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In the swirl of underground music emerging from Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1980s, Peter Gutteridge stands as one of the era's most intense and shadowy figures. Despite being a founding member of The Clean and The Chills, Gutteridge would eschew indie-rock fame for the hypnotic and driving sounds of his later bands such as Snapper.
Fittingly, it is Pure – Gutteridge's lone solo album of intimate home recordings – that serves as the most revealing and celebrated release of his career. As Peter Je…
"abundance" is the new album by Iksre (Phoebe Dubar) composed of eight tracks, eachoffering positive, elevating, shimmering, and textural sonic experiences. The songsincorporate layered vocals, viola, analog and software synths, binaural beats, and uniquesound healing instruments. Iksre (I Keep Seeing Rainbows Everywhere), creates ambientmusic that teeters on the edge of danceability, inviting listeners to connect themselves to theabundance that surrounds them.
The creative process leading to th…
*100 copies limited edition* An absolutely gorgeous long-form piece for trombone, its sustained tones billowing into spectral rumbles that open up trance-inducing harmonic spaces. Simultaneously monumental in scale and introspectively meditative, This Is What People Think Mountains Look Like leaves the brain swirling for days with its reverberations. The venue is vital to the overall recording given its reverberant nature, allowing Barbier to follow the sound of their own trombone as it develops…
*100 copies limited edition* Embracing the impermanency of the world and its ever-fluctuating dynamics, salad offers an intimate portrait of life and the sounds that animate it. Riverside Ishiyama opens a window into a typical Japanese apartment, rich with the activities of daily life and the delicate interactions between a new mother and child. The tinkering and whirring of these subtle, incidental sounds commingle with birdsong and the bustling city outside — altogether engrossing the listener…
*100 copies limited edition* A strange and alluring admixture of guitar and sine tones, electronics, and field recordings. The sounds have a crystal-like clarity that allows for the perception of their depths and distances. Its episodic form is structured by a compositional spine — with its irregular vertebrae both cohering its shape and allowing it flexibility. As its title suggests, Looking For A Ruler is involved in the construction of space, the stitching together of a world wherein perspect…
*75 copies limited edition* A wild and beautiful journey into the ecstatic regions of noise. Unfettered distortion ceaselessly billows and unfurls, harmonized and melodized in all sorts of unexpected ways. The momentum is undeniably forward in every direction, while the jarring suspensions that momentarily intervene to restrict the sound's movement serve ultimately to unleash its sublime energy all the more fiercely.
Prolepsis has been one of contemporary Harsh Noise's best kept secrets for the past couple of years, although i've done my best to put people on to the project, which is not easy considering their minimal online presence and short list of physical only self-released titles (that honestly tend to outshine a vast majority of hyped releases by more well known artists).
Until now this Michigan-based project has only been featured on AAD's "Life is Fucking Stupendous!" compilation, but the brief soni…
In the late '70s, The Avengers established themselves as one of the US's preeminent punk bands. Fusing incisive guitar hooks, explosive rhythms and adolescent venom, the group forged some of the most in-your-face songs of the era. Their live shows were legendary, playing up and down the West Coast and even blowing Sex Pistols off the stage at the latter's final performance. As Byron Coley writes in the liner notes, 'Of the best bands of San Francisco's first wave in 1977, The Avengers were by fa…
Following the release of lo-fi electronic masterpiece I Don't Remember Now / I Don't Want To Talk About It and his brilliant follow-up Plaster Falling, Cincinnati-based artist John Bender began assembling his third and last album, Pop Surgery, in late 1982. While all of Bender's work draws from intimate home recordings – featuring the artist alone with various keyboards, analogue sequencers and tape delays – Pop Surgery remains the one that perhaps best distills his arrant deconstruction of the …
"Reflex" is Gábor Lázár's debut album on Raster. His new album is a collection of seven tracks, featuring an extended sound palette of percussions and synthesizers drawing our attention towards the essential soundscapes of techno while maintaining his distinct, uncompromising and meticulously detailed style. While the tracks do not follow traditional narratives, the album has an evolution: it gently builds up from challenging, unpredictable, and organically composed structures to linear yet play…
** CD digipack ** Originally released in 1974 on Shandar, Dream House 78'17" is the second full-length album by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This first-time US edition reproduces the original gatefold sleeve with beautiful calligraphy by Zazeela and liner notes by Young and French musicologist Daniel Caux.
Side one was recorded at a private concert (on the date and time indicated by the title) and features Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone with Jon Hassell on trumpet a…
Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to which it al…
The sixth volume of the collection, Arbor Vitæ, pays homage to the Canadian-American composer James Tenney with performances of the complete quartets and quintets. These works were composed over a period of more than 50 years, from the first string quartet, written at 21, to the last, posthumous quartet. Through various acoustic and musical phenomena, Tenney creates broad, open musical spaces, making music that is both rigorous and sensual. We feel privileged and honoured to be associated with t…
Tom Johnson uses numbers as base material, turning formulas, combinations and other mathematic phenomena into music. And somehow, this music becomes poetry, sometimes like a haiku, sometimes like a sonnet, sometimes descriptive and clear, often enigmatic but always beautiful.
A new vision of John Cage, via his complete works for string quartet. Spanning forty years of the artist’s activities, these three masterworks illuminate the different stylistic periods in the output of this 20th century icon.
"Originally written for orchestra, Phill Niblock’s Disseminate (1998) and Baobab (2011) were arranged by the composer specifically for the Bozzini Quartet, or rather, for ‘multiples’ of the Quartet: twenty different tracks are mixed in each piece — twenty different instruments, the equivalent of five string quartets. The music is essentially a work on the shifting nature of overtone patterns that arise from acoustic instruments. As composer Robert Ashley convincingly argued, these pieces inscrib…
“It is not enough just to play the right notes at the right time in the right way; one must also have the right consciousness. It places the performer in the role of explorer of the interior in order to produce, and being still in order to be active.” — Pauline Oliveros "These words, spoken by Pauline Oliveros, remind us of how fundamental an influence Alvin Lucier has had on the development of new music and its interpretation; they remind us of our role as explorers of sound, and of the irresis…
“It has been my conviction for a number of years that Music (and Art in general) must simply assume the humble task of describing its own end, or at any rate its gradual extinction,” wrote Italian maestro Aldo Clementi (1925–2011) in 1973. Three years earlier he had written B.A.C.H., a piano piece which proved to be pivotal. From this point on, almost all his works are — in David Osmond-Smith’s words — constructed from “tonal fragments arranged in a polytonal canonic counterpoint that ensures ne…
Much-needed repress. "I was very honoured to receive this request from Quatuor Bozzini, whose immense talent I already knew. The first meeting was very warm, friendly and familiar, like a reunion of old friends after a long separation." —Éliane Radigue Thus began the collaboration between Quatuor Bozzini and Éliane Radigue. In the hospitable atmosphere of her apartment, the composer conveyed the intricacies of her sound to QB. Her entire career, Radigue has been dedicated to building a body of w…