Piano Sonatas & String Quartets 1
The first volume in a projected series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets — there are six of each — on Mode performed by the superb JACK Quartet and Stephen Clarke (piano). In the 1970s, Horatiu Radulescu (1942 - 2008) began exploring and composing begun composing what he called “plasmatic music,” in which sound was conceived as an “endless ocean of vibrations,” as opposed to the traditional way in which music treats sound as a fabric of discrete scale steps. His mu…
Soweto Stomp
Malcolm Goldstein, violin & direction. The Ratchet Orchestra. Composer/performer Malcolm Goldstein (b.1936) has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s. He received an M.A. in music composition from Columbia University in 1960, having studied with Otto Luening. In the 1960s in New York City, he was a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble. His 'Soundings' improvisations have received international acclaim for having reinvent…
Wucherungen
Hans Koch: Bassclarinet, Soprano Sax. Thomas Peter: Amplified Objects, Live Electronics. Recorded March 2014 in Biel / Bienne, Switzerland. “Music by bass clarinet and soprano saxophone player Hans Koch has been reviewed before and I particularly enjoyed his solo release Erfolg (see Vital Weekly 964). For Thomas Peter it has been a long time ago since I reviewed Medir (Vital Weekly 682). That one was entirely made with digital means, but on the disc he recorded with Koch he plays 'amplified obje…
Cheval ouvert
'After sharing the bill with fellow musicians like Knut, Isis, Jesu, Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, Zu, Asva, Todd, Shit & Shine, Marduk or Tony Conrad on the occasion of the 150+ concerts given over the last years, drummer Marc Fantini, bassist Derek Shirley, electronic musician & vocalist Gilles Aubry and electrified tenor sax maestro Antoine Chessex felt the need to come back to studio work. Results a powerful though dark and introspective piece of pure sonic radicalism. 'Cheval ouvert' immerse…
Gather & Release
Gather & Release is the result of years worth of composer Sarah Hennies' exploration of the vibraphone in synthesis with her experiences of identity, obsession, anxiety, tension, grief, and loss. Over the course of an hour, Hennies entangles highly focused percussion playing with field recordings, sine waves, signifiers from her personal & family history (including a 20+ year old recording of her grandfather reciting poetry), and bilateral stimulation, a tool for anxiety release and a major comp…
The Hum
Anne La Berge, flutes and voice. Joe Williamson, double bass and voice. Flutist-composer Anne La Berge, an American living in Amsterdam, and bassist Joe Williamson, a Canadian based in Stockholm, have formed a new duo. Both artists are known for their eccentric approach to text, either in song writing, or music compositions. With two intriguing text/music pieces that sound like odd radio plays, they introduce the listener to the ambiguities of their unrestricted fantasy. A pleasurable, sometimes…
Lunch music
Lunch Music by composer Yannis Kyriakides is a set of pieces for voices, percussion and live electronics, inspired by the 1959 book Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. On this recording the virtuosity of percussionists Slagwerk Den Haag (recently heard on the recording of Michael Gordon's Timber) and contemporary vocal specialists of Silbersee are embedded in a rich sonic environment of electronics, modulated voices, grinding pulses and hallucinatory noises.The concept of the music revolves aro…
Kore
180-gram LP version in gatefold sleeve. Includes download code. Edition of 300. Reinhold Friedl and his zeitkratzer ensemble perform Friedl's Kore, an homage to Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis. A natural advancement of Friedl's composition Xenakis [A]Live!, released in 2007 by Asphodel, Kore was conceived for nine amplified instruments, demonstrating zeitkratzer's well-established tradition of instrumental amplification (e.g. its early collaborations with Zbigniew Karkowski and Merzbow an…
Stockhausen - Aus den Sieben Tagen
180-gram LP version in gatefold sleeve. Includes download code. Edition of 500. The third collaboration between Keiji Haino, one of the most prolific artists of the Japanese experimental/noise scene, and the critically acclaimed zeitkratzer ensemble, comprising stunning interpretations of Stockhausen compositions. When Keiji Haino heard zeitkratzer rehearsing for their Stockhausen performance at the Ruhrtriennale festival, he spontaneously decided to join the group for that part of the program…
Aithein
**restocked** Oren Ambarchi, Stefano Pilia, and Massimo Pupillo (Zu) team up for an instrumental trip bridging post-rock, drone, and improvisation. Limited 180-gram LP in silk-screened sleeve with artwork by Sara D'Uva. Includes download code. Since the late '90s Oren Ambarchi has been exploring new ground as composer and multi-instrumentalist (mainly focusing on guitar), fusing a wide range of influences and inspiration from improvisation, contemporary music, modern electronics, and rock…
Gianni Sassi uno di noi
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Mudima Foundation (once Multhipla) this book is the very first extensive retrospective overview of Gianni Sassi’s work, design career and role that he played in the development of alternative cultural action and promotion in Italy. Gianni Sassi truly was a larger-than-life figure whose contributions were wildly varied. In the Sixties, inspired by the artist Marcel Duchamp, Sassi participated in the loose interdisciplinary network of Fluxus. Durin…
Search Ensembles
Search Ensembles is a new evocative project of and/OAR founder / operator Dale Lloyd presenting “sonic archeology”, unearthing forgotten and previously unreleased recordings from project participants’ archives, plus new recordings to create a conceptually cohesive album. The name “Search Ensembles” is a play on the term “search parties” which means: “groups of people conducting an organized search for someone or something lost or hidden.” This first offering comes across as a collection of inexp…
One Hour As Trees In Finland
The second release in the new sub-series called “One Hour As...” based on Ben Green’s radio program of the same name on Resonance FM, which aired between 2002 and 2004. Recorded in 2007, this release presents exterior and interior sonic perspectives of trees being blown by wind in Alajarvi, Finland. Not only a meditation upon a very important part of the terrestrial ecosystem, but a normally hidden insight into the realm of living intelligent trees.Includes an essay written by Stefan Militzer wh…
Andrei Tarkovsky - Another Kind Of Language
With Michael Northam, Jon Tulchin, Yannick Dauby, Dale Lloyd, John Hudak, Kiyoshi Mizutani, Ronnie Sundin, Ven Voisey, Magali Babin, duul_drv, Josh Russell, Phillip Pietruschka, Sawako, Logoplasm, Andrew Chalk, Loren Chasse, John Grzinich, Radio Cegeste, Asher, BJ Nilsen, Kassel Jaeger. At last, a triple CD re-issue of one of the most requested out-of-print releases in the label back catalog. Twenty one sound artists created work inspired by one of Tarkovsky’s seven feature length films. The fir…
For Leos's Piano
Alvin Curran, piano (originally owned by Janacek), electronics. Gordon Monahan, digital performer software, native instruments akoustik pianosoftware.“Janacek Revisited, Recomposed, and Retuned.In June 2013, on the occasion of the Exposition of New Music festival, Gordon Monahan created a sound installation on the grounds of the famous Villa Tugendhat in Brno, using the music of Henry Cowell and Leos Janacek. The choice of these composers was not accidental; Cowell highly credited Janacek’s musi…
Lost Shadows: In Defence of the Soul - Yanomami Shamanism, 1978
Mixed by Lawrence English. Recordings from 1978 by David Toop of Yanomami ritual songs, shamanistic ceremonies, and rainforest sounds. The voices of spirits and animal familiars, ventriloquial illusions of sound in dark spaces, secret spirit languages, the clap of thunder that links shamanic trance with the sleep language of Finnegans Wake... Out of these passages of the everyday, intensity flares like flames caught by a gust of wind. Skin burns or oozes blood, the wind blows up havoc as t…
Santur: Orient/Occident
This disc offers two approaches to an ancient instrument called the santur. The first, by the Iranian master musician Hossein Malek, consists of improvised pieces recorded by his friend Leo Kupper in the '80s, representing a unique and valuable archive. The second is Kupper's Western approach as a student of Malek, filtered through undetectable electronics. Includes 24-page booklet. "The santur is a stringed instrument in the same family as the Appalachian hammered dulcimer, the Chinese yangqin,…
as/if/when
Sub Rosa presents works by industrial music pioneer, Z'EV. The physical vibrations of the objects in his works with both text and sound has been influenced by the Middle Eastern mystical system best known as Kabbalah, as well as -- but not limited to -- African, Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian rhythms, musics and cultures. He has studied Ewe music, Balinese gamelan, and Indian tala. From 1959-1965 he studied drumming with Arnie Frank, then Chuck Flores and then Art Anton at Drum City in Van …
Kosmic Music from the Black Country
Never-before-released recordings of mythic Belgian kosmische band Kosmose (1973-'78). Kosmose can be approached as a collective without a specific leader. The line-up fluctuated quite a lot around a rock-solid core formed by Alain Neffe and Francis Pourcel. As this release demonstrates, their sound evolved from something deeply influenced by kosmische music to a purely improvised form of noisy free jazz. The whole adventure took place in the heart of the '70s, almost under wraps, though mo…
Unusual Perversions
Unusual Perversions was the first "official" production of Pacific 231, originally released in 1984. Previously,Psychic Euthanasia was a limited edition, self-produced tape, and one of the first DIY experiments from 1981-83. After the short lived Berlinerluft, an outfit that included Axel Kyrou (from Vox Populi!) and Bertrand Wolf, Pacific 231 swiftly moved away from the new wave genre toward a raw industrial sound with power electronics tonalities in-line with his influences, going from writers…