Beach Jolanda
So Sweet! Edition of 400, with a full-colour sleeve and insert. It’s taken 14 years for these extravagant Icelandic artist troubadours to follow up their last (untitled) album. (At least they managed to give this one a name ; imagine what else they’d be capable of if we’ d waited another five years. ) Beach Jolanda transposes their classic calipso - beach - bar - laptop - organ g ibberish to the unmanned terrain of public lavatories in the dead of night. But i t wouldn’t be a party without guest…
Dark Arc
Edition of 300, with a full-colour sleeve and insert. Two side-long mental bar crawls with these distinguished minds. Payment in kind, please! And definitely no cards; this is not Copenhagen. Burping the blues, straining for Schnapps, sweating for extra ice. Make mine a double!Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson (b. 1977) is an Icelandic musician and sound artist, founding member of Stilluppsteypa. Sigmarrson was born in Akureyri, Iceland and studied sound art at the Fachhochschule in Hannover, Germany f…
Danish Tape Amateurs 1959 - 1976
Outstanding! Long understood as the realm of advanced composition, plumbed only by a small handful of adventurous listeners, the spirit which began the history of tape music and musique concrète, is too often overshadowed and lost. This incredible movement, kick-started by Halim El-Dabh, Pierre Schaeffer, and Pierre Henry, shortly after magnetic tape became widely available following the Second World War, was quickly adopted by many of the most noted composers of the day, from Messiaen and Boul…
The Where House?
Colin Potter is a sound engineer and musician currently based in London. He has worked within the fields of electronic and experimental music for over 35 years, collaborating with the likes of Current 93, The Hafler Trio, Organum, Andrew Chalk, and most notably as a key part of Nurse With Wound alongside Steven Stapleton. He started the esteemed ICR (Integrated Circuit Recordings) label in 1981 releasing a clutch of wonderful home recordings of his own, over half a dozen small run cassette only …
Vis-viva
Vis-Viva is the surprise of movement, the wonder that leads to imagine new possible configurations of the present, objects created with materials not yet invented move in aseptic and virtual spaces without respecting the normal laws of physics. Used for the first description of kinetic energyinelastic collisions the historical term Vis-Viva titles second OOH-sounds release from Voronoi, a work inspired by post humanism literature, experimental observation and speculative evolutionism where…
Grid of Points
Not long after recording her 10th album, Ruins, Grouper (Liz Harris) traveled to Wyoming to work on art and record music. She found herself drawn towards the pairing of skeletal piano phrasing with spare, rich bursts of vocal harmony. A series of stark songs emerged, minimal and vulnerable, woven with emotive silences. Inspired by the idea that something is missing or cold, the pieces float and fade like vignettes, implying as much as they reveal. She describes them as small texts hanging in spa…
Arctica
Pionneering production from the Düsseldorf mid 80s electronic underground world. Transferred for the first ever time from the original cassette to vinyl and CD. Konrad Kraft (Detlef Funder) is one of the still overlooked producers of Düsseldorfs fertile electronic music scene. Arctica was originally released on Cassette on Funder's imprint SDV Tonträger in 1987 in a handmade edition of about 50 copies only. Reduced to its essential musical elements, Arctica certainly contains some of the most un…
Shunter
Shunter, the new album by the Berlin-based duo Driftmachine, is their most ambitious work to date. Although instantly recognizable, featuring their trademark Kosmische and Avant-garde sounds, it also presents a new journey into abstract and hallucinatory worlds. Filled with eerie textures, their electronic visions are darker and more vaporous than ever.Driftmachine's fourth album (also the fourth one for Umor Rex) offers a new perspective on their ample sound spectrum and systemic narratives. Sh…
Khayal Kuno
Khayal Kuno represents one of several detours that Fosil Sangiran (Matt Shoemaker) undertook over his career. Instead of the long-now drone mutations, Shoemaker turns his attention to an interplay between warbling cassettes and primitive rhythm-box sequencing. The minimal, proto-techno explorations suitably evolve slowly out an initial dispersion bloom from swarms of cassette splutter and insect mimesis. Cast within his slinkies-as-spring-reverb contraptions that provided a signature Kirlian glo…
Hawaiki Tapes
Recorded during a vacation on the big island, Hawaiki Tapes is somewhat of an anomaly in the M. Geddes Gengras music - A series of short, improvised sequences voiced by a small plastic digital synthesizer, minimally processed in real time & jacked straight into a handheld recorder. It was made at night, on a little hotel room desk. The internal sequencer of the volca greatly influenced the pieces, since it only goes so slow and is limited in it’s voicing. It was windy and cold for most of the tr…
Pasar Fosil
Pasar Fosil is classic Fosil Sangiran (Matt Shoemaker). At the core to this album is an ur-drone sculpted from electro-acoustics, analog synthesis, and most probably a radically altered field recording here or there. All of these accretions of sustained tone organize themselves with a rhizomatic logic of recombinant twists, folds, and mutations. Elegant harmonics with golden, clarion hues set the stage to this album, but Shoemaker would never allow for any his compositions to merely stand as pol…
Dreaming In Colors
Emotional Rescue begins the first in a series of reissues looking at the music of guitarist Carl Weingarten and his Multiphase Records label, starting at his highly sought after collaborate album with Walter Whitney, Dreaming In Colors. With an early interest in photography and Super 8 film leading to a degree in cinema production, Weingarten’s other, self-taught, love was the slide guitar. Taking its blues roots and merging them with his visual arts background created a unique “painting in soun…
Terry Riley and Don Cherry Duo
**Last copies. Newly remastered from the original tapes for optimal sound. Limited edition of 500 copies** Another incredible treasure from the vaults of Cologne radio, recorded in February 22/23rd, 1975. Unreleased sessions, carefully remastered, in this duo improvisation Riley's organ intersections just define the geometry of the hyper-dimensional space where Don Cherry's outwordly trumpet lives. Mantric and evocative, we could go on and on listening to the very same track all day long, it cou…
Idiology
**Die cut cover, limited color edition** From their beginnings in 1992, Cologne native Jan St. Werner and Dusseldorfer Andi Toma have consistently challenged electronic music's paradigm in often surprising and always intriguing ways. Idiology is the duo's seventh album and is no exception to this rule, as Mouse on Mars surround themselves with strings, woodwinds, brass and the band's own heavily modified fleet of machines in the St. Martin's Tonstudio. Fans should once again brace themselves for…
String Figures
A multi-platform production that explores the overlap between the digital and the organic through field recordings of Inuit throat singing may sound, on surface level, to be something that is a rather niche. However, Zoe Mc Pherson’s exploration of this world on String Figures is a deeply rhythmic, immersive and forward-thinking piece of electronic-leaning music that remains just as danceable as it does experimental. The album is fundamentally one of duality, exploring the traditional and the co…
Applied Autonomy
The great Robert Lippok (To Rococo Rot) returns with his first solo album in seven years, Applied Autonomy for Olaf Bender's Raster. A survey of what he’s been up to, as much as a statement of intent for here and now, Applied Autonomy reprises the fine balance of tuff-edged minimalism, spatial illusion and melodic delicacy that emerged with Redsuperstructure [2011], but ratcheting its effect with a renewed vigour for a frankly epic impact.As the title makes explicit, Robert’s 3rd solo album is c…
Instant Music
Instant Music is the trio of Bernd Schöll (Bass, Vocals, Rhythm), Mike Hauer (Guitar, Synth, Percussion) and Marion Siekmann (Vocals) from Munich, Germany. They formed in 1980 after meeting through mutual friends attending the local art and graphic design school. The trio were dissatisfied with their surrounding musical environment. Inspired by the Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, and Giorgio Moroder, they set out to create their own brand of Neue Deutsche Welle fusing Dada, disco and Krautrock.Ov…
Eros In Arabia
This year has been an incredible period for avant-garde, Minimalist, New Age, ambient, and electronic reissues. One after another, many of the most coveted and rare LPs from these movements have emerged from the shadows. While each of these movements had a tendency to avoid easy categorization, the reissue market has largely veered toward those whose location can be easily understood, offering less attention to those members whose work fell into the spaces between. With their fourth release sinc…
Music and Poetry of the Kesh
Small repress available, in process of stocking. Includes a facsimile of the original lyric sheet, liner notes, a letterpresses bookmark and an instant download.Buchla synth supremo Todd Barton’s hyperstitious soundtrack to Always Coming Home, an ‘80s American sci-fi novel by author Ursula K. Le Guin, is yet another ingenious recording dug out for reappraisal by Pete Swanson and Jed Middleman’s Freedom to Spend label - a division of RVNG Intl. Expect alien folk songs in made-up language, set to …
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Edition of 200. An immersion into Classics. That kind of Classics which holds in his pantheon Pierre Henri and Pierre Schaeffer, even though I should maybe refer to Michel Chion, given the powerful dramatic intensity displayed by these two compositions.Mario De Vega has once again proved himself a master at mixing in his works all of the elements that make me love electro-acoustic music so much. The unpredictability of the sound sources, some sort of spectral musicality, and the sudden Moves; th…