A Minute To Pray A Second To Die
CD version. Reissue issue of an album described by Byron Coley as “the best rock record ever recorded”. The Flesh Eaters is the name behind one Chris Desjardins a.k.a. Chris D. Taking his stage name from a 1964 cult film, Chris D. wrote for legendary fanzine Slash in the late ’70s and assembled the first of many Flesh Eaters lineups from heavyweights in the burgeoning L.A. punk scene. After releasing a ravenous EP and heart-ripping debut album, The Flesh Eaters unleashed their era-defining state…
New Works For Realistic Mixer
2016 release. Following 2015's Teaspoon To The Ocean, Jib Kidder delivers an uncanny dance LP featuring no-input mixer sequenced together with drum machine. It steers the chaotic atmosphere of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (1975) towards an emotive tide of information that, whether too much or too little, makes it hard to grasp but easy to eat up. If electronic music has been made familiar (through musique concréte or Lee Gamble) with the conversion of noise into dance, New Works For Realist…
Uguisubari
Faitiche present the launch of its new Acoustic Surveillance Series. Each 7" vinyl single in the series presents a historical system for acoustic surveillance, beginning with Uguisubari by Jan Jelinek's field recordist pseudonym G.E.S.. The pieces feature recordings of uguisubari -- special floors in Japanese temples and castles. The nightingale floor was a popular acoustic warning system. It was very simple: when someone stepped on the floorboards, the nails holding them in place rubbed against…
Winkel Pong
Faitiche present a new Ursula Bogner record. Winkel Pong contains three previously unreleased pieces from the archive of the sound researcher who died in 1994. In 2008, Jan Jelinek put together a first album from Bogner's tape archive, Recordings 1969-1988(FAITICHE 001CD, 2014). A second followed in 2011, compiled this time by Andrew Pekler Sonne = Blackbox (FAITICHE 005CD, 2011). For Winkel Pong, the tape archive was passed on to Lucrecia Dalt. The Berlin-based Colombian sound artist and musici…
Processed Snippets: Congo Traditional 1952 & 1957
Mike Kitcher's Processed Snippets falls firmly into the category of new exotica, a music created from a very specific location that becomes placeless through abstraction. Kitcher reworks moments recorded from the SWP Records re-mastered release of Congo Traditional 1952 & 1957 (SWP 046LP, 2014), a collection of recordings by Hugh Tracey. Tracey, a pioneering documenter of traditional music across the continent of Africa was notable for the extent of his travels and the breadth of his work, as we…
Ou
2015 release. Along the arc of Lucrecia Dalt's music, beyond what steers her so allusively away from self-repetition, there is an undefinable forward inertia. What can explain, for instance, the near absence of her voice? Is it personal interest, renunciation, an embrace? Is she driven by a backdrop of conceptualism, or is this a lyrical wandering? What is known, for starters, is that she made Ou immersed in a cinema of her own, curatorial creation. Ou's filmic quality is a direct consequence of…
Les Duresses
2014 release. Les Duresses emerges through a prism of speculative intonation. Marc Sabat uncovers an opening of tonal possibilities that he roots in an unfinished composition for solo violin by Morton Feldman. From its enigmatic notation and the conceptual tendencies expressed by Feldman, Sabat determines that the fragment is written in an alternate tonal space. Throughout Les Duresses, this space is given shape and consideration. Sabat draws on a sound world, not from Feldman, but like Feldman,…
At The Door
Limited edition of 118 copies. Henning Lahmann on Ezra Buchla's At The Door: "Ezra Buchla creates immersive, intricate, and at times overwhelming soundscapes carried by masterful viola and synth renditions, broken up only by his dark yet soft, almost hushed voice."
Swallow
2013 release. Scott Cazan's music is driven by a fascination in the fullness of sound as well as an interest in network and information theory. Like the writings of those who inspire him, such as Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Alexander Galloway, his work, for all its directness, has a dark and seductive aura. Swallow is an album that lingers at the borders between memory, ambience, and feedback.
Study For A Monument
Gothenburg-based artist Johan Zetterquist delivers his debut album for the excellent iDEAL label, unspooling three extended pieces shaped like sound sculptures. It's a profound drone metal variant recorded on a Gibson SG, amplifier and effects, live with no overdubs, slowly unfolding to reveal blistered shards of sound that recall everything from Stephen O’Malley to Maryanne Amacher's seminal Sound Characters. Zetterquist gets a huge amount of mileage out of the contrast between extremes produce…
Rotations
Hyper colourful and shiny modular synthesis and effected Clarinet ecstasies from the American contemporary avant garde...“As the duo Golden Retriever, Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff have explored an ocean’s worth of sound. Primarily working with the intersection of modular synthesis and amplified/effected bass clarinet, the duo has done eight releases for labels like Thrill Jockey, Root Strata, and NNA Tapes. Their music combines an intense emotional immediacy and meditative focus with strong…
Smoke / An Ally
A hypnagogic narration that evolves in a dream-state, hazy atmosphere intrinsically embodies Dead Gum's thirteenth release. “Smoke / An Ally”, freely curated by the subconscious, evolves on sonic interpretations that emerge from a specific vocal pattern of indelible words. Variations of monad launch a descent to translucent memory fields. Numb listening, ceaselessly transformed inwards, unto the inner light of the night, nearing, until it dims down once again to blackness. Dead Gum is the solo p…
Concept Bongo
"Concept Bongo"'s completely minimal logic is not exhausted in the fact that it is an album that is only played with bongos. Because beyond this conception, the music we find in its thirty minutes is characterized by a mystagogic feeling which, through an abstracted and repetitive ambience, keeps you totally transfixed, marginally helpless to react to it. References to the musical culture of the percussion instruments are stimuli left to the listener's own discretion: you can understand "Concept…
London Taximi
Taximi is the improvisation during the performance of traditional musical pieces, using soloistic folk instruments. It has roots in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabic culture and can be commonly found in Greek music and specifically in rebetiko. Taximi is a free rhythm melody, an author's imagination, alternating between various emotional paths with a passion respective to each one who carries it. The main prerequisite in order to play a taximi is not to have excellent technical knowledge, but…
Whitehouse
Karlrecords presents the second collaboration between the critically acclaimed ensemble zeitkratzer and the legendary power electronics and afro noise pioneer William Bennett (Whitehouse, Cut Hands). Music with crystal clear, even neurosurgical precision -- pure acoustic power! The floor vibrates with deep bass frequencies, produced by the huge orchestral drum, the beaten bass strings of the piano, and sub-tones of the horns, while high piping sounds from amplified violin harmonics and bitt…
Live At Candy Bomber Studios, Vol.1
Curtains up for a new power trio: bass player Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Laniakea), drummer Alexandre Babel (Sudden Infant) and Caspar Brötzmann on guitar. As the title Live At The Candy Bomber Studios, Vol.1 indicates, this album is the first cut from an inspired recording meeting. Raw energy with full focus; three instrumentalists, at the peak of their skills, blend noise rock, drone, and improvisation into two relentless, epic pieces. The line-up consists of Massimo Pupillo, bass player in Zu, …
Oneirika
Reinhold Friedl's Zeitkratzer proves the perfect ensemble for Oneirika, avant-garde veteran Elliott Sharp's composition/soundscape inspired by Cageian tradition that premiered at Maerzmusik Festival 2014. Zeitkratzer worked with Elliott Sharp for the first time in 1997, and have since been releasing several cooperations, including two duo releases of Zeitkratzer mastermind Reinhold Friedl and Elliott Sharp. Over the last 40 years the avant-garde musician has created an immense oeuvre: he ha…
Bwoouunn: Fleeting Excitement
Alto sax player/improviser Masahide Tokunaga released his second solo album in 2015, and the highly original playing on that recording, comprised entirely of powerful long tones, received critical acclaim. Two years later, his third solo album shows that he has reached new heights. Proceeding in a comfortable way, his performances here consist mainly of long tones, but add subtle changes in timbre and volume with impressive technical skill, producing a highly creative sound space which could eve…
Schulevy Maker
Holotype Editions was founded as a means of bringing out music by some of the most unique and peculiar artists of the last decades. What could be more fitting for the imprint’s seventh release, than the duo of cult artist Ghédalia Tazartès and multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer Maya Dunietz. Recorded live at Cafe Oto, in December 2013, Schulevy Maker documents the duo’s first live appearance. An amalgam of bizarre samples, concrete sounds, live piano and bells, juxtaposed with the otherw…