Eel Asp Flaps Feet
Fifty years after I first encountered the music of Orchid Spangiafora, it is a pleasure to be listening to new work by this most bonny of modern sound manipulators. Like Flee Pasts Ape Elf (FTR 096), which we reissued in expanded form in 2013, Eel Asp Flays Feet (the title of which is an anagram of the earlier set) is an assemblage of immaculate invention. It manages to produce a unique splotch of confusing analog surrealism in an increasingly digital world, and Robert Carey (aka Orchid himsel…
Render
The sophomore album from Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, Render has been praised as encompassing "bounteous diversity and ingenuity" (Tiny Mix Tapes) and as "a veritable embarrassment of vocal riches" (Textura). Building on the group's widely acclaimed first album, which won the 2014 GRAMMY for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and included Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices, Render delights and surprises.
The album features compositions…
Blitzkrieg
One of Germany's longer lasting bands had first started as Blitzkrieg (until they found out a British band used the name as well) and changed their name to Wallenstein and kept their former name for the album, gracing it with a war-themed gatefold cover. Produced by the unavoidable Dieter Dierks and released on the ultra collectible Pilz label in early 72, this debut album is stunning effort that transformed the 200 MPH speed notion into music. Keyboardist Jurgen Dollasse's very international gr…
Når Man Ser Inn I En Annens Hjerte
Tip! Nærværet is a Scandinavian collaboration by Mattias Gustafsson (Altar of Flies) and Andreas Barsleth (Jordmenneske). If you are familiar with their individual works, you’ll know they operate on the same wavelength. On ’Når Man Ser Inn I En Annens Hjerte’, they’ve created something truly beautiful: serene landscapes of tangible presence. Comforting sounds, gathered from rural surroundings blend seamlessly with restrained, still instrumentation. These elements are manipulated with tapes and l…
How to Rescue Things
Restock due on February "Charlie Parker's first album with a string section landed in 1950, ten years after his debut recordings. Although the overtly lush arrangements of Charlie Parker with Strings were Parker's idea, the record must've been something of a relief to producer Norman Granz, especially when the sides went on to become Bird's best-seller, by a long shot. The record (and its follow-up) sparked something of a jazz-strings virus, infecting Nina Simone, Paul Desmond, Clifford Brown, a…
Henry House
CD housed in 6 panel digisleeve. 12 pages booklet and Obi. Henry House is a recurring dream song. Combining closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice, this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that ha…
Circles Of Song
For two hours, the public and passersby are invited to freely join the singing improvisations directed by three choir leaders: Liévine Hubert, Tom Mannaerts and Baptiste Vaes.In this moment of collective singing, people who do not know each other will share the same tune, creating spontaneous complicity through rehearsals. Circles of Songs is a performance by Raffaella Crispino, commissioned by BOZAR Center for Fine Arts Brussels, performed on the 21st of December 2022, as part of Rebirth/Third …
RING!
*Limited Edition 150 copies* Ring! is an artist album by Francesco Cavaliere and Dick El Demasiado created during A Week From Monday 2023, an artistic residency organized in Umbria by Viaindustriae Publishing and Holydays Festival. The residency involves a week-long research and production phase, in which the artists divide their time between Foligno's industrial zone and the mountain village of Scopoli with the intent of exploring possible points of contact between visual and sonic artistic lan…
Swing Low
Modern Obscure Music is proud to present Pierre Bastien & DJ Low's “Swing Low”, a work that fuses the poetic inventiveness of Pierre Bastien with the visionary legacy of the late DJ Low (Tom Deweerdt), a central figure in Belgian independent music and founder of the influential Lowlands label. This album, which interweaves memory and experimentation, represents Bastien's debut on the Barcelona label's catalog and a testament to the creative bond between the two artists. The album, composed of se…
Strobe Radio
Reissue of a 1985 cassette. Psychedelic delay abuse, ahead of its time.
John Cage memorial
Big tip! The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s. In 1992,…
Aesthesis
Tip! Thorn Wych is a musical instrument maker and musician based in the Lancashire town of Bacup, specialising in work made from tree branches. Particular to her interest are UK native trees; so far Wych Elm, Lime, Wild Cherry, Oak, and Yew. With these unique instruments, crafted in her backyard workshop, she creates music that evokes memories of an unknown world—out of sync with time and place and beyond the boundaries of the material realm.
Her pieces consist mainly of bowed string instrument…
Intermissions
Feldman and Tobias Hume (performed by Luciana Elizondo and Guy Vandromme).
Exhaustion / Proliferation
Exhaustion and Proliferation, two pieces created in 2024 by Cyril Bondi and d’incise for the Insub Meta Orchestra, with the help of Ed Williams for the chord choices. Both rely on their ownprinciples, within a reduced esthetic and a guided timeline. While Exhaustion offers to musiciansmultiples choices of paths and interactions, Proliferation plays with the echo; fragments of thepiece being recorded and played-back via smartphones. The IMO's music, developed throughyears of experiences, deals wi…
Dissolution Seedlings
The members of House on Fire met Ben Richter in 2019 while we were all attending CalArts,and as our ambitions as a group grew, we wanted to work with someone who would engagethe latent, unexplored possibilities of our instrumentation. The piece sprawls - musically,temporally, physically. Each movement reconfigures the group around a spare set ofinstruments, in each permutation pulling out new composite sounds. Wells plays cello and bassmelodica simultaneously, Andrew tunes a C# drone, Richard pl…
enclosures
enclosures addresses issues of space, place, reverberation and resonance across five pieces. Anexercise in scale, each piece is a portal: a biome, containing its own environment, weather, sense of time. Featuring juxtaposed convolution reverbs that transport an ensemble through real and imaginary spaces, beatings between Just Intonation and Equal Temperament, a triptych of environmental portraits, an exercise in the musicalized resonance of the harp’s pedal mechanism, and finally, an exploration…
green
green is an album of quiet music for solo piano — music in which the atmosphere isserene, intimate, and elegant, with maximal time for reflection. These works, all by livingcomposers, provide opportunities to slow down in our fast-paced world and focus withina distraction-free environment. Feel less hurried. Suspend time. Appreciate the worldfrom a different perspective.Pianist Ashlee Mack has given recitals in Germany, Italy, Czechia, and across theUnited States. Specializing in contemporary mu…
Music for Gallery
This special edition is added a CDR Music for Exhibition Space No.1 composed by Kuniharu Akiyama. Two descriptions High and Chic Fair and Oct. 26, 1963 were on envelope of original tape. But detail of the event is unknown.Several tapes that were discovered at Aki Takahashi's house and audio sources that have been put on hold until now are being released collectively. The time periods and contents of the sounds vary, and most of the detailed data are not known. Nevertheless, the contents are all …
L'Engoulevent
According to Wikipedia “Caprimulgidae are a family of birds consisting of around 95 extant species of nightjars." Digging a little deeper, we learn from Libération that "the word caprimulgidae comes from the Latin caprimulgus, literally meaning 'goat sucker.' In his famous Natural History, Buffon tells us that “peasants used to believe that the nightjar, a bird of twilight, entered barns at nightfall to suckle milk from livestock.” Originally, the nightjar was simply a bird, later transformed by…
Reflection
*180 gram Gatefold Vinyl* One of the most exciting bands of the British Blues Boom era, Steamhammer was powered up by guitarist Martin Pugh and vocalist Kieran White. After gaining a reputation for steaming ‘live’ performances they were signed to CBS and released this debut album in 1969.
It is packed with dynamic performances, including ‘Junior’s Wailing’ - a track released as a single that became a hit in Germany (and was also successfully covered by Status Quo). Also among the tracks on the L…