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
Calcutta Gas Chamber
John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber has long been hailed as one of the minor masterpieces of post-industrial sound art, this is the very first edition on N D label. Back in 1990, this German born sound artist had traveled to Calcutta where he stumbled upon a gas chamber that had been closed down just a few years earlier. Watermann explains in the liner notes that the Indian government had numerous policies, both official and clandestine, aimed at population control; and the gas chamber was one…
Crop circles
a rare early work by Steve Roden, a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, known for his musical work under the name 'In Be Tween Noise'. Steve felt that this particular work, music for an installation he has done, was far enough from the music of 'In Be Tween Noise' to ask us to release it under his own name. It is a quiet soundscape, produced by using only a microphone and a speaker to create the sound material, and designed to fill the room at a moderate loudness to let the listener take a…
untitled # 90
The sonic vibrancy of tropical rainforests is highlighted on the one long (45 minutes) track of Untitled #90. But, of course, in the hands of Francisco López, the kinetic sounds are manipulated and shaped in most imaginative ways. Opening with the buzzing hum of life (insects? birds? animals?), the ambience of life within the moist, humid rainforest, envelopes the listener. Not just simple field recordings, the sounds are looped, subtly stretched and tweaked, in such a way as to really bring the…
Before The Law
Raz Mesinai is one of the most respected young musicians in New York’s burgeoning underground electronica scene. His unique approach utilizes samples of acoustic instruments performing his original compositions, electronics of his own design, computers and occasionally his dynamic percussion work. His latest project is inspired by the hermetic Jewish writer Franz Kafka whose influential work views the Jewish experience through a mystical, almost Kabbalistic lens. A complex and multifaceted CD of…
Project
7' vinyl only. Limited edition. Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft. Cut by Jason at Transition. 'Project began as a film soundtrack for 'The Overcoming of Hazard' by Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, whose 3 monitor installation piece was presented in the crypt of St. Pancras church in London, August 07. It uses four atmosphere recordings, short wave radio and an organ stop - an attempt to confuse inside and out. Mixed with Mathias Gmachl at Loop.ph using Digital Performer, one side is designe…
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was an album of electronic music released in 1961. It was the recording of a concert performed at the McMillin Theatre (today called the Miller Theatre) at Columbia University on May 9 and 10, 1961. The Arel composition is completely electronic, with articulated signals over a continuous background texture. El-Dabh's composition, an "electronic drama," has a text drawn from the epic of Layla and Majnun, and consists primarily of tape manipulated instrum…
New Sounds in Electronic Music
One of the most beautifully pressed vinyls of electronic music with 3 important works: Steve Reich "Come Out" (see Reich's Early Works), Richard Maxfield "Night Music," and Pauline Oliveros "I of IV." Maxfield's "Night Music" is an exquisite pre-synthesizer electronic music made -- like his pieces "Sine Music" (1959) and "Trinity Piece" (1960) -- with only the supersonic bias signal of a tape recorder and a supersonic sawtooth waveform from an oscilloscope producing audio range difference tone "…
Happy Ending
Happy Ending contains the soundtrack to Joel Santoni's Les Yeux Fermes (1972), reissued together with Lifespan (1974) as Les Yeux Fermes & Lifespan (Elision Fields, 2007). The soundtrack itself consists of two lengthy pieces: the grave Journey From A Death of a Friend for organ and piano (the highlight of the album), and the lightweight Happy Endings for piano and saxophone (reminiscent of Poppy Nogood). Only copy available.
Clic
"Clic" is released in 1974 and it is truly of those art-popping creations Battiato ever managed to do - there are full analogies naming it a best ever album, there are voices that appreciate its corrosive attitude under quite exhaustive portraits, everything being or not of a heads-up, since "Clic" needs to affirm a great response from the person who listens to it. All the fractured comparisons can become unremarkable, even if most of the previous solid works has lead to this entire full interes…