How much better if Plymouth rock had landed on the pilgrims
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as an innovator in American experimental music since the 1960s. Although much of his work has been collaborative, virtually none of his large-scale collaborative works has hitherto been documented on record. How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims (1969-71) is considered to be one of the most important, prompting the following Washington Post review after a 1970 performance: 'If there were a device whereby one could plug int…
Magic & Return
Editions Mego has finally reissued the woefully out-of-print complete recorded oeuvre of this massively influential and infrequently convening laptop supergroup. Unsurprisingly, it still sounds great. The Magic Sound Of...’ and ‘The Return Of...’, originally released in 1999 and 2002. Fenn O’Berg (Christian Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke and Peter Rehberg) first hit the scene after a surprise appearance at the Nickelsdorf Festival in 1997. Throughout 1998 and 1999 the trio toured extensively throughout A…
Rozenhall
A re-mastering and repackaging of two previously released LP’s (2001 & 2003), this CD is a collection of 5 quite different pieces. All are mixed-moving-surrounding sounds and natural and manipulated noise - some can be considered as drone though they aren’t at all. No name for Rozenhall’s style. Very intense. As the CD liner notes say, “Play loud!”. Trk 1: “A Plumage…” - Early 60’s satellite type mixed sounds going round and round the Earth, then they come at you. Grabs your ears with claws. Sho…
Works, 1965-1995
Massive and essential! This box set gives the listener all of Reich's major works. I can't even attempt to describe them individually, but every one of these 10 CDs is compelling. For the totally uninitiated, take out "Music for 18 Musicians" (presented here in a crystalline new recording) to get an idea of what the core of this guy is all about. From there, you might want to listen to "Different Trains," "Electric Counterpoint" and "Six Marimbas" to get an idea of the pointillistic pulse minima…
Untitled (angle. 1)
'Untitled (angle.1) is a stereo composition based on the eight-channel installation Untitled.First exhibited February 11 Ð March 13, 2009 at the Art Gallery of the University of Maryland (USA), Untitled is the unique first collaborative project between visual artist Linn Meyers and sound artist Richard Chartier, in an installation where optical and sonic patterns intersect. With an architectural transformation of the space, two fifteen foot long by eight foot high walls meet in an enfolding chev…
Flächen Mit Figuren
Beautifully minimal new work by Asmus Tietchens using layers and stretch out sound fields as a compositional basis and placing miniatures inside them. 54 minutes, 8 tracks, handnumbered edition in nice paper sleeve 300 copies.
Recherche_00
In this work I am approaching the analogue synthesizer Yamaha CS-40M. I built up the research in a journalistic kind of way. At first I made a plan of procedures, gave myself a problem formulation. In my first step I was looking for sounds that represent the „soul“ of this instrument. The next step was abstracting these sounds without losing the specific character of the instrument. An unconventional click sound was the result. This sound was then fed with additional information, fie…
Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel
The reverberation length is so long (approximately 45 seconds) inside the 186-foot diameter cistern at Fort Worden, about 70 miles northwest of Seattle, that the composer describes the feeling as "this is where you have been forever and will always be forever". This engaging CD contains seven selections with Dempster playing solo on conch shell, didjeridu, and trombone, and in ensemble with nine other trombonists, two conch players and one on Tibetan cymbals. In the group pieces, the composer fa…
The Freak Of Araby
Strictly limited edition on vinyl: Listen through Sir Richard Bishop’s six readily available solo albums, and you get the picture that the worldview of the former Sun City Girls’ guitarist is not only complex, but also more than a little ambiguous. What exactly is Richard Bishop? A dealer in the exotic? A dabbler in esoteric mysticism? A “traveling salesman”? The Freak of Araby doesn’t make Bishop’s worldview any simpler for us, but it does clarify it some. He is, first and foremost, a traveler,…
Twenty Systems
Described by Brian Eno as "a brilliant contribution to the archaeology of electronic music", Twenty Systems is a truly impressive catalogue of innovations in synthesizer technology, chronologically ordered between 1968 and 1987. Each of the twenty pieces on the disc showcase the particular sonorities of a synthesizer, beginning with the Moog Modular and concluding with the Kawai K5M. This really is nerd heaven. As far as composition is concerned, Benge (aka Ben Edwards) has tried to leave his ow…
Experiments \'80-\'82
self-issued cd collecting two early 80s cassette-only releases (“quiz party” & “life in video city”) by richard bone, both tipped by the mutant sounds crew a few years back resulting in something of a renewed interest in this otherwise obscure figure in the 70s / 80s “minimal synth” wave - jumping back & forth between noisy, arpeggiated sequences & more atemporal modes (i can certainly hear the tod dockstader influence throughout the “quiz party” pieces) this is in many ways the perfect disc for…
July 19, 2006
may 2009 release: label-less lp release (“private,” if you will) covering the first ever duo set between myself & geoff mullen, recorded in concert at the brendan murray-curated “uppercase sound #2” event @ pa’s lounge, somerville, ma, 02143, usa, on july 19th, 2006 ...the music is entirely improvised, with geoff sticking largely to a suitcase-electronics-based setup (although he does provide some fine guitar & pedal alterations throughout) & myself to the doepfer (ditto guitar & korg guitar-syn…
Dream House Variations
here’s something i’d been meaning to do for years, and thanks to the constant (friendly) prodding of arbor’s mike pollard it’s now a tangible reality ...starting with a single 60-second loop-cassette of a field-recording made during the saturday afternoon of the 2008 no fun fest, i started running the signal through the doepfer, recording exactly 225 minutes of improvisations & “variations” - utilizing the pitch-control of two sony walkmen & the filters & processing agents in the synth itself ..…
Taking Away
here are two pieces from august 2008 ; built from “playthroughs” -style guitar / synthesizer / computer improvisations recorded april 2008 ; (time crawls when you live in a bubble) ...the “side 1” half is the tail-end of said improv, run through a low-pass filter taking its cut-off frequency from the relative “loudness” of the audio (i.e. the louder it gets, the more high-end it let through) - a nice & simple piece that turned out well (there’s even a bit of “dry” guitar playing at the end there…
Schöner Flußengel
here we go... lp-only release #2 for the magnificent kranky label. this turned out exactly as i had planned it (no typos to be found!). don’t let the doom/industrial cover (which was a take off on “a sucked orange” and “ohrenschrauben”) fool you... this is a psychedelic-drone freakout of just about the highest caliber i’m currently capable of producing...this particular record had its roots in a “krautrock-themed” lp i was working on for the deluxe label a few years back (i.e. “hrvatski ‘73”). a…
Tiny Red Tables b/w Big American Hole
Last copy available "at one point during the free noise tour evan parker pulled out a little black notebook and read back to us all the names of weird bands we'd been discussing. really funny / embarrassing coming from the mouth of e.p.we played at this one club that had all of these tall red tables with tiny circle tops. e.p. said that our new unit should be called "tiny red tables", but later he was talking about some 7" and said, "you know, with the big american hole" ... so we decided that w…
Agilok & Blubbo
The Inner Space is the stuff of legend. This obscure outfit is best known as the antecessor band of Can and not much is known about them except it featured the core members of Can (Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli and Jaki Liebezeit) and lasted just a few months before renaming themselves The Can and releasing Monster Movie. They left two ultra-obscure seven inches as their only recorded legacy and only the first of them is credited to The Inner Space, it contained two songs taken fr…
Santi
In Śānti, Jan Beran unites meditative-expressive means of articulation with avant-garde techniques, and Western attitudes with those of the Far East. This multicultural approach is founded not least on Beran's extraordinary personal and musical background and development, which took the mathematician and composer from his native town Prague to Switzerland, the USA, and as far as India. This explains, among other things, his efforts to reconcile the time patterns of Indian music with Western seri…
3048
A dark, choking, psychotropic immersion into abstract isolationist electronics, floating among rumbles, drones, bleeps, glitches...like a trip into the deepest corners of an obscure unknown galaxy, lost forever and glad of it! Everything is made with exclusive use of vintage equipment, no computers, no midi, no emulators…nothing can beat the sound of an unleashed vintage analogue synthesizer
Mectpyo Bakterium / Genocide O.T.M.
Numbered edition of 600 numbered copies in a trifold 10" inch sleeve with original artwork. Re-issue of the Maurizio Bianchi's early Lp Mectpyo Bakterium . Included in this re-issue is a bonus disc with 55 minutes of ultra rare material officially published on CD for the first time here.Disc 1: First two tracks are from the 1982 LP 'Mectpyo Bakterium' released by DYS Records, USA. Third track is from '40 Days/ 40 Nights' compilation on Stratosphere Music, Japan. Fourth track is from 'Internation…