h-Menge
The latest in Asmus Tietchens ongoing Mengen series, this album maintains the bold adventurousness and strict minimalism of previous recordings whilst suggesting some sense of evolution along the way. The series was initiated as an exercise in composition based exclusively around spatial manipulations of white noise and sine tones, but this instalment seems to hint at a heightened level of sonic richness and diversity than that policy could ever reasonably hope to accommodate. Some of the pieces…
Untitled 1-3
This magnificent collaborative album from two of the key minimalist composers of their generation originally crept out in 2004 as one of the very earliest releases on the Spekk label. The album now sees a significant overhaul for its reissue, with an extra two pieces thrown into the bargain plus a remastering job courtesy of Taylor Deupree. Although the original Spekk edition of the album went out of print within two months of its release, a digital version has been in circulation more recently.…
Voice Coil
Pauline Oliveros (accordion with Expanded Instrument System); Peer Bode (live text with Bode vocoder); Andrew Deutsch (live mixing, archival recordings, samples, loops and electronics). Voice Coil was performed by the Carrier Band in the fall of 2003 at the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, New York. Pauline Oliveros performed on accordion and computer-based Expanded Instrument System, Peer Bode performed live text with his Bode Vocoder, and Andrew Deutsch performed live mixing, archival recordi…
Further Materials
A sequel to the Other Materials compilation (released via Richard Chartier's own 3 Particles label), this album draws together the various compilation tracks released by the artist between the years 2002 and 2005. Many of these pieces take the form of miniatures, meaning they're both shorter and more condensed than Chartier's conventional output, the most succinct of these being the two-minute sound sculpture 'Tracing (Sketch For)' lifted from Raster Noton's Frequencies [Hz]. You'll find more su…
Extented play
Janek Schaefer's illustrious career as a sound artist, turntablist and composer has seen various standout moments over the years, from his postal travelogue 7", Recorded Delivery, on the Hot Air imprint to his collaboration with Stephan Mathieu, Hidden Name. Extended Play ranks alongside Schaefer's very finest works, and one of his most overtly musical, in the traditional sense. Originally conceived as an installation, Extended Play consists of piano, violin and cello each playing a predetermine…
Constellations
Long out of print. Though it begins with a few minutes of depth-plumbing space music, Constellations soon evolves into a series of tuneless synthesizer squiggles tweaked to perfection by Schnitzler with help from his effects array (reverb, delay, echo, etc.). The assortment of electronics is reminiscent of '60s academia but loaded with emotion nevertheless.
Audioscope - New Electronic Music From Madrid
Two tracks each by Francisco Lopez, Luis Mesa, Juan P. Monreal, Antonio Garcia, Miguel Ruiz, 1 track each by El Sueno de Hyparco, Markus Breuss, Orfeon Gagarin.
Glossalalia
Slowly pulsating drones, chirping electronics, distant radio static. Ambient or minimal? To answer the question, it might help to go back a couple of millennia to the Epicurians. Today their name mostly evokes indulgence in fleshly pleasures but that only one form of their thinking; the other sought to deny the body excess experiences. Though the difference isn’t always audible, ambient tries to envelop a listener in pleasant fluffiness while minimalism wants to remove any nonessentials to focus…
Isabelle Eberhardt: The Oblivion Seeker
Another Schutze soundtrack, this is for a relatively big-budget, commercial film, and is consequently one of his most conventional recordings. However, it does showcase his talents as a composer and a manipulator of synthesized sound. Acting as a studio "one man band," Schutze has created a score which is lush and fully orchestral, with extensive use of string, horn and woodwind voicings, and some fine contrapuntal writing. Several sections even seem to follow traditional classical forms such as…
Clock Face
This release documents the second collaboration between Conrad Schnitzler and Jörg Thomasius (the first, “Tolling Toggle” came out on Fünfundfierzig). 15 tracks of their experimental collaborations. Recorded in 1991 and 1992, and released in 1992 in an edition of 500.
Continue
Lull is exactly what its name would seem to imply -- ambient noise with a surprisingly hypnotic effect. Consisting of a one-hour-long track that unfolds excruciatingly slowly, Continue could be the soundtrack for a '90s version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was equally unnerving for its vast expanses of nothingness. Where Scorn can be the horrific equivalent of a musical Freddy Krueger -- getting in your face to tell you how badly he's gonna mess you up -- Lull's approach is more subtle and se…
21 Situations
This is the long-anticipated encounter between Martin Tétreault and Otomo Yoshihide, recorded in the CBC studios in Montréal. Witness for yourself the clash of two masterful turntable manipulators, one from Japan, the other from Quebec: two universes, two attitudes and one electro-mechanical encounter around the record player. The result is a stunning collection of twenty-one improvised “situations” exploring themes such as science fiction, education, jungle, cartoons, and seventeen additional s…
A Bead to A Small Mouth
A beautifully packaged collection of specially recorded pieces (which could be most accurately described as "sound poems") from such left field luminaries as Nurse With Wound, Zoviet France and Graeme Revell (he of SPK and "Dead Calm" soundtrack fame).
All The Rage
"All the Rage" was developed from a recording I made of a riot in San Francisco in October 1991, which followed California Governor Pete Wilson's veto of a bill designed to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. Bob Ostertag's "All the Rage" turned the evening on its head with a devastating roar of gay anger. Of recent concert pieces having to do with AIDS, "All the Rage" seems by far the most powerful example. Mr. Ostertag's stern, purifying gaze has swept away the sentimentality and me…
The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid
Are there other earthling-conjured soundworks rivaling the majesty of Henry Flynt's minimalist hillbilly fiddle fantasias or the heavens-rending power of Messiaen's works for organ? Undoubtedly, else why bother listening. But the only thing speaking at us right now from these charmed regions are the celestial airs of these Stars of the Lid. Alternately lulling and wielding a potency that wholly escapes 'experimental' musics, SOTL bring big, whomping chunks of sonic firmament with a sustaining, l…
Avec Laudenum
Avec Laudenum was originally released on the Belgian Sub Rosa label in 2000. Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride recorded the album via mail and by the time it was released Wiltzie had moved from Austin, TX to Brussells. Avec Laudenum marked a decided expansion of the Stars of the Lid drone methodology. The duo's use of guitars and samplers was more compositionally directed, creating long, exquisitely stretched out melodies.
Le Temps Des Moissons
A long-lost classic of the Terry Rilesque (!) music and experimental world fusion. French saxophonist Ariel Kalma is one of the pioneers of early experimental electronic music; born and raised in Paris and studying recorder and saxophone from an early age, Kalma became interested in other musical traditions during his international travels in the early '70s, even going so far as to study circular breathing techniques from an Indian snake-charmer. His debut album, originally recorded in 1975 and …
Sea Changes & Coelacanths
Subtitled: A Young Person's Guide to John Fahey. This compiles Fahey's earlier releases for TOE: 1997's Womblife and the live followup Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts; plus the Hard Time Empty Bottle Blues 12" (all o/p as individual releases at this point). In the 43 years between his first recordings and his death in 2001, John Fahey stomped across the American soundscape, leaving behind footprints of influence so breathtakingly vast that entire genres now huddle within them. Fahey's mesmeric gu…
Echran
Echran is a duo: Davide Del Col playing synth - he also released several records with the name Ornament (music located in the territories of obscure ambient) - and Fabio Volpi (programming and voice) playing also in the musical-visual arts collective Otolab. Echran’s music is a form of post-industrial ambient mixed with analogical echoes of the 70’s and the 80’s, all combined with cold digital sequences and an obsessive metronomic minimalism. A lot of tension and hypno runs through the rhythms o…
Opera Decima
LAST COPIES...This album has been released on both a double CD and on a boxset of three LP's, and it's long out of print now; the music is a combination of ambient and industrial which can sometimes sound fit for a horror movie. Heartbeats, the chatter of children and ghostly voices swiftly floating around. Other times it's more spaced out, sad or just odd. A Hammond organ is present as a little link between his heavy metal/hard rock roots and this, and the whole work is pure drone masterpiece