Authority is Alive
Recorded live at the Playfreely Festival in Singapore, November 2019, Authority is Alive is a potent performance mixed from an intoxicating brew of poetry, philosophy and sonic alchemy. Bearing the theme “The Transparency of Turbulence”, the festival featured a strong line-up of East Asian and Southeast Asian artists and bore the ambition to be “an alternative to how we coalesce and navigate a region that is continuously torn apart by words, egos, greed and ideologies.”
“Everything... living... …
Hope
Bourbonese Qualk were an experimental music group from England who where active from 1979 until 2003. The group were always obsessively and uncompromisingly focused on controlling their work – they ran their own record label, recording studio, tour organisation and music venue (the legendary ‘Ambulance Station’) – they refused to integrate into the commercial music racket turning down publishing deals from major labels – stubbornly opting for total independence.
Bourbonese Qualk were also known …
Ice Exposure
Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the ‘70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theatre were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock ‘n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and un…
Summing
Oscar Jan Hoogland is the sound of Amsterdam in person. He plays in the Muziekgebouw (Amsterdams main hall for modern composed music) as well as in the Bimhuis (Holland’s main jazz venue) that is literally attached to it, as in its parking garage. He is an instant composer, pianist and inventor of his own instrument by putting a clavichord, a keyboard instrument from the 17th century, on 220 Volt electricity.
As the last student of the late pianist, composer and improvisor Misha Mengelberg he te…
Eric Random & Free Agents
The Free Agents was originally a side-project of The Tiller Boys. These were a Manchester group active from 1978 to 1979. They supported Joy Division on a few occasions. They recorded a single for Factory, which the label did not release in the end. Later, the single was released on New Hormones after the group disbanded. The Boys consisted of Eric Random, Francis Cookson and Pete Shelley.
When Free Agents was founded, an LP was released entitled £3.33 in 1980 on Groovy Records. This album later…
An Abandoned Laboratory Vol. III
Edward Ka-Spel is an English singer/songwriter and musician residing in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is best known for his work with the band The Legendary Pink Dots, which he co-founded. He is also known for his work on The Tear Garden with Skinny Puppy's cEvin Key. In 2017, he collaborated with Amanda Palmer on the album I Can Spin a Rainbow.
In The Dots, he was initially known as D'Archangel, Prophet Q'Sepel and he used other pseudonyms as well. He has also released numerous solo albums (ini…
S.O.T.A.
*Limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies, issued in a digipack.* Non Toxique Lost are one of the most important and equally most underrated bands from Berlin's 1980s Industrlal scene. Sprung aus den Wolken, Einstürzende Neubauten, Die Tödliche Doris and also Non Toxique Lost were the core of the movement in the divided city. In the old days, most of their albums came out on cassette only, later they were collected onto vinyls and CDs.
After the tragic loss of long-time member Steffen Schütze…
Duette (Live In Vienna)
Section 25 formed in Blackpool,UK in November 1977. Initially they were a duo, consisting of brothers Larry Cassidy and Vincent Cassidy. In June 1978 they made their live debut with Phil Denton on guitar. Their first 7", "Girls Don't Count", was released in July 1980 on Factory Records, produced by Ian Curtis and Rob Gretton of Joy Division fame.
Joined by percussionist Lee Shallcross, Section 25 gradually evolved with a more electronic-dance direction from 1983 onwards, a process which culminat…
Larme Secrete
Pascal Comelade was born in Montpellier, France. After living in Barcelona for several years, he made his first album, under the name of Fluence, influenced by electronic music and by the group Heldon. Since 1980 Comelade releases music under his own name. Ever since, his music has become more acoustic and is often characterised by the sounds of toy instruments, used as solo-instruments or as an integral part of the sound of his group, the Bel Canto Orchestra.
Marc Hurtado is one half of the exp…
Moravian Meeting
The show on this album was performed in Olomouc, Czech Republic, at the Moravian Theatre, in the year 2010. The Ceasar gallery organized a retrospective exhibition called “The Residents Residence“ in Olomouc. The exhibition contained art, constumes, masks and other artefacts of The Residents and Už Jsme Doma were asked if they could create their own versions of The Residents’ songs, and play them to support the exhibition.
As Randy, the Residents’ singer, was invited for the opening and staying …
Eyeful
The Residents are an American art collective best known for their over 60 studio albums that were recorded over a period of over forty years. They also created some outstanding multimedia works, mainly three CD ROM projects and ten DVDs. Working as an anonymous collective, their identitites were kept secret until in 2017 Hardy Fox revealed himself as their primary composer. Hardy died in October 2018, but the group continue to record and perform.
Recently, several new albums have been released, …
Nineteen-Sixty-Seven
The all-new album by former Residents composer Bobuck. Based on the H. Fox story, “O-bay Scooplaws and the Summer of Love.” O-bay Scooplaws was one of the thousands of bands whose dreams were smashed like a Peter Townsend guitar. "We planned to leave for California at midnight hoping for lighter traffic and avoidance of the excruciating heat the Southern Route is so famous for. But it was nearing 2:30 and the truck still did not have the drum set loaded. There was a nervousness in the air. Our p…
The Lightest Words
The "The Lightest Words" by Kirsten Reese is now available at World Edition. Kirsten Reese studied flute, electronic music and composition and lives in Berlin, where she teaches electroacoustic composition at the University of the Arts. In her works Reese often focuses on performative and narrative aspects, as is the case in the three pieces on this CD.
The first track "the lightest words had the weight of oracles" features the historical and specific tone colour of the Fairlight CMI Synthesize…
ENIAC Girls
Seventy years ago, computers were as big as swimming pools and were programmed by country girls. ENIAC, the world’s first fully electronic, vacuum-tube-based universal computing machine, sported a weight of 27 tonnes and used 18,000 vacuum tubes for calculating. And, each day, at least two of those vacuum tubes gave out. When this machine was presented to the world public in 1946, six young women, most of them maths students from the rural Midwest of the USA, had spent three years inventing a me…
Oneiric Formulary
Master of myriad styles, Sir Rick Bishop takes in baroque, flamenco, surf, and harder to place fusions of phantasmagoric sound design, Gaelic folk and Indian Raga, and more lysergic expression in this bounty of a new album.
Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transm…
Rock Sutra
Sun Araw released Rock Sutra, via Sun Ark, his Drag City sub-label. Cameron Stallones' latest LP consists of four long tracks. "The music is offered in a spirit of generosity and adventure," he says, "It doesn't stay put, and it keeps zooming in to reveal more and more. This is so you can zoom in and experience 'feeling-without-articulating' for yourself, which is better than reading about it here."
Rock Sutra is the first album Stallones recorded live-to-MIDI with his band, which consists of Jo…
Iteration
Two improvisations from an astonishing Munich performance in May 2019 by the Berlin-based duo of Lucio Capece - bass clarinet, slide saxophone, room acoustics and mini-speakers & Werner Dafeldecker - double bass.
"The two pieces were recorded last year during our live performance at the ‘Offene Ohren’ concert series in Munich. On the disc are two unedited improvised sets. Lucio and I have known each other for many years and play together periodically. So the music was maybe ‘pre-planned’ to some…
Good Day Good Day Bad Day Bad Day
A unique and extraordinary 45-minute composition for piano & keyboards + percussion, written for the GBSR duo: George Barton & Siwan Rhys. Composed by Oliver Leith in 2018, and recorded in March 2020 by Mark Knoop.
"I like looking at and framing everyday life, sometimes banal things. Good day good day bad day bad day is almost an incantation, I was interested in the rituals, habits, things we tell ourselves to keep going, invasive irrational thoughts, odd pleasures and reliefs of life. Mainly be…
Monument of Diamonds
Epic 45-minute microtonal composition by Kraig Grady, using a 17-tone scale, the Meta-Slendro tuning, created by Erv Wilson. Composed in 2020. The instruments were specially built or adapted for the unusual tuning system.
"The idea of Monuments came from the sound of the brass, in which I include the saxophone here. Brass seems to be used much less in newer music than strings, winds and percussion which is unfortunate. Since they are used less than strings or winds in new music, they seem to inv…
Repetition of the Same Dream
Five works for flute, percussion & electronics, recorded during Covid-19 lockdown in a church in Basel, Switzerland, March 2020. Commissioned by Another Timbre and performed by Mara Winter - flute and Clara de Asís - bowed objects, percussion & electronics.
"There were some pieces that I composed and others that were formed by Mara and I, where the roles of composer / performer dissolved into each other. ‘A passage through’ was composed specifically for Mara’s bass flute, also relating very much…