Music from Germany

Liminoid is a composition for large ensemble exploring sonic immersion in drones and textures, rhythms and pulsations. Incorporating composed and improvised segments, the piece uses elongation of sound and layered polyphony in an attempt to create a liminal and/or numinous state. This recording of Liminoid is from its premier at The Music Gallery’s X-Avant Festival in Toronto, October 25, 2008. The piece features a powerful vocal performance with every member sharing the vocal duties. The lyrics…

Recorded at the Roundhouse 1972, during the ICES Festival."For this show we rehearsed a week in a small village in the south of Holland. The repertoire of the first part was a kind of "frozen improvisation". We made some written plans about the form and structures and then rehearsed it for the whole week. So during these rehearsals things moved from improvisation into fixed form, just by remembering what we have played, and polishing it. This is a working concept that …

CD reissue of the first Can album, originally issued in 1969. "Can's debut is the only full-length, proper release to feature original vocalist Malcolm Mooney, whose free-form ranting is matched by a raw, aggressive dynamic unlike anything else in the group's canon; driving, dissonant songs like the extraordinary 'Father Cannot Yell' and 'Outside My Door' even owe a rather surprising debt to psychedelia and garage rock. More indicative of things to come is the closer 'Yoo Doo Right,' a 20-minute…

An uneasy truce had been thrashed out by the warring factions of Can by the time they came to record 'Future Days' in 1972, yet it is the underlying musical tension that makes this album such a thrilling part of their cannon... With Damo Suzuki's ethereal vocals continuously juxtaposed by Michael Karoli's fraught guitars and Holger Czulkay's invasive bass, the remastered versions of 'Spray' and 'Bel Air' are numbly visceral in that trademark Can way, convincing you that the full spectrum of cont…

2007 remastered release. The group's fourth album, from 1972, originally issued by United Artists. "The follow-up to Tago Mago is only lesser in terms of being shorter; otherwise the Can collective delivers its expected musical recombination act with the usual power and ability. Liebezeit, at once minimalist and utterly funky, provides another base of key beat action for everyone to go off on -- from the buried, lengthy solos by Karoli on 'Pinch' to the rhythm box/keyboard action on 'Spoon'…

German composer Josef Anton Riedl doesn’t have many releases to show for nigh on six decades of activity. Of his small handful of albums, all long out of print, the best known is a 1972 Wergo LP. The second half of the noughties saw a minor swell of interest in Riedl’s work – the Wergo album was given the Creel Pone CD-R bootleg treatment in 2005, and one of his compositions was included on the fifth volume of Sub Rosa’s Anthology Of Noise And Electronic Music series – but for the most part he r…

Is MTV unplugged still going? I haven’t watched MTV in about 15 years... Anyway Aidan Baker has a CD out on Install called ‘Dry’ and the name is a clue to what’s happening on the recording. Basically the man is playing his electric guitar ‘“Dry” i.e zero effects. Okay so his guitar is plugged in but this is kinda like his Unplugged session. What a session it is too as his sound is stripped right back to its basic elements. What this really reveals is his genius guitar playing which can sometimes…

Henrik Walsdorff (saxophone). Matthias Bauer (bass). Axel Dörner (trumpet). Uli Gumpert (piano). Sven-Ake johansson (drums). Recorded on June 1998 in Berlin.

Original copy, italian pressing of this classic album - cover has some age wear, vinyl seems unplayed

The first track of this is the side-long "Teilmenge 20," which begins as a set of indecipherable static electricity clicks that are quite warm and engaging, which quickly builds to a rhythmic cycle, continuing to mutate and diverge throughout the entire track.  Most interestingly, as the rhythm sets in it truly begins to resemble a traditional 4/4 techno beat.  The tempo and percussive elements are there, but the sounds in no way resemble the stale drum machines and overwrought synths. As the pi…

Cluster's early-'80s farewell to their first era: shorter, gnarlier electronic vignettes, wry and rhythmic. 'Curiosum' finds Moebius and Roedelius at their most impish, sketching miniature worlds with battered analogue gear.

With Suzuki departed, vocal responsibilities were now split between Michael Karoli and Irmin Schmidt. Wisely, neither try to clone Mooney or Suzuki, instead aiming for their own low-key way around things. The guitarist half speaks/half whispers his lines on the opening groover, "Dizzy Dizzy," while on "Come Sta, La Luna" Schmidt uses a higher pitch that is mostly buried in the background. Holger Czukay sounds like he's throwing in some odd movie samples on that particular track, though perhaps i…

"Malcolm Mooney passes the baton to Damo Suzuki for Soundtracks, a collection of film music featuring contributions from both vocalists. The dichotomy between the two singers is readily apparent: Suzuki's odd, strangulated vocals fit far more comfortably into the group's increasingly intricate and subtle sound, allowing for greater variation than that allowed by Mooney's stream-of-consciousness discourse." -- Jason Ankeny

Featuring Ken Vandermark & Mats Gustafsson. Recorded live at Victoriaville in May of 1999. Fantastic live material from a very unique group – the instantly-legendary meeting of reedman Peter Brotzmann with the leading lights of the Chicago avant jazz scene in the 90s – brought together into a tremendous tentet that's maybe even better than the sum of its parts! The group features Brotzmann on tenor and clarinet, Ken Vandermark on tenor and bass clarinet, Jeb Bishop on trombone, Fred Lomberg-Holm…

After quite some silence here come two unheard tracks by the mysterious German duo Cranioclast. In keeping with the spirit of the 10” travel document series, issued by the krev ministry of detours, Cranioclast provide two rhythmic tracks in the form of cocktail recipes. Side 1 utilizes a crazed out beatbox sound and intermingles the beat patterns with all kinds of noise and tape splicings. Woven in with this active soundscape is Cranioclast’s signature sound – distant voices. This time the human…

Second revised and expanded edition of our book about the work of Asmus Tietchens. The book is in GERMAN. It includes essays about Tietchens, a fully commentated discography up to December 2005, short prose by Tietchens and a 70 minute CD collecting compilation tracks from CD and tape compilations from 1984-1995, plus one unreleased track.

“Eine Menge Papier” assembles 20 minutes of sounds derived from using paper as the sound souce. Two tracks originally came out as a limited 7” record on the austrian Syntactic label in the 1990ies and appear here for the first time on CD. The other two tracks were planned for a follow up 7” on the same label that never materialized. The fifth track is a study of sonic material in the same series. There are two further tracks from the P.I.G. series that are considered by the artists as failed att…

Musica Viva 03: Pleading for divine forgiveness, exploring the bounds of possibility of clarinets, and tricks of light.

Late legendary bassist and virtuoso woodwinds player, Los Angeles 2000. Vinny Golia (woodwinds) + Peter Kowald (bass, voice).

Released in 1986, Geboren stuns in the same way early Esplendor tracks do, with blasts of chugging, caterwauling noise sounding straight from the factory floor.  Tietchens’ most monotonously rhythmic work to date, it lacks the esoteric primitivism of earlier records or just severely limits the spaces in between, emphasizing speed in a defiant and less calculating way.  Here is the artist realizing that his own devotion to excavated and mechanized sound, nourished by insular years of homespun syn…