Electronic / All styles

Bartlett built chance into electronic music, worked on the Buchla 400 and made his own devices. He studied with Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and David Tudor, Carnatic singing in Madras, and gamelan in Java. He died of AIDS-related causes in 1993, after years of rejection from labels.

Midday Moon is a survey of ambient and experimental music that emerged from Australia and New Zealand between 1980 and 1995. These recordings are sourced from a rich variety of micro-labels, private pressings, theatre soundtracks and artists’ personal archives. Curated by Melbourne based DJ and archivalist, Sanpo Disco (a.k.a Rowan Mason), the collection delves deep into the world of outsider music that emerged in Australia and New Zealand in the latter half of the twentieth century, as synthesi…

This Sote album is incredible - a highly complex but beautifully fluid traversal of Iranian folk music and modular synthesis that reminds us of Dariush Dolat-Shahi’s unparalleled ‘Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar’ with its fantastically creative sense of freedom and abstract expression, pulling us deep into uncanny valleys of hyper modernism bursting with ideas and a sense of disrupted harmony that’s hard to absorb in one sitting. Ata Ebtekar’s restlessly searching sound has been in action for 3…

2019 Small Repress. Ecstatic finally issue Abul Mogard's modular landscape paintings on 'Circular Forms' a suite of 4 analogue synth pieces. Unfolding through a 40 minute synthesiser suite in four parts, 'Circular Forms' is one of the most captivating examples of Mogard's deeply evocative music, drawing out a sort of direct emotional quality from his limited set-up of Farfisa organs and a self-built modular system.Abul Mogard was born in Belgrade, Serbia and spent most of his life working in a m…

"La Colonna Infinita" (The Endless Column) it is inspired by the short essay " Brancusi et les mythologies" written by Mircea Eliade. The "Column of Heaven" is an axis mundi, a mythological theme already attested in prehistoric times and which, moreover, is widespread in many variations in various eras and cultures: the Irminsul column of the ancient germans, the cosmic pillars of the North Asian populations, the central mountain, the cosmic tree, etc. In the symbolism of the axis mundi, the axi…

his release is LP and it's individually 300 hand-numbered limited edition. It's dedicated to the 1988 Experimental / Electronic masterpiece by the Italian contemporary guitarist Riccardo Giagni, originally released on Stile Libero (Italy) featuring Antonella Ruggiero, Roberto Colombo and Mauro Pagani. Archeo Recordings is a reissue record label that regenerates old, lost, obscure and forgotten rare gems of mostly Italian music but also all over the world of the 70s, 80s and 90s. All outputs are …

Lexachast is an ongoing collaborative work by Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas and Harm Van Dorpel’s A/V project, it  arrives in album form, taking in unspooled/unravelling mixtape fragments, generative avant-EDM and cyberdrone topographies inspired by NSFW imagery and extreme banality. If you were into Haswell & Hecker’s amazing ‘Blackest Ever Black (Electroacoustic UPIC Recordings), or generally fascinated by PAN's sprawling, multi-faceted interests, this incredible album really is a kind of enc…

Brian Eno's pioneering Ambient album from 1978. Standard 1 LP version. “Arguably the most quietly influential of all his works” according to the BBC, this conceptual record was intended as a soundtrack for imaginary films, with excerpts later featuring in movies by directors including John Woo and Derek Jarman.The album is a loose compilation of material, composed of short tracks ranging from one-and-a-half minutes to just over four, making it the antithesis of the long, ambient pieces he later …

Jake Blanchard's third volume of Menagerie finally shows up just over a year after #2... The concept this time is slightly different, not only do the artists create imagery based on the musicians music, but this time the musicians also create a track based on an image created by the artist. Two exclusive new tracks from each of these artists: Ben Nash, Isengrind, C Joynes and Twinsistermoon. And exclusive new artwork by Jim Stoten, Simon Fowler, Adrianne Neil and Jake Blanchard. The sleeve is a …

With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July 1980), Dome 2 (October 1980), and Dome 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome IV was released on the Norwegia…

2019 Small repress. Abul Mogard's first new solo album since 2015’s Circular Forms, a staggering suite of widescreen landscapes painted in self-built modular synth strokes. Hugely recommended if you're into Alessandro Cortini, early OPN, Coil, Brian Eno... Above All Dreams is Abul Mogard’s beautifully absorbing new album for Ecstatic, deploying six longform pieces for the most expansive solo release by Mogard to date. Taking into account its intangible divinity and cinematic quality - the result…

Edition of 200. This is the last release in the series of Nicolas Bernier’s worldwide acclaimed and Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica awarded project “frequencies”. The piece frequencies (a / archives) is a composition based on sounds from the scientific archives of Rennes 1 University (France). This impressive collection of antique scientific apparatus includes one of the few remaining "Grand Diapason" built by Rudolph Koenig circa 1880. The two gigantic forks of the Grand diapason can gen…

'You & I are Earth' begins with the sound of a woman talking. She recalls memories of being a young girl during the London Blitz fire bombings of World War II. She speaks calmly at first, with memories of the event slowly creeping up on her. These impressions soon become illustrated through Vanessa Rossetto's own collage of mechanized cacophony. Eventually, they develop into her signature Feldman-esque flowing-out of strings.  The woman’s voice belongs to none other than Rossetto’s mother,…

Born in Montreal in 1940, Guy Thouin is a true original. He played drums in a variety of small bands prior to enrolling at Montreal’s School of Fine Arts where he studied sculpture and refined his understanding of the contemporary art world. By 1965, he had acquired a taste for all things experimental. Around then, he turned to collective improvisation – an experience that led him to explore free jazz and other forms of experimental music. He helped cofound Quatuor de jazz libre du Québec (1967)…

Best known as an electronic duo, Cham-pang became a fixture of the Montreal new wave scene in 1981 with the release of a two-song EP on YUL Records (“Tantum Ergo” b/w “Ne mourrez pas”). The session featured Men without Hats’ Allan McCarthy on electronics and Yvel Champagne on vocals, although the group also depended on contributions from Mario Spezza of Rational Youth and Pyer Desrochers. A multidisciplinary artist with a singular voice and an arresting presence, Champagne then joined force with…

By 1981, after four years of DIY electronics, it was time for a change. For Philip Sanderson that change came in the form of film. At first, requests came from friends for soundtrack work, and by the end of the decade he was making short experimental 8mm films himself. On One Of These Bends is a collection of unreleased songs, soundtrack work and obscure cassette-only pieces from the 80’s which reflect Philip’s shift in focus. It was a departure from the industrial music he had been making with …

The latest release on Canada's Seance Centre label focuses on the work of long-serving Dutch experimentalist Michel Banabila, gathering together examples of his "excursions into otherworldly and imagined realms". The first record boasts tracks recorded between 1987 and 2017, shuffling between humid, percussion-led workouts, exotic ambience, dark and creepy soundscapes and sticky electronic/acoustic fusion. The second record (clips of which are not featured here) replicates the track list of the …

Tutti is comprised of eight soundscapes: an audio self portrait comprising of manipulated sound recordings from Cosey Fanni Tutti’s life, music and art: “It’s the only album I’ve made that is an all encompassing statement expressing the totality of my being. A sense of the past in relation to the present and everything in between.” These eight pieces were originally conceived as the soundtrack to the autobiographical film ‘Harmonic Coumaction’, and performed live in February 2017, part of a seri…

2019  small repress. Everywhere At The End of Time is the first in a series of six albums by The Caretaker, aka James Leyland Kirby, slowly cataloguing the stages of early onset dementia. Each album will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration, progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness. Viewing dementia as a series of stages can be a useful way to understand the illness, but it is important to realize that this only prov…

Berlin based trio Keller Crackers collective likes to shape haunting esoteric sounds, in which self-built instruments dance with ritualistic synthesised rhythms, field recordings, psychoacoustic drones and poetical spoken silhouettes.After a self-released MC and a mesmerising tune called “Anem” out in February 2019 on the custom-made Kashual Plastik 007 double-vinyl compilation, now they give birth to their own debut record “KC”, a four track EP resulting from various improvisational studio sess…

2019 Small Repress. Fourth in a series of six albums from The Caretaker cataloguing the effects of early-onset dementia. Featuring four extended, smudged and hallucinatory side-long pieces - the darkest and most immersive music from The Caretaker to date.The Caretaker slips into the first “post awareness” stage of Everywhere At The End of Time. The ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror; the beginning of a process where all memories begin to become more fluid thro…

2019 Small Repress. The third of a six album cycle cataloguing The Caretaker's fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia, presenting some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists fade away. In this crepuscular, autumnal phase, recollections phosphoresce, and wilt in advancing stages of entropic decay, steadily approaching a winter of no return. Continuing to mirror the progression of dementia, using nostalgia for ballroom as an alleg…

2019 Small Repress. The second of six LPs issued under the title Everywhere At The End of Time, cataloguing The Caretaker’s fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia. This second stage takes a more wistful tack as our protagonist gradually realises that all is not well and begins to rummage deeper into the recesses of his mind, masking emotions of grief, loss, fear and uncertainty.  As The Caretaker’s short term memory functions begin to more rapidly erode, the loop-based …

Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remix and Bécs. Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story. I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even ha…

Michael Byron's Fabric for String Noise, Parts 1 and 2 (2018), composed for New York’s notable violin duo String Noise, is wildly virtuosic music that is unlike just about anything else ever written for two violins. This two-movement work, a tremendous (and relentless) river of complex lines, may be said to resemble a sort of universal folk music of madly driven ecstasy, a sonic canvas wherein intense continuous activity shares space with an overarching sense of motionlessness.The composer chara…

Peter Garland's Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1) is a quiet, sparse, introspective six-movement work for three large gongs and a large tam-tam. Performed by celebrated new-music percussionist William Winant, it unfolds with a muted sensuality and a glacial inevitability—as if bent on suspending time. Each of the movements (or individual “pieces,” as the composer sometimes refers to them) has a distinct character, developing in its own fashion—utilizing such traditional means…

Daniel Lentz's River of 1,000 Streams is a complex, slowly growing, densely textural piece for solo piano and up to 11 layers of “cascading echoes” (which are created in a live performance via a computer running a MAX patch). Each of the piece’s hundreds of “echoes” is a short moment (generally one to a few bars in length) of the piano solo that may reappear anywhere from a half-second to 25 minutes after the pianist first plays it. Floating sparsely amid the piece’s rich primary texture of trem…

The Threat Of Memory 5CD box-set, by Steven Stapleton and David Tibet features all of Steven’s and David’s previously-issued recordings, made under their “Steven Stapleton & David Tibet” faces, on the first four of the CDs, as well as a fifth CD with previously unissued out-takes from the Musical Pumpkin Cottage recording sessions. It does not include the unissued out-take on Side 4 on Side 4 of The Threats Of Memories 2LP. It comes in a hinged box, with new artwork by Babs Santini on the CD’s i…

The form of both freeHorn and ii-v-i consists of a continuous modulation between three different harmonic series. freeHorn weaves together the live interaction of acoustic instruments and computer software written by Larry Polansky and Phil Burk. ii-v-i, a reverberant cloud of moving intonation, gradually drifts from one natural harmonic series to another. Only open strings, 2nd, 3rd and 4th harmonics, and notes stopped at the 7th and 12th frets are used, and the guitars are audibly re-tuned fro…

Stephen Whittington writes:“…from a thatched hut draws upon a particular strand of Chinese culture: the Chinese scholar who withdraws, temporarily or permanently, from society. The thatched hut was the place where the great Tang dynasty poets Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Li Bai (Li Po) withdrew from the world. Their example was followed by many others, including the poet Bai Juyi (Po Chu-I), author of Record of the Thatched Hut on Mount Lu, and Xia Gui, the Song dynasty painter of Twelve Views from a Thatc…

Nicholas Chase's Bhajan, described by one critic as “a pas de deux between violin and electronics,” is in four joined/continuous sections. Influenced by many musics from around the globe, the work tantalizes and bewitches the ear with a breadth of sounds that ebb and flow as if guided by an elusive but inherent sense of logic. The composer performs its electronics/computer part while noted violinist Robin Lorentz (who has appeared on four previous Cold Blue CDs) propels the music compellingly, i…

Erik Griswold's Ecstatic Descent is a prepared-piano work that melds composed and improvisational elements to create an intensely animated, one-of-a-kind textural sound world. Performed here by the composer, at times it may call to mind an enormous out-of-control music box or mechanical toy. It also readily lends itself to comparisons to various ever-changing (yet ever the same) natural sound phenomena, and has been likened by composer Annea Lockwood to the bubbling frequencies of a river.The co…

Chas Smith's Twilight of the Dreamboats, one of his quintessential electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures (instruments with such names as Bertoia 718, Que Lastas, lockheed, Mantis, Sceptre, DADO) and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars (Clinesmith, Emmons, Guitarzilla, Cadillac bass), performed by the composer. “Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and market…

Peter Garland's After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is quintessentially Garlandesque. In some ways it marks a slight shift of focus from his more overtly melodic and rhythmically driven material of the past 30 years. Garland writes about the piece:“After the Wars was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as part of her A Sweeter Music project. The idea (I believe) was to focus on the idea of…

Michael Byron's In the Village of Hope is a restless (and in some ways relentless) virtuosic harp solo performed by Tasha Smith Godínez, who commissioned the work. This ever-changing, ever-churning, ever-developing music is unlike anything else in the solo harp repertoire, though not unlike some of Byron’s other recent work, such as his Book of Horizons for pianist Joseph Kubera.Byron writes about the music:“In the Village of Hope,” a purely sentimental title, was composed at the invitation of h…

In the Sea of Ionia is a wildly spinning, charismatically eclectic album containing four of Daniel Lentz’s recent piano works: (1) 51 Nocturnes (2011), a set of very short, contrasting nocturnes that are played without pauses, as one continuous work; (2) Pacific Coast Highway (2014), a primarily textural three-piano piece built of polyrhythmic layers of continuously shifting/drifting harmonies; (3) Dorchester Tropes (2008–09), a four-movement piano solo; (4) In the Sea of Ionia (2007–08) a piece…

This is the third album by Laurent Perrier’s “Pylône”, Laurent’s experimental electro-acoustic project. Entirely composed and performed with modular synthesisers, it consists of 2 long tracks stretching across each side of the LP. Side A: “A jamais” was produced with the writings and sampled voice of multimedia artist Lyne Vermes. Her words are dissolved into a stream of digital treatments, creating new textures, long waves. With the use of granular synthesis it stretches out only to end up in s…

First time release since 1977. 500 copies on 180 gram vinyl. Facsimile reproduction of the original cover Artwork by Walter Verdin and Marc Moulin. This edition contains two new postcards as an insert, including liner notes by Michel Moers and the original lyrics of Aman and drawing by Ariel Kalma. Around the time Marc Moulin played the last concerts with Placebo, he met the young musician Michel Moers at the jazz venue ‘Les Lundis Hortense’ in Brussels in 1977. Impressed by his vocal delivery M…

An amazing limited LP that features four new Rhys Chatham compositions that were performed live at Kassay's exhibition at Art: Concept in Paris in 2010, and loosely functions as an audio catalogue to the exhibition. Reve Parisien contains compositions that were both performed live and used as a soundtrack through Kassay’s exhibition. These compositions mark a change in direction for Chatham, who has abandoned the trumpet style he developed in the nineties for a non-distorted, less effects-driven…

Anthology box set containing 7 hard-to-find and critically acclaimed albums, released on labels such as Cantil, Opal and All Saints. 57 tracks across 6 discs plus a 68 page softbound book with spine compiling interviews, essays, poems and archival photos.Produced as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Each disc comes in a foil-blocked wallet and the entire contents are housed in a sturdy slipcase with foil-blocked lettering.The Serpent (In Quicksilver) (1981)Abandoned Cities (1984)The White Arcad…