{"title":"Al Karpenter","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"musik-from-a-private-hell","title":"Musik from a Private Hell","description":"\u003cp\u003eVoice is an excess, a surplus of the body; it is at once outside and inside. It can be listened to peacefully, but it can also generate the anguish of a voice attempting to escape from language, setting the logos free in the wilderness, scavenging in the semiotic debris. We glimpse the wound, the fall into this private Hades, in the sounds of profane, everyday technologies, the changes and glissandos of banjos and cellos that tear up the tropes of Heavy Metal and Southern Rock -- forgotten welding, archeologies of industrial symbols beyond our reach. Only towards the end of the album do we experience nausea, on the final tracks, adjacent to psychedelic states fed by sinister efforts to tear out the internal organs and destroy the calm that came before in an effort to stop time. A record of songs dependent on a million bits of exhausted cultural knowledge, orchestrated in the sounds of a punitive intimacy, always surrounded by the ghostly presences that allow it to escape urban anxiety, sketching, in a warmer light, the Desert Always Yet to Come. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bruit Direct Disques","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50526040097099,"sku":"1128561","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d9f8f322-68b5-4cbc-a98f-98f9359a3d62_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1728038942"},{"product_id":"greatest-heads","title":"Greatest Heads","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGreatest Heads\u003c\/em\u003e is the fourth album by the radical Basque-Berlinesque group Al Karpenter. A deconstruction of structured “rock” music, here Al Karpenter re-imagine “the band” to explore the intersection between Free music, afro-beat, the avant garde and gonzo rock.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf Theodore Adorno wrote “To Write Poetry after Auschwitz is Barbaric” in 1949, Al Karpenter attempts to answer the difficult question today; what kind of music can be done in the face of a genocide? Álvaro Matilla, Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini \u0026amp; Mattin’sresponse to the planet’s slipping into a vortex of hate is to create a music ecstatic, a music of protest bursting with multiple musical languages and glossaries, full of overlapping histories and thrilling tensions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eGreatest Heads\u003c\/em\u003e posits a plurality of musics both in opposition and intertwined: Al Karpenter play rock instruments pulled apart in the studio in post-production. Distorted rhythm chunks bit-crushed and dissipated, segments of freedom oppressed by waves of sound invading from every direction. The interplay between the chief instrumentalists and renowned, storied sound artist Mattin creates something akin to ESP freedom-seekers Cro Magnon playing in Miles Davis’ early 70s groups, The Los Angeles Free Music Society tightening up into a clenched fist of plunderphonics and runaway percussion.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe Are All Karpenters opens \u003cem\u003eGreatest Heads\u003c\/em\u003e with the most straight-forward song refrain of the record accompanied by a band that soon crash into eruption, imagining Sun City Girlsin full free rock mode. The modulating synth sound soon sucks the band into its wake to create a spine-chilling climax of distorted sound, made fully orgasmic with mastering engineer Rashad Becker’s attention to detail. On Izugarrizko Buruak (\u003cem\u003eGreatest Heads\u003c\/em\u003e), Matilla intones in Basque over a mangled distorto-beat. A Brand New Astraphobia creates a black space for a heavily processed guitar to blow up before falling to earth at night, a gentle figure serenading the coming end.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn Side B, the band begins by being masticated by a brutal phaser, squelching and stretching the music into new territories. The overt message of Stop The Genocide! is besieged by violence before Worm City aggressively samples the ghosts of soul music, mixing in noise bursts, prepared piano and swiping, abstracted sound. Epic closer Perfect Love feels like a beat poetry performance on a burnt world, still grasping for community, for home, for some sort of human love. A Mad love, then; an angry love fuelled by solidarity and collaboration.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe band’s cascading layers of references and polyglottal musics attempt to create the perfect lover, alive with rage and disorientating ecstasy: Al Karpenter.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Night School","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51612800188747,"sku":"R5417-9618","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed-2025-04-09T130919.666.jpg?v=1744200567"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/al-karpenter.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}