Dilo
** Gatefold sleeve, incl. extensive 8 pages booklet (photos, notes, lyrics) ** I first discovered khroniky – Ukranian folk songs – in the Highlands of Scotland. I was watching a screening of Bajka, a mesmerising documentary made by the filmmaker Lucia Nimcová and sound artist Sholto Dobie. I knew nothing about these ballads beforehand, but I was fascinated by these odd, beautiful songs, especially the easy way in which they mixed misery and levity, where gentle melodies blend with tales of dark …
Schism
** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…
Loops & Pieces
** Edition of 100 ** Dauw welcome Spanish based artist Jason Kolàr to the label with his new work Loops & Pieces (2017-2020). It’s a prelude to his new full-length album coming in October 2021 through Dauw. Three years after Stroom TV released his debut album Modified Perspectives, Kolàr now offers a documentation of sounds he has been working on in the period 2017-2020. According to Kolàr, this tape is full of vaporous drafts transforming into solid forms with the help of time and distance. Com…
The Veiled Sea
I sometimes think of Ben Chasny as an occultist of the old school. For all the searing acetylene fire and noise that courses through his work as Six Organs of Admittance, there is something curiously late Victorian about the way his mind operates. For Chasny belongs to the lineage of seekers who, in the face of the fragmenting forms of knowledge in the modern world, held out the last hopes of synthesis: that art might not be parted from religion, nor religion from science—and that science, in so…
Pick A Day To Die
Sunburned Hand of the Man might be the last of the great American free rock collectives. There was a time, not too long ago, when every region of this great republic could boast of its own visionary troupe of seekers and improvisers, thrumming at the frequency of the illuminated world. There was Pelt in the south and Jackie-O Motherfucker in the Pacific northwest, No-Neck Blues Band in New York and the iridescent Jewelled Antler out in the Bay Area. And up in the New England wilds, there was The…
Axacan
There has never been an album quite like "Axacan", guitarist Daniel Bachman’s latest double LP. By defiantly playing against type and creating an album that, sonically and compositionally speaking, has more in common with Pierre Schaeffer or Edgard Varèse than John Fahey or even Jack Rose, Bachman has crafted one of the most introspective and deeply personal albums of instrumental music released in recent memory. "Axacan" weaves together acoustic guitar and harmonium alongside raw material from …
Cumino in Mia Cucina
** Edition of 300 ** Acoustic nylon strung guitar is not something I usually play but a visit by Duck Baker to our home in Rome inspired me to dig out my Brazilian version. I met Duck at Stefan Grossman’s house in the late seventies and embarrassed myself by replying to his question about what did i play by answering "you probably wouldn't understand", assuming he only played folk music. He produced from his bag and gave me a copy of a record with him, Henry Kaiser, Eugene Chadbourne, Owen Maerc…
A Thousand Sacred Steps
We owe this session to a touch of happenstance and a measure of forethought. Chris Abrahams was in London with The Necks for a residency at Café Oto, the capital's enterprising and valuable haven for adventurous music. Mark Wastell asked him whether, if he had any spare time whilst in the city, he’d be interested in doing a studio session as a duo.
The two have met a number of times over the years (including once in Berlin when Chris came to hear The Sealed Knot, the trio which Mark inhabits wit…
A More Attractive Way
** Edition of 500 + 20 pages booklet ** A More Attractive Way is a comprehensive study of live performances made by IST between 1996 and 2000. This set begins at the very outset of the group's career and features their debut concert at Club Orange in London and charts its way through further gigs in London, Billericay, Norwich and Cambridge. “A completely different intensity, but an intensity nonetheless,” Jo Fell reflects in notes accompanying A More Attractive Way. Her husband Simon, to whose …
Sale Quanto Basta
Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…
Animast
** Edition of 200 ** Ferns Recordings proudly presents Animast by Francisco López. Few albums would be as fitted for vinyl release as this one. Drawing on both analog-material and digital-immaterial undisclosed sources, “Animast” plays with the sonic textures and responses most suited for the characteristics of this particular analog medium: noisy crispness, compositional ‘loopiness’, contrasting sharp-and-thick textures and cycling dynamics. A must for experimental heads and adventurous DJs ali…
Jar'a
Jar’a is a surprising album in which the prepared Sardinian guitar, without any overdubs, achieves the tonal range and sonic pressure of a post-rock ensemble. The suite in six movements brings together avant-garde and ancient traditional singing rituals, evoking wide open spaces, combining underground worlds and the most ancestral Sardinia. Jar’a is a concept album, with three-dimensional sound, in which Paolo Angeli expresses an innovative contemporary language, inlaying it with fragile, emot…
Drumming in the Dark
Neuma presents Drumming in the Dark by Steven Schick. Engineer, Josef Kucera. Production assistance: Roger Reynolds and Terry Longshore. "In 1938 when John Cage formulated his famous dictum, "Percussion is revolution," I doubt that he had my mother in mind..." - Steven Schick
Pocket Music
James Caldwell’s creative life is the embodiment of the principle, Start at Home. In his case that is not only Macomb, Illinois, but even more precisely, in his pockets. Whereas some might consider music to be a soundtrack to their lives, an add-on, Caldwell reaches deep into the spaces around him for sonic potential and helps it emerge. For more than twenty years I have pursued a sporadic project of making small musique concrète pieces. The original set used sounds I made with things I found in…
Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire
Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…
Mémoire Magnétique, Vol. 2
Transversales is very glad to announce the release of Mémoire Magnétique Vol. 2 spanning 1966-1993, revelatory collection of short and secret music by electronic music pioneer Bernard Parmegiani. Since the late '50s, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some eighty two concerts music. From the start, Parmegiani’s work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, animation films but also music…
Memoire Magnetique, Vol. 1 (1966 – 1990) LP
**2021 Repress** Transversales is very glad to announce the release of Mémoire Magnétique, vol.1 spanning 1966-1990, revelatory collection of commercial and secret music by electronic music pionneer Bernard Parmegiani. Since the late 50's, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some sixty concert music. From the start, Parmegiani’s work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, animation fil…
Skamielina
** Edition of 50. Cassette With Skeleton Doggo Insert ** Skamielina means fossil and there is an excavated feel about this pretty piece of pastoral horror. Like something has been dug up and now stalks the cloying, humid summer, alive again in the warm rain with the incessant mosquito-buzz of tape, the ever-present tape-buzz of mosquitos. Samutek’s has over 30 releases, none of which have any details apart from titles that are in varied German, Polish and English. The cover photography is murky-…