Hinterland
Carlos Roque Alsina is an Argentinean-born composer who tends to mix acoustic and taped sounds together in a manner that evokes natural sounds to some degree, something of a more programmatically inclined Iannis Xenakis. The title piece combines piano and percussion with taped sounds that often possess an organ-like quality. While the acoustic instruments dance around each other in intricate patterns, the tape heaves and respires ominously, depicting the sort of backcountry that's unsettling in …
Leech
With his works the swedish artist Carl Michael Von Hausswolff takes interest in revealing and using accoustic, visual, social and cultural phenomena. For the cd Leech he acts as a parasite on works by Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Tommi Grönlund-Petteri Nisunen and Richard James. In the three first pieces he sucked energy-sound out from the electric functions of those works; sounds that normally can not be heard. On James' work he bruises the skin surface as leeches usually do before they pen…
Wakool
Recorded over a series of four Sunday afternoons, Wakool is an interrogation into an expanded range of techniques and gestures applied to instruments including banjo, electroacoustic guitar, bandura, and eukolin. In part an antidote to laborious studio process, this project privileges live stereo recordings without additional overdubs, processing or equalization. The varied and spontaneous nature of David's effortless playing across an eclectic range of instruments was recorded transparently to …
Getting a head
Second in the metal box limited edition re-releases, this one from1980 with Fred Frith (guitar) and Charles K. Noyes (percussion) and featuring unorthodox instruments built from tape recorders and helium balloons.
Sooner or later
Long out of print, now reissued in limited edition metal boxes by Bob himself,Sooner or Later is a powerful piece (for sampler) derived from the sounds of a Salvadorian boy burying his father: a shovel striking rock, a voice, a buzzing fly. Some guitar sounds by Fred Frith are added in part two. This tells only of the sources; what Bob does with them is compelling and hypnotic.categories CC, SAPT, EL, C
Rückwarts backwards
Black To Comm is an alias for Dekorder label owner Marc Richter's audio excursions. "Rückwärts Backwards" is his debut full-length album recorded between 2003 and 2005 in his adopted hometown Hamburg and his childhood home in the Black Forest located in the south of Germany. With a background in many musical styles (from Psychedelia to pure Computer Music) BTC's music is never easy to pin down. This album is essentially created from scratchy shellac and vinyl loops merged with ambience field rec…
Three sparkling echoes
Doomy, magisterial drone works, xylophone tones dragged behind trucks ploughing straight through mountains of mud and some classically wasted drum/horizontal blades nod-out ritual ala Outside The Dream Syndicate from this inspired hook-up that pairs Campbell Kneale's orchestra with Anla Courtis of Reynols.
Peachy Keen-O
This CD has pieces with an auctioneer, a Kentucky farm with birds & clover, a jazz dancer, a quivering, vibrating, sexually tinged piece full of women saying supplication, a saint dying in flames, a drum piece about frustration, mother/daughter miscommunication, a pipe organ, and punk rap with overtones of yoga. Many of Beth Anderson's compositions from 1973-1979 use words or parts of words to make either all or part of the music. Sometimes the music is derived from the words. Some of it is cons…
Japan
Originally projected to be sold exclusively at our concerts during our tour in Japan in November 2001 this split CD of Steve Roden and me will be released on TRENTE OISEAUX, along with Steve's upcoming CD for our label, because we found ourselves to fond of the pieces it contains to limit it to this use. While the three pieces differ very much in style (mine being made of noises exclusively, while the two by Steve are using concrete sounds), they work together very well.
Un océan de certitude
long out of print, one copy only available - Un ocean de certitude' V223 is a triple set: a disk each by Gunter and Wehowsky and one collaboration. Gunter's piece 'Deceptive likeness' is a minimal work, which while at a low volume is not quite subliminal, and close listening (especially on earphones) reveals a delicate soundscape. There are small musical events - what sounds like a cello, rising and falling tones, an almost shaker-percussion, a match being lit, metal clanking, water - which occu…
Univers temporel espoir
For this CD, mister Günter has remixed his 1997 piece “Un lieu pareil à un point effacé, 1ere partie”, which had been released on a CD that accompanied the American HALANA magazine, and reworked “Un lieu pareil à un point effacé, 2eme partie”, never released before. He has also made a new version of his piece “The ant moves - the black and yellow carcass - a little closer”, a piece mainly based on sounds from New York based artist John Hudak, who also wrote the title Haiku. This new version has …
Redshift / Abschied
"I was forming plans for a very different project in my mind when i came across a number of DAT tapes from my first sampling days in 1993, the time of 'Un peu de neige salie' - these tapes contained sounds i had not used in those days, and that i could not at all remember the origins / sources of, but that sounded interesting to my present day ears. I thus started to work with them, without the slightest idea of what might be the result, and the piece kind of made itself - the result was a struc…
Crossing the river (night music)
Crossing the River is calm, peaceful, and beautiful, guaranteed to slow you down after a busy urban day (but unlike chemical products designed to this effect, it leaves your mind clear and aware). The effect it had on me was that i bagged my elaborate liner notes about 'crossing the river' as a Buddhist metaphor for reaching enlightenment, and replaced them by this:
brown, blue, brown on blue (for Mark Rothko)
“I finished "brown, blue, brown on blue (for Mark Rothko)" in mid-july 1999, and it picks up where "Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (for Heike)" left off (actually, the two pieces can be listened to as one large work in two parts...). It is dedicated to my favorite painter, Mark Rothko, and the title is taken from one of his paintings that has accompanied me for a long time as print hanging beside my bed. I finally got a chance to see this painting in an exhibition of Rothko's works at the Musée…
impossible grey
A wildly beautiful. Dangerously low frequencies, that is if you’ve a good system and neighbors. Lovely bright hard sounds, too. You doubtless already like the scratchy sound at the beginnings or endings of LPs
Monochrome Rust / Differential
As with many LINE releases, describing the hyperminimal microsounds of Bernhard Günter’s Monochrome Rust/ Differential is difficult like telling a sketch artist about the features of a ghost’s face seen from a distance – a long time ago – while you were drunk. Extremely vague yet undeniable! Two single-piece CDs are part of Günter’s “triptychon”, with Monochrome Rust (44:30) being the third piece (following Monochrome White and Polychrome w/Neon Nails). A digital degradation of Polychrome, the t…
Immersion
Split LP. Two pieces: 'Immer-sound' by Bernard Parmegiani. 'Transparency' by Philip Samartzis. 'To become immersed in sound, what could be more pleasant? Diving underwater where fish glide across your eyes, signs of a random visual score, mute but shimmering. However, as fish are not the sea, sounds are not music. They are only components within a specific order; random for some, composed for others. Both circulate in their own space. Without them, all life seems to be forgotten. The space to ex…
La creation du monde (1982-84)
This is a sprawling, ambitious painting in sound modeled on the birth of the universe. Moving from roiling, gaseous clouds of hiss and static through sharp peels of detailed, unrestrained texture, this is acousmatic music at its very finest, literally creating a universe of sound out of thin air. (AMG)
De natura sonorum
Classic 1975 recording of mostly quiet, resonating electronic sounds. "With the music of Bernard Parmegiani something in us is freed and comes out of passivity. This thing, which I know now was blocked without my knowing where, is the buzzing and Time within the flesh -- a humming of millions of closed mouths between the cells. What is the murmur made up of? The body develops a tongue in listening to this music, and there is within it great movement of the sound material... it is music that make…
Sonare
One 25 minute piece, from 1996. A State/CIRM commissioned work. A dreamy five-movement suite that deals with the encounter and metamorphosis of natural sounds and synthetic sounds. Bernard Parmegiani wrote about this piece "There is already music... of an Italian an character in this title! Sonare: l love this word because it is Italian and because upon hearing it, music simply springs forth from within it. For each of the 5 movements, I have chosen a pseudo-instrumental or synthesis sound whic…