Program
"A collaboration between Kouhei Matsunaga (who has worked with everyone from Sensational to Autechre and Asmus Tietchens) and the less prolific Toshio Munehiro, NHK’s ultra minimalist approach to techno may conjure memories of the late 90s/early 2000s glitch and microsound scenes, but their combination of erratic beats and digital expanses feels anything but dated, sounding entirely unique and fresh in 2015. I have always had a soft spot for that short lived era that was often full of derided la…
Sleepwalkers In A Cold Circus
On Sleepwalkers in a Cold Circus Belgian sound artist Koenraad Ecker creates a biotope of musical characters that is sober, delicate, complex and vivid, with a restrained intensity, a “cold fire.” The characters discuss, hesitate, fight, pull closer, push back. Through the use of microtonality and recordings of acoustic instruments it is the elusive sound of a somnambulistic travelogue. “I’m searching for ways to create an intricate narrative, switching perspectives and voices within one form, t…
Days
Triac is a new trio project led by Rossano Polidoro of former duo TU M' whose beautiful 2009 sold out LINE release Monochromes Vol.1 (LINE_040) garnered great acclaim. Days is an album of dazzling yet smooth distant drones that almost hover in the air. The sound of the slowest moving picture and subtle flickering lights beyond it. For listeners who appreciate the works of Celer, William Basinski, and Stephan Mathieu.Triac is a discrete electronic music trio formed in the end of 2011. Their work …
A Ravishment Of Mirror
Los Angeles, a city of mirrors, twinkling lights, noir history, and deep secrets is the new home for Pinkcourtesyphone. This third full album explores Hollywood dreams and deception… meant to be slowly sipped. We all pretend but in Hollywood pretending is its dark sustenance… a plastic organic unity ready to enfold and repackage you. "Richard Chartier recently raised the curtain up on his interesting project Pinkcourtesyphone by a series of releases with thematic interconnections. His third full…
Flower & Water
Steve Roden writes:"Flower & Water began with an offer to work with the first Dragon’s Eye release – a flexi-disc with a recording of George Winston playing a blues piano composition called “Medley: Bread Baker’s Stomp” – as source material. Since I am not a true remixer, I decided to modify the track via physical manipulation. Most of the material began with cutting up some of the flexi’s and taping back together in ‘wrong’ ways. I then played (or tried to play) the broken records that had been…
Fable
Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello are creators of mythology. Their mythology renders a series of acoustic spaces, haunted by narrative and hinting at happenings unseen, but certainly heard. With Fable, we are presented with their second duet. It chronicles three years of intermittent audio communications in search of new collaborative approaches. The results focus on the pair’s joint interests in modular synthesis, field recordings and the blurry boundaries between acoustic instrumentation a…
Malefactor, Ade
In 1989, ‘Malefactor, Ade’ was issued on the UK’s Glass Records, which had arranged several years earlier for the first actual release of Mayo Thompson’s 1970 solo LP, ‘Corky’s Debt To His Father’. This was the first Red Crayola record release in five years. The fearlessness with which genres are converted can be disarming, but stick to it - you’ll find listening an utter triumph. ‘Malefactor, Ade’ was reissued on CD by Drag City in the year 2000. Now it's on lovely vinyl.
Cascade
"Cascade" is the first new album in over two years. Includes Bonus Download: “The Deluge" (Live at Issue Project Room). Cascade and The Deluge are variations on the latest tape-loop and delay composition from the inimitable William Basinski. In Cascade, a single ancient lilting piano tape loop repeats endlessly carrying one along in its tessellating current. In The Deluge, the same loop is processed through a series of feed-back loops of different lengths creating a spiraling crescendo of overto…
A Forum For The Arts / Studio
ARNE NORDHEIM Forum for the Arts (1969)Taken from the soundtrack to A Forum for the Arts – a promotional film about Henie Onstad Kunstsenter directed by Pål Bang-Hansen in 1970. Original material recorded in Studio Eksperymentlne Warsaw, 1969. Edited and reconstructed by Helge Sten at Audio Virus Lab, 2012. Licensed by Rannveig GetzDEATHPROD Studio (2010)Taken from the sound and light installation Studio commissioned for the John Cage – The Anarchy of Silence exhibition at Henie Onstad Kunstse…
Column One: Entropium
Five compositions by the Berlin based electroacoustic / industrial collective Column One in stunning interpretations by Zeitkratzer, recorded live at Berghain during MaerzMusik 2012. Within their nearly 2 decades of existence, zeitkratzer have gained high reputation for their unique approach, their outstanding and internationally acclaimed members and their adventurous projects that include collaborations with noise musicians like Merzbow and Zbigniew Karkowski, rock’n’roll experimentalists like…
Ina Hudba: Experimental Studio Bratislava Series 1
Milestone!!! Incredible historical recording never issued in any format ever. It is the first release of Slovak composeres that were active in the 60s and 70s, a missing link in the history of Musique Concrète."In 1965 the Experimental Studio Bratislava was founded by the Czechoslovak broadcast service. The Studio Bratislava was quite independent from the headquarters in Prague and in some ways competed with it. Composers like Peter Kolman, Jozef Malovec etc. started on a “do it yourself” level…
Travel
Jun Konagaya is best known as GRIM, but in 2012 he published a story and CD called “Organ” about a young girl called Magnolia and a monster called Gamahead. “Travel” presents the second part of the story. Several years have passed and Magnolia has set out on a journey, where she records the many things she sees and hears. It is unclear whether her journey is real or imaginary, and as she wanders between dream and reality she stumbles across some ruins in the middle of a forest. Her feet carry he…
Sintetizzatrice
Sintetizzatrice is the first recorded document of the collaboration between veteran DJ and producer Donato Dozzy and female vocalist Anna Caragnano. Through his solo work, and in his collaboration with Giuseppe Tilleci (Neel) asVoices from the Lake, Dozzy has achieved some of the most remarkable vistas contemporary electronic music has seen since the turn of this century. By removing himself from his areas of mastery to shift his focus on the voice, he has achieved a new peak with Sintetizzatric…
Sonnet
The sound of the fifth Benoit Pioulard full length is lush and verdant, a temperate rain forest of ear ecstasy that reflects the environment surrounding the artist. A mostly instrumental work, it is an adept melding of song and sound, melody and texture, the intangible and the palpable, that in an abstract sense recalls the more fractured and loose end of the 70's krautrock movement."The basis of the album was a series of field recordings of tones and unintentional harmonies that I made in the s…
Whispers
Whispers is a cycle of five idiosyncratic works spanning 2010–2014, composed and directed by Frank Denyer and performed by The Barton Workshop (with Denyer, Kiku Day, Juliet Fraser, Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenburg, Pepe Garcia Rodriguez, Dario Calderone, Bob Gilmore, Jamie Man, and others). The title track, “Whispers,” is a procession of seventeen short vocal meditations: Denyer’s own whispered, murmured, and muttered sounds traced by rare instrumental gestures- muted…
Extinguishment
Extinguishment documents the chamber dialogue between Billy Gomberg (bass guitar, electronics, recordings) and Anne Guthrie (French horn, electronics, recordings), working as Fraufraulein for Another Timbre. Recorded over several months in 2014, the album pursues a shared language of improvisation - each piece constructed from discrete performances, then woven with a common thread of minimalism, private lyricism, and environmental observation.Field recordings, manipulated live, are inseparable f…
Acid Tracts
An expanded double vinyl edition of Ralph Cumbers aka Bass Clef's acclaimed 2013 cassette Acid Tracts, originally released in late 2013 via Cumbers' own Magic + Dreams label, its seven dense and immersive club tracks comprising his most expansive and multi-faceted work to date. They meld his modular synthesizer's hard-edged tones with grinding drum machine rhythms, traveling from the anarchic techno of 2012's Reeling Skullways album still further outward into the void. Acid Tracts represents the…
Fires Frame the Silhouette
Cremation Lily is the project of UK-based Z. Zsigo. For the past five years, Zsigo has been consistently working under most people's radars with his distinctly personal take on power electronics, developing a modest cult following and a respectable catalog of releases through his Strange Rules label. In 2012 the project was brought to the attention of Steve Underwood from Harbinger Sound who subsequently released the Fertility Servant 7" and the project began to gather a more visible live presen…
String Studies
Deas is the new moniker of London-based guitarist Cameron Deas, and String Studies, his first LP of all electronic-based material, is unlike anything else he's released. Recorded at home between February and March of 2014, the 8 pieces on this LP were recorded live with very few overdubs, with Deas's 12-string acoustic guitar used as a sampling source to trigger and in turn be manipulated by a modular system. The immaculate production and scalpel-sharp twists and turns found within the music dis…
Acolytes
Acolytes is the self-titled debut album by London-based enigma D. Shan. Following up a puzzling (yet well received) 7" on The Pheromoans' label Savoury Days, Acolytes sees Shan develop his sound into areas of greater fidelity, complexity, and a unique non-linear approach to songwriting. Reference points could be drawn towards Art Bears, the Cold Storage scene, The Residents, and the Ralph Records roster, but they would all fall short because ultimately Acolytes is a highly unclassifiable record …