Sub Rosa is a Belgium-based label exploring a wide range of sounds and musical journeys. The name derives from the Latin phrase sub rosa, literally translating as "under the rose", and figuratively meaning something secret or undercover. The label was founded in the mid-80s and expanded its catalog in the mid-90s with the release of electronic music. The catalog ranges from archives and voices (William Burroughs, Belgian Surrealism, Marcel Duchamp) to proto-electronic forms (Angus MacLise, Luc Ferrari, Henri Pousseur, Léo Kupper), contemporary (Christian, Wolff, Julius Eastmann, John Cage Morton Feldman, Nam June Paik) and traditional music (Inuit, Yanomami shamanist ceremonies, Tibetan rituals, Gongs from Southeast Asia), "In the Margins" forms of expression (Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel, Adolf Wölfli), as well as echoes of the Belgian underground scene (Pseudocode, Etat Brut, Kosmose, Punk in Brussels) and the Framework Series, devoted to the many shapes of electronic music. To which should be added regular collaborations (long-term or recent ones) with artists such as David Shea, Bill Laswell, Ulrich Krieger, David Toop, Scanner, C.M. Von Hausswolf, Opening Performance Orchestra, Oiseaux Tempête, Charlemagne Palestine, Hastings of Malawi, Palo Alto, Michel Redolfi. But this just the tip of the iceberg, for Sub Rosa has been a home, since the '90s, for out-of-range music, which lead to various "non-compilation" conceptual projects: Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music Volumes 1 to 7, Persian electro, Chinese, Turkish, Greek experimental and electronic music, Folds and Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze...
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LP
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SR 529LP
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$24.99
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 3/10/2023
Recorded at the height of the global pandemic, and at a time when remote communication was becoming increasingly prevalent, Choreological Exchanges is part of Hastings Of Malawi's continuing investigations into the medium of communication itself. Prior to telephony becoming digital, all phone calls were routed through mechanical telephone exchanges, and the majority of the sounds on side one are the sounds of these exchanges and some of the voices of the engineers who worked with them. Hastings Of Malawi make strange records and this one is no exception although it has a more linear narrative structure in opposition to what critics have described as their Dadaist approach. Their records certainly resist genre classification and do not really fall into the category of music. Hastings Of Malawi have themselves described previous records as films without light, radio plays and as poems. This one is a dance -- a dance that takes place within the chain, or pipe, that is brain -- mouth -- telephone -- telephone exchange -- telephone -- ear -- brain.
"It is a dance record but not in the way that these are usually understood. An invitation to dance appears twelve minutes in on the first side. It is a dance within the wires, movement around noise used as a sculptural material rather than unwanted signals and a joyful exploration of sonic materiality. The second side begins with the voice of a telephone engineer, who states that in the top floor switch room of the exchange is the only vestige of human control. Is this top floor switch room the human brain? The sounds on this side, float between the mechanical telephone exchange and the body where the messages are created and interpreted -- it is an exploration of the relationship between thought and the material devices in which telephone sound is propagated and transformed. Side two ends with a long list of randomly generated words created by digital voice synthesis." --Hastings of Malawi
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SR 535LP
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$24.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/24/2023
Green vinyl. It's an all-electronic affair, harmonically maximalist, predominantly symphonic-synthetic, requiring active listening. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works full of sound, euphonic, and vivid in nature. The making of this album was intentionally a very personal process, going into self-therapy territory at times interpreting the composer's contemplating mind dealing with tolerance, destruction, compassion, misery, grace and tyranny in an auditory manner. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works, awash with euphonic sound vivid in its essence, with a deep focus on various synthesis techniques within a compositional framework. Dedicated to Peter Rehberg aka Pita.
Ata "Sote" Ebtekar composes music with a deeply-held conviction that rules and formulas should be deconstructed and rethought. He alters musical modal codes from their original tonality and rhythmic tradition to achieve vivid, synthetic soundscapes. Over the last three decades, his work has been published by labels such as Warp, Sub Rosa, Opal Tapes, Diagonal, Mute, and Morphine, among others. In 2018, he founded a new label called "Zabte Sote", which focuses on releases by Iranian experimental electronic composers from around the globe. Known for creating compositions that range from the delicate to the abrasive, using sounds both of acoustical and electronic origins, Ebtekar sees music as the expression of cultural habits in sound and anti-sound (silence). Seeking to expand such traditions he creates music that, while rooted in many cultures at once, belongs to none in particular. Sote's work deals with various blueprints, in particular his solo all synthetic music, his electroacoustic audio/visual group project, and his multi-channel sound installations. Sote is on the jury panel of The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and has created commissioned work for and performed at a.o. Berghain and CTM Festival (Berlin), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Cafe Oto (London), Jazzhouse (Copenhagen), TodaysArt Festival (The Hague), Bozar (Brussels), Ultima Festival (Oslo), Donaufestival (Krems), Donaueschinger Musiktage, Mira (Barcelona), Terraforma (Milan), and many more.
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SR 532LP
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Previously unreleased music by Otto Sidharta, pioneer of Indonesian electronic music. Inspired by Indonesia's multifarious styles of traditional music, that he tries to preserve, the four pieces on Kajang express a contemplation of the self. Otto Sidharta loves to travel, everywhere within Indonesia, in order to collect almost any environmental tones and harmonies he can gather, as an endless source of composition. He is also deeply inspired by Indonesia's multifarious styles of traditional music, that he tries to preserve, as in some remote places, they keep their own tradition very strongly. What really interests Sidharta is musicians not interacting with other kinds of music, as in those deep villages, where one might find sounds that feel like very "natural". It results in works expressing Sidharta's personal impression from their music: "I just use my own feeling, with no calculation", not using the tribals motif or style. Kajang is the name of a tribal people living in the south of Sulawesi, a giant island in eastern Indonesia, a closed community, that Sidharta visited twice: "They cut off their communication with the outside world. They live in a very traditional way and try to avoid any new development in culture that might impact their way of life." Sidharta's previous album collected early pieces under the title Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-92, released on Sub Rosa in 2017 (SR 452CD). Kajang gathers a quartet of compositions from 2015 to 2020. White vinyl.
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SR 531CD
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With their sixth studio album, Oiseaux-Tempête unveils a new facet of its mythology through a dense work that carries darkness towards the light of day, that rumbles, calms down and warms up again. Like the silhouette of a lighthouse that reveals itself as its torch rises and shines, the powerful beauty of What On Earth (Que Diable) radiates into an expanding musical cosmos. From the mammoth riffs of "Partout Le Feu", progressively thickened by explosive sound textures and sirens ringing the alarm, you levitate on "Terminal Velocity", a minimalist interlude with a crepuscular feel that is jostled by the hypnotic pulsations of "Voodoo Spinning" and then the call of the dungeon "The Crying Eye - I Forget", an electro mystical trance that deploys its philters in a troubled moat haunted by the psalmodies of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. The tempo speeds up in "A Man Alone in a One Man Poem", a meeting of body and mind, of mechanical energy and burning breath where the spoken word of G.W.Sok sneaks in, before the pastoral crossing of "Waldgänger" and its forest of electronic chimeras.
"... At the center of this project, which blurs lines and genres, the duo turned trio of multi-instrumentalists Frédéric D. Oberland, Stéphane Pigneul, and Mondkopf have been building dialogues between their own reality, their vocabulary, and those of fellow travelers met all around the surface of the world. From their Mediterranean trilogy to their foray into Canada with the explosive From Somewhere Invisible, deeply instinctive albums shrouded in mystery take shape, in parallel with feverish and incendiary live performances, punk in their urgency to tell the world by blasting the boundaries of space and time. After having signed the soundtrack of the bewitching Tunisian film Tlamess (Sortilège) by Ala Eddine Slim in 2020, Oiseaux-Tempête immerses us with What On Earth (Que Diable) in a collapsed future. A psychedelic/psychological roadmap, the album gathers around Frédéric D. Oberland, Stéphane Pigneul, Mondkopf and Jean-Michel Pirès (Bruit Noir), the voices of Ben Shemie (SUUNS), G.W.Sok, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) or the electric strings of Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion). If the planetary reality of 2022 looks like a bad spin-off of a pre/post-apocalyptic series, this new record invites us to another kind of anticipative present where the only weapons are poems chanted against the wind. Ben Shemie opens the projection on 'Black Elephant' and sets the tone for this magnetic dance . . . Drum machines, analog synths, percussions, guitars, mellotron, flute, saxophone, vocals, rhodes, piano, violin and electric buzuk come to life in a sort of disaster aesthetic, pushing back the walls of the decor, against the current of any calibrated music." --Alice Butterlin
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SR 488CD
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L'effet Rebond is not one album but two. Two parallel albums sharing the same title. One by Pierre-Yves Macé, the other by Sylvain Chauveau -- two friends and regular collaborators for nearly twenty years. Both works come from the same original material: a few tracks of guitar, piano, harmonium, and vocals, initially recorded by Chauveau. The lyrics (in French, English, Japanese) are very short poems by or quotations from e.e. cummings, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, Basho, cult tennis player John McEnroe, Carla Demierre, Aram Saroyan, Joseph Guglielmi, and painter Philip Guston. From this common material, each of the two composers has built his own edifice, choosing the elements he keeps, the ones he abandons, adding little by little his own instruments, structures and ideas. In the end, two distinct and autonomous opuses are born. Double-CD; digipack inside a slipcase.
"Version Iridium": Pierre-Yves Macé has allowed himself to be guided by his long-standing obsessions: hybridization of genres and formats, balance between lyricism and formalism, intersection of chamber instrumental writing and chiseled electronics. But this time he pushes his penchant for sobriety further than ever. Whether it is a song-haiku, a miniature for piano or a long repetitive and rhythmic piece, the simplicity is at the service of the clarity of the ideas and the beauty of the timbres -- Maitane Sebastiàn's cello or Cédric Jullion's bass flute in mind.
"Version Silicium": Sylvain Chauveau has surrounded himself with his friends Peter Broderick (backing vocals), Machinefabriek (electronic processing), Lucille Calmel (field recordings), Romke Kleefstra (electric guitar), and Rainier Lericolais (electronic sounds) in order to develop more than ever his love of repetition and the ultra-short format. Here, the pieces often last only the time of a breath, of a few heartbeats. A musical form rarely explored in any musical genre, but one that Chauveau has been fond of since his early days and whose quintessence he seeks here.
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SR 537CD
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$15.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 12/9/2022
Lynn Cassiers and Jozef Dumoulin have been making music together since over 20 years. But it's a vast and fascinating list of unrelated events that brought them to make this recording, featuring the music of 12th century sage and mystic Hildegard von Bingen in a setup of voice with electronics accompanied by pipe organ. Yet it feels like an unexpected and vibrant evidence -- coming home somewhere else. The music of Hildegard von Bingen is essentially monodic, made to be performed by a voice and maybe one fixed pedal note played by an instrument. A big part of the work has been to find the right approach and tone for this setup. To see how these melodies resonate today and what they call for, inventing spaces where they can unfold simply. Improvisation played a key role in this process; listening, feeling, dreaming. A tune of Robert Schumann and Tom Jobim have been added to enhance and stabilize the colors that presented themselves. The result -- Sibyl Of The Rhine -- is an object of a mesmerizing beauty, made to be heard over and over. But it's also a clear blueprint and a powerful source for further live reenactments. Lynn Cassiers and Jozef Dumoulin both established themselves in the realm of contemporary jazz and improvised music. Besides other collaborations they play as a duo called Lilly Joel, mixing free improvisation with electronics. Lilly Joel Plays The Organ is a special edition of the duo with Jozef Dumoulin replacing his usual electronic setup by the ancient pipe organ, an instrument he played extensively as a teenager. Personnel: Lynn Cassiers - voice and electronics; Jozef Dumoulin - pipe organ.
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SR 531LP
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Double-LP version. Gatefold sleeve. With their sixth studio album, Oiseaux-Tempête unveils a new facet of its mythology through a dense work that carries darkness towards the light of day, that rumbles, calms down and warms up again. Like the silhouette of a lighthouse that reveals itself as its torch rises and shines, the powerful beauty of What On Earth (Que Diable) radiates into an expanding musical cosmos. From the mammoth riffs of "Partout Le Feu", progressively thickened by explosive sound textures and sirens ringing the alarm, you levitate on "Terminal Velocity", a minimalist interlude with a crepuscular feel that is jostled by the hypnotic pulsations of "Voodoo Spinning" and then the call of the dungeon "The Crying Eye - I Forget", an electro mystical trance that deploys its philters in a troubled moat haunted by the psalmodies of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. The tempo speeds up in "A Man Alone in a One Man Poem", a meeting of body and mind, of mechanical energy and burning breath where the spoken word of G.W.Sok sneaks in, before the pastoral crossing of "Waldgänger" and its forest of electronic chimeras.
"... At the center of this project, which blurs lines and genres, the duo turned trio of multi-instrumentalists Frédéric D. Oberland, Stéphane Pigneul, and Mondkopf have been building dialogues between their own reality, their vocabulary, and those of fellow travelers met all around the surface of the world. From their Mediterranean trilogy to their foray into Canada with the explosive From Somewhere Invisible, deeply instinctive albums shrouded in mystery take shape, in parallel with feverish and incendiary live performances, punk in their urgency to tell the world by blasting the boundaries of space and time. After having signed the soundtrack of the bewitching Tunisian film Tlamess (Sortilège) by Ala Eddine Slim in 2020, Oiseaux-Tempête immerses us with What On Earth (Que Diable) in a collapsed future. A psychedelic/psychological roadmap, the album gathers around Frédéric D. Oberland, Stéphane Pigneul, Mondkopf and Jean-Michel Pirès (Bruit Noir), the voices of Ben Shemie (SUUNS), G.W.Sok, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) or the electric strings of Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion). If the planetary reality of 2022 looks like a bad spin-off of a pre/post-apocalyptic series, this new record invites us to another kind of anticipative present where the only weapons are poems chanted against the wind. Ben Shemie opens the projection on 'Black Elephant' and sets the tone for this magnetic dance . . . Drum machines, analog synths, percussions, guitars, mellotron, flute, saxophone, vocals, rhodes, piano, violin and electric buzuk come to life in a sort of disaster aesthetic, pushing back the walls of the decor, against the current of any calibrated music." --Alice Butterlin
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SUBLOGOS 002LP
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Never released before recordings from Logos Foundation live sessions at Logos Foundation, Gent, Belgium on January 3, 1981. "The music is free-improvisation -- that is we make our music co-operatively while playing: by listening, reacting, throwing in new ideas, not by following preplanned schemes. At its simplest the group's intention can be said to be to play together as well as possible and to enjoy ourselves while doing so. We are very interested in the result and intend that the audience is as well. As well as the musicians reacting to each other the music itself is pretty reactive to context. In other words, room acoustics, background noise, audience response have a strong effect on what happens. This is particularly true of the audience. We have done performances where conversation has broken out with some audience members. There is much to see as well as hear -- this is partly to do with the instruments. Together Terry, Steve and David have hundreds, all sizes, all sorts, most colors. They completely cover the floor. Many of these are non-western. The wide range of instruments means that an extremely broad sound spectrum is covered, from sudden bangs to very quiet low notes, from squeaks to normal guitar sounds. This is what fixes the overall group sound." Personnel: David Toop - flute, home-made reeds, percussion; Peter Cusack - guitar; Steve Beresford - piano, small instruments; Terry Day - percussion, home-made reeds.
Logos Foundation: Belgium Flanders' unique professional organization for the promotion of new music and audio-related arts by means of new music production, concerts, performances, composition, technological research and other activities related to contemporary music. This organization has been founded in 1968 by Godfried-Willem Raes.
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SR 524LP
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Dark-folk songwriter Chantal Acda and beyond drums-percussion musician extraordinaire Eric Thielemans propose a new score for Koyaanisqatsi, re-actualizing the incredibly beautiful, raw, rhythmic, and touching images of this '80s cinematographic masterpiece. Slow deep electric waves, lonely synths in sonic desert landscapes, rhythmic pulses, transporting drums and bells, and deeply longing sounds and voices make up the audible fundamentals of this imagined, neo shamanic, ritualistic music to accompany the Earth as it keeps on supporting our post human frenetics even today. This release contains a selection of the musical material scored for a live performance together with the screening of the movie. The live performance premiered on Film Festival Gent and Vooruit in the fall of 2022. White vinyl.
Chantal Acda: Currently based in Belgium, Dutch-born Chantal Acda (b. 1978) has worked under the Sleepingdog moniker since 2006, making three acclaimed albums. After touring the UK, it was time for her first real solo record. Playing in various formations (Isbells, True Bypass, Marble Sounds) had made her conscious of shared patterns. Through her solo career, she's worked with German pianist and producer Nils Frahm, multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick (Efterklang, Bella Union, Erased Tapes), cellist extraordinaire Gyda Valtysdottir (Múm), and Shahzad Ismaily. Acda has released four solo records under her own name. She also released some live recordings with her band, and also with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. In 2019, Chantal created her first music/theater performance P_wawau for Oerol Festival, The Netherlands. She worked with Valgeir Sigurdson (Björk, Bonnie Prince Billy) and singers from Het Nederlands Kamerkoor. She released an album of music from the performance: Puwawau (2019). In 2021, Chantal released her most recent album Saturday Moon (2021, GRCD 1029CD/GRLP 1029LP).
Eric Thielemans, drummer and percussionist. Travelling across music scenes and disciplines, Thielemans navigates by means of his own compass. Recently, Thielemans has collaborated with PVT -- a trio together with Mika Vainio and Charlemagne Palestine -- a new trio together with Oren Ambarchi and Charlemagne Palestine, a new duo together with Oren Ambarchi, Billy Hart, Chantal Acda, Marshall Allen (Sun Ra), Tape Cuts Tape, Distance Light & Sky, Jozef Dumoulin, Trevor Dunn, Shahzad Ismaily, Vaast Colson, Nico Dockx, and many more.
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SR 526CD
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"My piano compositions are a mixture of musical reminiscences and a confession of my love for disharmonic chords on the one hand, and lascivious melodies on the other. As in the case of almost all my pieces, I wrote them 'dry', at a desk, without using any musical instruments. I only worked with memory and a little bit of imagination. The compositions often come across as randomly taken out of a pot, which contains a blend of fragments of works of a variety of periods, styles and creators." --Milan Knízák, Mongrelised Piano
Another State of Stagnation contains six unreleased piano pieces by Milan Knízák, written between 1991 and 2021. Played by Czech piano virtuoso Miroslav Beinhauer in August 2020 and recorded in August 2021 at Czech Radio Ostrava under the Petr Bakla's recording direction. The author of the title and cover is Milan Knízák. Produced by re-set production. In the second movement, at least two references to Czech "tramping" (hiking, country) music can be read or heard: Ceka huãí and Táboráku, plápolej. They are among the numerous references to other pieces, while they can concurrently be something else -- for instance, a Beethoven minuet. Beinhauer pointed out: "Milan KníÏák's piano works abound in these 'quotations', some of which are just very similar to well-known melodies, while others are true quotations... I do not even recognize some of them at first listen, but that is not actually the point. If someone does identify these quoted fragments when listening, they can feel good about themselves or can even remember the whole piece better, but I myself do not deem it essential in the case of Milan's compositions. Alternation of styles is more important."
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SR 511LP
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Sound architect and filmmaker from Liège, Belgium Phil Maggi is known as the lead singer of heavy-rock combo Ultraphallus. He has shared the bill with Jerusalem In My Heart, Keith Rowe, Phill Niblock, Tuxedomoon, Sote, Thisquietarmy, and many others. The Encrimsoned is the second part of his diptych inspired by Henry Corbin's writings, which started with his previous album Animalwrath (SR 453CD). The Encrimsoned is a four-track album, harboring a few musical friends and usual collaborators (Maja Jantar, Tom Malmendier, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Sebastien Schmit, Gabriel Séverin, Xavière Fertin). Ranging from free-jazz to ambient-electronic contemporary art sound, this adventurous second and final chapter is an homage to Hardy Fox, pioneer and primary composer for The Residents. Inspiration: Henry Corbin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bela Tarr, Farid od'din Attar, Shihab od'din Sohrawardi, The Residents. Milky white vinyl.
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SR 507LP
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Perfect follow-up to Sub Rosa's precedent double-LP Electronic Works & Voices 1961-1979, this release highlights Leo Kupper's earliest compositions with his GAME machine -- Générateur Automatique de Musique Electronique (Automatic Generator of Electronic Music) constructed during the 1960s. Purely electronic sounds into new structures, Leo Kupper shows through his four tracks a real spirit of renewal. Released in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic series.
Leo Kupper was born in Nidrum, Hautes Fagnes (Eastern Belgium) on the April 16th, 1935. He studied musicology at the Liège Conservatory, then became the assistant of Henri Pousseur who, in 1958, had just founded the Apelac Studio in Brussels. Kupper started to work on his first pieces there, but he would finalize them only upon putting together his own studio in 1967: the Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives (studio of audio electronic research and structuring). That is where he would compose, to this day, over forty works, most of them on instruments of his own design. In the '70s and '80s, he built a series of Sound Domes (briefly established in Rome, Linz, Venice, and Avignon), places where every sound, every phoneme uttered by the listening audience was transformed by hundreds of loudspeakers of various sizes organized in a dome shape. This device transformed sounds through space and time: something said could be morphed into another sound hours, days, perhaps years later. Leo had envisioned that a device like his, a place for contemplation, would be much-needed in cities where nature had been evacuated. In the late '70s, after discovering Iranian music master Hussein Malek, Kupper became one of the very few Western virtuosos of the santur.
The GAME machine: In 1961, having terminated his musicology studies, Leo Kupper left Liège for Brussels. By that time, centers for music research such as those in Cologne, Paris, and Milan had already produced works of experimental music, where pioneers were forging new and diverse routes in electronic music, "musique concrete" and electro-vocal music. The GAME machine was constructed during such period and spirit of renewal and technical exploration. The GAME consisted of a collection of variable "sonic cells" sensitive to modulations of positive and negative voltages and programmable manually through the aid of color-coded cables. Complex electronic loops and sound from loudspeakers and from microphone pick-ups were then either recorded by tape-machines or performed and interpreted by musicians who opened automatic channels, thus triggering automatic sound to exit the speakers. This in turn penetrated the machines by means of microphones and was replayed.
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2LP
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SR 510LP
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Following Murder Ballads [Drift] (SR 506LP), here is, for the first time on vinyl, Murder Ballads [Passages]. Post-isolationist, deep ambiance, and folksong re-emerge in this first vinyl outing of the classic Murder Ballads [Drift] by Mick Harris and Martyn Bates. Rarely do two types of music meet on a level where they threaten to cancel each other out -- let alone create something even more meaningful in their mutual vanishing. But the music created within the seminal Murder Ballads [Drift] by Martyn Bates (Eyeless in Gaza, and solo) and Mick Harris (Napalm Death, Lull, Painkiller, Scorn) creates just such a world. Murder Ballads [Drift] evolves Martyn Bates vocalizations/storytelling song-voices, by turns expressed as labyrinthine layers, calls and responses, muted and distant echoes, sung whispers and counter-melodies, ultimately resulting in a mesmeric conversation of musical inferences and correspondences. Murder Ballads [Drift] created the post-isolationist frame of reference, innovating and extemporizing into a truly original dazzlingly unique form. Mick Harris traffics in the isolationist ambience of Lull, while Martyn Bates is the emotive voice of literate cult-pop duo Eyeless in Gaza. The unlikely pair -- one given to terminally frigid drone, the other to impassioned, bittersweet voicings -- finds common ground in folk music's most macabre tradition, the murder ballad. These ghoulish parables are awash in blood and tears, the strands of love, hate, birth, death, sin, and salvation entwined within like the roots of an ancient tree. Mothers callously kill their children; suitors slay their maidens without remorse; and fate exacts its cruel price from all. The archaic murder ballads that leak from Bates' vocal cords are intensely sad and carnal. They tend to leap off cliffs of hollow effects or drone darkly, offering neither a robust delivery nor an element of irony to take the edge off. The archetypal characters that live and die in them give life's full tragedy back to Harris' electronically numbed "post-isolationist" dreaming. Passages (originally released in 1997) plays out an unbreakable and timeless cycle of bloody folklore (people) and hypnotic soundscapes (the god who watches). The effect is chilling yet engrossing. Where most ambient music has barely enough courage to ring the doorbell and run, Murder Ballads slips through the cracks of the unconscious and does its work with remarkable ease. All the more reason to listen thoughtfully. In 2022 -- re-emerging 25 years after its initial inception -- somewhat surprisingly, Murder Ballads [Passages] still remains/exists in an area overlooked by other artists. Textured sleeve; marbled vinyl.
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SR 509LP
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LP version. Includes insert. This project, Massif And Archipelago, is a field recording project initiated by Japanese sound artist Yasuhiro Morinaga, documenting traditional gong music by different Southeast Asian ethnic groups. The project aimed to examine the impact of the natural and social environment on the gong music culture of Southeast Asia. During the project, he visited over 50 different ethnic groups and made hundreds of recordings. This album presents a selection of the unique gong music from different ethnic minorities. The selected music has been divided into two broad sections: one focusing on the music from the Massif, ie. mainland Southeast Asia (Central Highland of Vietnam and Northeast Cambodia), the other on music from the Archipelago, maritime Southeast Asia (the Luzon Islands of the Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi, and the Flores Islands of Indonesia). Liners notes by David Toop.
"Gongs have played an integral role in the mytho-geography of Asia. This is not music that aligns with national borders or ideas of homogenous populations, let alone racial stereotypes and exotic clichés. What connects all of these tracks is a simultaneous feeling of entrancement and social cohesion. Communal and collaborative, its form is hypnotically repetitious, melodies and rhythms spread out among the players using the technique of hocketing in which a flowing line is distributed among all the musicians. The effect is mesmerizing, immediately intoxicating to anybody who loves Chicago footwork, free improvisation, Sun Ra, or young hip-hop producer, Jetsonmade. The music is simple yet mysterious and enveloping, a sound world in which to disappear. A theory exists but this is not explained." --David Toop (extracts from the liner notes).
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2CD
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SR 509CD
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This project, Massif And Archipelago, is a field recording project initiated by Japanese sound artist Yasuhiro Morinaga, documenting traditional gong music by different Southeast Asian ethnic groups. The project aimed to examine the impact of the natural and social environment on the gong music culture of Southeast Asia. During the project, he visited over 50 different ethnic groups and made hundreds of recordings. This album presents a selection of the unique gong music from different ethnic minorities. The selected music has been divided into two broad sections: one focusing on the music from the Massif, ie. mainland Southeast Asia (Central Highland of Vietnam and Northeast Cambodia), the other on music from the Archipelago, maritime Southeast Asia (the Luzon Islands of the Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi, and the Flores Islands of Indonesia). Double-CD version includes 52-page booklet with photos and liner notes by David Toop.
"Gongs have played an integral role in the mytho-geography of Asia. This is not music that aligns with national borders or ideas of homogenous populations, let alone racial stereotypes and exotic clichés. What connects all of these tracks is a simultaneous feeling of entrancement and social cohesion. Communal and collaborative, its form is hypnotically repetitious, melodies and rhythms spread out among the players using the technique of hocketing in which a flowing line is distributed among all the musicians. The effect is mesmerizing, immediately intoxicating to anybody who loves Chicago footwork, free improvisation, Sun Ra, or young hip-hop producer, Jetsonmade. The music is simple yet mysterious and enveloping, a sound world in which to disappear. A theory exists but this is not explained." --David Toop (extracts from the liner notes).
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SR 535CD
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It's an all-electronic affair, harmonically maximalist, predominantly symphonic-synthetic, requiring active listening. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works full of sound, euphonic, and vivid in nature. The making of this album was intentionally a very personal process, going into self-therapy territory at times interpreting the composer's contemplating mind dealing with tolerance, destruction, compassion, misery, grace and tyranny in an auditory manner. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present a problem-solution scenario, collectively via a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works, awash with euphonic sound vivid in its essence, with a deep focus on various synthesis techniques within a compositional framework. Dedicated to Peter Rehberg aka Pita.
Ata "Sote" Ebtekar composes music with a deeply-held conviction that rules and formulas should be deconstructed and rethought. He alters musical modal codes from their original tonality and rhythmic tradition to achieve vivid, synthetic soundscapes. Over the last three decades, his work has been published by labels such as Warp, Sub Rosa, Opal Tapes, Diagonal, Mute, and Morphine, among others. In 2018, he founded a new label called "Zabte Sote", which focuses on releases by Iranian experimental electronic composers from around the globe. Known for creating compositions that range from the delicate to the abrasive, using sounds both of acoustical and electronic origins, Ebtekar sees music as the expression of cultural habits in sound and anti-sound (silence). Seeking to expand such traditions he creates music that, while rooted in many cultures at once, belongs to none in particular. Sote's work deals with various blueprints, in particular his solo all synthetic music, his electroacoustic audio/visual group project, and his multi-channel sound installations. Sote is on the jury panel of The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and has created commissioned work for and performed at a.o. Berghain and CTM Festival (Berlin), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Cafe Oto (London), Jazzhouse (Copenhagen), TodaysArt Festival (The Hague), Bozar (Brussels), Ultima Festival (Oslo), Donaufestival (Krems), Donaueschinger Musiktage, Mira (Barcelona), Terraforma (Milan), and many more.
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SR 528CD
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After its reading of Julius Eastman's Feminine, released in 2021 (SR 501CD), the Ensemble 0 revisit the repertoires of Pauline Oliveros and György Ligeti from another angle. From the works of Oliveros, they exhumed a deeply meditative piece for accordion and voice, giving it a new life in the form of vaporous, cloud-riding chamber music. With Ligeti, the piano radicalism of the Musica Ricercata miniatures crop up again in a new and as yet unreleased orchestration.
György Ligeti (1923-2006): György Ligeti was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" and "one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time."
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016): Pauline Oliveros was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.
Ensemble 0: "Music that's immediately attractive and persistently elusive" --The Wire, UK. The Ensemble 0 (pronounced "zero") is a collective created in 2004 whose full-time members are Stéphane Garin, Joël Merah, and Sylvain Chauveau. They are based in Bayonne (France), Barcelona (Spain), and Brussels (Belgium). The ensemble performs mainly pieces by living composers, as well as compositions by its members. The band has many regular collaborators and guests, allowing the line-up to increase or decrease according to each specific project. The ensemble 0 has played live around Europe (France, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Germany) and in Asia (Japan, Taiwan). They have released a number of records on international labels and have been reviewed or interviewed in magazines and websites such as The Wire, Vital Weekly, Fluid Radio, Mouvement, Ecocolo, The Sound Projector, Textura.
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2LP
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SR 503LP
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Sold out, black vinyl repress available in 2023... Four Pianos (1979-80): It is recognized today that these tutelary pieces for four pianos are among the most powerful in contemporary music, their impact is almost unparalleled. After the historical version recorded forty years ago, this one, featuring four of the greatest European performers, is now regaining its full power. High level recordings too. Red vinyl; includes color insert.
Julius Eastman: There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic -- undoubtedly also one of the most powerful, and it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
The Performers: Nicolas Horvath, pianist and electroacoustic composer; Melaine Dalibert, a French composer and pianist; Stephane Ginsburgh, a tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new music; Wilhem Latchoumia, embraces both new music and the classical repertoire with success and charisma.
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SR 498LP
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Two rare historical recordings (1983 and 1986) originally released as single sides and gathered here for the first time. Carl Michael von Hausswolff on the pieces: "'Conductor' might be my favorite composition and 'Life and Death of Pboc' might be my most sincere. 'Conductor' was my first composed piece with no obvious reference points . . . 'Life and Death of Pboc' was the second. These two compositions gave me the title Godfather of Dark Ambient." Edition of 300.
Carl Michael von Hausswolff (b. 1956 in Linköping, Sweden, lives and works in Stockholm): Since the end of the '70s, von Hausswolff has worked as a composer using recording technology as his main instrument and as a visual artist using light projections, film/video and still photography as well as other media. He has exhibited at dOCUMENTA (Kassel), the biennials in Venice, Moscow, Liverpool, Istanbul, Sarajevo etc. and in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nicosia, Kaliningrad, Tokyo, London, New York, Philadelphia etc. His music has been played in festivals such as Sonar (Barcelona), CTM (Berlin), L'audible (Paris), el niche Aural (Mexico City), MUTEK, (Montreal) etc. and release works on LP, CD, and download by labels like Erototox (Ashevile), Sub Rosa (Brussels), Touch (London), Pomperipossa (Göteborg), and iDeal (Göteborg). He recently curated the second part the sound-installation FREQ_OUT named freq_wave in co-operation with TBA21-Academy and collaborates with artist Leif Elggren, EVP re-searcher Michael Esposito, composers Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Mark Fell, Jim O'Rourke, author Leslie Winer and as Dark Morph (with Jónsi of Sigur Rós). He has also collaborated with Pan Sonic, The Hafler Trio, Freddie Wadling, and Erik Pauser (as PHAUSS).
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3CD
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SR 491CD
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The complete works of one of the pioneers of Belgian early electronics. This three-CD set highlights Leo Kupper's earliest unique compositions produced during the '60s to '90s when he was ardently seeking out structures distinctly applicable to purely electronic sounds. His GAME machine -- Générateur Automatique de Musique Electronique (Automatic Generator of Electronic Music) was constructed during such period and spirit of renewal and technical explorations. Released in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic series. Includes 20-page booklet.
Leo Kupper was born in Nidrum, Hautes Fagnes (Eastern Belgium) on April 16th, 1935. He studied musicology at the Liège Conservatory, then became the assistant of Henri Pousseur who, in 1958, had just founded the Apelac Studio in Brussels. Kupper started to work on his first pieces there, but he would finalize them only upon putting together his own studio in 1967: the Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives (Studio Of Audio Electronic Research And Structuring). That is where he would compose, to this day, over forty works, most of them on instruments of his own design. In the '70s and '80s, he built a series of Sound Domes (briefly established in Rome, Linz, Venice, and Avignon), places where every sound, every phoneme uttered by the listening audience was transformed by hundreds of loudspeakers of various sizes organized in a dome shape. This device transformed sounds through space and time: something said could be morphed into another sound hours, days, perhaps years later. Leo had envisioned that a device like his, a place for contemplation, would be much-needed in cities where nature had been evacuated. In the late '70s, after discovering Iranian music master Hussein Malek, Kupper became one of the very few Western virtuosos of the santur. His first pieces were released by Deutsche Grammophon and, later, Igloo. His latest works have been released by the New York-based label Pogus.
The GAME machine: In 1961, having terminated his musicology studies, Leo Kupper left Liège for Brussels. By that time, centers for music research such as those in Cologne, Paris, and Milan had already produced works of experimental music, where pioneers were forging new and diverse routes in electronic music, "musique concrete", and electro-vocal music. The GAME machine was constructed during such period and spirit of renewal and technical exploration. The GAME consisted of a collection of variable "sonic cells" sensitive to modulations of positive and negative voltages and programmable manually through the aid of color-coded cables. Complex electronic loops and sound from loudspeakers and from microphone pick-ups were then either recorded by tape-machines or performed and interpreted by musicians who opened automatic channels, thus triggering automatic sound to exit the speakers.
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2LP
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SR 492LP
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Reinhold Weber, born in 1927, was known as a pioneer of electronic music. In his compositions, Weber placed a focus on twelve-tone music, he became increasingly fascinated in the field of computer music since the 1970s. He produced numerous works at the Studio for Electronic Music at the University of Karlsruhe. Released in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic series.
Reinhold Weber was born in Gießen on July 18, 1927. He studied at Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf (including composition with Jürg Baur, piano with Max Martin Stein) and passed his exam in composition, theory, piano, and ear training with distinction. He completed further masterclasses with Wolfgang Fortner, Hermann Heiss, Oliver Messiaen (composition), Kurt Thomas (choral conducting), Andor Foldes (piano), and Gerhard Nestler (electronic music). Reinhold Weber was a professor at the Baden Conservatory of Music in Karlsruhe and also worked in the Studio for Electronic Music of the University of Karlsruhe. His works have been performed in numerous concerts and were broadcasted by SDR, WDR, NDR, HR, SWF, and Radio Bremen. Reinhold Weber died March 25, 2013.
Actor Kurt Müller-Graf was born in 1913. After visiting the Theater Academy of Baden in Karlsruhe, he appeared on stage at National Theaters of Karlsruhe, Kassel and Munich since 1935. During World War II, he performed in about ten feature films by Bavaria Film Munich. After 1945, he played at National Theaters in Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and at Theaters in Nuremberg, Cologne, Munich, Mannheim, Baden-Baden and Burgtheater Vienna. Furthermore, he had guest performances in Zurich, Basel, Salzburg and Heidelberg. Kurt Müller-Graf was touring and had broadcasts on radio and television shows at home and abroad. Kurt Müller-Graf died August 10, 2013.
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SR 523CD
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Released in Sub Rosa's Unclassical series. "This album is the result of years of work and friendship with the composer. It started with 'De Profundis', a piece which has had a deep impact on me as a musician and a person, and ended with it. Frederic attended many of my performances of the piece, the last one during our last public concert together in early 2020 in Brussels. In the meantime, he wrote 'Dear Diary' (2014) and 'America: A Poem' (2020) for me which were both premiered at Ars Musica festival. I am very happy to present these pieces to you on this new and special album coming out on Sub Rosa." --Stephane Ginsburgh
Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021): Frederic Rzewski was born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1938. He initially studied piano with Charles Mackey in Springfield and went on to study composition with Walter Piston (orchestration) and Randall Thompson at Harvard University and with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt at Princeton University, where he also took courses in philosophy and Greek. A Fulbright-Scholarship enabled him to study with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence in 1960-61. His musical collaboration with Dallapiccola marked the beginning of his career as a pianist for contemporary piano music. His friendship with Christian Wolff and David Behrman and his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor influenced his development, both as a composer and as a pianist. During the 1960s, Rzewski taught and took part in the first performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Klavierstück X" (1962) and "Plus Minus" (1964). From 1977 to 2003, he was a professor for composition at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège, Belgium. He also taught at various other universities, among them Yale University, the California Institute of the Arts and the Berlin University of the Arts. Rzewski founded the live electronics ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum in Rome in 1966. After his return to New York in the early 1970s, his politically outspoken compositions probably made it difficult for him to obtain a long-term teaching position in the US. Frederic Rzewski lived and worked in Brussels. He left us on June 24, 2021 in his Italian home in Montiano.
Stephane Ginsburgh (1969): A tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new combinations including voice, percussion, performance or electronics, Stephane Ginsburgh performs as a soloist in many international festivals such as Ars Musica (Brussels), Quincena Musical (San Sebastian), ZKM Imatronic (Karksruhe), Agora (Paris), Bach Academie Brugge, Ultima Oslo, Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse, Gaida (Vilnius), Warsaw Autumn, Klara Festival (Brussels), Festival Forum (Moscow), and Musica Strasbourg. He has collaborated with many contemporary composers such as Frederic Rzewski, James Tenney, Philippe Boesmans, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Stefan Prins or Matthew Shlomowitz as well as with choreographers such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (Rosas) and visual artists such as Peter Downsbrough and Kurt Ralske.
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7"
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SR 522EP
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7" limited clear vinyl. Following their recent Difference and Repetition: A Musical Evocation Of Gilles Deleuze (SR 484CD/LP, 2021). Features "The Tears of Nietszche" on side A with Richard Pinhas as guest musician and "Vecteur d'abolition" on side B with the voice of Gilles Deleuze. Palo Alto: Formed in Paris in 1989, Palo Alto released his first album (a cassette) on the Italian label Old Europa Cafe in 1990. The year 2020 is therefore an opportunity to celebrate the 30th anniversary of this first stone, the founder of a discography rich with ten albums. The band is now composed of Jacques Barbéri (also a science fiction author), Laurent Pernice (ex-member of the French industrial band Nox) and Philippe Perreaudin (also coordinator of several compilations and reissues: Legendary Pink Dots, Un Département, Nino Ferrer Revisited, Ptôse, Hardy Fox...) Literature, and particularly science fiction, is a leitmotiv in the band's work. Antoine Volodine, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Lewis Carroll or J. G. Ballard have been invoked many times. In recent years, Palo Alto has multiplied musical collaborations with, among others, The Residents, Ptôse, Klimperei, Tuxedomoon... From industrial music to inextricable electronic ramifications, by making a detour through improvisation, the musical universe of Palo Alto is multifaceted. Their new album is no exception to this rule...
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SR 519LP
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Maurice Louca is one of the most gifted musicians and composers on Egypt's thriving underground music scene. This forthcoming full-length album draws voraciously on Arabic music, psychedelic folk. The title Saet El-Hazz is a coded saying in Egypt to refer to a good time and usually implies a great deal of debauchery. "When you mention to someone that you've had a saet hazz, there are no questions asked. It is what it is." The initial spark for Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour) was Louca's desire to collaborate with "A" Trio, the Lebanese improvisational group featuring Mazen Kerbaj on prepared trumpet, Sharif Sehnaoui on prepared guitar, and Raed Yassin on prepared double bass. "When the three of them come together they create a sonic cosmos entirely their own. I started by composing music that I wanted to have exist within this sonic world- at times in harmony, or clashing with it, and all the emotional ranges in between." Just as "A" Trio served as the spark, a commission from Mophradat, an arts organization based out of Brussels, was the tinder. The commission was for a new composition to be performed using instruments that Louca would modify to play microtonally. This led him to Turkey and Indonesia. In Istanbul, he worked with a luthier to custom-make a guitar. In Surakarta, he ended up with an instrument maker tuning a Serang-referred to as the Indonesian xylophone, part of the family of Gamelan tuned percussion instruments. These new modified instruments opened up the composition to new tonal possibilities which drove Louca to expand his line up to include Khaled Yassine, a longtime collaborator and versatile percussionist and drummer, Christine Kazaryan, a dynamic harpist whom he met via Praed Orchestra, and Anthea Caddy, a cellist who came highly recommended from the Berlin free improv scene. Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour) is a long form composition of six movements, recorded over the course of a week in August 2019 at A/B studios in Brussels. RIYL: Sun City Girls, Tortoise, Nadah El Shazly, Amirtha Kidambi, Don Cherry, Jaubi, Pharoah Sanders, Sunil Ganguly. Black vinyl. Includes insert.
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CD
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SR 518CD
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Milan Knízak canonical text Aktual University, dating from 1967, contains ten short lectures outlining the university's character -- On Conflict, On Dreams, On Revolutions, On Love, On Belief, On Art, etc. These lectures were to serve as inspirational schemes for lectures, seminars and discussions held at an ideal university. In the first piece, Aktual University, Milan Knízak reads his own text, with Opening Performance Orchestra providing the musical accompaniment. It was performed live in October 2019 at the Movement-Sound-Space festival in Opava, where this recording was made. The second track, titled "Broken Suite", is a studio remix, in which Opening Performance Orchestra used fragments and quotations from Milan Knizák's compositions, conceived over the past fifty years, applying the "broken" method. The majority of them are made public for the very first time in the newly created "Broken Suite". The booklet features English translations of ten Aktual University lectures, as well as Milan Knizak's contemporary initiation text. Includes 12-page booklet.
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