Joachim Nordwall
Co-founded Swedish experimental label Borft Records. Left label and Sweden in 1994. Later returned, and formed the iDEAL Organization including the iDEAL Festival in Göteborg and IDEAL Recordings.
Co-founded Swedish experimental label Borft Records. Left label and Sweden in 1994. Later returned, and formed the iDEAL Organization including the iDEAL Festival in Göteborg and IDEAL Recordings.
Member of: Sins For Beginners
An Island Is An Island
*300 copies limited edition.* An Island Is An Island is a correspondence musical project of two respectable islanders, Michael Morley (of The Dead C, based on Te Wai Pounamu / South Island, New Zealand) and Joachim Nordwall (Ideal Records, Island of Brännö, Sweden).Two tracks touching the 40 minutes mark are as unique as it can get, magical and just sort of hard to define folktale of hypnagogic dream landscapes full of haunting micro tones and fragments of cursed melodies.While listening to this…
Healing Music 13 - 18
*70 copies limited edition* Enter the 3rd chamber: »Healing Music 13–18« is the final installment in Joachim Nordwall's Healing Music Triptychon. Where the first volume delved deep into the depths of dub and the second body of tracks was dedicated to the organization of noise through rhythm and silence, the third part takes a logical step forward, being a radical exercise in asceticism. It's the most stripped down set of the three, demanding attention to details as much as it furthers concentrat…
Their Power Reached Across Space and Time - To Defy Them Was Death - Or Worse
World-renowned horn player Mats Gustafsson teams up with Joachim Nordwall to create Their Power Reached Across Space Ana Time- To Defy Them Was Death- Or Worse- an avant-garde masterpiece. Gustafsson and Nordwall push their instruments to the limit, almost mirroring the title of the record by "reaching across space and time". The duo creates a sense of vast, three-dimensional auditory expanses. "This is where acoustics and analog synths meet. It is unique music. Unheard Vibes. Perfect for specia…
Topology
Jeph Jerman (Hands To) and Joachim Nordwall (Organ of Corti) present "Topology," a stunning collaboration that brings out the best from both artists. Jerman's trademark field recordings are accentuated by Nordwall's electronics in a seamless fusion that simultaneously evokes the mechanical and the environmental. There are moments of subtle tension, but longtime fans of Jerman will note several instances of heightened intensity in his contribution that harken back to some of the more aggressive H…
Healing Music
*Limited edition of 100 copies.* "Disclaimer: Joachim Nordwall is one of those artists whose work I've been following for a long time, from the spastic no wave of Kid Kommando to the sprawling drone rituals of Skull Defekts, from the industrialized meditations of Saturn & The Sun, his collaboration records with the likes of Mats Gustaffson or Mika Vainio, to his multifaceted solo outputs, under his own name or the Idealist moniker... well you might get the point: I am a fanboy. So I write from a…
It Wasn't Until Weeks Later (LP)
Jack Callahan & Asha Sheshadri’s 'Misfired Empathy' was recorded and processed in April and May of 2020 in a number of temporarily shuttered venues and the artists’ apartments. This is their first record as a duo.
Asha Sheshadri is a New York based artist. Her multivalent work commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. In her essayistic videos, recordings and performances, she layers her own voice with original writing, te…
Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves
** First pressing of 350 with artwork by Jaime Zuverza ** Astral Spirit presents Shadows of Tomorrow b/w The Brain Produces Electrical Waves by Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall. Recorded in Nickelsdorf and Brännö in 2019-2020. Mixed by JN at the Gothenburg Sound Experiment.
Insnitt
Ideal Recordings presents Insnitt By Carl Michael Von Hausswolff. Recorded at the opening of CM von Hausswolff’s solo exhibition ”Insnitt” at 3:e Våningen, Gothenburg on September 14th 2018. With: John Duncan, Leif Elggren, Jean-Louis Huhta, Joachim Nordwall, Henrik Rylander. Cover photo by CM von Hausswolff. Design by Joe Gilmore at Qubik. Produced by Joachim Nordwall.
Before It Gets Better, It Will Get Worse - MMXX-17
A deft hand with a long history within the brooding realms of ambient, electronic, and electroacoustic music, since emerging on the Swedish scene during the 1990s, Joachim Nordwall has cut a wide path, not only with a stunning body of solo work and collaborative efforts with Mika Vainio, John Duncan, Mats Gustafsson, and numerous others, but also through his highly regarded label iDEAL Recordings.Nordwall’s contribution to the MMXX series, Before It Gets Better, It Will Get Worse, is a remarkabl…
A Higher State of Body and Mind
**200 copies** Lebanese saxophonist Christine Abdelnour brings an impressive, extended instrumental vocabulary to Joachim Nordwall’s cryptic electronics in this live recording made at Ystad Konstmuseum for Sweden’s Firework Edition Recordings.Falling deeply within the label’s taste for sounds that exist on the liminal edge of perception, A Higher State of Body and Mind sees Abdelnour coaxing spittle-inflected small sounds and bestial whimpers from her brass tool while Nordwall colours the negati…
Fireburn the Bloodlot
**300 copies** Fireburn the Bloodlot commits crenellated walls of guitar noise by CM Von Hausswolff and Joachim Nordwall under their Sins For Beginners alias for avant-garde powerhouse, Ideal. Mantled after a phrase Richard Kern graffitied on the bathroom wall of Hausswolff’s Lower East Side apartment in the late ‘80s, Fireburn the Bloodlot dispatches a pair of unrelenting and incendiary exercises in amp worship and FX-mutilated electric guitars - which is perhaps not what one might expect from …
Conventional Wisdom
Rich, multi-layered vocal studies and shortwave electronics from avant-garde polymath John Duncan (LAFMS, collaborator with Pan Sonic, Chris & Cosey, Jim O’Rourke and countless others), bolstered by synths, drum machines and arrangements by Joachim Nordwall. Highly recommended if you’re into anything from Scott Walker and Pere Ubu to Jay Glass Dubs, Coil and Ilpo Väisänen’s classic Liima Versions. Venerable avant-garde composer John Duncan follows his prized cycle of cover versions ‘Bitter Ear…
Monstrance
Monstrance documents Mika Vainio & Joachim Nordwall reshaping guitars, drums and incendiary electronics at Einstürzende Neubauten’s Berlin studio back in 2010. The results were originally issued by Touch in 2013, with this new 2LP edition now arriving on Nordwall’s iDEAL label five years later as a posthumous tribute and reminder of his erstwhile collaborator. In our opinion, it’s one of Vainio’s most crucial and absorbing collaborations; moving away from ice-cold electronic precision and into a…
A Map of Guilt
Mats Gustafsson and Joachim Nordwall joined their forces for a magmatic new LP out on Bocian. This long player was recorded at Garnison7, Vienna by Martin Siewert in January 2013. Mats Gustafsson - blowing stuff, organ surfing, piano mating.Joachim Nordwall - guitar wanking, synth loving.Mixed by idealist & Christopher Berg at Svenska Grammofonstudion, Gothenburg in Octobre 2015.
The message is very simple
A quote from Timothy Leary, 'The message is very simple : think for yourself and question authority, opens and closes this piece of around 30 minutes. Close mic sounds and electronics.Limited edition of 100 copies. Mastered by Jacques Beloeil.
Trance Below The Streets
Recorded in a Brooklyn basement during a couple of cold December days in 2014, the collaboration between Ryan Martin (DAIS Records, modular synth wizard) and Joachim Nordwall (iDEAL, analogue synth lover) became something very special, raw, intense and powerful. There is an hypnotic feel to it, that may lead you into a wanted or unwanted state of trance. Harsh, yet meditative (and at times beautiful) electronic music masterfully engineered by Kyle Keays Hagerman and mastered by Kris Lapke…
Soul Music 2
Swedish iDEALIST, Joachim Nordwall spills the psychic contents of his skull temple in Soul Music 2, just over two year since his 1st volume, also for Entr’acte. Technically a collaboration with Dungeon Acid on percussion, this album pursues a rich seam of solo releases under Nordwall’s own name since 2010 with a typically ascetic approach to hypnotic, icy minimalism, dissonant tone and plaintive rhythm.
As you might expect from a core member of The Skull Defekts, Fire! Orchestra, and Saturn and …
Prepresence
Recorded live in concert at iDEALFEST, Fylkingen, Stockholm on February 28th 2011. Heavy, lo-fi, monster drone set, featuring two of Sweden's most engaging performers. Sounds generated from the combination of electric hair clippers and analogue synthesiser are amplified, smashed and ground to a pulp, reformed and catapulted into the stars.
Concert
Nordwall is here captured - perhaps on cassette, given the self-confessed terrible quality of the recording - during a 17-minute set in Oslo, in 2008. It's too bad that we can't really get a hold on the actual gradations generated by this 'skull transmission' (I had thought about an Alvin Lucier-like performance with wires linked to the artist's head, then read that JN is a member of Skull Defects) because what transpires is positively stimulating. These sounds might have ranked in the field of …
Soul music
Soul Music consists of six pieces built from monotonous percussion and bent analogue synthesizers. Pulse is central to these works. Taking inspiration from acid house, primitive trance music and 1960s downtown NYC minimalism, Soul Music is music from the skull of Joachim Nordwall. This is his soul music, and its path is circular, rhythmical and intense. Joachim Nordwall runs the iDEAL Recordings label. He is a founder member of The Skull Defekts and also plays with Alvars Orkester and Oceans of …