Coh Bâle
Tip! *Limited edition of 300 copies.* This new album compiles several songs made in the years following Black To Comm's classic "Alphabet 1968" album. Originally released on the seminal Type label in 2009 (and to be reissued on Cellule 75 this year) "Alphabet 1968" combined the sound of vintage shellac and vinyl loops with broken electronics and field recordings, the press release mentioning disparate influences "ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann". In a beautiful o…
Vakning
Tip! "Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, nothing holds for anyone, any time or anything.
As stable as we might choose to think it is, this planet is anything but that. A paper thin crust, the zone in which we find ourselves, and mostly concern ourselves with, exists as a modest veil cloaking a dynamic seismic turbulence that is as powerful as it is unknowable.
There are moments though where ruptures occur. The pressure from within carves its way to, and through, the surface of the planet si…
Nowhere
2023 Stock. New Rome, the latest project from Polish composer Tomasz Bednarczyk, presents Nowhere. In the late 2000s, Bednarczyk emerged with a trilogy of electronic records that set pastoral-tonality against grainy smears of pulse and rhythm. His previous Room40 editions Summer Feelings and Painting Sky Together were lilting, melancholic affairs, littered with a deeply personal approach to music making that felt as therapeutic as it did artistic. In hindsight, they were records that stamped out…
Wilderness of Mirrors
2023 stock. Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. This album has been two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A. Baker's novel, The Peregrine. It is English's most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. The phrase, "wilderness of mirrors," draws its root from T.S. Eliot's elegant poem "Gerontion." During the Cold War, the phrase became ass…
Cruel Optimism
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment. This edition owes its title and its origins to the wonderful text of the same name by American theorist Lauren Berlant. I had the fortune to come across her writing almost a half-decade ago. In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of cri…
Elegant & Detached
2023 stock. This is the second full-length album from U.S. sound installation artist Richard Chartier aka Pinkcourtesyphone. Pinkcourtesyphone is an echo of an unfamiliar voice. Pinkcourtesyphone remembers two things you hold up to your face as a conduit to forgotten love. Pinkcourtesyphone permeates like a syrup-y dream. Pinkcourtesyphone is many things from many places. Pinkcourtesyphone is elegant and detached. This is the second full-length call from the Pinkcourtesyphone-line; a loquacious …
Improvisações Cristalizadas
*300 copies limited edition* Unreleased but perfectly formed "hidden" album, recorded in 1989-90 by Nuno Rebelo on the wake of his "Sagração Do Mês De Maio" double LP (composed in 1988 as soundtrack to the third Manobras de Maio fashion event in Lisbon). The tracks convey a sense of investigative curiosity regarding computer composition and they sound wonderfully artificial. Titles as "Moon OK", "Tiny Space Ships" or "Dança Das Creaturas Elásticas" ("Elastic Creatures Dance") embody this idea of…
Circus Parade
Tip! A reflection on the absurdity of life with its paradoxical contrapositions: light and darkness, peace and despair, joy and sadness, all mixed together in a chaotic and ridiculous "circus", where, inexplicably, we all find ourselves in. The undeniable overwhelming beauty of it all is a constant source of puzzlement and delight where laughter always finds its way.
Jasper Sits Out
From Lawrence English: "A few years ago, my dear friend and bandmate Jamie Stewart and I were talking about Swans. I started to mention how much I admired the utterly personal approach to guitar that Norman Westberg had developed on those early records and moreover how that had blossomed out so richly on this latest incarnation of the band. During the course of the conversation Jamie mentioned a CDR that Norman had passed to him, which collected a few pieces of solo work that Norman had been wor…
Mirror
2023 Stock. Drawing deeply on the earliest recorded period of Japan’s history, the Kofun era, Chihei Hatakeyama’s Mirror meditates on the importance placed on reflection during this age. The mirror was a source of great inspiration, not only as a metaphor for the sun, but also for its ability to shift and reflect light from one location to another. This act of transplanting light, considered almost magical by many during that time.
Similarly, this idea of reflection spurred Hatakeyama to underta…
Formally Haywire
*100 copies limited edition. Totally sold out at source. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing.* The latest mysterious musical missive from these soundohm faves, NYC's psychedelic improv free rock explorationists No Neck Blues Band, a reference whenever we need to describe some sort of tribal freeform psychedelia or jazzy abstract drift, or dirgey home-brewed free form minimalism, or pretty much any stop in between, these guys are the modern mas…
Live at the Stone
*100 copies limited edition. Totally sold out at source. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing* Thurston Moore (guitar) Bill Nace (guitar) and Samara Lubelski (violin). Presenting a series of psychedelic textural works, Lubelski creating vibrant and reiterating structures that Nace uses as a foundation for swells and expressive emanations; hypnotic and mesmerizingArt by Spencer HerbstSilkscreen By SIWA prints
School of Elea
100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * Swirls of guitar artifacts, collateral noise, percussive events, and synthetics all processed, looped, layered and mystified in improvisations by No-Neck Blues Band members Pat Murano (aka Decimus) and Dave Shuford (aka D. Charles Speer & The Helix). Scary textures and ticklish surprises. In some distant future? No, you say. Now, there’s a logic in being skeptical about seers, b…
Mass Observation (Expanded)
2023 stock. From Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud: "There were three performers and one witness. I can remember this day well, even though it was some twenty-four years ago. Standing up before a mixing desk in a dark room in an apartment in South London, Jim O'Rourke, Robert Hampson, and myself, literally all hands-on deck as we each took responsibility for the faders on the desk. Introducing sounds to the mix, the accident reigned supreme. Sometimes the high frequency of cellular noise would pervade …
Requiem for a Dying Animal
In outer space, music does not exist. Only in a thin layer of atmosphere, wrapped around the planet earth, humans can live and breathe. With all their power and creativity, they have exploited and eradicated an unspeakable amount of fellow animal beings. As Arvo Pärt once put it: also with music, you can kill – because with music, you touch the medium of life, the air itself. In this sense, music is not condemned to express the inner life of homo sapiens. Instead, humans are affected by music, b…
Computer Sourire
The fifth release on Tempo Dischi comes from one of the true pioneers of Italian disco: Maurizio Dami aka Alexander Robotnick. 'Problèmes d’Amour' and 'Computer Sourire', included in the mini album "Ce n’est q’un début" are two fundamental songs in the history of electronic music made in Italy. 'I started with music very late. I was 27 years old. In the early 80s Florence became the music capital of the new rock in Italy. There was a movement, different from what we were used to in the 70s, vari…
Roto Vildblomma
Roto Vildblomma, a re-worked, re-mixed and re-mastered edition of MMMΔ’s first ever recording is now available on vinyl by Improved Sequence. Roto Vildblomma marked the beginning of MMMΔ’s (still ongoing) quest to tame the beast of melody grafted intermodulations. It was first released in May 2010 under the Mohammad moniker.
Stupidamutaforma
Fera's sought out tape debut 'Stupidamutaforma' (2020) is finally reissued on 2xLP remastered by Matt Bordin and with new artwork.
The Mont Aigu Tapes 2
**Blue tape Limited Edition to 90 numbered copies ** Sound and Radio Frequencies captured in location in Mont Aigu. Part of Fieldworks#26 .
Continuous Hole
Continuous Hole, a collaborative album by Drew Daniel (Matmos) and John Wiese. The fruit of over ten years of home recordings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Baltimore, “Continuous Hole” melds improvisation and musique concrète composition into a uniquely sweaty document of labor-intensive rhythm. A finger puzzle of reconciled opposites: lockstep structure and constant flux. Many of the tracks reflect the unique blending of the disparate backgrounds of its creators: on “Abhorred Shears”, “Slee…