Issue 8
The 8th issue of Lasse Marhaug's fanzine Personal Best. Features in-depth interviews with: Rachel Shearer, Peter Rehberg, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Benjamin Nelson, Peter Brötzmann, Jana Winderen, Otomo Yoshihide and Ghédalia Tazartès
Songs From The Bardo
Songs from the Bardo begins with a bell ringing out once, twice, three times, as a ritualistic chant emerges from the dense silence. The collaborative composition by avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson, Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal, and composer and activist Jesse Paris Smith is a guided journey through the visionary text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, unfolding in an 80-minute ebb and flow of sound and words. Songs from the Bardo is a transporting experience, meant to draw the l…
Mi specchio e rifletto
Tip - this is stunning! Since their launch in mid-2000s, the New York based imprint, Unseen Worlds, has continued to set an incredibly high bar through the earth-shaking quality of their releases. As dedicated to historical artists and works as they are to those emerging in the present, they’ve always taken their time, slipping things into the world with remarkable care, that leave humble tectonic shifts in their wake. After an absolutely incredible couple of years with brilliant albums from Lau…
Due Matte
**Limited edition of 50 cassette tapes with extractable paper crochet holy image on white matte rough paper. Includes digital download**Two of the most important artists of UK underground music: Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Vanishing Twins, etc) and Marlene Ribeiro (Gnod, Negrabranca) were invited to contribute to Hysteria, an artistic residency in Porto 2019. "Due Matte" is the fruit of it: an interaction game between styles and sounds, mesmeric in its echoes of distant landscapes and envelopin…
Cantus, Descant
**2CD Edition** The new double album from artist Sarah Davachi is an 80 minute, 17 track meditation on impermanence and endings, framed by minimalistic organ études and careful harmonic layering, with two tracks featuring the artist’s own vocals for the first time.I spent a lot of time while working on this album thinking about impermanence and endings, which led me to change my understanding of “vanitas” and “memento mori.” These concepts arise allegorically across classical antiquity and Buddh…
VII
A new timley studio album from the duo of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley. Recorded and mixed during an unexpected extended stay in Berlin when the borders of the world suddenly closed. The claustrophobic urgency of this scenario is seared into the colossal vibrations set into this vinyl release.
Unlike many of their releases this is a studio record made unto itself as opposed to the many soundtracks they have made for theatre works and the like. It also stands as one of their most fully real…
Camizole
Camizole was co-founder with Etron Fou Leloublan of the collective Dupon et ses Fantomes. In 1977 Camizole was composed of Jacky Dupety (tenor sax, oboe, perc), Jean-Luc Dupety (drums, tuba, trumpet), Francoise Cruble (alto sax, guitar) and Dominque Grimaud (sax, guitar, synth). First ever issue of some live recordings from 1977 (intended for release by Tapioca) by this underground French group with linkage to Etron Fou, Lard Free, Art et Technique, etc. Primitive, at times violent free form flo…
Take All the Ships...
The title to this album from Tarab (nee Eamon Sprod) is striking enough in its allusions of damnation, with a watery grave a potential outcome from human activity impacting the earth. So, it may be stating the obvious that the corroded locations where mankind has scarred the surface of the earth feature prominently in the work of this Melbourne based sound artist. The residual elements of these sites become the agents for metaphor and allegory in Tarab's work, documented through field recording …
Sub
**Limited edition of 500 copies** The most enigmatic of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Marc Zeier is the man behind G*Park; and here, he presents his first major album since the acclaimed 2008 album of cryptic electro-acoustics entitled Reuters. Many years in the making, Sub is a sprawling masterpiece of modern day musique concrete, reflecting the early pioneers' use of razor cut tape with a grandiose revelation of an existential horror. Zeier describes this album as the manifestation of amorphous cond…
I’m Lost
A schizoid-concrete opus of environmental sounds heightened, stimulated, decontextualized, and teased into a psychic puzzle of industrialized and post-industrialized detritus, I'm Lost marks another milestone in the ever impressive catalogue from Australian sound-artist Eamon Sprod, who adopts the moniker Tarab for his endeavors. The title is one that explodes with a multitude of meaning. There's the geographical frustration in losing one's way as the surrounding landmarks fail to match with wha…
Ozeanische Gefühle
irr. app. (ext) is the work of California-based sound artist Matt Waldron, whose collected body of work is far too important to continue to be forgotten. During the past decade, only two full albums -- Dust Pincher Appliances (2003 on Crouton) and An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding in Conversation (1997 on Fire, Inc.) -- have seen the light of day despite the fact that perhaps a dozen albums have been completed. The public silence for irr. app. (ext) was never by Waldron's design, a…
We Share a Shadow
Murmer is the pseudonym for Patrick McGinley, a man with several passports which have taken him to many a foreign land in search of found sounds of the unsettled, the forgotten, the mysterious, and the beautiful. His field recordings of activated environments (e.g. resonant industrial spaces, windswept telephone lines, bowed branches, gasping ventilator systems, etc.) originate from all of the locations where he has traveled; yet, the documentation of these sounds is not the terminus of McGinley…
Kreiselwelle
irr. app. (ext.) is the sound-engineering project of Californian M.S. Waldron, whose liminal slippages and detourned croons have been spotted recently on stage in Nurse With Wound. Yet for all of the antics that are required for the NWW spectacle, Mr. Waldron still dedicates himself in the parallel pursuits of irr. app. (ext.) with a discography that reads more like a wunderkammer of uncanny investigations into futility declared as its reverse.
Kreiselwelle is the third and final installment to …
Samoa Highway
**Edition of 500** RV Paintings were born in California. Humboldt County, to be exact. It is nearly impossible to imagine their origins being elsewhere since the brothers Brian and Jon Pyle, who currently pilot RV Paintings, constantly mine the metaphysical properties of their homeland through a heavy-lidded psychedelia. The redwood trees that majestically rise from the rugged terrain may have been one of the endemic objects that inspired RV Paintings to “jam nature”; but Humboldt County’s other…
Works For Cassette
Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb -- also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tap…
So Long
A journey through time, perhaps, for a daydreamer floating in a small boat amidst the radiant hues of a midnight sun. that daydreamer in this instance is the icelandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, best known for his electro-surrealism in stilluppsteypa. he has long been an artist of extremes and absurdities -- mania fueled performances, wildly scribbled drawings, and haflerian audio shock-therapy, on one side; and on the other, a profound meditation on austere shape, form, and mood cast th…
The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971
With this album, Fossil Aerosol returns to the damaged media and decomposing mediums of the late 20th century. The basic tracks were recorded in 2010, and were remixed and remastered in 2014. The source material for the work consists of dissociated fragments from nearly-lost genre films of the 1970s, filtered by scratched celluloid, bad splices, dropouts, and damaged control tracks.
The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971 was released on vinyl by the Helen Scarsdale Agency in 2015. The first 200 copies o…
The Unlistening Place
The core tracks of The Unlistening Place were recorded in 2015. At the time, these were intended to be part of what was to be the final Fossil Aerosol album, scheduled for a distant release. But history circled back on itself and the result was a reworking of future tracks, alongside more new material. Historiography eating its own tail. Tradition, referents, and resolute nothing from the place that does not hear.
Scaath Catfish
Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approac…
Con
Bureau B present a reissue of Conrad Schnitzler's Con, originally released in 1978. Conrad Schnitzler: In the electric garden by Wolfgang Seidel, May 2020: "... Whilst on shore leave in Düsseldorf, Conrad Schnitzler heard about a professor at the School of Art (Kunstschule) who also accepted students into his class without high school diplomas. Conrad Schnitzler became one of them. The spirit of a fundamental new beginning bonded this generation of artists together, with Karlheinz Stockhausen an…