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Water Babies
*2023 stock. Blue Transluscent Vinyl* 'Every morning, about an hour before sunrise, the day breaks gradually, with little noticeable fanfare. It’s the best time of day outdoors. The nighttime goblins have gone to their hiding places, loud day creatures have yet to rise, and it’s just us with the cool morning mist and that dim kind of landscape that lets us see only what we want to see.When Water Babies was recorded in 1967 and 1968, Miles Davis had with him one his best working units. His and Wa…
Rot
** 500 copies. Limited 50th Anniversary Edition: embossed, reverse board, hand numbered, limited edition red vinyl ** There was a particular type of artist who could only have emerged in the legendary early 1970s. Few musicians fit the bill better than Conrad Schnitzler. Revolution, pop art and Fluxus created a climate which engendered unbridled artistic and social development. Radical utopias, excessive experimentation with drugs, and ruthless (in a positive way) transgression of aesthetic fron…
Selected E_missions
Deep and wrapping digital soundscapes, dotted by micro-noisy granular material, resonant fields where time and space humble themselves in a single perceptive continuum. Contemporary, abstract, minimal, cold, intense and evocative drone music.
Samba Blim
This is the second incredible album which the Brazilian bossa combo did in the US for A&M Records, during the brief time when they were expanded to a quartet from the original Tamba Trio lineup. This album can be considered a masterpiece that combines their original style with American sophistication. The set is completely sublime. A wonderful mix of the group's trademark harmony vocals and crackling bossa rhythms, with the warmly flowing CTI production style of the time – not funky like the CTI…
The Call
** 20220 ** Available on vinyl for the first time in 40 years, Outernational Sounds is proud to present a masterpiece from the Los Angeles jazz underground – Horace Tapscott’s burning, spiritualised 1978 set, The Call. One of the unsung giants of jazz music, the composer, bandleader, arranger, pianist and community activist Horace Tapscott was the undisputed keystone in the grassroots Los Angeles jazz scene. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his radical community arts and music formations the UGMA…
The Road Was Bent From The Way We Took It
*150 copies limited edition* Brandon Tani is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Diego, CA. He is drawn to the varied intersections of minimalist, concrète, and found sounds. Mixing narrative and abstraction. Since 2022, Brandon has released music under the moniker "Daily Rituals" and has recorded 5 releases to date. This new album represents the first release under his own name.
Arcoiris
*200 copies limited wedition. In process of stocking* "Backwards is really pleased to present the new Fabio Orsi release. This time Fabio offered a monumental work: eight long tracks contained in a huge box set with four compact discs. Musically it stands on the new course of the artist: together with the classic ambient and drone atmospheres that we know well, the work has more dynamic parts with rhythms and pulsations, and more melodic parts. A perfect meeting between ambient music and berlin-…
Kyosaku
Kyosaku is a trio. Guitarist Finn Loxbo. Electric bassist Else Bergman. Drummer Ryan Packard. They are based in Stockholm. Together, they explore intensive plateaus. States of constant ecstasy. Kyosaku's music has been described as relentless. But it's really a combination of mesmerizing and prodding, the name a reference to Zen Buddhist "encouragement stick," used to rouse dozy meditators. Packard says: "Relentless as a conceptual place to live within. To be wide awake, relentlessly. To use a f…
Kalpa
*200 copies limited edition* Since the start in 2008 Jon Wesseltoft and Lasse Marhaug, aka Tongues of Mount Meru, have released a set of intense and mind tripping longform pieces. Their music often almost seemingly static and gradually building it’s intensity over long streches of time. This is music that demands concentration, and hypnotically drill into the awareness of the listener. At times abrasive andintense, but also beautiful and calmly introspective. Last year they released the culminat…
Spaces
**200 copies** "Spaces is a series of compositions based on recordings in museums. Each work builds on a binaural recording of the environmental sounds a museum and each has been processed based on different concepts. The approach for processing and adding of electronic sounds was inspired by an artwork that was hanging in the museum space. So space and artwork form a unity. As a composer and mastering engineer I am extremely sensitive to the sounds around me. But I’m also a keen visitor of muse…
Continue
* Edition of 200 * With his new album “Continue” Richard Chartier presents four minimalist compositions with a focus on deep drones and apparent silences. The music is subtle, delicate and at moments fragile. Full, with details, like delicate patterns that unfold like ripples on water.
With a keen eye on details the compositions reflect Chartier’s earlier work, but also asks new questions. When is the creative process done? Is art ever finished or does it continue to develop? And how does the li…
Moving Music - Sounds From the Rocking Chair
* Edition of 200 * In December 2019 we had a crowdfunding campaign to support us into the year 2020. For this we asked several of our musicians if they could contribute to this campaign. From this the compilation Moving Music: Sounds From The Rocking Chair grew. In total 24 musicians submitted their creativity to make a total of 16 tracks. Aside from some exclusive solo tracks there are also 10 collaborations with unique combinations of musicians. To name a few: TVO & Jos Smolders, Radboud Mens …
Additive Inverse
* Stunning collaborative work of field recordings and electronics by Jos Smolders and Jim O'Rourke * What if sounds were to fold in on themselves? Quite quickly after being 'born', even. Only to be released back into the 'normal' world of linear projection and moving waveforms from a resonant source to the ear drum to hearing and listening, some album length later? Through a looking glass of sorts, as if emerging from an anechoic chamber through the backdoor. From absolute silence into all heari…
Dwaal / Wold +
Dauw, the great tape label based in Ghent, invited me in 2015 to do a release for them. This resulted in two 18 minute tracks, Dwaal and Wold. Both are exercises in creating an auditory space or sphere rather than sculpting a structured composition. With its orchestral washes amidst a barrage of radio static and erratic noise, Dwaal is the noisy brother of the two. It's a balancing act or battle perhaps between disruptive tumult and serene calm. On Wold, with its sparse piano notes spread out ov…
Fifteen Saxophones
First ever CD reissue of this little known classic from founding Philip Glass Ensemble member Richard 'Dickie' Landry. Following two jazz LPs issued on the Chatham Square label (which he co-ran), Dickie Landry released Fifteen Saxophones, a set of 1974 recordings done with engineer Kurt Munkacsi, on the Northern Lights and Wergo labels in 1978. Fifteen Saxophones simultaneously demonstrates Landry's boundary-pushing saxophone and his understanding of the minimalists' long-form treatises on sound…
Satie Slowly
American composer Philip Corner likes Satie too well not to object to how he is played. From the time of his participation in the first performance of Erik Satie's "Vexations" he realized that here was, lurking under the travesties of the 1st Gymnopédie, one of the greats of this or any other century... a "secret genius" who masked with humility and seeming conformity a profoundly innovative thorough-going critique of the limitations and pretensions of our High Culture as it has come down to us.…
Vitriol
2017 release ** "Spiritual research and constant need for inner transformation. These are the key elements in the compositional style of Dubit, Pier Alfeo's moniker, the Apulian countryside-based electronic musician and producer whose Backwards is proud to issue "Vitriol", his second full length. This ten-track album, which resumes the Backwards' CD-series started in 2013 with Fabio Orsi's “Endless Autumn”, has taken more than one year of work, using both analogue instruments (such as Spring Rev…
Soft Focus: Volumes One
Pastoral moods, pastel modes, daydream verve, colors in complement, slightly dissonant, outdoor airs, shadow underleaf, gravity's touch, falling rain, solemn distances, memento mori, the wandering mind...Soft Focus is two volumes of a musical experiment that intended to go one way and went another. A project that sought song form became a process that discovered tonal movements through unexpected environments and atmospheres. I hope you enjoy! -Wednesday
Cadenza Del Crepuscolo
"The meaning of "cadenza del crepuscolo" ("dusk cadenza") can be interpreted in a variety of ways. The most profound is the one corresponding with the implicitly slow flux of thoughts and reflections that emerge as we sense the day fading away, possibly in a moment of somewhat regretful oscillation between an unknown tomorrow, what we have already experienced and now miss, and the unexpressed potential of what we long for, but have not yet achieved (and perhaps never will).
The sympathetic music…
Selected Works For Piano And/Or Sound-Producing Media
”The earliest and still predominant influences on my conceptual attitude toward art were the works of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock ... the integral but unpredictable ‘floating’ variations of a mobile, and the contextual ‘rightness’ of the results of Pollock’s directness and spontaneity in relation to the materials and his particular image of the work…as a total space (of time).”
Earle Brown’s influence on the avant-garde community has been philosophical as well as tangible and practica…