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-…
Tomiris
** Edition of 50 ** It begins violently and gets worse. Rattled barely-percussive scrapings, peppered with audio documents at the edge of perception lead to an unignorably painful and persistent crying baby. Eventually she is sped up, synths slide in and it’s over. Tomiris is being born. Club-concrete producer Ratkiller’s Tomiris is a conceptual reworking of the soundtrack to the 2019 Kazakstani film of the same name and it occupies a similar weird mythic space. Tomiris the film is a piece of na…
Electric Fauna
Leif Elggren and Kent Tankred, 3 September 1999, Fylkingen, Stockholm – a small chamber play where The Sons put the small animals on pasture and let them live their own lives, but under strict supervision and with a fixed eye so that no accidents may happen, so that no one is injured, so that no one is ill-informed, or how it might be if not everything is organized and supervised in a well-structured society.
"You can't just let things be without direction, then there would be nothing at all (or…
ZA87
** Edition of 100 ** The dusty streets of apartheid-era Soweto, 27 July 1987. The politically charged funeral of a young activist who fled South Africa to became a commander in the military wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Police await in armoured cars. The funeral is restricted by specific government decree. "The man being buried is Peter Motau, assassinated in neighbouring Swaziland on the orders of South Africa's most notorious government-sanctioned killer, Eugene de Kock, …
Of The Shapes of Hearts and Humans
** Edition of 100 ** These recordings capture a meeting between Patrick Shiroishi and Paul Zachary, a few days before Zachary left Los Angeles and embarked on a journey across the country. The sounds of Garfield Park echoed while the San Gabriel mountains burned, and Patrick and Zachary intoned a prayer for our shared futures. Recorded on 9 September 2020 at Garfield Park, Pasadena. This shapely tape is a product of The Tapeworm – “…we decided to leave when we got thrown out”.
Four Walls Full of Sound
** CD / 4 Pages Digipack + Booklet ** Four Walls Full of Sound is an electronic interpretation of the works of Phill Niblock by the Prague-based group Opening Performance Orchestra. This studio version, recorded at the re-set studio, was preceded by a live performance at the 2017 Ostrava Days Festival of New and Experimental Music. The cover was designed by Jaroslav Buzek and the booklet includes essays by Kurt Gottschalk and Petr Ferenc. Sound designer Stephan Mathieu took part in shaping the r…
Plux Quba
One of the greatest sonic masterpieces of the '80s - long championed by Jim O'Rourke and foreshadowing the work of an entire generation of experimental electronic music that emerged during the 1990s - Christian Fennesz, Oval, Mouse on Mars, Microstoria, C-Schulz, Mountains, and Oren Ambarchi - we're thrilled to offer an essential repress of Nuno Canavarro's visionary LP, Plux Quba, via the venerable Drag City. Originally appearing from the shadows of the mysterious vanguard of Portuguese music i…
The Great Learning
** CD housed in a 4-panel digipak. Comes with 12-page booklet ** Tone Glow Records is proud to present a special archival recording of Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 7 from Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning. Conducted and formed by American composer Dean Rosenthal, the Montréal Scratch Orchestra featured 14 or so like-minded experimental music enthusiasts who performed the pieces at Redpath Hall on the McGill University campus in 1996. This release arrives on Cardew's 85th birthday and follows Ro…
Nuova Abduzione
** Limited hand-stamped green and purple C44 cassette ** How can knowledge be increased? Probably with small leaps into the void, starting from our own certainties but throwing ourselves headlong into the probabilities. The leap into the probable is an abduction: an extraordinary gesture that has been carried out for millennia, but abduction is nothing without empirical verification and this is done only by looking closely, bridging unimaginable distances, analysing samples, sending probes, proj…
Rhythm Voice
The Swedish dancer, choreographer, and performer, Greta Lindholm, has remained, since her emergence during the late 1960s, a singular and unique force on the global contemporary dance scene. Having developed a synthetic and experimental approach to movement and generative sound, her boundary pushing body of work can be understood as a celebration of the body and its languages, and their intimate relationship with the voice; using primarily foot drumming and vocal rhythms, her body is transformed…
Well Known Strangers (14×7″)
** 14x7" Singles Boxset, limited to 128 numbered copies, celebrating Unrock's 25th anniversary as an entity ** The Well Known Strangers 7“ Singles Box Set documents the history of the Unrock singles (as we know it). International dervishes galore….Fourteen singles, thirteen were originally released in the Unrock Series, or have been part of our Saraswati Series and came first with the Early-Bird-Editions of the regular albums. Instead of the only missing single (Bill Orcutt/Sir Richard Bishop …
Glimpses of a Day
** Orange cassette with black imprint. Comes in regular jewel case and 4pp 150gsm paper covers. Limited to 70 hand-numbered copies ** Hailing from different corners of the experimental music world and following 2018’s acclaimed performance at Centro d’Arte in Padova and a plethora of solo releases, Alessandra Novaga and Stefano Pilia return to discography with their very first studio collaboration. Recorded in 2017, "Glimpses of a Day" comprises a series of nine compositions for electric guitar …
Batlahatli
Batlahatli starts where Drookitarlùp left off. Giancarlo Toniutti and James Wyness developed two electroacoustic compositions out of sound materials collected during their European travels in search for drookitarlùp. Exploring different relational morphologies, opening their systems to timbrally charged forms, from two points of the universe, it is true that, albeit the "archaic" descriptor was not entirely apt, they extended their theoretical investigations in music.
"Clustering on the geometry…
Total Blackout
** 2021 Stock. Edition of 47 numbered copies in pro-printed cardboard box ** Born from an original concept by Paolo Ippoliti of Logoplasm, this compilation is a collection of seventeen randomized and "unplugged" tracks by aal, Andrea Marutti, Carlo Giordani, Crashcars for the Ravers, Fhievel & Luca Sigurtà, Madame P, Rinus Van Alebeek and Vale. All the artists were asked to create their contributes without using any electrically-powered source/instrument, just like they were experiencing a real …
Oto to Secchi
** Editin of 100 ** Tsss Tapes presents Oto to Secchi by Anne-Françoise Jacques and Takamitsu Ohta. A slow walk through Oto to Secchi, a collaborative sound installation by Ota and Jacques at Bonjour! Gendaibunmei, Kyoto. Recorded on August 2019. Installation organized by Takamitsu Ohta. Recorded, edited and mastered by Anne-Françoise Jacques.
Entenka
** Edition of 100 ** Tsss Tapes presents Entenka by Tim Olive: magnetic pickups, electronics and Kayu Nakada: circuit boards. Recorded August 13th, 2020, Kobe. Mastered by Francesco Covarino.