The Structure of Chance
Years On Earth’s electronic, experimental and industrial approach to their music reminds one of a mix of early Cabaret Voltaire, Eyeless in Gaza and Throbbing Gristle. It can be considered as an alchemistic creation, forming something very unique and amazing in mood and atmosphere produced and experienced by the listener. As Mutant Sounds website stated: “… wonderful, dark, claustrophobic, scary atmosphere... an absolutely unknown Gem!“Years On Earth (Bob Roke & Mebz) have been act…
ConTainer T1-12: 8LP (Friends Edition)
A real Milestone! Heavyweight 8LP boxset containing four deluxe tri-fold gatefold jackets/double albums plus official, individually numbered certificate of ownership, housed in a deluxe canvas box and limited to an edition of just 500 copies... "Needless to say that VOD100 must be committed to one of the greatest most innovative and influencuial electronic musicians, protagonists and pioneers on this planet. VOD honours Conrad Schnitzler’s life-time achievement with the Catalogue-Number VOD100 a…
Muzika Electronic
FRAK has been around for 25 years now. They have been the talisman of Sweden's inimitable Börft label since its inception. Over the course of dozens of tapes, 12"s, and full-lengths, this group has known no real boundaries. It is alien music in every sense of the word. Even if each track offers something different to the narrative, the album keeps a connective tissue running throughout. After 25 years, FRAK is showing no signs of age. Muzika Electronic is a mix of skewed dance music paire…
... And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness
It may well be the case that the whole modern classical scene suffered from a possibly fatal case of over-familiarity and over-exposure these last few years, but it would be a shame if a genuinely gifted musician and composer like Iceland's Ólafur Arnalds was lumped in with the vast majority of his contemporaries - the guy is just the real deal. And if there were any doubts about his talents, Arnalds created and released a new song a day for one whole week during the month of October this …
Clear Of/Someday, Sometime
* Recorded to four-track cassette 9/09-10/09 in Brooklyn, NY. Edition of 400 copies with glossy jackets and inner sleeves.* Working together, but differently. Clear Of, shows Cloaked Light working within a new mode; an expanded temporal sensitivity through field recording and discrete static chords. Slow movement- revealing growth and decay at the subtlest thresholds; disappearing music with a heavy presence, a shifting sense of space, not in the room, but of the room. Pale Blue Sky's Someday, S…
Shades of Grey
Pale Blue Sky is the new project from Mike Pollard (formerly Treetops). Shades Of Grey is the project’s genesis; a long considered transition uniting the organic drone-work of the former project with compositional structures. The recordings embody a delicate sense of distance; staring out at the moving landscape obscured by the mediation of the window. Through blurred fidelity the origin of melody is placed under microscopic inquiry; an exploration into the moment of tonal interaction. Pale Blu…
Surviving The Garden Of Hate
"Copper Glove, the new project from Baltimore's Door (formerly Earth Crown; who shared splits with Secret Abuse and Kites on past Arbor releases), shows a further progression of his one man industrial-noise synth unit. In opposition to his former work, Copper Glove is more mindful of composition; utilizing tone generators and processed synthesis and vocals, to present a dense cut up analog form of industrial concréte. Door's nihilistic optimism carries itself with a sense of effortlessne…
Kithless
Pedestrian Deposit (Jonathan Borges and Shannon A. Kennedy) possesses a certain, restrained relationship to texture. Sources both electric and acoustic operate on a logic of hybridity_ becoming compositional elements organized through their activation of a shared acoustic space. This functions in multiple directions: in some instances, the cello is captured and converted to a subtle electronic variation, expanding the range of the tone through this capture, at other times it acts as a sort of …
Husk
Husk, a career-spanning double-LP retrospective marking Raglani’s “early period” (2004-2009), is both the artist’s “Best-of” collection*, as well as a document of a personal orientation within the canon of electronic music. As a devoted student of E.M. history and synthesis techniques, Joseph Raglani has spent the past decade in his St. Louis studio consuming and refiguring. While highly-informed, these tracks avoid simple derivation, the traces of influence are not easily decipherable; the co…
Foley Folly Folio
Pinkcourtesyphone is the not so secret alter ego of renowned sound artist Richard Chartier, and while it seems to be geared more towards a looser, more relaxed sensibility than the serious artist guise that is usually thrust upon him, it lacks none of his careful attention to structure and detail. Quite a bit of the material on this compilation (recorded erratically between 1997 and 2011) could pass for his normal work, but throws enough curve balls to give it a distinct identity all its…
Kippschwingungen
In 2007, Frank Bretschneider was invited to compose music for the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument developed during the 1960’s at the RFZ, the technical center for radio and television of the East German postal service. Built in a limited edition of eight machines total, only three Subharcords (in Vienna, Trondheim and Berlin) are believed to survive to this day. The Subharchord is, broadly defined, a subharmonic sound generator, comparable soundwise to the Mixturtrautonium. It’s sugg…
Dropsonde
2012 repress; originally released 2006. Biosphere is Norwegian composer and performer Geir Jenssen, and this is his fifth release for Touch. In the early 1990s he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic and enduring. Dropsonde isn't a soundtrack like the interwoven Substrata nor an episodic journey in the way that Autour de la Lune is. Here Geir Jenssen is pushing new directions towards the jazz colors of Miles Davis a…
Leyfou Ljosinu
Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir presents a new album, Leyfdu Ljósinu (trans. "Allow The Light"), recorded live at the Music Research Centre, University of York, in January 2012, by Tony Myatt, using a SoundField ST450 Ambisonic microphone and two Neumann U87 microphones (NB -- it was not played in a concert environment and there was no audience). To be faithful to time and space -- elements vital to the movement of sound -- this album was recorded entirely live, with no post-tampering …
Forbidden Planets, Volume 2
Subtitled: More Music From The Pioneers Of Electronic Sound. "Further to Chrome Dreams' enormously popular first Forbidden Planets CD comes this superb second volume of music from the pioneers of electronic sound. Compiled and annotated once more by music historian Alan Clayson, and featuring his extensive sleeve-notes, the two discs here, featuring 142 minutes of some of the strangest sounds ever recorded, will again delight fans of this most intriguing and previously un-compiled genre." …
Forbidden Planets
With Electronic music’s current resurgence and interest in the form at an all time high, this superb 2 CD set, containing compositions and original recordings by the pioneers of this fascinating style of sound, compiled here for the first time, is certain to attract enormous excitement amongst fans of the genre. Featuring tracks recorded largely in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, from names as diverse as the ever popular John Cage, Edgar Varese, Daphne Oram, Henri Pousseur, Miklosz Rozsa, Pierre…
Bliss
Versatility has always been what sets Luca Sigurtà apart. His new solo album ‘Bliss’ out on Fratto9. Recor- ded in 2011 and Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, this new offering exhibits his most dreamy side. There are five tracks which sit between cinematic drone music and that of Angelo Badalmenti.
It a soundscape through a sunny afternoon in the North of Europe, filled with white light that illuminates the port and with the presence of distant noise.
Shared between the passion for silence and …
Souvenir Of Italy
A lost gem from the mid 80s in the best italian tradition, BlowUp reissue of the month: to describe GustoForte’s Picture disc “Souvenir of Italy - La merda che fuma”, to give some dialect shape to the electro-magnetic throbbings that come out from the record , to try drawing, with grammatic help also that more basic, a logic or a descriptive way, it’s complex.And not because exists a multi-shape objective difficulty but rather the concreteness it’s impossible to approach to GustoForte: sandpaper…
Inward Eye
The edition is limited to 287 and vinyl comes in three different colors: marble orange, marble white, and black. The record is housed in a 12" cloth bag, with front, back and inner fully screen-printed with artwork reproducing a painting by Roberto Opalio. Secret messages are written between the grooves and both sides' center labels, that feature mysterious, full-color portraits of Ramona and Roberto respectively on each side. Each copy hand-…
Pagetos
The Between the elements Quadrilogy began in 2007 as a collaboration among the well-known industrial master Maurizio Bianchi/MB and the experimental musician Matteo Uggeri. The first two chapters (Nefelodhis, which means ‘cloudy’, and Erimos, ‘desert’) were released in that year by Cold Current and Digitalis Industries. Kapnos (‘smoke’) followed in 2009, as a collective effort by Meerkat, “the Italy's finest in the fields of ambient, electronics, microsound, post guitar” (as Frans De Waard wrote…
Piano Works and Tape Music
2009 release. Outstanding reissue covering some of the best Yuasa experimental and electronic works from the 60s and 70s: Yuasa was developing a fascination for tape music from the very beginning, and the inner journeys that such music would take him on. As he later wrote: “Tape music was [a] completely unknown field at the time. Even reversed playing of recorded sound, change of tape speed, filtering and feedback echo were totally new for the ear.” However, as Yuasa’s knowledge of technolo…