songs are originals, conceived in the moment by the avant-gard composer, but some of the most affecting, like Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Marc Bolan’s “Light of Love,” are covers.

Maybe the best summation you can make of a collection like this is that it’s its own universe. It is recognizably the work of one eccentric genius, a man of exacting standards, untrammeled curiosity and and wandering pitch. But it also contains many, many rooms, each distinct and separate from the others.

I’ve gotten fascinated with the idea of structured creativity lately, the phenomenon where artists create within a disciplined, even arbitrary practice, like Hemlock and her song-a-day regimen or Brian Dolphin and his six-hour-plus album-in-a-day recording sessions. The Studio Village Hototogisu recordings seem to be another very fruitful example of this impulse. Kudo set aside a time and place for creativity, and while he had total freedom to explore instruments and styles and structures, he had to do it in those hours, in that spot, under those conditions. It’s remarkable how freeing this discipline turned out to be, eliciting everything from Beatles-esque garage rock to spare poetry to fragile little folk fragments. Wonderful stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

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A good year for music if nothing else: Jennifer Kelly’s 2024 review

Ben Chasny came to VT in 2024, go figure.

Things have been feeling very end of the world for a few years now, and 2024 (especially from November on) only intensified my sense of doom. It’ll get worse, too, in 2025. The vilest, stupidest people on earth are in change, and oh boy, do they have a lot of ideas, all of them bad.

But you lived through last year, too, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to experience whatever hell 2025 brings. It’s scary shit, but also deeply tedious, so let’s talk about music instead.

Because music came through in a big way this year. There was so much of it, and so much that was great.

Live music, for instance, continued to flourish, even in very small markets like Western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire. Bang, right off the bat, we caught Makaya McCraven in February holding court at Brattleboro’s Vermont Jazz Center. With Junius Paul, Brandee Younger and Marquis Hill, he hit the highlights from 2022’s In these Times, mixing up trad jazz, improvisation and hip hop in an intricate mesh, and it was wonderful.

Makaya McCraven and friends

Now let’s jump ahead to May and the always remarkable Thing in the Spring, where Myriam Gendron (with Jim White and Marisa Anderson), Mark Ribot, Earth and many others visited Keene, NH. Wadada Leo Smith played an astonishing set with Shazad Ismaily…even more astonishing, he had to yell at the crowd for quiet.

I even had the chance to see a couple of bands that rarely play live. In August, my friend Chris Liberato booked the super-ish group Winged Wheel to play at a nondescript bar near Springfield Mass. It was revelatory, worth getting lost trying to find 91 in the middle of the night afterwards.

Winged Wheel

Then in November, right around the time, things started getting dark, I hit the lottery. First Haley Fohr and Bill Nace raised the spirits in Keene, a day later the NYC post-punk legends Love Child with Lupo Citta in Easthampton, and a couple of days after that, Ben Chasney and Tashi Dorji in Brattleboro in front of the towering pipe organ at Epsilon Spires.

Love Child

Tashi Dorji

Recorded music came in an avalanche in 2024, just so many good records, month after month after month. I narrowed my favorites down to a list of 42, harder than you’d think, and there are plenty of discs I enjoyed plenty that didn’t make the cut.

Top Ten

Rosali—Bite Down (Merge) My favorite all year long for Rosali’s lovely voice, the instant classic-ness of the songs and the kicking band in Mowed Sound.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Wild God (PIAS) What I’d really like is another Grinderman, but this lush, string-heavy iteration of the Cave art form is very fine in its own way, not least because it leans on the Bad Seeds more heavily than the last couple. Time for joy indeed.

The Cure—Songs for a Lost World (Polydor) It is not easy to crack my top five in November, but Robert Smith did it with the bleak, soul-stirring grandeur of this late-life epic. It doesn’t hurt that he still sounds exactly like he did in my misspent youth.

Oneida—Expensive Air (Joyful Noise) Oneida has been my favorite working band for decades, and this one follows the song-structured Success with more bangers but also more weirdness. Thalia Zedek sings on two tracks with her signature ragged power.

Miriam Gendron—Mayday (Thrill Jockey) These are just surpassingly beautiful songs about love and death, gorgeously played and sung.  Gendron continues to get more comfortable with her art, taking a few more well-worth-it steps from her folk music origins.

PYPY—Sacred Times (Goner) Unhinged post-punk from one of the best in Montreal’s thriving scene. “Lonely Striped Sock” crosses ESG with Delta Five and contains the craziest keyboard lick I’ve heard this year.

MJ Lenderman—Manning Fireworks (ANTI-) One of 2024’s consensus favorites, and for all that, more idiosyncratic and complicated than you’d expect. Genuinely intriguing writing coupled with an incendiary rock roar.

Cassandra Jenkins—My Light My Destroyer (Dead Oceans) A bigger, denser, more accomplished sound for Jenkins than on her magical debut, but no less quirkily intelligent for its beauty.

Mdou Moctar—Funeral for Justice (Matador) Mdou Moctar is maybe the best guitarist in rock music right now, and here’s the kicker, he’s not really in rock music. Searing, wrenching, politically charged Afro-rock from the master.

Another Dancer—I Try to Be Another Dancer (Bruit Direct Disques) This charmingly odd Brussels ensemble skips from detuned Lewsberg-style minimalism to glowing Stereolab raves. Unexpected and intoxicating.

The rest

Winged Wheel—Big Hotel (12XU)

Uranium Club—Infants Under the Bulb (Static Shock)

E—Living Waters (Silver Rocket)

Luppo Citta—S-T (12XU)

Six Organs—Time Is Glass (Drag City)

Des Demonas—Apocalyptic Boom Boom (In the Red)

Guided by Voices—Strut of Kings (GBV Inc.)

Weak Signal—Fine (12XU)

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Hear the Children/The Evidence (No Quarter)

Yasmin Williams—Acadia (Nonesuch)

Bill Mackay—Locust Land (Drag City)

Hard Quartet—S-T (matador)

The Bug Club—On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System (Sub Pop)

Black Pus—Terrestrial Seethings (Thrill Jockey)

Dummy—Free Energy (Trouble in Mind)

Horse Jumper of Love—Disaster Trick (Run for Cover)

Itasca—Imitation of War (Paradise of Bachelors)

West of Roan—Queen of Eyes (Spinster)

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg—All Gist (Paradise of Bachelors)

Workers Comp—S-T (Ever/Never)

Jessica Pratt—Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer)

Aluminum—Fully Beat (felte)

Mary Timony—Untame the Tiger (Merge)

Mount Eerie—Night Palace (P.W. Elverum & Sun)

Penny Arcade—Backwater Collage (Tapete)

Rail Band—S-T (Mississippi)

The Softies—The Bed I Made (Father/Daughter)

Thine Retail Simps—Strike Gold Strike Back Strike Out (Total Punk)

Unknowns—East Coast Low (Drunken Sailor)

Ava Mendoza—Circular Train (Palilia)

Ned Collette—Our Other History (ever/never)

Amelia Courthouse—broken things (Spinster)

The Osees—Sorc 80 (Castle Face)

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Visit Original Link

(bruit direct disques)

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Autumn has come : a video by Jared Leibowich. yeah!

Autumn has come (again): a video by Jared Leibowich. yeah!

In October last year, jared Leibowich’s “Secret spells” lp was released Jared Leibowich – secret spells It was Autumn People who heard it, loved this record People who have yet to hear it can do so now, as it has timeless qualities of its time Jared has made a new video to commemorate, to revive, to renew our love for this music Autumn has come video by Jared Leibowich it strikes me now…

Autumn has come : a video by Jared Leibowich. yeah!

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T-Shirt by Jonas Delaborde (Bruit Direct ラブクラブ)

Original 2024 design by famed artist, editor and scholar Jonas Delaborde. Logo of the soon to be launched CD sub-label Bruit Direct ラブクラブ (Love Club) . 2 versions available, Orange print on Sky blue fabric and Red print on Creme fabric in sizes S, M, L XL

T-Shirt by Jonas Delaborde Original 2024 design by famed artist, editor and scholar Jonas Delaborde. Actually the logo of the soon to be launched CD sub-label Bruit Direct ラブクラブ (Love Club) with already 3 upcoming releases in this handy format. 2 versions available, Orange print on Sky blue fabric and Red print on Creme fabric in sizes S, M, L and XL. Silkscreened by Severine at Institut…

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[dustedmagazine]

Kenji Kariu — Rain/Water (Bruit Direct Disques)

Kenji Kariu’s songs land oh so lightly. The lyrics (in Japanese) are barely breathed. The melodies waft through gentle arrangements like dandelion fluff. The songs refer quietly to other songs— opener “And Then There Was Light” has the ineffable bossa nova lilt of, say, “The Girl from Ipanema,” while breeze-y, beachy “Umbrella,” borrows a sing-song-y tea dance tune from 1920s Broadway—but don’t over rely on them. Keyboards twinkle, percussion shuffles, the artist croons, and all is weightless, well-lighted and faintly unreal.

This is Kariu’s fourth album, following a stint in OWKMJ. It feels a bit less fragmentary and experimental than 2021’s Sekai, with stronger melodies and lusher (though still quiet) arrangements. Like its predecessor, it draws from all sorts of soft, non-rock influences, French movie soundtracks, Brazilian beach café music, arch 1990s lounge revival and the airier iterations of Stereolab. If you wish the Sea and Cake was a tad less abrasive, Kenji Kariu might fit the bill.

From the title, you might infer an aqueous theme, and indeed, you wouldn’t be far off. Boats, umbrellas, bubbles, sand and water populate these effervescent concoctions. Listen to “Boat” rocking woozily on a sea of pop that stretches and distorts like a well-loved summer tape left too long in the car player. Or consider “Sand”’s sense of wonder and melancholy, Kariu’s voice drifting out over languid drum machine and keyboards. “Umbrella” opens with a splash and ends with seagulls; in the middle, it executes precise and well-behaved pirouettes at a seaside ballroom. “Water” separates into fat rounded, drops of vocal sound, dripping judiciously over a warm tangle of guitars, a bright chink of bells. The songs slip by without friction, all pleasure, no sting.

There is one song with a certain amount of distortion, the buzzy, floaty “Convenience Store” flirts with rock but backs away, the slush of cymbals muted under sweet, insinuating tunefulness. But mostly this music hovers and entices and dissolves into sweetness. By the end, you may not be sure what you just heard, only that it was pleasant and you might want to hear it again.

Jennifer Kelly

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Kenji Kariu - Water/ 狩生健志 - 水 Music Video

pre-order is up for "Rain / Water", Kenji Kariu's eagerly anticipated follow up to Sekai. here's a video for the track Water

pre-order is up for “Rain / Water”, Kenji Kariu’s eagerly anticipated follow up to Sekai. here’s a video for the track Water film　 監督・撮影 KALUN LEUNG　カルン　 https://kalun.jp/ cast キャスト VASYA GRONSKIY　ヴァーシャ・グロンスキー drone ドローン HAN FISCHER　ハン・フィッシャー costume 衣装 ALISA GORULEVA　アリサ・ゴルレヴァ 歌詞（English translation by KALUN LEUNG） preorder “rain / water” here!

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YOUR WARTIME STATUS SAYS WHAT

Writing this post and knowing that at this very moment the evil forces of destruction march into Rafah with the intent to pursue genocide, stopping at nothing, destructing everything and killing children is in itself difficult.

Writing this post and knowing that at this very moment the evil forces of destruction march into Rafah with the intent to pursue genocide, stopping at nothing, destructing everything and killing children is in itself difficult. But voicing our opposition to war and death, and support for peace, hoping/fighting for the end of apartheid and colonization, is still useful. so here’s “your wartime…

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guest show on Sad Tuesdays

bruit direct disques was invited to guest on the Sad Tuesdays radio show (kchung from Chinatown, LA) listen to it by clicking here and here’s the tracklist; Destroyer – the music loversDavid Bowie – big brotherPeter Hammill – Been alone so longMr. Mitch – VPN (feat. Palmestry)Taj Mahal – Why did you have to desert me ?Patti Smith – Piss factoryAccelerate with the mercurian – SecondhandKevin…

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Singalong III

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Singalong II

fight for world peace! fight capitalism!

Aus dem LandDas sich selbst zerstörtUnd uns den “way of life” diktiertDa kommt Reagan und bringt Waffen und TodUnd hört er FriedenSieht er rotEr sagt als Präsident von USAAtomkrieg? – JaBitteDort und da Ob PolenMittler OstenNicaragua Er will den EndsiegDas ist doch klar Doch wir wollen Sonne statt ReaganOhne Rüstung leben!Ob WestOb OstAuf Raketen muss Rost!Wir wollen Sonne statt ReaganOhne…

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Jared Leibowich in review

jared leibowich in review with his lp "secret spells" at dusted, still single and yellowgreenred yeah!

nice surprise, today and yesterday, that fantastic lp by mr. Leibowich got another batch of raving reviews Jennifer Kelly over at Dusted writes that Jared “has made an expansive, ebullient solo album here, meriting comparisons to the Papercuts, White Fence and Peel Dream Magazine and, even, once or twice, the Beach Boys in its full multi-tracked, multi-vocaled glory.” Doug Mosurock says…

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Jared Leibowich – Secret Spells LP (Bruit Direct)

RECOMMENDED

New work by a guy who always impresses with new works. Constantly surprised and overjoyed by whatever Jared throws down the pike; maaaaaybe there was a Zoltars LP I wasn't 100% about but who knows, he might not've been either! Secret Spells comes in between releases by new band The Infinites and resembles his most realized effort, strings dutifully chugging behind cascading stings of guitar and grace that hasn't always been within his realm, but it's working maybe better than ever. Ten songs that hit the midpoint between Brian Wilson and My Dad Is Dead's Mark Edwards, the stars firmly removed from his eyes and cataracting on yours. It sounds like his confidence has matched his levels of freedom and both are frankly thriving. Whenever I listen to this guy's work I can think of nothing else but that work. I don't drift and the songs stay with me for a good while after, like I've stared at a bright image and it's burned into whatever I see next. There's even a song about a grifter we all know and it's so resolute. Man. Jared Leibowich. (vinyl in the states available from https://thebusinessanacortes.com/shop/secret-spells-by-jared-leibowich-lp/ – ROW you can hit up http://bruit-direct.org or get digital/tape from the Bandcamp player above). (Doug Mosurock)

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Jared Leibowich — Secret Spells (Bruit Direct Disques)

Jared Leibowich’s songs sound much larger than bedroom pop, with their massed vocals and clanging, chiming guitars. The songwriter, who got his start with Austin bands including the Zoltars and the Infinites, has made an expansive, ebullient solo album here, meriting comparisons to the Papercuts, White Fence and Peel Dream Magazine and, even, once or twice, the Beach Boys in its full multi-tracked, multi-vocaled glory.

Consider, for instance, “Can I Hear Your Story?” a sugar rush of criss-crossing vocals and gauzily irresistible hook. Around Leibowich’s main vocal melody, a chorus of overdubbed descants swirl, filling out the space, as drums pound and guitars exult. It’s such a good song, and so very different from the guy-on-stool-with-guitar-moaning-about-his-love-life standard that solo, self-recorded pop often adheres to.

These are not, in general, confessional songs. The palette is much larger than Leibowich’s personal experiences; it explores imaginative visions that are not quite real. For instance, “Without Fail,” which opens the second side, is a third-person story song about a dangerous pied piper sort of performer. He captures his audience with words and doesn’t let them go. It billows and masses and lilts in soft-focus hookiness, very much in line with Jason Quever’s best work with Papercuts.

A few of the songs rock out a little harder, shaped by sharper guitars and rowdier drums. “Don’t You Fall Down” is one of these, a jagged garage pop gem that punches as hard as it daydreams.

It’s always difficult to put a finger on exactly what makes one album of guitar pop better than another, but this is a good one, eccentric and wistfully pretty and not at all limited by the format. Leibowich is thinking in larger terms — of choirs and orchestras and baroque poetry — and making that stuff out of what’s at hand.

Jennifer Kelly

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Lès Modernos live in Paris

Great night was had by all present at La Mécanique Ondulatoire where we had orgazided a release party for the Ciutats lp, with the fantastic participation of Yves Saint Rocher and Trigore From a green Corolla, to a Paris cave, to an unbalanced phone, to you Lès Modernos live in paris Ciutats release party 15 Février 2024 Untitled 13 août 2006 15% off with this coupon à revigorer le pop…

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Lès Modernos @ Wire

Soleil pour toi, off the album Ciutats is included in this month’s office ambience Stream a selection of tracks from releases we listened to during the making of our new issue.The Wire's latest Office Ambience playlist includes @BruitDirectDisq, @MuraillesMusic, @577Records, @fridahalo, @astspiritsrec, and more:https://t.co/uoe0cj3Xd1— The Wire Magazine (@thewiremagazine) February 13,…

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