Silence Over Florence 1982-1984
In the beginning there was Tenax…rock club / black hole of youth in search of an identity…and not just musically speaking. In this pagan temple of torn army pants and calcified hair gel the Florentine new wave scene had just begun to take shape, and this box set maps the humble beginnings of that near-great metropolitan epic. 4 bands. 4 CDs. Collected in a clear plastic box with a 16-page booklet (in English) that tells the tragic tale…
Milano New Wave 1980-83
a representative and intense snapshot of the Milanese sinthy wave scene of the early eighties, 20 tracks that recount the salient steps of the brief but intense career of four Milanese bands — from the post-punk of Other Side, to the oblique funk of State Of Art, to the evident Kraftwerk infl uences of La Maison, to the electro of Jeunesse d’Ivoire — four bands that illustrate the mood of an underground scene tha…
Rebetika
Andy Moor (guitar) and Yannis Kyriakides (computer) lovingly deconstruct and reassemble their favourite rebetika music in a set of 9 pieces that encompass a wide scope of musical vision. This is an unusual and original take on the so called "blues" music of the Greek diaspora of the early 20th century. Originally recorded and released as an exclusive download for Seven Things, this live set recorded in Glasgow's CCA in 2006 is a re-release on CD with two additional tracks. Rebetika derives its n…
Miniaturen
“Miniaturen” or in English: “Miniatures” is Konrad Sprenger’s first solo album. The dictionary defines a miniature as “a representation or image of something on a small or reduced scale”. Sprenger worked for over two years to find a “grand form” in which to represent his myriad bagatelles; drawing from hundreds of finished and unfinished recordings recorded over the last ten years with a diverse palette of musicians, artists and friends.The result is an unlikely juxtaposition of 32 abbreviated s…
Saucers In The Sky
Rodney Keith Eskelin, aka Rodd Keith, aka Rod Rogers, would've certainly found the recognition during his lifetime that his talent demanded, if he hadn't chosen to work in the lowest depths of the music industry: the "send us your lyrics" field, known today as the song-poem genre. Saucers In The Sky gathers together twenty-six previously uncollected Rodd Keith gems from the hundreds upon hundreds of songs that he recorded before he leapt from a highway overpass in 1974. It would be inaccurate to…
Mining Our Bid'ness
A revelatory debut album by a 64 year old pianist/composer may beg the question: where has Carei Thomas been all this time? Born in a culturally diverse neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Thomas cut his musical teeth in Chicago during a particularly fertile period for that city: gigging with Sun Ra as an improvising vocalist in 1959-60, joining up with the AACM for one hot minute in 1966, co-founding a group called The L…
Gedanken Splitter
Paul Metzger continues to pile up the plaudits from critics and peers alike for his virtuosic string-slinging, gaining notice through his CD on Chairkickers and his split LP with Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano on Roaratorio. Metzger’s modified banjo is tricked out with additional sympathetic raga strings, although the compositions on Gedanken Splitter are informed by much more than Eastern drone music alone. Recorded in the same period as 2007’s Deliverance on Locust Music, this is a more jagged …
Gussie
On a hot Minneapolis night in the summer of 2001, the legendary avant/jazz group Curlew played a scorching gig at the now-defunct Gus Lucky's Gallery. Gussie documents that evening: the veteran improvising group dispensed with their compositions altogether and took an eminently successful walk along the free-improv tightrope. The ever-evolving lineup featured George Cartwright (saxophones), Davey Williams (guitar), Chris Parker (piano), Fred Chalenor (bass), and Bruce Golden (percussion). A limi…
Knife World
Formed in Minneapolis in 2004, Knife World have converted many unwary bystanders into true believers through their frenetic gigs in underground venues and the occasional club. The band worships at the Riff Temple, swapping pomposity for a mischievous intelligence. Guitarist Jon Nielsen plays as if part of some skewed arena-rock mashup, while drummer Josh Journey-Heinz avoids the obvious backbeats by carving out the spaces around them instead. Together they have a fuller sound than most groups wi…
Urban Disease
'Urban Disease' is the new radical work by Billy Bao, Mattin, Taku Unami, Tim Barnes, Barry Weisblat and Margarida Garcia. It's important to remember that before Mattin and anarchism ruined his life, Billy Bao was a bit of a troubadour who accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and warbled wild songs of protest in his native Nigerian patois. This new album, his third on vinyl, finds Billy in a transitional phase toward the end of 2006, before the gaztetxes of Bilbao burrowed into his marrow, bef…
I Love You, Please Love Me Too
With "I love you please love me too", Joseph Hammer continues his journey into playful yet heavily focused idiot-savant infinite psychedelic inertia. Utilising consumer audio technology and 20th century detritus, Hammer lovingly decodes his passion for mid century sci fi and AM radio station beyond all point of recognition like a snakecharmer. Multi-dimensional audio collage techniques to a free form and completely unorthodox plunderphonic hypnosis. Baked devotionals for tape loop minds. Joseph …
Zwolfzungen
For Zwolfzungen I collected recordings of eleven languages I'm not, or partially, able to speak and understand. Eleven languages I encountered in my travels, whose sound I especially liked. Moreover, I invented a twelfth one, developed and learned during the past years and featured as a last installment of the series. Zwolfzungen could be translated as twelve languages as well as twelve tongues. I try to "misunderstand" each one of those languages as much as I can. They include, among ot…
Autodreamographical
Despite being midway through his seventies, minimalist icon Terry Riley shows no signs of slowing down or satisfying his searching experimental appetite. On Autodreamographical Tales Riley embarks upon a musical dream diary, a project initiated in 1996. The resultant pieces play out chiefly as spoken-word passages given musical accompaniment, with Riley scoring his own strange REM meanderings via an array of MIDI instruments and piano pieces. At various points during the course of the album you …
Around The World In A Daze
DVD-Audio release, total Content: 110 min. NTSC format, All Region. "Leading new-music composer Phil Kline debuts a major work on this new surround sound DVD. Heard here for the first time, this 65-minute studio composition was commissioned by Starkland to premiere on this high-resolution surround-sound DVD. Daze is Kline's longest work and biggest commission to date. Daze is also likely the largest work so far commissioned for a high-resolution surround-sound recording. Performers include the u…
The New Nixon Tapes
"Since 2003, NYC's Talibam! have been charting a course through the improv waters in a way that few other groups can pull off. Rock, jazz, noise and all stops in between collide in an aggressive mix that defines free music in the best sense of the term: nothing is deemed out of bounds. Too much fun to be a po-faced postmodern exercise, and too expertly played to be sunk in a morass of good intentions, The New Nixon Tapes hurtles through two side-long pieces in an agile cascade of rhythmic and me…
4
This fourth Supersilent installment once again features the tantalising quartet lineup of Helge Sten (aka Deathprod), Ståle Storløkken (synthesizer), Arve Henriksen (trumpet), and Jarle Vespestad (drums). If you haven't encountered their work before, Supersilent 4 is a good place to start - a sumptuous arrangements of tracks often described as "Death Jazz", though the title is somewhat misleading. Deathprod's arrangements and production techniques loom large over these amazing pieces, coating th…
1-3
Debut triple CD by a Norwegian deathjazz improvising unit! The group features Helge Sten (audio virus), Ståle Storløkken (synthesizer), Arve Henriksen (trumpet), and Jarle Vespestad (drums)." Many hours of studio recordings, which have been trimmed down into this debut. "Difficult music, perhaps, but also playful and stunningly beautiful, always trying to stretch the limits." New packaging, now comes in an elaborate fold-out digipak.
Seven Easy Pieces
Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is the first performance artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. To coincide with "The Artist is Present," Microcinema has released Seven Easy Pieces, a document of Abramovic's week-long residence at the Guggenheim in 2005, in which the artist spent seven hours a day performing one of five landmark performance art pieces by other artists and two of her own.Performance art is by nature ephem…
A Dragonfly For Each Corpse
A Dragonfly For Each Corpse is a record that stands no daylight. A feverish nightmare of an album, dragging us into a brown paper bag —ferocious cannibal jungle ambience seeping through— till we're cast down some stairs into a cellar made out of spit. A twirling folkballad sung by a ghost made out of chewing gum turns into a symphony of typing fingers, ticking clocks and slamming car doors, like a noirish soundtrack to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, accompanied by squeaking …
Peeesseye + Talibam!
Talibam! (Kevin Shea on drums, Matt Mottel on keyboards) and Peeesseye (Jaime Fennelly on electronics, Chris Forsyth on guitars and Fritz Welch on drums) have been pals and Evolving Ear labelmates for a while now, so it was only a matter of time before they all got together and let it rip. And rip this certainly does, driven on by the double-barrelled percussion attack, underpinned by Fennelly's drones and scribbled all over by Mottel and Forsyth, whose wild gonzo soloing is a happy and healthy …