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viewing 1 To 10 of 10 items
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LP
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TTTT 011LP
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Following on from recent works for 12k, The Trilogy Tapes, and Important, Far More Decentralized is a new collection of subtle, enchanting pieces from Tokyo-based sound and visual artist Akhira Sano. Working with electronic, instrumental, and concrete sounds, he crafts immersive assemblages of long overlapping tones and blurred resonance, cut through with textural crunch and hiss. The resonant bell-like tones of opener "Kouai" invite the listener in, calling up the warm sound palette of ambient classics like Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music for Nine Postcards, but leaving any sense of compositional anchor behind for a free-floating harmonic drift. Woven through this seductive tonal cloud is a wavering stream of white noise and tactile pops, its textural grit threatening to derail the calmly reflective pool of pitched sounds, but never quite doing so. Each of these seven pieces occupies a similarly ruminative harmonic space while possessing its own identity. On "Neow," lush tonal swells form around fragmented samples, touching on the techniques of early 2000s glitch artists like Ekkehard Ehlers. "Orbv" is particularly subtle in its combination of rippling back-masked tonal wash, almost subliminal suggestions of field recordings, and distant traces of raw electronic interference, as if a Toshimaru Nakamura recording is playing through an open window across the road. 'Margin' weaves together a skein of wistful slow-motion melodies while untraceable, resonant clinks and ambiguous static washes rise gradually to the surface. In comparison to his recent Phase Contrast for Recollection on 12k, recognizable instrumental sounds are a rarity here, yet a hand-played feeling is present throughout. On "Teens," filtered electric guitar tones reminiscent of the melancholic miniatures of Andrew Chalk float over aqueous burbles, bringing the album to a magisterial close. In the crowded field of contemporary electronic music tending toward ambience, Sano is a distinctive voice. Like his elegant abstract paintings, here seemingly static surfaces of unhurried calm reveal rich interior worlds of subtle activity and gentle chaos. Where much contemporary ambient music aims for an almost stifling cleanliness of tone, Sano breathes life into Far More Decentralized through the acceptance of imperfection, accident, and rough edges.
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CD
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TTTT 016CD
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Fatty is a desperate suite of consoling, tanked songs by UK composer Laurie Tompkins. Friends' samples, instruments, and voices sag and soar through intimately deranged, muckily decadent productions. The mind runs fast while the body lags, sludge in a cage, fat coagulating on bones. Opulent throw-downs from Teresa Winter, Gwilly Edmondez, Eliza McCarthy, and Otto Willberg are the backdrop for Laurie's voice to heave into the sky, or lilt, baffled, through the gunk. Elsewhere, Gwilly and Jess Hickie-Kallenbach (Still House Plants) are all power, grain, and delight as they sing through a scrub of electric violin and too-smooth keys. Aaron Parker binges through manic arabesques for spinnet, xylophone and vibraphone on "Sombor Shuffle", as strangely graceful as the Nuggets' no 15. The album is accompanied by videos and images by Joel Wycherley, whose dummy burb of dredged-up ornaments, wasted dwellings, and moldy mother nature feels realer and faker than life. His 33-33 debut is one of Laurie's three spring '22 discs, between an album with Eliza McCarthy for Entr'acte and another with Eliza and Ashley Paul for Hyperdelia.
Laurie Tompkins (b.1990) is a UK composer, performer and co-founder and co-director of the Slip label. From scores for samples, instruments and voices he creates a grabbable music that dreams and confounds. Bodies, things, words, and sounds strain under duress, looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, moldy echo, and swollen bombast. Laurie co-directs Slip, which has released music by Yeah You, Mica Levi, Julia Reidy, Bass Clef, Object Collection, Mentos Gulgendo, Chaines & Competition. Old releases of his own include Ample Profanity (2018), with cellist Oliver Coates; Heat, War, Sweat, Law (2016); and Exorcise (2021), as Yes Indeed with bassist Otto Willberg.
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LP
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TTTT 007LP
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Restocked. Garden of Shadows and Light is the first collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Toop, presenting the entirety of a concert performed in London in August 2018. With their collective musical experience encompassing collaborative work with figures as diverse as Evan Parker, Akiko Yano, Arto Lindsay and Christian Fennesz, in contexts ranging from pop session work to film scores to sound installation, no one could be sure how Sakamoto and Toop would approach their first concert together as a duo. From the opening moments, in which Sakamoto's delicate inside-piano work is paired with distant scrapes and moans from Toop's prepared lap steel guitar, it became immediately clear that a subtle, at times hushed, form of free improvisation is being practiced here, one in which space, pause and silence often take on heightened importance. The album's title takes inspiration from the aesthetics of Japanese gardening, and the spatial metaphor this suggests is apt, as listeners can imagine themselves wandering through a subtly changing environment, chancing on beautiful details and admiring them before moving on. You are led through a series of discrete moments, each uniquely shaded, whether by highly amplified small percussive sounds, austere electronic tones or the mournful tones of Toop's bass recorder. The course of the music follows a non-teleological drift, in which Sakamoto and Toop seem less concerned with establishing an overarching structure than in allowing each moment the space it needs to develop and breathe. When Sakamoto eventually turns to the piano's keyboard in the performance's second half, the music becomes lushly enveloping, as his jaggedly lyrical lines float against a backdrop of prepared guitar and field recordings. The music takes a radical, unexpected turn when Sakamoto picks up an electric guitar, with both players turning up the volume for a passage of distorted roar and shuddering feedback -- bracing evidence of the unfettered, exploratory approach shared by these two uncategorisable musicians, beautifully documented here.
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LP
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TTTT 008LP
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El Hardwick's debut album, 8, explores an alternative cyberspace at the crossroads of climate and digital justice. Originally imagined as a sci-fi graphic novel back in 2016, over the following three years, 8 expanded into a concept album. Combining photography with poetry and song, Hardwick spins a cautionary tale in which technocrats advise a social elite to give up their bodies, upload their minds to a server, and migrate into cyberspace. Those the algorithm deems less worthy are left behind on a depleted earth. Channeled through Hardwick's vaporous falsetto, 8 unfolds along two paths: the A-side builds, while the B-side destroys. In the shimmering "Bitter Lake", Hardwick reflects on grief and creates a spiritual energy that moves between hope and grief. "Ration Without Reason", "Tidal" and "Expect" delve into more personal territory. For Hardwick, these three tracks are ecological love songs that address their relationship with capitalism. Track eight, "Vanishing Point", captures the tipping point at which one person's creation becomes someone else's destruction A prominent photographer in the music industry, Hardwick has constantly expanded their talents, from cocurating a zine on shapeshifting and hosting shows of young women photographers, to DJing as Moonbow at queer raves. They recently launched a new series of projects, titled Desire Lines, with a compilation in support of QueerCare. Last year, Hardwick banded with Discwoman affiliate Ciel, who remixed the album's fifth track "BNND WDTH" for a 12" single, released on West Friends label. Features Cardinal Fang, Conrad Kira and Elliott Arndt, Sim Hutchins, and MX World.
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LP
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TTTT 010LP
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Landscapes is the latest release from prolific Yorkshire born composer and producer Kirk Barley (Bambooman). Across a tight 34-minute runtime, the album presents eleven short pieces that inhabit an exotic, other-worldly space of chiming guitars, buzzing insects, and squelching synth tones. Working with looped fragments of his own instrumental, electronic, and field-recorded sounds, Barley assembled the tracks from edited improvisations, some of them enriched with live drums from Matt Davies. Barley's skittering, off-kilter loops overlap freely, combining with meter-less, free-jazz-inspired drumming, and processed environmental field recordings to craft gently surging sonic environments. At once static and constantly shifting, the pieces unfold themselves like views of a landscape, where we take in individual details one at a time while always remaining aware of the whole. Deeply influenced by the "Fourth World" philosophies of trumpeter Jon Hassell, champion of a music bridging global traditions and contemporary technologies, Landscapes integrates electro-acoustic techniques with suggestions of a variety of non-western musical forms, from the pitched percussion effects of "Water Wheel" (calling to mind the incredible bamboo tube percussion of Solomon Islands music) to the stately Gamelan-esque procession of clanging metallic tones and deep, filtered synth chords that underlies the pop and crackle of fireworks on "Ark". Several pieces make use of a drifting pentatonic harmony that brings them close to the work of Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura, though Barley's productions are so rich in detail and surprise that they demand active listening. At other times, a distinctly English sensibility makes itself felt in the pastoral expanses of gently spaced chords and chiming guitar harmonics, calling up the delicate miniatures of Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker's cult Deux Filles project. Landscapes is an unassuming but powerful work that uses a rich array of details, materials, and techniques to conjure 11 snapshots of a unique sound world, one both comforting and disorienting. Recommended for anyone moved by the evocative sketches of Eno's Music for Films (1976), the fourth world fusion of Jon Hassell, the abstract explorations of the far-side of club music techniques of Giuseppe Ielasi/Inventing Masks or the tropical soundscapes of Lievens Martens/Dolphins Into The Future.
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LP
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TTTT 005LP
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ThirtyThree ThirtyThree present the debut LP from the Clandestine Quartet, bringing together Alan and Richard Bishop with Michael Flower and Chris Corsano. Invited to perform in London as part of the St John Sessions series, Alan Bishop rounded up this quartet of underground stalwarts with a deep history of collaborative ventures -- the Bishop brothers making up two-thirds of the legendary Sun City Girls, Richard Bishop and Corsano comprising two parts of psychedelic juggernaut Rangda, and the Flower-Corsano Duo having wowed audiences for over a decade with their face-melting brand of eastern-tinged free shred. The quartet spent four days in the studio developing material for the London show and recording the five pieces heard here. They settled, for the most part, on something approaching a classic rock quartet line-up: Richard Bishop on electric guitar, Michael Flower on his signature amplified "Japanese banjo" (an Indian keyed zither), Alan Bishop on bass, and Chris Corsano manning the drums. Rather than a straight-up improvised blowing session, the LP strikes a balance between free-flowing spontaneous interaction and structured surprise, alternating between zoned-out group meditations and stop-on-a-dime unison dynamics. On the epic side-long opener "Don't Hang From My Ceiling", a lyrical weave of guitar, bass, and Japanese banjo lines approaches the unhurried melodic invention of Indian classical music until Corsano's tumbling, free-form drums incite the quartet into an ecstatic crescendo, over which Richard Bishop's guitar unfurls a euphoric solo that calls to mind the mystical grandeur of prime Popol Vuh. The B side finds the quartet branching out both in terms of instrumentation and compositional strategies, crafting a suite of pieces that, like classic Sun City Girls, move unexpectedly from tightly locked bass and drum grooves to explosions of free jazz alto saxophone (courtesy of Alan Bishop) and from shimmering guitar jams to massed choirs of horns. "(So Long) Harry Dean", one of the record's highlights, finds Richard Bishop on piano, leading the quartet through a languorous series of chords punctuated by Corsano's gracefully ungainly percussive accents, before a sudden blast of reed horn announces a passage of rapid-fire dissonance that seamlessly transitions back into the pianistic meandering of the track's first-half. Effortlessly balanced between improvisation and composition, melody and noise, rhythm and space, the Clandestine Quartet is a fitting next step for this group of psychedelic troubadours.
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2LP
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TTTT 003LP
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Trailblazing Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is joined by revered electronic musician Taylor Deupree on this live recording, documenting their collaboration at St John-at-Hackney Church in 2014, part of ThirtyThree ThirtyThree's flagship concert series St John Sessions. The two musicians develop a kinetic understanding over the recording, entering a sparse musical dialogue -- flourishes of prepared piano give way to bursts of noise and sculpted synths. Totally improvised, the performance follows their collaborations on record -- as a duo on 2013's Disappearance, and in a trio with Illuha on 2014's Perpetual. Ryuichi Sakamoto has had an extraordinary career, from his founding of revolutionary electronic trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, to his remarkable film scores, notably Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and the soundtrack for Oscar-winning film, The Revenant (2015). Taylor Deupree, meanwhile, spent his career devoted to his label, 12k, and an intricate form of ambient minimalism. Originally released in 2015, ThirtyThree ThirtyThree's inaugural record, the album has been remastered by Deupree. Features new artwork; Comes in a gatefold sleeve; 180-gram, transparent blue vinyl; Includes 24" photographic print.
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LP
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TTTT 002LP
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Oglon Day is the debut release from the quartet of Oren Ambarchi, Mark Fell, Will Guthrie, and Sam Shalabi. Though Ambarchi had previously worked on separate occasions with Fell and Guthrie, the two days the four musicians spent together in a London studio producing this LP was their first meeting as a quartet, preceding an acclaimed performance at the 2016 Masāfāt Festival. The four musicians have created an effortless blend of their seemingly disparate approaches, carving out a musical space that gives equal weight to Ambarchi's physically affecting guitar explorations, Fell's stuttering electronic pulse, Guthrie's virtuosic drumming, and Shalabi's psychedelic oud improvisations. Oglon Day is an inspired meeting of the acoustic and the electronic, the composed and the improvised, the human and the machine, the austere and the joyous. Quite unlike anything else in the four musicians' respective back catalogs, it also offers a surprisingly accessible point of entry for any listener so lucky as to be unfamiliar with their work.
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2LP
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TTTT 006LP
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Following on from 2018's rapturously received Assimilation, London-based saxophonist, improviser and producer Ben Vince returns with Don't Give Your Life. Over the last few years, Vince's solo saxophone and electronics performances, along with his work in the clattering post-punk troupe, Housewives, have helped him quickly establish a considerable reputation among those in the know. Where his first releases under his name honed in on his meditatively layered and looped saxophone lines -- placing him in a lineage beginning with the Time Lag Accumulator works of Terry Riley and stretching into the icy expanses of John Surman's 1980s recordings and the hypnotic riffing of Gilbert Artman's Urban Sax (1977) -- Assimilation saw Vince branching out to work with high-profile collaborators such as Micachu and demonstrating his deep love of the outer reaches of club music (also evident on last year's collaborative 12" with UK bass music bigwig Joy Orbison). Don't Give Your Life is the strongest work yet from an artist whose work demonstrates a risk-taking, omnivorous appetite for the new while also digging deeper and deeper into a unique sonic sensibility. Features Bianca Scout, Kenta Sekine, Tom Glencross, Jacob Samuel, Alpha Maid, Rupert Clervaux, and Raven Bush.
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LP
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TTTT 004LP
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Full title: A Loss Permitted To Open Its Eyes For But Three Hours And There Glimpsed, Finally In Focus A Mystery That Begs Earnestly, "Ask Me Nothing" Now, Once More The Problem Is Yours Alone. Experimental music pioneer Keiji Haino, one of the most mysterious and influential figures to emerge from the Japanese psychedelic underground, teams up with Charles Hayward, British drummer and founding member of This Heat and Camberwell Now, on a new live album released on ThirtyThree ThirtyThree. A Loss Permitted... comprises a live recording of the duo's improvised performance at the Copeland Gallery in London in July 2016, presented as part of ThirtyThree ThirtyThree's performance series Japan: London. The result is fascinating: a mix of air synths, distortions, improvised Japanese poetry and warped guitar sounds. Sedate harmonica and guitar sections give way to cosmic din or an equally unnerving silence, in a performance All About Jazz described as having "no sense of logic, only silence where the tension seemed to build, then finally release". It's not the first time Haino and Hayward have worked together -- Hayward's rare album Double Agent(s) (1998) documents their improvisational sparring live in Japan in 1998. Both are restless collaborators: Haino has played with Derek Bailey, Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke, Pan Sonic, and Stephen O'Malley, as well as in his own groups Fushitsusha, Nazoranai, and Nijiumu, among others; while Hayward's collaborators have included Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, and Laura Cannell. A Loss Permitted... sees these two visionary musicians revisit their partnership, creating a sound that is at turns contemplative and ferocious -- and always completely compelling.
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