Solaris. The Mirror. Stalker (1972-1979)
Another addition to the early electronic music from Russia, this album is a compilation of music drawn from three Russian movies directed by Andrei Tarkovskiy - not having seen any of them I know of "Solaris" only by repute. The music here, composed and performed by Edward Artemiev, is mostly electronic and extremely evocative. "The Stalker Theme", which opens the CD, is very wistful and gentle and leads into "Train", which carries on some of the same themes mixed with the sounds of a train pass…
Electroacoustic Music (IV) Archive Tapes, Synthesizer ANS 1964-1
again, long out of print, beautiful CD with pioneering electronic music from the period 1964 – 1971, which is a period when the somewhat lighter hand of Nikita Krushchev was replaced by the much sturdier and more repressive totalitarian reign of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. This CD is a great revelation to the world outside of Russia, giving insights to the experimentation of sound during that important period, when so much was happening in the U.S.A. (San Francisco Tape Music Center) and Europe (The…
50 ans de musique électroacoustique - GRM
This is a long out of print (1998) beautiful glossy magazine, written in 5 languages with a great collection of visual material, giving some background on French and Italian electronic music history, practice and institutions - along with it, a double CD with 57 short pieces or extracts covering the first 50 years of the work of the seminal Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris, starting with Pierre Schaeffer (1948) and ending with Christian Zanesi (1998), selected and compiled by INA.GRM its…
May
May is the latest collaboration between New York composers Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner. Recorded on May 9, 2008 at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, the album represents the first available live recording of Deupree and Kirschner's concert performances. Continuing in the direction of their acclaimed post_piano series, Deupree and Kirschner's live work explores the intersection between piano and digital music technology. For this performance, Deupree and Kirschner took an even more …
47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing
Eugene Carchesio's renown as a visual artist has unjustly eclipsed his extraordinary output as a soundmaker. Since the mid 80s, the Brisbane artist has steadfastly proliferated a sack full of barely released cassettes and cdrs under the D.N.E. moniker.Twenty years ago, he emptied his wallet to press 250 copies of the appropriately titled LP 47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing'. Then compact discs arrived. The local pressing plant closed and the master tape went with it. Copies were circulated to frie…
Painting Sky Together
Wroclaw based sound artist Tomasz Bednarczyk has a penchant for capturing the emotion in moments of stasis. It's this acute sense of expanding fleeting moments and exploring their detail that informs the sonic palette of his latest full length recording Painting Sky Together. Akin to his acclaimed debut edition 'Summer Feelings' (Room40), which elegantly documented a uniquely Polish experience of summer replete with distantly warm bursts of piano, and crisp glitch ridden pulses, Painting Sky Tog…
Substrata 2
Reissued: Biosphere's 2nd CD for Touch after Cirque (Touch # TO:46, 2000) is a double CD in digipack designed by Jon Wozencroft. CD One - Substrata. Originally released in 1997 on All Saints Records, this remastered version of Substrata contains 11 tracks with a total length of 55:20. '...by many (the undersigned included) considered to be the finest ambient album of the 1990s' (Motion-State 51), and 'Three years after its release, biosphere's 'Substrata' is already being recognised as one of th…
Drone Trailer
This is a consolidation of the previous musical high-life of the duo's space shanties for the 21st century. In other words, they explore their unique mix of lunar raga & astral string band music, w/ a couple deep-space burners/covert jams such as opening blast "Anyway" thrown in to bust it all open.
Octuplex
NEIL CAMPBELL returns w/ an album of squelching, restless ambience. The CD is split roughly in half between Harmonia/Voigt-style chuggers & sweeping swirls of instantly recognizable dronage. Includes contributions from RICHARD YOUNGS, JOHN CLYDE-EVANS & SPIDER STACY (POGUES)
Liedgut
Awesome new raster cd..."We're completely blown away by Raster Noton at the moment. There used to be a time, back in the mid-late 90's, when we had a total obsession with the work of Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart, aka Atom Tm. His seemingly endless series of albums for his own 'Rather Interesting' label not only displayed a visionary ability to harness technology into an ever-changing series of pseudonyms and personalities, but also somehow managed to do so with the kind of attention to detail and…
Xerrox 2
OK, brace yourselves. Returning to his much lauded Xerrox project, Alva Noto has out of the blue delivered one of the most emotionally arresting and quite simply jaw-dropping album's we've heard in recent times. Carsten Nicolai once again shuns the pinpoint precision for which he's become renowned, turning to a more abstract yet harmony-driven working methodology. As with the first Xerrox album, the starting point is a set of samples culled from external sources; this time around, snippets and r…
Immolate Yourself
Their last, and one of the more experimental so far "On wikipedia there are 'facts' pertaining to Joshua Eustis and Charlie Cooper of Telefon Tel Aviv suggesting that the former has the Fibonacci sequence tattooed on his arm while the latter changes outfits three times during live sets. I'd very much like to believe these things to be true, though I suspect at least one of the statements to be mere apocrypha. Regardless, there is something about Telefon Tel Aviv that suggests they'd be a little …
Choral
Following on from last year's triumphant vinyl-only release Mountains, Mountains, Mountains on Catsup Plate, this latest opus from Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg finds the pair decamped to Thrill Jockey. Mountains have certainly risen to the challenge of releasing via a bigger label, and Choral could reasonably be considered the duo's most refined full-length to date, serving up six tracks of highly evolved drone-folk, all exquisitely produced and filled with dynamic variation. The thirteen-…
Navigation in hypertext
Lehn and Schmickler's 1st recording, Bart is considered one of the best synth improv albums ever made. Since Bart, dating back to 2000, the duo has toured frequently through Europe, Japan and the USA. This double-release, features some of the best performances the duo recorded over the course of 15 live concerts. A brilliant amalgam of the two musicians' strengths, Navigation in hypertext utilizes both improvisation and studio postproduction techniques to create a lasting work, combining the fee…
What Happened
Ohio's Emeralds are a band that we cherish dearly here at boomkat. Last years 'Solar Bridge' EP was a (third) eye opening experience and the entry level opener to their self created world of synthesized pschedelia. The group, consisting of members John Elliot, Mark McGuire and Steve Hauschildt, have some 20 odd releases to their name since 2006, generally produced on the deliberatly lo-fi cassette and CDr formats for a number of tiny boutique imprints like Hanson Records, Wagon and Fag Tapes. Th…
Grosses Wasser
Originally released in 1979, Grosses Wasser is Cluster's last great album. Combining the ambient space rock of early albums on some songs with a more updated, beat-driven, (dare I say space-disco?) sound on others, it at times sounds like the best of both worlds. Cluster were probably the most influential and ground-breaking group to come out of Germany in the '70s (no small feat) and every one of their records is pure trailblazing musical history. Includes a 12-page booklet.
Experimental Music of Japan Vol. 3 Early works & live 1994-1996
This is the third release in Edition Omega Point's Experimental Music of Japan series, featuring the work of Japanese performer/composer Tomomi Adachi. Known for his versatile style, he has performed solo improvisations with voice, computer, sensor systems and self-made instruments, and also is active in the field of theater music, installation and video. This is a collection of his early recordings, just after starting his career in 1994. Almost all tracks were performed as improvisations witho…
Incoming
Long out of print, John Duncan's release Incoming continues his work exploring the inner qualities of electronic drones in conjunction with shortwave radio, itself an extension of his work in pirate media, including both radio and television. The title track builds from metallic scrapes, layered with intense electronics, garbled vocals, descending electronic whines reminiscent of the final section of Karlheinz Stockhausen's masterpiece Hymnen, shortwaves, white noise, and digital pops. It is one…
Outwaard
For close to forty years z'ev has been at the absolute fore front of new musics. Playing his unique brand of percussive music he gained a lot of attention, but in more recent years he returned to working with electro-acoustic manipulations.Since 2003 he has also begun a wide ranging series of collaborations, working with Francisco Lopez, Stephen O'Malley, David Jackman/Organum and Oren Ambarchi among others. One such ongoing collaboration is with Frans de Waard, with whom he released 'Forwaard' …
Work for GV 2004-2008
All audio made by Peter Rehberg 2004-2008. For the following Gisèle Vienne productions : 'I Apologize' (2004), 'Une Belle Enfant Blonde' (2005), 'Jerk' (2008). Text written and spoken by Dennis Cooper. Action on ÔMurder Version' by Catherine Robbe-Grillet & Jonathan Capdevielle. Mastered at Piethopraxis, Köln, June 2008. Artwork by SOMA. Photos by Gisèle Vienne. Peter Rehberg's collaboration with the Paris based puppeteer and choreographer, Gisèle Vienne began in 2001, with the production of the…