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Search Result for Genre EXPERIMENTAL
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LP
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KRXN 026LP
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$27.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/23/2024
Presenting the second thematic volume on the Aquapelagos series -- a collection of split LPs where selected artists offer their own take into water surrounded cultures and communities. After the initial release of the anthology compilation Aquapelago in 2022 and the split LP Atlantico by Lagoss & Banha da Cobra, Keroxen introduces a unique collaboration in the series in the shape of no other than two improvising giants, Mike Cooper and Pierre Bastien. This second volume blows the lid wide open with a sound journey inspired by the equally majestic and mysterious Indian Ocean, a wide space of open ocean bounded by Africa, to the west, Asia to the north and north-west and Australia, to the south west.
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GG 461CD
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$19.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/2/2024
"Originally, Hastings of Malawi were Heman Pathak, David Hodes, and John Grieve. They recorded the album in one night in 1981 with no plan and no idea of what they were doing. They played drums, clarinet, synthesizer and piano but also made use of things that they found lying around the studio -- old records, cookery books, telephone directories and a telephone. The recordings were played down the phone to randomly dialed numbers and the reactions added to the recording. All three had been involved in the recording of the first Nurse with Wound album Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella and had contributed metal scrapings, piano, effects, clarinet and guitar during the session. The band split up after the first album but reformed 35 years later with a string of new albums. In June 2023, Hastings Of Malawi were invited to play the Klang 30 festival in Vienna, Austria. This was only the second time the band graced a stage, 38 years after the first performance. This outstanding rare opportunity was recorded and is now presented on CD."
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LP
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ST 1042LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/26/2024
"After her stunning collaborations with Vincent Royer (for Mode Records), Jim O'Rourke, and Christoph Heemann (both for Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle Records) Brunhild Ferrari returns to the scene with this new solo album. Extérieur-jour is comprised of two previously unreleased compositions, one being the title track the album is named after and the other 'Le Piano Englouti (version original).' Extérieur-jour translates to 'Outside Day,' and indicates an instruction for a film scene, a piece of cinéma pour l'oreille, a movie for the ears. It was recorded at Luc Ferrari's Atelier Post Billig in January and February 2014. 'Le Piano Englouti' ('The Sunken Piano'), another electroacoustic composition which was realized over a period of fourteen years between 1996 and 2010, also brings forth cinematic elements with sound sources recorded in places as diverse as a Greek island by the noisy Agean Sea, a Pachinko place and a quiet island in Japan. It comes across as a meditation on the loss and reappearance of memory and silence. The graphics for the album sleeve were created by the late Wolfgang Meyer Tormin, artist and composer and also father of Brunhild Ferrari. The album was mastered for vinyl from the original source by Jim O'Rourke."
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BR 134LP
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$34.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/26/2024
This album compiles a series of sound pieces produced by the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1933 -- Lima, 2021) during the 1970s. It includes works that were part of various artistic projects, mainly sound installations, as well as pieces commissioned to musicians and inspired by her work. This album thus embodies an approach to a sound universe that has accompanied Burga's very personal work, which has transcended the limits of the artistic medium and disciplines. In the last decade, Teresa Burga's work has been present in numerous retrospectives and anthologies, as well as in various critical studies, which has cemented her standing in the art world, both in her home country and internationally. A founding member of the avant-garde art collective, Arte Nuevo, Burga began painting and then embarked on an experimental path influenced by conceptual art. Her works emphasized her status as a woman in an eminently male art scene, as well as her experience as a public worker in the national tax administration system, which familiarized her with the bureaucratic language of reports and records -- a distinctive feature of her artistic style. Her work has explored multiple mediums and the use of technological resources, which can be seen in her light installations, videos, pieces that allude to computer processes, and sound installations, highlighting the place which women occupied in a world of technological mediations. This album includes the sound pieces "Estructura Informe Corazón" (Structure Informe Corazón) (1972) and "4 mensajes" (4 Messages) (1974), composed of heart sounds and distorted television signals. It also includes the interpretation of the conceptual score "Esctructura Propuesta Sonido" (Structure Proposal Sound I) (1978), based on the poem "Cruz y Ficción" by Blanca Varela, in versions by the Peruvian Nicolás Wangeman, and by the Argentineans Alma Laprida and Alan Courtis. Also included is the piece "Borges" (2017), a commission by Burga to the Peruvian composer Jan Diego Malachowski, for the installation of the same name, here presented in a synthesizer version by Laprida and Courtis. The publication includes a booklet with extensive notes by curator and researcher Luis Alvarado, as well as extensive visual documentation. This album is published by Buh Records with the support of Proyecto AMIL, who have joined efforts to develop a collection dedicated to presenting fundamental Peruvian works that operate at the borders of visual arts and sound.
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SNS 025CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/12/2024
Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest. Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France. It is composed of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the '70s and '80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document recordist Michel's tastes in music and radio programs of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations. In the composition, family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.
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SNS 026CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/12/2024
Spuren & Gegenworte began with a quasi-telepathic collaboration between Kohei Matsunaga and Ralf Wehowsky. Both recorded a track on May 3, 2021, from 8:00 PM to 8:10 PM. These recordings were subsequently transformed, combined, juxtaposed, and further modified over the course of several months, resulting in the completion of the four pieces on the CD. Spuren & Gegenworte can be translated as "traces and antonyms," opening up a wide range of interpretations. "Traces" may refer to the remnants of the original sounds that have been transformed in the process of reworking, or it can symbolize the cultural and musical influences that can be discerned. "Antonyms" oscillates between contrasting/contradictory and complementary meanings. Of course, other interpretations are also possible. The four titles are indicated as Japanese terms on the cover: 痕跡、対立、変動、補完. They stand for the themes of traces, confrontation, fluctuation, completion.
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BNSD 080X-LP
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LP version. Color vinyl. The title of the Lau Nau's tenth album, Aphrilis, derives from the Latin word aperire, meaning "to open." A fitting verb for the month of the year it is closely associated with -- April. And while the images of plants and blossoms coming back to colorful life after a long, cold winter feels appropriate when listening to the rich and lustrous bloom of music on Aphrilis, another definition of open feels even more apt. For under the abundance lies the memory of times of austerity, the friction of hard choices, the acceptance that nothing is fixed and the future is unknown. This literal and metaphorical exploration of complexity and contradiction makes Aphrilis a multi-dimensional antidote for our troubled times, one that emphasizes the quiet and communal over noise and spectacle. Laura Naukkarinen, the Finnish artist behind this project, has long kept her mind and spirit open to whatever sounds and creative ideas felt appropriate for the moment. For the past six years that has meant primarily working with modular synthesis. Running parallel to this work, however, has been a continued exploration of acoustic instruments and group performances with her trio Lau Nau ja Seitsemäs Taivas. Aphrilis arrives then like fresh growth in a creative season cycle. A companion to her brilliant 2017 release Poseidon, the album, says Naukkarinen, "felt like a needed moment to embrace songs with lyrics again." And through the creation of this work, she remained open not only to her own creative muse, but also the input of her chosen collaborators. Each player on Aphrilis -- Matti Bye on celesta and synths, Pekko Käppi on jouhikko, Hermanni Yli-Tepsa on violin and contrabass, Topias Tiheäsalo on electric guitar, Samuli Kosminen (Múm) on various instruments -- was given free reign to arrange their own parts to accompany Naukkarinen's compositions. Kosminen's lush fingerprint can also be heard in the mixing and production of the album, as with Poseidon six years ago. The moniker of this project may be taken from Naukkarinen's own name, but Lau Nau feels more like a band than ever before. RIYL: Múm, Amina, Björk, Espers, Julia Holter, Ólöf Arnalds, Sigur Ros.
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GB 143LP
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LP version. Haunting in situ recordings from Parchman Farm maximum security prison in Mississippi. Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project) recorded the prison's Sunday gospel service and the results are unforgettable. The performances range from solo acapella to a floor-shaking electric band. The repertoire includes both traditional and newly penned spirituals. Some Mississippi Sunday Morning is an unfiltered and deeply resonant journey into a musical world rarely seen or heard. The notorious Parchman Prison has a rich musical history with Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison, and Elvis Presley's father Vernon Presley having been former residents. Mississippi's oldest penitentiary, Parchman was founded in 1901 and has one of the highest prisoner mortality rates in the nation as well as experiencing ongoing riots. Due to restrictions on video and photos, the only artifact from this meeting are the sounds -- making the voices all the more ethereal and ghostly. One man's voice was so deep, it sounded like the Mississippi River singing -- as if Barry White were a soprano. Another freestyled a rap about the shame he feels for having caused pain to his mother and others due to his actions. Another was a 73-year-old, former "rock and roll" singer who'd survived prison, become a chaplain, and found God. A veil of sadness seemed to shroud. The singers' voices softened and textured by the inescapable regret that their environment confronts them with. Most songs were covers of Gospel standards, but delivered so imbued with subtext that they were transformed almost unrecognizably from the source material. One of the beauties of the experience was that it was a successful integration of white and black inmates, whose services are often held separately due to racial tensions. As the men beamed, hugged and hi-fived one another in celebration, Chaplain Sidney beamed, "The making of this record has brought much needed encouragement and hope to the men here at Parchman." These were voices unchained, if only for those few hours. Expressing a vocal breadth of freedom otherwise denied and restrained. Recorded 100% live without overdubs at Parchman maximum security prison's Sunday morning service.
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MP 067CD
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During February 22nd, 2022, two years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mattin and Ashra Sheshadri took audio snippets from their everyday lives documenting their homes and surrounding urban environments, their intellectual interests and their musical tastes. They also gathered pictures with our phones. Some of the audio sources were processed, some were not. Here you get slices of their lives from two different cities, New York and Berlin -- a glimpse of the fragmentation of the times through a broken sonic diary entry.
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LP
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BNSD 080LP
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The title of the Lau Nau's tenth album, Aphrilis, derives from the Latin word aperire, meaning "to open." A fitting verb for the month of the year it is closely associated with -- April. And while the images of plants and blossoms coming back to colorful life after a long, cold winter feels appropriate when listening to the rich and lustrous bloom of music on Aphrilis, another definition of open feels even more apt. For under the abundance lies the memory of times of austerity, the friction of hard choices, the acceptance that nothing is fixed and the future is unknown. This literal and metaphorical exploration of complexity and contradiction makes Aphrilis a multi-dimensional antidote for our troubled times, one that emphasizes the quiet and communal over noise and spectacle. Laura Naukkarinen, the Finnish artist behind this project, has long kept her mind and spirit open to whatever sounds and creative ideas felt appropriate for the moment. For the past six years that has meant primarily working with modular synthesis. Running parallel to this work, however, has been a continued exploration of acoustic instruments and group performances with her trio Lau Nau ja Seitsemäs Taivas. Aphrilis arrives then like fresh growth in a creative season cycle. A companion to her brilliant 2017 release Poseidon, the album, says Naukkarinen, "felt like a needed moment to embrace songs with lyrics again." And through the creation of this work, she remained open not only to her own creative muse, but also the input of her chosen collaborators. Each player on Aphrilis -- Matti Bye on celesta and synths, Pekko Käppi on jouhikko, Hermanni Yli-Tepsa on violin and contrabass, Topias Tiheäsalo on electric guitar, Samuli Kosminen (Múm) on various instruments -- was given free reign to arrange their own parts to accompany Naukkarinen's compositions. Kosminen's lush fingerprint can also be heard in the mixing and production of the album, as with Poseidon six years ago. The moniker of this project may be taken from Naukkarinen's own name, but Lau Nau feels more like a band than ever before. RIYL: Múm, Amina, Björk, Espers, Julia Holter, Ólöf Arnalds, Sigur Ros.
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CD
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GB 143CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/15/2023
Haunting in situ recordings from Parchman Farm maximum security prison in Mississippi. Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project) recorded the prison's Sunday gospel service and the results are unforgettable. The performances range from solo acapella to a floor-shaking electric band. The repertoire includes both traditional and newly penned spirituals. Some Mississippi Sunday Morning is an unfiltered and deeply resonant journey into a musical world rarely seen or heard. The notorious Parchman Prison has a rich musical history with Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison, and Elvis Presley's father Vernon Presley having been former residents. Mississippi's oldest penitentiary, Parchman was founded in 1901 and has one of the highest prisoner mortality rates in the nation as well as experiencing ongoing riots. Due to restrictions on video and photos, the only artifact from this meeting are the sounds -- making the voices all the more ethereal and ghostly. One man's voice was so deep, it sounded like the Mississippi River singing -- as if Barry White were a soprano. Another freestyled a rap about the shame he feels for having caused pain to his mother and others due to his actions. Another was a 73-year-old, former "rock and roll" singer who'd survived prison, become a chaplain, and found God. A veil of sadness seemed to shroud. The singers' voices softened and textured by the inescapable regret that their environment confronts them with. Most songs were covers of Gospel standards, but delivered so imbued with subtext that they were transformed almost unrecognizably from the source material. One of the beauties of the experience was that it was a successful integration of white and black inmates, whose services are often held separately due to racial tensions. As the men beamed, hugged and hi-fived one another in celebration, Chaplain Sidney beamed, "The making of this record has brought much needed encouragement and hope to the men here at Parchman." These were voices unchained, if only for those few hours. Expressing a vocal breadth of freedom otherwise denied and restrained. Recorded 100% live without overdubs at Parchman maximum security prison's Sunday morning service.
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LP
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HOL 106RE-LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/8/2023
"I have worked together with sheep before," says Henning Christiansen, introducing the performance he did in front of the Brucknerhaus in Linz in July 1988. But this time he went beyond, building a "Concert-Castle" with hay blocks where thirty sheep could perform music. Another time the animals -- Christiansen's obsession and passion -- become the musical instruments used for his compositions. Schafe statt Geigen (Sheep Instead of Violins, 1988) and "Verena" Vogelzymphon (Bird Symphony, 1990) first appeared as a small CD edition issued by Galerie Bernd Klüser in 1991. Both works, each one occupying a full side of this LP edition, extend from one of Christiansen's long standing conceptual strategies -- deploying recordings of animals as stand-ins for musical instruments, sheep and birds respectively. While each work allows these sources to take the natural lead, at times masquerading as field recordings, both feature subtle tonal and electronic interventions by the composer, creating strange and brilliant compositions which shift the terms and subjects of music as they were long understood. Accompanied by a twenty-page booklet featuring drawings and texts by Henning Christiansen, as well as pictures of the performance by René Block.
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CD
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SHELTER 147CD
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$16.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/8/2023
Trances, Jules Reidy's follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of -- or is it away from? -- a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances' primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in just intonation. Reidy's combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions' sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy's vocal interjections -- their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible -- are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy's picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy's compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting.
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10LP Box
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DIALP 926BOX
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$360.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/8/2023
10 LP box set version. Includes hand-numbered certificate, 10 LPs in faithful replicas of the original covers and polylined inner sleeves, an 80-page LP-sized book in English, all housed in a custom lavish linen box; edition of 1000. Over the last few years, the Italian imprint, Dialogo, has showed a remarkable dedication to the history of experimental music via reissues of seminal artefacts from the Cramps catalog, and important albums by Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Enrico Rava, and others. This initiative now takes on a towering scale with the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno's Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. A truly groundbreaking body of recordings - many of which have remained out of print and difficult to find for decades - it contains some of the most important, influential, and enduring music to emerge during the second half of the 20th Century, which collectively reconfigured the terms of minimalism and laid the groundwork for the emerging movement of ambient music over its short, three-year run. Each box set contains all of Obscure's albums, completely remastered by Andrea Marutti and housed in faithful mini-replicas of their original covers and liner notes, as well as a 130-page booklet, this historic collection marks the first time such a seminal series has received a complete repress. This is certainly one of the year's most interesting, essential, and widely anticipated releases, stunningly produced with the complete involvement of all the artists or their estates. When viewed collectively, the Obscure catalog reveals a remarkable, and previously unexplored counterpoint -- bridging the United Kingdom and the American West Coast -- to the dominant threads of minimal and experimental music, centered in New York that had long dominated the public consciousness. This historic collection marks the first time the seminal Obscure catalog has received a complete repress; simply a dream come true. Featuring Gavin Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, Brian Eno, David Toop, Max Eastley, Jan Steele, John Cage, Michael Nyman, The Penguin Café Orchestra, John White, Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton, and Harold Budd.
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LP
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HOL 125LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/8/2023
Mediterranean Music Water (Mare nostrum in moedium terrae) Op. 203, a never before issued tape composition, belongs to a body of work embarked upon during the 1980s and '90s connected to Sicily, the other most notable and available being Op. 201 L'Essere Umano Errabando, La Voca Errabando, issued by The Henning Christiansen Archive in 2020. These works were an extension of Ursula and Henning Christiansen's meeting and befriending the Sicily based couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, with whom they regularly visited and collaborated. Like its predecessor, the aforementioned Op. 201, Mediterranean Music Water Op. 203 is a conceptualization of abstract theatricality at the connection of place and its relationship to the sea. Performed by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen and recorded at a small performing arts theatre in Erice, Sicily -- Teatro Gebel Hamed -- during December of 1991, the abstract for this work reads: "In the morning (after the storm), on the beach. The sea has thrown some things on the beach. Blue light -- some mist? On the ground. Ursula's slides on the wall. Henning is rolling from the background of the stage slowly, very slowly, towards, in a fish net. I come in looking for the things the sea has left and discover him. I roll him out of the net, he's nearly dead, and try to get life in him. Light in the background in rainbow colours. Ursula wears a partlett dress, as a siren." These images lay a foundation and context for the sounds that emerge over the album's two sides, a fascinating conjunction between the power of water and the human spirit. Through the processing of heavy delay and reverb, we encounter the howling utterances of violin tones, vocalizations, and countless unplayable instrumental and non-instrumental sound sources, gathering in a vast and sprawling serious of sonorous expanses that seem to echo the power, movements, and myths tied to the Mediterranean.
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10CD BOX
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DIACD 926BOX
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$147.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/8/2023
Over the last few years, the Italian imprint, Dialogo, has showed a remarkable dedication to the history of experimental music via reissues of seminal artefacts from the Cramps catalog, and important albums by Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Enrico Rava, and others. This initiative now takes on a towering scale with the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno's Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. A truly groundbreaking body of recordings - many of which have remained out of print and difficult to find for decades - it contains some of the most important, influential, and enduring music to emerge during the second half of the 20th Century, which collectively reconfigured the terms of minimalism and laid the groundwork for the emerging movement of ambient music over its short, three-year run. Issued in a deluxe CD edition of 1,000 copies, each box set contains all of Obscure's albums, completely remastered by Andrea Marutti and housed in faithful mini-replicas of their original covers and liner notes, as well as a 130-page booklet, this historic collection marks the first time such a seminal series has received a complete repress. This is certainly one of the year's most interesting, essential, and widely anticipated releases, stunningly produced with the complete involvement of all the artists or their estates. When viewed collectively, the Obscure catalog reveals a remarkable, and previously unexplored counterpoint -- bridging the United Kingdom and the American West Coast -- to the dominant threads of minimal and experimental music, centered in New York that had long dominated the public consciousness. This historic collection marks the first time the seminal Obscure catalog has received a complete repress; simply a dream come true. Featuring Gavin Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, Brian Eno, David Toop, Max Eastley, Jan Steele, John Cage, Michael Nyman, The Penguin Café Orchestra, John White, Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton, and Harold Budd.
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LP
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SHELTER 147LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/8/2023
LP version. Trances, Jules Reidy's follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of -- or is it away from? -- a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances' primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in just intonation. Reidy's combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions' sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy's vocal interjections -- their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible -- are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy's picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy's compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting.
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RM 4208CD
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A note From Fabio Perletta: "This release borrows its title Nessun Legame con la Polvere (No Attachment To Dust) from a Zen story as well as from a small wooden box, namely one of ten sculptures of my project I Fiori Non Vedono Mai I Propri Semi (Flowers Don't Ever See Their Own Seeds). This artwork was exhibited in 2020 at Pollinaria's forest, Italy as part of Aequusol Autumnus MMXX. The exhibition had no sound. It is now clear that life, the matter we are made of, and the objects we use every day cannot be considered entities in their own right but rather as relationships between these things, the way they affect each other. Even their own tangibility and particular properties are nothing but the way they influence and act on other things. It is a perspective that quantum physics has adopted for many years, but also the basis of our biology, of our feelings. When we perceive the world we establish a strictly localized perspective which in turn can generate a more extended and widespread resonance within and around us. Nessun Legame con la Polvere is a web of mutual influences; encounters that come and go forever; sounds that intersect with others in unpredictable ways, fragments sedimented over time and resurfaced, personal happenings that unwittingly steered the rudder towards one course rather than another. Nessun Legame con la Polvere is a meditation on lost friends, death and its counterpart, the extraordinary force of life. Although the title of this work seems to betray what I have stated so far, it is in its paradoxical, bizarre riddle that I learnt to really appreciate the value of things. I embraced a perspective that contemplates life's complexity in a broader sense, without looking for a purpose, an alleged answer to our existence, a meaning or God. Having no attachment to dust opens up to possibilities, it welcomes likelihoods. I hope that this work can generate some light while listening, and create new relationships between you and the shadows of the world, their ripples and little openings, between the infinitely small and the unknowable vastness of the universe."
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RM 4218CD
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A note from Kate Carr: "All the birds I never recorded, and some I did. Re-imagined. Stretched and stuttering, glitching and morphing, swirling and sputtering. Artifact and performance, digital bits all. I imagine them swooping and calling in these scaffolds of sound I have made for them. Gleaming amid technicolor jungles. Alive, unassailable; in a world we haven't ruined. In a field recording I never made."
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ZORN 102LP
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In addition to the unique musical proposals and the large body of work that they have developed separately, Amelia Cuni and Werner Durand have been performing together as a duo as well as in collaborations (Tonaliens, Born of Six) for more than 20 years. Fusing her Indian Raga singing in the Dhrupad style with his minimalist and experimental approach, they have expanded the reach of their soundworlds as well as proposed new paths for contemporary music. In this occasion, Uli Hohmann joins them in a range of hand drums from the Middle East and North Africa, plus a dulcimer-sounding hammered guitar. Durand's various self-made wind instruments, soprano sax, and blown kalimba shine along with Cuni's astounding vocals, which are sometimes sung through a mirliton (a medieval type of kazoo). Clearing is the trio's first published recording. With a condensing sound going from Buddhist morning chants down to Indian festive traditional music, the title track, which closes the album, is the most vibrant of all, permeating a bit of commotion through buzzing drones and galloping percussion. Without disorder, yet without measure. Clearing is therefore this shuttle into the distance, this space that weaves, unites, and tenses the different cords that we are made up of. When the clouds advance silently, gray, until they become dark in a few minutes, it means that the monsoon is coming. It reaches us without apparent noise, but then resounds in its images, leaving behind lightness, freshness, clarity, and a tremendous luminosity that comes from so far away: from the Himalayas, from so ancient, from Sanskrit, from a sound where the darkness and the divine, where the concrete and the landscape, where the rock and the humidity leave a mark that brings together and ties a sky loaded with new clouds.
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ZORN 101LP
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Recorded in Brussels in 2019, Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities is Timelash's second delivery of a four-album projected series. In their debut, A Morphology of Wonders (Aguirre Records, 2021), the duet formed by Embassador Dulgoon (Nonlocal Society, Archimboldos) and Corum (Psychic Sounds, Million Brazilians) revealed a unique musical journey that unfolds and expands like a cluster of organic matters and mechanical dialogues lit by iridescent fluorescences. Timelash's musical proposal is firmly rooted in retrofuturism, reminding us of exotic and library music artists such as Martin Denny, Egisto Macchi, Bernard Fèvre, and Eric Vann, reaching up to Mark Dwane's cinematic soundscapes, or Constance Demby's Novus Magnificat. Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities digs precisely into what the title indicates: civilizations not yet explored, untraceable ruins, and the unknown. Digital synthesizers, samplers, flutes, percussion pads, and effects are assembled as stirring sprouts of life and evolutionary dream cycles. Spacecraft bustles, strange body noises, tolling bells, plasticine murmurs, and boiling potions ring under harmonic synth soulful crescendos, building up a sense of both machinery and wonder; the emotional significance that the mechanical contains. The tactile quality of detail and the flourishing motifs join and bloom in poignant, even epic manners, as in "Outside Grottos of Time." A mood more dizzying and suspenseful speeds up "Sandrunner's Pass" until the puzzling closing track "Shadows of the Skyfish" wraps it all up. Chromatic glares, mechanical abstractions, and multicolored visions emerge like fumes radiating from electric dreams; melodic layers drift, rise, and finally lay down subtly. There's a feeling of mystery and motion in several directions, sometimes even simultaneous, although limited, all of them equally full of meaning, since this is a coherent musical tale. The Great Nebula of Andromeda swims like a phosphorescent amoeba. Far away yonder in forbidden cities, foreboding creatures are planning to abduct us while we sleep. In the dark, we cook our macaroni and eat by lantern light. Stars cluster all over our table like fireflies. We watch the turning moon through our little telescope. The unknown stumbles around the dying campfire. As breaths gather firm, an auroral stain illuminates the sky once again. Great geometrical winter constellations lift up over sinuous litmus gleams. We walk under the stars, our feet on the unknown round earth. Our eyes follow the lights of a deep glowing spaceship. Engine tones rise, shrill, faint, finally inaudible, and its lights go out in the southeast haze beneath the feet of Orion.
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METAPHON 016LP
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Arthur Petronio's one and only LP, now reissued by Metaphon, was originally published by the Belgian Igloo label in 1979. An extravagant DIY montage of musique concrète and sound poetry. In addition to Petronio's voice several female readers/performers contribute to this theatre of voices as guest vocalists. An album as unusual as his lifecycle. Born Switzerland 1897, Petronio was a French-Italian musician, poet and painter. He was a young violin virtuoso studying with Belgian master violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, and played solo violin for Belgian King Leopold II at the age of 9. He was attracted to the avant-garde and visionary ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk and developed and presented his "Verbophonie" in 1919, integrating sound poetry into regular music scores. He was a friend to Kandinsky, Mondrian, Cocteau and Picasso, and published several avant-garde journals and poetry books with participation of like-minded artists. He wrote many scores for solo instruments, small ensembles, orchestral works, and operas and extended his musical ideas with new possibilities of tape composition.
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ZORN 095LP
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As an important agent of Gothenburg's underground scene, Dan Johansson has been a member of several experimental harsh noise projects such as Sewer Election, and lo-fi indie folk bands like Enhet För Fri Musik and Amateur Hour. Ordeal is his latest solo output, and might as well be ashes stuck in the blast furnace's edges of his last longing career. Not by means of summing up genres or as a culmination of his musical development, but as a profound music piece weaved in his own household. With not much more than a synthesizer, Vätterns Pärla is built by trembling, dissonant drones stained in feedback and reverberation, thickly textured by the no-fi quality of the recording, depicting a menacing atmosphere congested with heavy fumes. In Johansson's words, Ordeal "takes inspiration from the early '80s albums of Maurizio Bianchi, filtered through a Gothenburgian no-fi bleakness. It's an album for inner voyage, childhood memories, and places that now lost purpose and meaning." There's certainly intimacy and nostalgia, yet a claustrophobic, hypnotic ambiance wraps it all up in a contained and narrow space. Emphasis is put on texture rather than on detail, on color rather than on progression, on suspense rather than on conclusion. Tension varies stiffly, sometimes a drone layer dismantles and the mood seems to filter, but ragged edges are never polished. We can feel the walls and the air, which although tarnished, can be breathed in somehow. It's as if waking up in a dark room and having to recognize it with our ears and tact, testing its dimensions and its surface. The stillness in the chamber is like the stillness between gasps of storms. Without visible stars, an enclosed share of night sky hides a heavy load of industrial debris underwater. These remnants are maybe the pearl regarding the album's title. It all can seem like a dream, a grim mechanical soundscape deafened by hefty, yet sporadic winds. Soil strives to make something grow, but sprouting is kept suspended, held by a dismal presentiment. Long shadows on the ground prove that darkness is about to befall. And as these shadows stretch, almost about to break up in a loud strike, the noise turns white.
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TM 2022LP
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Tim Mariën's music settles in a liminal world, between borders. In A Basement Suite, musical self-evidences are called into question. At first, Mariën 'uproots' our listening experience through his use of unconventional musical tunings, which he distills from tones that are naturally present in the harmonic overtone series. In this liberating approach, turnings do not get bogged down in a fixed basic principle. They spread out and become a range of possibilities for the composer. Marien's flexible method is strongly tied to his practice of rebuilding and retuning instruments to play his microtonal scales, including antique, worn pianos, a discarded harpsichord, and a traveled mandolin. Sometimes the fragile state of these instruments prevents them from being tuned to perfection. But it is precisely this unruly materiality of sound, which runs counter to the theoretical perfection of tuning systems. Furthermore, Mariën often allows the instruments, with their unique timbres and microtonal scales, to simultaneously develop varying transformational processes in his compositions. Instruments are in constant interaction, taking over intervals, gestures and even playing techniques from each other. A Basement Suite takes us to the heart of Mariën's liminal sound world. This suite for string ensemble, written for Tiptoe Company, unites three pieces Mariën composed and reworked between 2012 and 2020: "Basement of Strings," "Unresolved Streets" and "Tomorrow Started the Game I." The liminal approach of A Basement Suite goes even further: the boundaries of the pieces themselves are also porous. Mariën conceived the suite as a modular composition, in which the three pieces can be rearranged and attached to each other in all sorts of ways. In the version for this album, Unresolved Streets (2015) was given a chorus role. With alternating plucked and bowed textures, the instruments seem to be searching for a solution that simply fails to materialize. (Text by Anna Vermeulen. Translation by Thomas R. Moore.)
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JUBG 003LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/1/2023
"The dissonance, the discord, is the tongue in the cheek of Ralf Schauff's music. Be it that the transverse flute, always underestimated as an instrument of torture, is used or slow synthesizer automations shift the tonality in an agonizingly and unnecessarily cruel way. Without this intention to challenge the listener, the music would have been there before. There are the soundscapes of NEU!, Harmonia, or Cluster, the modality of Can, Afrobeat and all kinds of electronics, but also the impression of 'Weltmusik' associated with folkloric instruments like the didgeridoo or the recorder. But it's none of these things. It only reminds us of them. And it reminds us listeners that music is also produced. The meta level comes into play and gets in the way of consumption. This is much more amusing, surprising and enriching than the mere description suggests. This is a must hear. It's just insanely fun." --Frank Spilker (Die Sterne)
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