When Cold Spring Records brought together the talents of Sun Ra and Merzbow, the opportunity to design something distinctive was too great to pass up. Cold Spring’s Justin Mitchell negotiated rare and unreleased tracks from the Sun Ra archive which were then remixed and treated by Merzbow’s Masami Akita into five pieces that turn Ra’s sounds into crushing noise whilst retaining his sense of space and innovation. Strange City was released as a matt laminated digipak CD and on 180gm black vinyl, with a limited 200 on yellow vinyl for Cold Spring mailorder customers only. Different music was featured on each format, with Livid Sun Loop and Granular Jazz Part 2 on the CD and…

2015 saw the release of Eleven Mirrors to the Light, bringing to a conclusion what had evolved into a trilogy of releases by legendary percussionist Z’EV on Cold Spring Records. Writing the press release for Eleven Mirrors gave me cause to reflect on the previous two releases, and where the third sat in relation to it. “Z’EV completes an alchemical exploration of Concord and Dissonance that began with the cosmological equations of Sum Things and then clasped the elemental quintet of air, water, fire, earth and spirit in A Handful of Elements. Now, with Eleven Mirrors to the Light, Z’EV plays with the intersection of light and dark, catching waves…

This survey of recent and not so recent work consists of several Cold Spring releases and begins with a picture disc and CD release from the legendary Hijokaidan. This was quite the honour and it was made all the better by being provided with some rather lovely gearshots to work with. These shots of wires and mixers (and an orange keyboard of some kind) provided the focus for the two sides of the picture disc, which contained the four parts of the studio-recorded title track. The CD, presented in a digisleeve and containing a track each from two live shows, was adorned with thumbnails of Hijokaidan performing. She Spread Sorrow…

Some of our recent work has included Recoiled, a collection of remixes of Nine Inch Nails tracks by Coil on Cold Spring. Remixed from original multi-tracks and DATs  sent by Trent Reznor to Peter Christophersen and Danny Hyde, part of which was appeared in the soundtrack for the film Se7en. Featuring the treated photographs of Marius Andrei Dima, Recoiled was issued in multiple formats: a CD digipack, black vinyl, limited brown/black splatter vinyl, and a forthcoming picture disc version.

There have been a couple of recent releases on Cold Spring, with three live Psychic TV albums and the debut from Mesektet. The Psychic TV albums include shows from the Haçienda, the Marquee Club in London and at the Hammersmith Palais (with the release taking its name from that of the event, The Fabulous Feast ov Flowering Light). The cover art for The Fabulous Feast ov Flowering Light incorporates Val Denham’s original t shirt design for the event. Both the Marquee and the  Fabulous Feast ov Flowering Light releases include 8 page booklets with sometimes never seen archival photos of the performances Towards a Bleak Sun is the debut from Dutch dark ambient act…

There have been a couple of recent releases on Cold Spring. For a vinyl and slipcase-CD reissue of Blood and Sand from The Grey Wolves, we took the original artwork from 2002 and remixed it, adding a strong typographic focus using Karbon Slab Stencil; a face that has a suggestion of military stencil but still with a modern typographic polish. A Handful of Elements, Z’EV’s follow-up to his previous Cold Spring album Sum Things, incorporates photographs shot at Cape Palliser near Ngawi, featuring rocks, sky and sea to express the idea of the elements found in the track titles. Also recently released is Lost Corridors, the debut album from Tunnels of…