Mandatory Reality
Mandatory Reality, the new album by Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society, is here. Setting aside (for the moment) the electric instrumentation of Simultonality (GB 048CD/MTE 068LP, 2017) and Magnetoception (MTE 063-64LP, 2015), Joshua Abrams conceived Mandatory Reality for an eight-piece acoustic manifestation of NIS, consisting of himself on guimbri, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium and gongs, Mikel Avery on tam-tam and gongs, Ben Boye on autoharp and piano, Hamid Drake on tabla and tar, Ben…
Petropolis
Xabier Erkizia is a Spanish musician, producer and journalist from the Basque Country. His work is based on research among different people, sounds and formats in different situations as sound installations, recordings and musical compositions, radio-art pieces, working with bands or collective improvisation.This release is a sono-geographical research about the Petropolis (Caxias do Sul, RG, Brasil) neighbourhood, and includes a 16 page booklet with photos and texts by Michele Mainardi, Lorena …
Empire / Flat Rock
Dark and gloomy string arrangements by Michigan’s Michael Collino (Dog Lady Island, Alien Passengers) on both sides, concluding to an intentional dragged out silence on side B to complete those sounds of loss. “Funeral Zither” at its best.
There is no Love
Few copies, sold out at source. Additional contribution from Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixer) recorded by Steve Bates and David Sylvian, Montreal. Tubular bell and concert bass drum recorded by Matthew Sansom, Surrey University, 2006. Original text by Bernard Marie Koltès. Compositional structure by Mark Wastell. Mixed and mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Personnel: Rhodri Davies - lap harp, table harp, vibraphone, radio; David Sylvian - voice, vocal treatments, electronics; Mark Wastell - tam ta…
Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps
James Tenney, for almost the entirety of his career, was one of the great, unsung giants of the American musical avant-garde - an artist’s artist, whose towering contribution and influence was everywhere - equal to Feldman and Cage, but who, like Nancarrow and Partch before him, was a maverick - radical to the core, refusing to play by the rules, and thus suffered at that fate’s all too predictable hand. Since his death in 2006, his legacy in devoted hands, recognition has slowly begun to grow, …
The Birthday Party
On first hearing, the piano music of Peter Garland (b. 1952) creates a feeling of dislocation, then astonishment: It is so very different from the contemporary concert music we are familiar with. The composer's intent, his emotional directness is immediate -- despite the unusual sound world and different sense of time that these pieces exhibit. The three pieces on this CD, 'The Birthday Party' (2014), 'Blessingway' (2011-12) and 'Amulet' (After Roberto Bolaño) for 4 pianos (2010), are quite diff…
Link
Edition of 500, no repress, no digital. After closing out Smalltown Superjazzz’ run in 2015, Mats Gustafson fires up its new iteration - Actions For Free Jazz - in the lacquer crackling, spittle-riddled investigations of ‘Link’ with avant-turntablist Christian Marclay Both known for charting paths less travelled, here they point to strange, liminal zones of perception on their first collaboration, with Gustafsson’s electronically processed tenor and baritone sax channelling an ecology of wee be…
Milano After Punk: Rare And Unreleased Tracks
Milan, 1979, only two years had passed since the explosion of punk but it seemed like ten years had passed, 1977 had inexorably changed the destiny of a generation of musicians. Milan in those years felt a bit like Manchester, a city in black and white, with monuments grayed by smog, busy and still far from becoming the "Milan to drink" of the mid-80s. The music scene was totally disconnected from the rest of the Italian underground, the bands were born and imploded within a few months. The inpu…
Ice Exposure
Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay return with Ice Exposure, their second album for Blackest Ever Black. A sequel and companion piece of sorts to 2015's Antigravity, its title couldn't be more apt: sonically it is both colder, and more exposed -- in the sense of rawer, more volatile, more vulnerable -- than its predecessor, capturing the combustible energy and barely suppressed violence of the trio's celebrated live performances with aspects of noir jazz, musique concrète, no wave ar…
Color Colour
** Edition of 300 copies, totally sold out at source ** Another incredible archival work from Cabiria Records here, a genuine holy grail of Italian post-punk music, Andy Warhol Banana Technicolor’ legendary 'Color Color' tape is remastered and issued on vinyl for the first time, this is an indispensable slice of ‘80s Italy’s underground experimental rhizome. Like their international tape-scene allies, Andy Warhol Banana Technicolor reacted to this world thru a matrix of mono-synths, drum machine…
Palm
"Kukangendai is a kickass rock trio from Kyoto (Tokyo transplants). When I first hear this band live I was instantly transfixed by their minimalist yet illusory primitive, polyrhythmic, and structural, memory evoking rock narratives. Their energy is completely and transparently palpable yet handled with restraint of the pleasure of a disciplined form dealing with time and articulation. They are a power trio of bass, drums, and guitar but the music they play is as much the limbic system of a fore…
Necropolis
Canadian private press mega-rarity/obscurity from the artistically schizophrenic Bob Bell. Recorded in 1978, Bell splits the difference between his love of basement psych splatter/pummel and squalling free jazz ramble, the former occupying side A with a stunning four-part suite of wasted guitar scuzz and churning Krautrock-like drama with an akin to German Oak, Roland Kirk, Albert Ayler, DNA, Melt Banana (minus the vocals) and Guru Guru. The latter represents Bell as a saxophonist on side B, and…
The Goldennn Meeenn + Sheeenn
CD Edition. Venerable composer and pianist Charlemagne Palestine revisits his seminal 1976 work ‘The Golden Mean’ in duo with enigmatic artist Rrose, reprising a dialogue started 10 years ago when Rrose was studying at Mills College and looking for a score to Charlemagne’s amazing ‘Strumming Music’…“In 2018 the Festival Variations in Nantes commissions Palestine to perform The Golden Mean, reworking the piece for two pianists. Palestine chose Rrose to join him in this new rendition of the work. …
Massimo Farjon Pupillo
Oltrarno Recording is honored to present the first solo album from Massimo Pupillo.
Massimo´s artistic life shaped through worldwide tours with his band ZU
as well as multitude of collaborations with artists such as
Thighpaulsandra, Peter Brotzmann, Mats Gustafsson, Paal Nilssen-Love,
Damo Suzuki and Oren Ambarchi.
"A reconnection to something essential, which sprout up and comes to
life. It´s a return on the way to home and to the foundation of my
existence"
Moondog
Manhattan in the Sixties. Every day, at the corner of 54th and Sixth, stood an imposing blind man with a druidic beard, dressed and helmeted like a Viking. Every day, he played music with home-made percussion instruments and declaimed poems. A simple eccentric or picturesque figure? No. Louis Thomas Hardin, called 'Moondog', was one of the true geniuses of his time. And even one of the geniuses of all time, prolific and visionary, capable of linking Bach, jazz and Amerindian rhythms, writing min…
Chronos
On C.h.r.o.n.o.s., their third album on Karlrecords, Arovane and Porya Hatami deliver five delicate ambient pieces, rich in textures and Zen-like atmospheres. After Organism (2017) and the musique concrete influenced Organism_evolution (2018), Uwe Zahn alias Arovane and Porya Hatami continue their sonic explorations with C.h.r.o.n.o.s, the fifth collaboration album by the German electronic producer and the Iranian sound artist. While the duo's last album was a collection of 23 mostly short track…
Cod War Kids
A deep and delicate dive into the psyche of an unusual duo, British-born ex-pat North Carolinian guitarist Dan Melchior & Icelandic-born Hanover-based experimentalist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson. Each quite unique on their own accord, but in combination bring a sound reminiscent of some odd combination of church music, the Deep South, some kind of swampy bluegrass, the Phantom of the Opera — really it’s hard to pinpoint where they might go. But through the whispering murmurs, the twang and fleet…
Nakara Percussions
Killer! Within the history of efforts dedicated to percussion, Nakara Percussions’s 1984 lost marvel LP stands apart. A singular work, made remarkable by the
diversity and range of its sonorities and structures. From
the delicate pulse of nature, deep resonances and carefully placed tone,
intricate structures and tempos as slow as they go, across its movements
the album rewrites how composition for percussion should be understood,
before giving way to consuming and ecstatic rhythms which referen…
Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982)
There's a myth about music critics according to which they are frustrated wannabe performers. Evidence to the contrary: Vivien Goldman. The London-born, New York-based Goldman is one of the foremost chroniclers of the perfect storm of reggae, punk, hip hop, and Afrobeat, but between 1979 and 1982, she was also a working musician, creating songs that, years later, would be sampled by The Roots and Madlib. These rare girl grooves are now collected for the first time onResolutionary, covering Goldm…
Bern · Melbourne · Milan
Killer! 300 copies packaged in a double gatefold ruby recycled cardboard sleeve with silver embossed text on front, including a 32-page booklet. Archival and live recordings from Australia’s premiere prepared acoustic improvising trio. Formed in 2002, Melbourne’s Pateras/Baxter/Brown toured heavily between 2004 and 2008, playing a regular residency at the Empress in North Fitzroy in between extensive European tours. They performed multiple concerts in classical, electronic, jazz, grindcore and a…