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SOMA 033LP
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"In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?" --W. Blake
Stephen O'Malley on the release (Paris, January 2020):"My first encounter with Karen Jebane (aka Golem Mecanique) was in the context of Echoés above the village of Le Saix in Haut-Ales, in 2016. This tremendous location runs along a deep river canyon with a long cliff on one side and a small mountainside slope on the other. Importantly, and uniquely, some mad acoustician geniuses have built massive concrete amplified horns into the hillside to project sound against the cliff, activating the landscape's natural resonance and delay patterns. The Echoés organizers exploit this system once per year, in a type of private weekend. People arrive for a few evenings of music and enjoy the summer and loosen their minds a bit. I was to be performing later in the night (under the stars, one of my most memorable and moving experiences with music ever), but Karen began her performance directly at sunset, the color saturating the sky and shadows growing deep purple and reds. Instantly and for the next hour I felt like I had descending into the Neolithic/Mythological age. And into the pre-renaissance mindset of time where linearity was absent, cyclic experience unnecessary... just when it was/is. Karen's deep and evocative chanting voice reflected and called forth in multitude amongst the landscape. Bone-chilling, or, perhaps, penetrating down through the bone. A thick and immaterial drone wove itself into the air. Voices began emerging from the cliff's face, the stones itself were singing, seemingly liberated from their geological time space. I understood more about why archetypal memory forms of seers, divinatory, witches and sorceresses exist in our cultural long storylines, our shared sociopsychological neurological rationalization constructs. Those necessary systems of attempting to interpret and communicate the world. It was an incredible moment within the blur between the night and the day. Although Karen's main instrument are her voice, and her mind, she also performs on organ, and also together with the Mediterranean folk music impressionada Marion Cousin on this deeply moving album. Karen also utilizes a very special French instrument known as the BAB, a kind of mechanized vielle (hurdy-gurdy)... one of the more incredible inventions of the La Nòvia group's legendary instrument builder Léo Maurel. Basically, the instrument sounds like an arcane goth/spirit interpreting Phill Niblock's string pieces, in monochrome on the very edge of the invention of color grain. Marvelous." Recorded and mixed by Borja Flames on 2019 New Year's Eve. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin July 2019.
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SOMA 032LP
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"Kukangendai is a kickass rock trio from Kyoto (Tokyo transplants). When I first hear this band live I was instantly transfixed by their minimalist yet illusory primitive, polyrhythmic, and structural, memory evoking rock narratives. Their energy is completely and transparently palpable yet handled with restraint of the pleasure of a disciplined form dealing with time and articulation. They are a power trio of bass, drums, and guitar but the music they play is as much the limbic system of a forest than it is a geode. They started in 2006. They left Tokyo to Kyoto and started the cult venue Soto ('Outside') 'to listen to music they hadn't heard yet' a few years later. They collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto last year. They reminded me of James Brown on a heavy binge of Bastro, there's a deep current of both archaic musical tastes and the human desire for articulating that archaism in there, but you shake your ass and get the shouting in... in a punk basement... 13th century version of Breadwinner, the bare soul version. I'm honored and proud to work with this tribe, and to count them amongst friends." --Stephen O'Malley, February 2019, Paris
Kukangendai is: Junya Noguchi - guitar, vocal; Keisuke Koyano - bass; Hideaki Yamada - drums.
Recorded and mixed by Bunsho Nisikawa. Recorded at Soto, Kyoto JP 0918. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin 1218. Photographs by Mayumi Hosokura. Graphic design by Shun Ishizuka.
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2LP
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SOMA 029LP
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Repressed. Double LP version. "Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O'Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. Dhrupad is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to 'show the raga in its clearest and purest form'. It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance . . . In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access to a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label . . . I'm proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time. Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad. Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching, the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release. Raga Yaman was recorded at a public concert in Seattle at the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington in March 1986 (the week after the accompanying release Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani (SOMA 028CD/LP) was recorded) at the end of his last tour of the United States. Yaman was a special raga for Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, one of his signature raags. For centuries, Yaman has been considered as one of the most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music and is one of the first ragas which is taught to students." --Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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SOMA 028LP
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Repressed! Double LP version. "Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O'Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. Dhrupad, for those who do not know, is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to 'show the raga in its clearest and purest form'. It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance . . . In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access to a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label . . . I'm proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time. Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad. Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching (a long story also in Seattle, my hometown!), the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release. Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani were recorded in a private house concert in Seattle at the home of the Benegals in March 1986 (the week before the accompanying release, Raga Yaman (SOMA 029CD/LP), was recorded). The Benegals were friends (and Shantha Benegal was also a student) of Dagarsahib who sometimes hosted Hindustani music concerts in their home. It's a rare glimpse of a more intimate, personal and perhaps different kind of performance considering the form of dhrupad." --Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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SOMA 029CD
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"Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O'Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. Dhrupad is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to 'show the raga in its clearest and purest form'. It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance . . . In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access to a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label . . . I'm proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time. Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad. Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching, the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release. Raga Yaman was recorded at a public concert in Seattle at the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington in March 1986 (the week after the accompanying release Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani (SOMA 028CD/LP) was recorded) at the end of his last tour of the United States. Yaman was a special raga for Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, one of his signature raags. For centuries, Yaman has been considered as one of the most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music and is one of the first ragas which is taught to students." --Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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SOMA 028CD
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"Around ten years ago, deep into a cozy and hazy night following a concert with my sound brothers Daniel O'Sullivan and Kristoffer Rygg in London (as Æthenor), they graciously introduced me to a recording of rudra veena (a kind of noble deeper bass relative to the sitar, in a way) as performed by dhrupad master Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. Dhrupad, for those who do not know, is a branch of Hindustani classical music said to 'show the raga in its clearest and purest form'. It's pacing concentrates heavily on the slow, contemplative alap section and works with specific microtonal gestures and deep characteristics of resonance . . . In early 2015 I was able to make contact with Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's son Bahauddin and some of his American students/disciples, primarily Jeff Lewis. Over time we developed a friendly and educational exchange, access to a massive archive of recordings and developed these two paired titles for my label . . . I'm proud to be able to reveal these to date unreleased archival recordings of one of the masters of dhrupad, Z. M. Dagar, to the public for the first time. Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was the nineteenth generation in a family tradition known as Dagar gharana, a rich lineage which continued and performed the musical form of dhrupad. Initially, dhrupad was a rigorous, austere, devotional genre that was sung in Hindu temples. But between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it became the preeminent genre in royal courts in North and Central India, and the Dagar gharana developed and continued publicly following the eventual loss of court patronage for dhrupad in the 19th century. The French ethnomusicologist Renaud Brizard covers the story of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's life and teaching (a long story also in Seattle, my hometown!), the Dagar family and gharana, the rudra veena and more topics in an extensive set of liner notes in this release. Ragas Abhogi & Vardhani were recorded in a private house concert in Seattle at the home of the Benegals in March 1986 (the week before the accompanying release, Raga Yaman (SOMA 029CD/LP), was recorded). The Benegals were friends (and Shantha Benegal was also a student) of Dagarsahib who sometimes hosted Hindustani music concerts in their home. It's a rare glimpse of a more intimate, personal and perhaps different kind of performance considering the form of dhrupad." --Stephen O'Malley, March 2018, Paris, France Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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2LP
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SOMA 030LP
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Double LP version. Crying Bamboos is a translation of the pidgin description of the sound of sacred flutes: "Mambu i cry, i cry, i cry". Sacred flutes are blown to make the cries of spirits by adult men in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea. Pairs of long bamboo male and female flutes are played for ceremonies in the coastal villages near the Ramu River. There are seven male initiation flute cries from Bosmun, four flute cries from Bak: Borai with occasional single garamut percussion and two flute cries from Kaean, one with vocals and hand drums. The flute players were of the last generation to have learned this skill during a complete cycle of male initiation. These previously unreleased recordings were made by Ragnar Johnson in 1979. Notes by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer; Photographs by Ragnar Johnson. Tape to digital transfer and mastering by Dave Hunt at Dave Hunt Audio, London; Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering, Berlin.
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2CD
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SOMA 030CD
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Crying Bamboos is a translation of the pidgin description of the sound of sacred flutes: "Mambu i cry, i cry, i cry". Sacred flutes are blown to make the cries of spirits by adult men in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea. Pairs of long bamboo male and female flutes are played for ceremonies in the coastal villages near the Ramu River. There are seven male initiation flute cries from Bosmun, four flute cries from Bak: Borai with occasional single garamut percussion and two flute cries from Kaean, one with vocals and hand drums. The flute players were of the last generation to have learned this skill during a complete cycle of male initiation. These previously unreleased recordings were made by Ragnar Johnson in 1979. Notes by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer; Photographs by Ragnar Johnson. Tape to digital transfer and mastering by Dave Hunt at Dave Hunt Audio, London; Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering, Berlin.
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CD
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SOMA 027CD
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Stephen O'Malley on Elodie, the project of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, and their album Vieux Silence: "Having been entranced by both Andrew Chalk's work with Mirror (and back to his solo works as Ferial Confine, plus multiple collaborations with David Jackman, The New Blockaders, Daisuke Suzuki, etc.), and Timo van Luijk (as Af Ursin, In Camera, La Poupée Vivante, and collaborations with Kris Vanderstraeten and others) for many years, I was naturally intrigued to hear about and hear their duo project Elodie. The project formed in 2010, and has spanned eleven beautiful albums already, to date. Vieux Silence for Ideologic Organ is their first release presented outside of their own record publishing nook, Faraway Press and La Scie Dorée. However this is not the first encounter between Ideologic Organ and Elodie, they performed at a night in London I curated in February 2012, alongside Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang. Elodie's performance was among the most delicately engaging and savant I have witnessed... so very quiet, with snow falling in London outside Cafe Oto's windows, the audience palpably entered a high intensity listening focus. The impression of this vivid memory is striking, considering how spare each of the individual elements present that night were. Vieux Silence, and Elodie in general, provoke a visual imagination in an instant, perhaps filtered through aged watercolor, tape grain, antique lenses, forgotten levels of listening, and observational patience. On this gorgeous album, Chalk and van Luijk also collaborate with piano, pedal steel, and clarinet (played by: Tom James Scott, Daniel Morris, and Jean-Noel Rebilly, respectively). Each detail carefully considered and coloring step-by-step, like an impressionist watercolor." Personnel: Tom James Scott - piano; Jean-Noël Rebilly - clarinet; Daniel Morris - guitar pedal steel. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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SOMA 027LP
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2018 repress; LP version. Stephen O'Malley on Elodie, the project of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, and their album Vieux Silence: "Having been entranced by both Andrew Chalk's work with Mirror (and back to his solo works as Ferial Confine, plus multiple collaborations with David Jackman, The New Blockaders, Daisuke Suzuki, etc.), and Timo van Luijk (as Af Ursin, In Camera, La Poupée Vivante, and collaborations with Kris Vanderstraeten and others) for many years, I was naturally intrigued to hear about and hear their duo project Elodie. The project formed in 2010, and has spanned eleven beautiful albums already, to date. Vieux Silence for Ideologic Organ is their first release presented outside of their own record publishing nook, Faraway Press and La Scie Dorée. However this is not the first encounter between Ideologic Organ and Elodie, they performed at a night in London I curated in February 2012, alongside Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang. Elodie's performance was among the most delicately engaging and savant I have witnessed... so very quiet, with snow falling in London outside Cafe Oto's windows, the audience palpably entered a high intensity listening focus. The impression of this vivid memory is striking, considering how spare each of the individual elements present that night were. Vieux Silence, and Elodie in general, provoke a visual imagination in an instant, perhaps filtered through aged watercolor, tape grain, antique lenses, forgotten levels of listening, and observational patience. On this gorgeous album, Chalk and van Luijk also collaborate with piano, pedal steel, and clarinet (played by: Tom James Scott, Daniel Morris, and Jean-Noel Rebilly, respectively). Each detail carefully considered and coloring step-by-step, like an impressionist watercolor." Personnel: Tom James Scott - piano; Jean-Noël Rebilly - clarinet; Daniel Morris - guitar pedal steel. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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2LP
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SOMA 025LP
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2018 repress. Ideologic Organ present Unfold, brand-new recordings from The Necks, the legendary Australian trio who excel in bypassing musical cliche whilst exploring and extending the practices embedded within improvisation, jazz, post rock, ambient, minimal, and textural, "sound based" music. The latest document from this long-running ensemble presents itself as a double LP, with four side-length tracks. A deliberate absence of numbered sides hands a substantial swatch of participation over to the listener, allowing her to navigate his own path through the soundscape at hand. The shorter length of the vinyl format, far from being a constraint upon the members of the ensemble, instead offers them a more compact horizon to contemplate, wherein the distance travelled is recalibrated to more immediate and dynamic textural concerns. The immediacy of "Rise" confirms this new path, as the mournful tones of Lloyd Swanton's bass swirl around Chris Abrahams's crystalline piano motif, with Tony Buck's percussion steering proceedings into enlightening free-jazz territories. "Blue Mountain" cuts a swathe through the sonic undergrowth, with soul organ, rattling percussion, whistles, and loping sound-waves all vying for the foreground. "Overhear" retains a sublime melancholic aura as the percussion and keyboards simultaneously embrace and fall apart, whilst "Timepiece" skips along as a gentle gesture of further possibilities. Exactly how The Necks conjure their particular magic - as deceptively simple as it seems - whilst always moving forward, is anyone's guess, but Unfold proves yet again that rules and schools are to be broken and re-formed into patterns and frameworks unlike those already known. Mastered & cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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LP
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SOMA 026LP
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Part 1 of The Fools Sermon as composed by and recorded by Daniel Higgs. Features Eli Winograd on bass and bass keyboard and Fumie Ishii on drums & voice and Higgs on banjo and voice. "Daniel Higgs once told me that the Earth is actually in its 34th life cycle. That everything has been conceived, created, grown, withered and ultimately been destroyed a grand total of thirty three times to date. As for quite how long this ourobouros-esque pattern will continue, he never enunciated. For enunciation is at the very heart of The Fools Sermon. Or I should say 'Ee-nun-see-a-she-on', as language in the hands of Higgs becomes a play-thing; syllables coil and retreat as if in eternal competition over the course of this 35 minute address. Anyone versed in Higgs' vocabulary over his 30 year-plus career as musician, poet and orator, The Fools Sermon will feel like a worthy distillation of his other-world view: a raw vision of the sacred and the profane, the physical and the metaphysical, The Proterozoic and the present. At points, the results conjure a Flannery O'Connor penned pulpit-bound preacher elucidating as a huddle of Tribe Records personnel channel Amiri Baraka's 'Black Dada Nihilismus'; at others the narcoleptic exotica of Eden Ahbez shakes hands with Blind Joe Death. One imagines Gene Roddenberry's 'Captain' turning his attention to the Philosopher's Stone, to boldly go where no man and everyman has been before and forever will go again." -- Anthony Sylvester, 2016. Cut by Christoph Grote-Beverborg at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Cover photo by Fumie Ishii. Back cover photo by Micke Keysendal.
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2CD
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SOMA 024CD
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Recorded by Ragnar Johnson, assisted by Jessica Mayer, in Papua New Guinea, April-August 1976. Tape-to-digital transfer by Dave Hunt at Dave Hunt Audio in London, July 2015. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, August 2015. Notes and photographs by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer. First combined release. Originally released as two distinct LPs on Quartz Publications (!QUARTZ 001 (1977) and !QUARTZ 002 (1979)) by David Toop with the assistance of Sue Steward, Evan Parker, Robert Wyatt, and Alfreda Benge. Reissued as two distinct CDs on Rounder Records in 1999 (Rounder CD 5154 and Rounder CD 5155). Includes recordings of sacred flutes blown to make the cries of spirits by adult men in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea, pairs of long bamboo male and female flutes played for ceremonies in the coastal villages near the Ramu river, Ravoi flutes from Bak accompanied by two garamut (carved wooden slit gongs), Waudang flutes from the island of Manam accompanied by two large and two small slit gongs and six singers, Jarvan flutes from Awar accompanied by a shell rattle, and the cries of six different pairs of flutes and one pair of conch shells from the Ramu coast, two pairs of Waudang flutes from the island of Manam with singing, and Mo-mo resonating tubes from the Finisterre Range. Occasional percussion is provided by wooden slit gongs and hand drums. "We would like to thank the performers and people of the villages of Awar, Borai, Bo'da, Kaean, Kuluguma, Nubia Sissimungum and Damaindeh-Bau for making this record possible. Copies of the master tapes are in the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, Port Moresby. Ragnar Johnson thanks the Canadian I.D.RC. for supporting his anthropological research. Thanks to Dave Hunt for transferring the original magnetic tape recordings onto digital media and to Stephen O'Malley, David Toop and Evan Parker for assistance."
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SOMA 023LP
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2016 repress. I Abused Animal is Heather Leigh's first solo album for Ideologic Organ, following solo albums on Kendra Steiner Editions, Golden Lab Records, Not Not Fun, Fag Tapes, Wish Image, Volcanic Tongue's label, and more. Renowned as a fearless free improviser, Leigh showcases her songwriting prowess on I Abused Animal, foregrounding her stunning voice and her innovations for the pedal steel guitar. Warmly recorded in a secret location in the English countryside, the album transports the power of her captivating live performances to a studio setting, capturing her tactile playing in full clarity while making devastating use of volume and space. Leigh explores themes of abuse, sexual instinct, vulnerability, memory, shadow, fantasy, cruelty, and projection. I Abused Animal is a personal, idiosyncratic, and deeply psychedelic work, ranging from almost Kousokuya-scale black blues through the kind of ethereal electro-ritual of Solstice-era Coil. At times the intimacy of the recordings makes you feel like she's singing directly into your ear, playing just for you. Leigh has performed and released music since the 1990s as a solo artist and with a wide range of uncompromising collaborators including Peter Brötzmann and Jandek, and has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh's steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions while juggling walls of bleeding amp-tone with choral-vocal-constructs and wrenching single-note ascensions. She's played, performed, and released music with Ash Castles on the Ghost Coast, Charalambides, Scorces (a duo with Christina Carter), Dream/Aktion Unit (a group with Thurston Moore, Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano, and Matt Heyner), Taurpis Tula, Jailbreak (a duo with Corsano), Termas (a duo with Lynda), Annihilating Light (a duo with Stefan Jaworzyn), Richard Youngs, Blood Stereo, MV & EE, Robbie Yeats of The Dead C, John Olson of Wolf Eyes, Smegma, Jutta Koether, Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär, and many others. I Abused Animal was composed and performed by Heather Leigh. Recorded and engineered by Joe Gubay in Surrey, October 2014. Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, July 2015. Photographs by David Keenan. Spiritual adviser: Dean Roberts. Ideologic Organ curation and art direction by Stephen O'Malley; manufactured and distributed by Editions Mego.
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SOMA 022LP
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Originally released in 1992 on CD by Tatra; never previously reissued. "Coming out of the 1980s Norwegian post-punk scene, When is the solo project of Lars Pedersen. The first albums were in a similar landscape as what he was doing with industrial art-rock band Holy Toy, and his later works have veered into a wide range of territories, but in between all this we find his fourth album from 1992 -- The Black Death (titled Svartedauen in Norwegian) -- a decidedly darker creation. Inspired by Theodor Kittelsen's 1900 series of grim drawings depicting The Black Death's 1349 ravaging of Norway, The Black Death is a highly sophisticated 38-minute musique concrète sound-collage that mixes elements of manipulated traditional Norwegian folk music (such as the eerie Hardanger fiddle) with sounds of horses whining, rats gnawing, wood grinding, and people moaning. Musically, it fits somewhere between Nurse With Wound's Dadaist studio experiments and Luc Ferrari's dramatic narrative environmental sound poems. Fans of Norwegian black metal will recognize the Kittelsen art from several Burzum album covers. The Black Death's release just happened to coincide with the church-burnings of the 1992 black metal summer, and Varg Vikernes, and a generation of young metal artists who would radically change the musical landscape of extreme metal forever, were big fans of this album. The Black Death incomparably evokes that feeling of doom and medieval dread that the black metal bands were attempting with croaked screams and distorted guitars around the same time. So if you're looking for the missing link between Arne Nordheim and Mayhem -- this is it. Pristine vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering in January 2015 and packaged in a gatefold sleeve featuring texts and interviews with and about Pedersen as well as a 12-page booklet of Kittelsen's drawings for Svartedauen. The rats would be pleased" --Lasse Marhaug, Oslo, March 2015. Composed by Lars Pedersen: programming, keyboards, harp, cello, percussion, sounds, and voices. Recorded summer 1992 at Sound Sector, Oslo, with engineer Bernt Kanstad. Mastered 2011 at Livingroom, Oslo, by Morten Lund. Produced by When. The Black Death is based on Svartedauen (1900) by Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914). All drawings by Theodor Kittelsen. Liner notes by Bjarne Riiser Gundersen and Bård Torgersen. Assistance and consultation on this edition: Kristoffer Rygg. Ideologic Organ curation and art direction by Stephen O'Malley; manufactured and distributed by Editions Mego.
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7CD BOX
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SOMA 021CD
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"In 2012 Ideologic Organ released the 2LP set 12 Stationer VI (SOMA 007LP) featuring the last part of a large scale work by the Hungarian-Swedish composer Ákos Rózmann. Here, in 2014 Ideologic Organ is immensely proud to present the complete version of Rózmann 's epic masterpiece presented for the first time in its entirety as a deluxe 7CD set. Akos Rózmann (1939-2005) was born in Budapest where he studied organ and composition at the Liszt Academy. From 1971 to 1974 he studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and from 1978 he was an organist at the catholic cathedral in Stockholm. Throughout his life, Rózmann dedicated himself to musique concrete, developing one of the largest and most rewarding bodies of work in this, the most alchemical of all musical genres. In the early '80s, Rozmann started to build a private electroacoustic studio which he installed in the basement of the Catholic Cathedral while continuing to work in tandem at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS Sweden) where he produced his earlier masterpieces. With an unwavering commitment to the creation of music, Rózmann would often lock himself up in his windowless studio working into the night in order to achieve the results he desired. This combination of vision, passion and stubbornness resulted in one of the most singular catalogs within the field of musique concrète, commissioned by the Hungarian composer Miklos Maros, who requested a five-minute work for piano and voice. Rózmann accepted the offer with the intention of writing a tape piece made from recordings of Miklos' wife, the soprano singer Ilona Maros' and his own experiments with prepared piano. The elements recorded here became the source material for Twelve Stations, a work which flew far from the initial five-minute brief to land 20 years later as a spirit-stretching journey of more than 6 1/2 hours. The compositional process is unique in Rózmann's output due to the 18-year gap between the initial phase and completion of the final work. The first phase made between 1978-1980 consists of an exploration of traditional musique concrète techniques such as speeding up, slowing down, cutting and splicing tape. The last four stations made between 1998-2001 embrace digital technology where small sections of the original recordings from 1978 were fed through an effects processor and improvised on a sampler keyboard. Despite this gap and the different techniques deployed at each period of creation the monumental result sits as a complete and staggering whole. Within the set limitations of the source material Rózmann's skill unfolds in an uncanny ability to coax a vast world of flexible sound from the original piano and voice recordings. The result is a maelstrom of dynamic audio and one of the most daring, challenging and rewarding works of musique concrète from the 20th century. Rózmann was typically ambiguous about the meaning behind his work despite suggesting earlier that the first part of Twelve Stations was an interpretation of the Tibetan Wheel of Life. Twelve Stations is a unique masterpiece of 20th century musique concrète and presents itself as an intensely personal and bold realm of sound, an offering as such, a radical mass open to all." --Mark Harwood; Packaged in a hardcover slipcase with a pull ribbon, a 20-page booklet containing an extensive essay on the composition by the scholar Gergely Loch, photos from the process and of scores and the composer.
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2LP
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SOMA 018LP
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CD
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SOMA 018CD
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Nazoranai comprises three gentleman, three friends and three fans of each other's creative output. The Most Painful Time Happens Only Once Has It Arrived Already..? is the second release from Nazoranai, a power proposition made up of three sound/song heavyweights: Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley (no introductions necessary, intimidation checked in at the door). Recorded by Chris Fullard at CCSO, Birmingham, July 9th 2013, The Most Painful Time... expands the trio's devastating explorations of improvised rock-based shapes. The opening track "you should look closely those shattered spells never attaining embodiment as prayer they are born here again you should look closely those shattered spells never attaining embodiment as prayer they are born here again" hurtles the listener straight in the abyss with an epic 18 + minutes of apocalyptic free rock. This is music on the threshold, a searing landscape where soaring guitars circle amongst a pounding minimal tribal rhythm. "will not follow your hoax called history" lurches out at the listener, offering a hand as a guide for this invented netherworld. The multi-limbed "who is making the time rot" documents our hosts in absolute freeform mode, wildly rummaging the remains of exploded structure. Finally, the title-track swings the pendulum back to earth in the guise of structure, base, rhythm and song. Hovering between annihilation and brutality The Most Painful Time Happens Only Once Has It Arrived Already..? is a sonic sinkhole where the unrestrained improvised peaks are indelibly stamped with the unique traits deployed by these three titans of rock and experimentation. Keiji Haino (guitar, vocals & synth), Stephen O'Malley (bass guitar) & Oren Ambarchi (battery).
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LP
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SOMA 017LP
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Repressed. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.
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SOMA 003LP
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Born in Romania in 1944, Iancu Dumitrescu is one of the leading personalities in contemporary music, whose significance embraces composition, interpretation and philosophy of music. His music and ideas are increasingly influential, centered on the idea of acousmatics and on the phenomenological approach he learned from Sergiu Celibidache, which Dumitrescu applies to the composition itself. Acousmatics represents for Dumitrescu not only "the art of disguising a sonic source" in a concrete approach, but the very metaphor of the sound -- infinite, cryptic alchemy applied to the sound material. Dumitrescu's activity as a musicologist, composer and performer (conductor) intersected from the very beginning. In 1978, he received a scholarship from Sergiu Celibidache in Germany, thereafter embarking on systematic studies of general and musical phenomenology, while also conducting at the University of Trier and Munich. He adopted the Husserlian phenomenological perspective which led to important theoretical crystallization and to fertile creative conclusions, placing in question the principles of academic composition. According to Dumitrescu, this was the first time phenomenology was utilized as a true method of composition, which throws into query essential concepts, nevertheless hidden at that time: inspiration, vision, creativity, and imagination. Dumitrescu is considered one of the leaders of the spectral music trend worldwide. In 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, proposing a new aesthetic in today's music, hyper-spectral, based on the radiant power of sound within its microcosmic complexity, which is questioned, analyzed, and recomposed from a spectral perspective. Dumitrescu is also founder and artistic director of the International Music Festivals of Computer Assisted Music, Acousmania, Musica Nova, Musica Viva and the International Spectral Music Festival, Spectrum XXI -- held annually in three European capitals. His music is performed all over the world, with different ensembles, soloists and orchestras. As a Blodget artist-in-residence at Harvard University, he shared his methods and techniques of composition to the student graduates in composition. His output includes more than 300 works of chamber music, electroacoustic, orchestral music, computer music, etc. His work has been edited by Salabert (Paris), Editura Musicala (Bucharest) Gerig Musikverlage-Schott-Schone (Koln). His previous LPs and CDs have been published by Edition RZ (Berlin), Generation Unlimited (United States), Escargot-Harmonia Mundi (France), Electrecord (Bucharest), Artgallery (Paris), ReR Megacorp (London), Bananafish (Los Angeles), and Edition Modern (London-Bucharest). Vinyl cut at 45 rpm by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, July 2013. Front cover photo courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
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SOMA 012LP
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2015 repress. A native of Korea, cellist/composer Okkyung Lee has been developing her unique voice in both improvised and composed music by blending her wide interests and influences. Since moving to New York in 2000, she has worked with numerous artists ranging from Laurie Anderson, David Behrman, Douglas Gordon, Vijay Iyer, Christian Marclay, Jim O'Rourke, Evan Parker, and John Zorn, just to name a few, while leading her own projects and releasing more than 20 albums and touring extensively in the U.S. and Europe. Okkyung was a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in 2010. Ghil was recorded and produced by the Norwegian artist Lasse Marhaug. Instead of recording in what has become the standard in modern contemporary music, with high-end equipment and in controlled studio settings, Marhaug wanted to record Ghil in an expressionistic way -- to purposely use crude equipment and unorthodox microphone placement in order to give a more raw and direct depiction of Okkyung playing her music. Marhaug says if they were making a film, it would be like shooting on grainy 16mm black and white with close-ups instead of 35mm color cinemascope. Thus all of Ghil was recorded on a portable cassette recorder from 1976 that Marhaug had just bought second hand. The sessions for the album were done during the spring of 2012 in and around the Oslo area. The locations varied from places like Marhaug's studio; a back alley in Oslo center; a cabin in the forest on the Nesodden peninsula; and a former hydroelectric power plant in the mountains outside Rjukan. The recordings have been edited, but no overdubs or other post-manipulation other than mastering. Mastered by Marcus Schmickler at Piethopraxis, Köln, March 2013. Vinyl cut by CGB at Dubplates and Mastering, Berlin, April 2013. Cover photograph by C. Spencer Yeh. Design by Stephen F. O'Malley.
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2LP
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SOMA 015LP
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Gravetemple was formed in 2006 as a side-project of the band Sunn O))) by Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley and Attila Csihar. The group formed initially to tour in Israel in the summer of '06, creating several recordings which eventually became The Holy Down album, which was released on Southern Lord Recordings in 2007. At the time of the Israel tour, the Lebanon War started and was in action. In summer '08, the trio reformed together with the addition of Australian drummer Matt "Skitz" Sanders for a short European tour culminating in a headlining performance at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham. In late 2009, the original trio reconvened for a special one-off concert at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. April 2013 marks the first set of live action since that period, and a new chapter in the ongoing system of the related network. Ambient/Ruin was created with the 2008 quartet -- elements of tape collage, concrète, and field recordings blend within a strong, geographically-diverse (parts were recorded in Japan, Australia, Paris and Israel) suite of heavy minimalist/maximalist music, black/death metal and drone. The culmination of these efforts become the music, literally, of Sadistik Exekution meeting Phill Niblock. Gravetemple clearly adapted the more abstract and experimental aspects related to Sunn O))) and have continued from that point, with ongoing focus on metaphysical construction of free music and will. The music became a geographically and metaphysically-based effort. Attila (chants & percussion & Fuji sounds recorded on location in Kamakura May 08); Stephen (guitars & Korg Polysix recorded in Paris & Saalfelden June 08); Matt (drums were recorded at 3 Phase studios, Melbourne by Sam Johnson March 06); Oren (guitars, motorized cymbal, electronics, bells, tympani, atmos recorded at Jerker House, Melbourne & BJB, Sydney 06-08). Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin February 2013. Drawings by Justin Bartlett/VBERKVLT. Art direction & backline design: SOMA. Housed in a gatefold sleeve.
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2LP
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SOMA 014LP
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Freermasonry Angle process has been severed, I wait with the goat's secret. Maul crushes skull On tiled ground. Eigenheit; sky-eyed willful one, Outside of them.
Statement from the Wold communiqué sent out following the completion of Freermasonry: "Lyrically Freermasonry consists of a series of poems and discourses. Early on in Freermasonry during 'SOL,' the Mother allusion is referenced out of Faust Part Two. It's a small portion and short moment. Faust does an invocation to the Mothers, but the execution is as trickery through occult charlatanism and not truly believed ritual. Goethe found passages about dark goddess figures known as Mothers in the writings of Plutarch. The metaphor is ambiguous, generally associated with creative dark force and will, but reared in a potent lie. I use it in correlation with screech owl as atheistic reactionary sentiment. Of course there are many other aspects to Freermasonry." --Fortress Crookedjaw
"This is all to say that Freermasonry -- the obliterative sixth album from Wold, the Saskatchewan act led by the incredibly named Fortress Crookedjaw -- is ultimately enigmatic and entirely unknowable, an intersection of noise, metal, and electronics that doesn't yield to such plainclothes criticism. Mean, dense and multivalent, with a lyrical conceit based on Masonic symbolism and Biblical scripture, it's the rare loud music that begs to be louder still if you're to have any chance of understanding it. Freermasonry is a case study in controlling the illusion of chaos, an elegantly constructed nightmare of sound where hearing one layer of serrated screams, static bursts, and feedback flares means you've missed some mass of activity somewhere else. Weirdly seductive rhythms tumble beneath a laundromat of blown-out tones and crackling vocals, generally pulling your attention a dozen different ways. I've been listening to the album consistently for three months now, and somehow, I'm still surprised by what its 58 minutes sound like and accomplish. Paradoxically disorienting and direct, Freermasonry is a constant tumult of surprising activity, more unforgiving than most everything in the noise, metal, and drone scenes, places where Wold kind of fits." --Grayson Currin, Pitchfork (8.3); Members include: Fortress Crookedjaw (poetry, discourse, composition, bass, devices, synth, and vocals); Obey (guitar on "SOL" and "Free Eyes"); and Acrimonia (guitar, additional compositional work, and programming on "Annex Axe"). Housed in a gatefold sleeve.
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SOMA 008LP
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The deep electric rainforest sound atmospheres that the listener will hear on this record was the tip of the iceberg of a rich and elaborate work process. For over 30 years, Norbert Möslang has made installations, sound performances,and music records that are deeply involved in the hidden world of vibrations to convert them into loud sounds and thick textures. Living simultaneously in spheres of inside/outside, micro-vibrations, spatial structures, underground music venues, art galleries, underwater, glass windows, body movement, precise equalizers, insects, microcosms, and electronic devices, Möslang constructs fascinating, untrammeled worlds of both philosophical and physical power. "I attempted a Voice Crack gig when I was 21 at an experimental noise festival in Fribourg ... Möslang and Voice Crack opened to me both the ways to experimental noise music as well as sound art performance. When looking through the rear-view mirror, it's clear that in the late '70s/early '80s, there weren't many artists working with harsh noise -- a list of the classics includes The New Blockaders, Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle in the UK; Hijokaidan, Merzbow, Incapacitants in Japan; NON, The Haters in the States, among only a few others. Since the break up of Voice Crack in 2002, Norbert Möslang enlarged his practice to cover all noise and experimental practices, from lo-fi 'Everyday-Cracked-Electronics,' saturation/overdrive work, performance and improvisation, field recordings and multi layered ambient noise composition. Through interconnecting, heterogeneous everyday objects; linking the outside sound environment into a quiet art museum by fixing microphones to its windows; filming the underwater Venice canal in order to set off neverending imagery flux, allowing a movie to play its own soundtrack by triggering photo-sensors, Möslang proves to our entire nervous system that the world we inhabit is no more than infinite continuum. To talk about indoor_outdoor specifically, again, Möslang's music drives us from nothing to everything. A field recording in a Swiss harbor is then processed and composed in a studio. The second track 'hot_cold_shield' is a collaborative duo with Toshimaru Nakamura, an influential member of the Onkyokei scene in Japan -- a brutal live improvisation recorded at Manif d'art in Québec." --Balthazar Lovay, Deborence, September 2012; Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, October 2012.
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2LP
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SOMA 009LP
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Gatefold 2LP version. Nazoranai is Stephen O'Malley, Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi. "Oren Ambarchi has been an active colleague -- we have collaborated on a number of Sunn O))) projects, and also Sunn O)))-related projects, film scores, tours, meals, etcetera over the years. He brought us to Australia for the first time in 2004, we toured Israel with Attila Csihar as Gravetemple Trio in 2006. Oren introduced us to Haino-san in 2006 when Sunn O))) played the FIMAV festival in Victoriaville, Quebec (Oren was in the ensemble on that tour), in a stinky locker room (the venue was a hockey ring). Had no idea what to expect but a few hours later, he was on stage with us. It was one of those 'what now' moments you never imagine happening, having been a fan/follower of Haino's playing, concerts and recordings over the years. Five years later, somehow, we ended up as this trio. Haino, Oren and I were all in Holland for one reason or another and decided to try it. I played bass for the first time on stage with this group. Maybe it shows but the idea was a power trio backing up Haino-san, with a lot of amplification. We have had the chance to repeat the trio twice again so far, and this recording comes from a concert in Paris, November 2011. It's hard to describe the lessons through real-time communication in music with such a master of form, but needless to say, they were much different than what I was expecting and beyond! Proof again that expectations lead to dead ends. Was a most challenging experience in real-time music. I feel incredibly honored to be part of this trio." --Stephen O'Malley; Keiji Haino (guitar, vocals & synth), Stephen O'Malley (bass guitar) & Oren Ambarchi (battery). Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, April 2012.
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