Rapport à une Académie Kafka's Parachute
A “man” tells his fabulous past as an ape, from his capture to his adaptation to the world of men, to the members of an Academy of Sciences. This edition of A Report to an Academy, a short story by the great Kafka, is accompanied by a musical piece especially written by Nurse With Wound (here, Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron, Quentin Rollet, and It could be Worse).
Yawar Fiesta
A Spatialized Electroacoustic Opera.“Born in the Baroque period, the opera is making a strong comeback in this late-20th / early-21st century with the emergence of a new form of Baroque, the result of the globalization of information, racial and cultural melting pots, our historical knowledge of the arts, and the cohabitation of styles. This world-as-a-whole, as the synthesis of all other art forms, is a reflection of a society and an era, and it has to resemble our world through the use of mode…
Histoires d'histoire
“Music of Another Present Era” (2013-16), stereo tape. Music of Another Present Era plays freely with our ability to imagine another time and culture. At the same time, it recognizes that this historical imagining is necessarily conditioned by our own time and place. We do not know exactly what ancient music sounded like, as we are left with only inaudible details such as the microtonal scales that were used. This work appropriates a number of these ancient tuning systems to create a sense of th…
La Baracande
CD version. Basile Brémaud : voice, violin. Guilhem Lacroux : guitar, lap steel, bass. Pierre-Vincent Fortunier : bagpipe, violin. Yann Gourdon : hurdy gurdy, drone box. Recorded in 2016. La Baracande is the meeting of musicians from Toad with the singer Basile Brémaud around the songs from Virginie Granouillet “La Baracande”. Her songs have been collected by Jean Dumas in the 50 and 60’s.
Materia Oscura
Squadra Omega is one of the bands which best represents the vast spectrum of the Italian underground. Psychedelic, avant-garde, jazz-rock, improvisation, kraut-rock, rock in opposition and ethno-tribalism blend seamlessly into the work of a collective that moves and expands depending on the urgency of the moment, focused around a core that rotates around the two members OmegaMatt and OmegaG8. In the band's wide discography we find compositional freedom, improvised jam-sessions in and a am…
Time of Hayfield
Time of Hayfied represents a thematic shift away from more long-form and slowly developing pieces Andrew Chalk is known for prior to this and also especially in his work with Mirror (1999-2004). It is the stepping stones between two worlds and is still steeped in foggy textural atmospheres, but as though pierced by sunlight through a forest canopy, where melodies and harmonic structures appear and dart through the vignettes. There is a sense of lost golden summers and all is enhanced by the narr…
All the Unnamed
Lumina is the trio of Graham Stewart, John Whyte and Timo Van Luijk, all of whom draw on long and distinguished careers in experimental sound - Stewart and Whyte collaborating since the mid 80’s, within the Canadian outfit Violence And The Sacred. All The Unnamed, recorded across 2015 and 2016, represents the project’s debut. It’s a stunning start. Built from the delicate interplay of sparse electronics and acoustic instrumentation, the trio constructs a dark and elaborate ambient world - an alm…
Itinera
**200 copies ** When Timo Van Luijk isn’t working under his own name, he works under the alias Af Ursin - a project focused on structured improvisation, combining electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Itinera is his eight full length release under the moniker since 2002. The album is a stunning and challenging marvel, hearkening back to another less compromising era of electronic music - one of rigorous and complex arrangements of structure and tone. While drawing on a number of sources for i…
Stack Music
Having felt restrained by the limits of traditional instruments and the techniques tied to them, composer, music producer, and artist Konrad Sprenger (b. Joerg Hiller), spent years developing various algorithms and custom instruments to realize his work. His recent focus has been on rhythmic patterns based on the Euclidean algorithm, using a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar. The unique system can create complex rhythmical patterns whilst tuning the strings during performan…
Rose Des Vents
Epic, impressionistic electro-acoustic sound travelogue of early ‘80s France by Swiss composer who studied under Stockhausen, Boulez and Gottfried Michael Koenig, among others, the first release on the newly minted Mana label run by Andrea Zarza, curator at the British Library Sound Archive, and Blowing Up The Workshop founder Matthew Kent.
“First commissioned by the French Government in 1981, the LP Rose Des Vents evolved out of a six year project by Swiss composer Pierre Mariétan to docu…
Alpha Percussion
Mondo Groove present a reissue of Giovanni Cristiani's Alpha Percussion, originally released in 1985. Alpha Percussion is a cult groovy ambient album of acoustic percussion, pleasant to listen to and full of samples and breaks known very well by DJs and artists like Danny Brown, who used a sample of "Fragments Of Crystal" in "Really Doe", a song off his album Atrocity Exhibition (2016). Giovanni Cristiani is one of the most prepared and complete Italian percussionists. Born in Rome in 1952, h…
Sei still, wisse Ich Bin
Originally released on Klaus Schulze's Innovative Communication label in 1981, 'Sei still, wisse Ich Bin' is Popol Vuh's 13th LP. Fricke and Fichelscher worked under the production of Klaus Schulze himself and were helped for the occasion by Chris Karrer on soprano sax, Renate Knaup on vocals and the Chorensemble der Bayerischen Staatsoper. Two of its songs, Laß los and ...als lebtendie Engel auf Erden where used on the soundtrack of Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, from 1982. There is also a …
Miszellen
After more than ten years of making music with turntables, tapes and loops the swiss based musician, artist, performer and architect Christoph Hess started in 1998 the project Strotter Inst. to concentrate just on the manipulation of turntables not using any records or sounds made by someone or something else. Strotter Inst.rument's machineries have dual roles as objects and as instruments. The first live impact is as installations, then the sounds start to grab the listeners' attention. The aud…
You & You
DNA burst onto NYC's underground scene in the late '70s and recorded their lone single at Ultima Sound (the same studio where Suicide made their first album) in May 1978 just weeks prior to the pivotal No New York sessions with Brian Eno. Featuring the original lineup of Arto Lindsay (vocals/guitar), Robin Crutchfield (keyboards) and Ikue Mori (drums), You & You is DNA's indelible debut that perfectly captures the anti-movement of No Wave: clearly defined and purposely oblique with traditional r…
Ghost
“The story of this album began with the idea of composing my response to Melodie – one of the Louis Andriessen’s pieces dedicated to Frans Brüggen. At first, I searched for information on the circumstances in which Louis Andriessen’s specific composition was created. As it has quickly turned out, however, I’m not so much interested in these circumstances any more. I have realized that this piece is a presentiment but also a goodbye. A farewell to the spirit of community. The community whic…
Populista Box
A lovely 3cd box collecting the latest Roginski efforts on Bolt records. "An imperial person complained to Mozart that there were too many notes. A merely imperious trumpeter said pretty much the same to John Coltrane. Here’s a kind of answer. Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski, perhaps most widely known for his work with the Shofar trio, slows up and spaces out Coltrane’s music, unwinding some of those much covered test pieces – “Equinox”, “Countdown”, “Mr PC” – and taking them almost to stallin…
Sometimes
“Sometimes (harmony series 1)”, realization for female voice and three electronics players by Colectivo maDam. This piece was, as the title indicates, the first of the 34 pieces that would eventually become the harmony series. in this and all the other pieces in the series, i attempted to create the conditions for a harmonic situation without giving any actual notes. the main stimulus for this was swell piece (for Alison Knowles) (1967) by James Tenney (one of the postal pieces). i had reaso…
Plays Henry Purcell
Raphael Roginski, guitar. Olga Myslowska, voice, synth. Sebastian Witkowski, synths. “I feel a very intimate relation with English culture thanks to my admiration to the music of the 60s. But then there is also William Blake’s Albion, Benjamin Britten and the myths. I have been puzzled by why do I constantly hear the same thing in the music of Bert Jansch and Led Zeppelin, Joy Division and Dead Can Dance. And then in the music of PJ Harvey and Traffic. And in Henry Purcell too, and in John …
More Chamber Events
Antoine Beuger (flute), Christoph Nicolaus (stone harp), Burkhard Schlothauer (trumpet, bass drum). Before starting the event series in 1995, I had been occupying myself with nonrepresentational minimalist painting, in which, rather than representing anything from the objective world, the artwork itself becomes an entity, an object of the world. Would it be possible to realize such a degree of abstraction in music? In this series of compositions for solo instruments each sound by itself is c…
Seven Miniatures on El Hadji Sy
Alienated voices. Crackling noises. Abstract sounds of unidentifiable origins … these are just some of the sources that Zorka Wollny, visual artist / composer from Krakow (whose work a.o. has been presented at CTM Berlin or ICI London), and her Austrian partner Christine Schörkhuber - freelance sound artist, video maker and musician with residencies in St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Valparaíso, Buenos Aires a.o. – apply to create seven acoustic miniatures that are based on and inspired by pai…