The Lowest Form Of Music
Long out of print huge box, The Los Angeles Free Music Society was a complete screwball fringe music collective that peaked in the true heart of darkness -- America in the mid 70s. They self-released LPs, 7"s and cassettes in the dawn before real independent distribution and the myth that surrounds those sacred pressings has in recent years become feverish. Mixing pure sonic weirdness, musique concrete, free improv blare, fringe-noise-nonsense and much more, the musicians involved with LAFMS cre…
Structural films
Rare selection of Kren films, spanning works from 1957 to 1979. Kurt Krens achievements with regard to the montage of short cuts in his early works was many years ahead of the rest of the (film)world, in both form and content. Kurt Kren was a pioneere: an avantgardist in the classic and best sense of the word. A filmmaker who knows how to think in images like few others in this trade, and who realized these images in films that are among the 'most beautiful' and 'most important' in cinematic his…
Action films
Though undoubtedly a collection of avant-garde works, it’s tempting to view Kurt Kren’s “action films” as documentaries. A series of collaborations made between 1964 and 1967, these ten assembled shorts find the Austrian director working primarily with the performance artists Günter Brus and Otto Mühl. Each piece serves as a recording of their actions – funny, confrontational, shocking examples of body art that should be vaguely familiar to most – yet addresses them in Kren’s own distinct manner…
Document 1 - 1999/2003
3 years of live electronic improvisation from the Kraakgeluiden series of improvised music performances in Amsterdam. Appearing on the CD are over 30 musicians including Jaap Blonk, Cor Fuhler, Gert-Jan Prins, Anne La Berge + Marko Ciciliani.
Number one
American performance/noise/percussion artist Z'ev, Japanese composer/performer K.K. Null, and field-recording artist Chris Watson (formerly of Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio) conjoin in a first collaboration for Touch. The idea for this recording, generated by Z'ev, has three elements: 1) to use the structure of the Noh Theatre cycle as the basis for the composition; 2) to consider the initial sound development in terms of developing "characters" which would then interact with one another …
Fertile
Fertile is KK NULL's first album for touch, following his collaboration with Chris Watson and Z'ev [Number One - Tone 24, 2005], which boomkat called 'moving and atmospheric', and The Wire wrote 'a complex dramatic work from a strict economy of means'. KK NULL (real name Kazuyuki Kishino) was born in Tokyo, Japan. Composer, guitarist, singer, mastermind of Zeni Geva and electronic wizard. One of the top names in Japanese noise music and in a wider context, one of the great cult artists in experi…
Yokosawa-iri
A former member of Merzbow, Mizutani has been creating his solo work since 1989, delving into areas of electronic noise, structural sound systems of feedback and instrumentation as well as natural compositional arrangements of field recordings. Yokosawa-iri falls into the latter category. All field recordings were made at this Satoyama<pi>, a traditional form of agricultural environment consisting of a mountain, a rice field and a small village where people and nature coexist in harmony. With be…
Gauntlet
Kevin drumm (guitar and noise) and Daniel Menche (organ and noise) recorded Fall of 2006 in Chicago at Uggae's Porta-toilet studio. Mixed and mastered at Stereophonic Mastering in Portland, Oregon. One organ, one guitar, several fuzz boxes and two highly regarded purveyors of american extreme sonics are the savuory ingredients that created Gauntlet. Building on Menche's aural low end physicality and drumm's exacting attention to high frequency detail - the aptly titled 'Gauntlet' is sizzling, sc…
Particles and smears
Grainy flickering, strangulated buzzing, blurred sonic shadows and harsh stridulations. Chicagoan Drumm continues to rethink the electric guitar in terms that suggest the microscopic life of ponds, and he deploys electronics along similar lines. Canadian turntablist Tètreault scatters clicks and blips as he skates the meniscus. Tiny events, inconsequential in themselves, taken together form a viable acoustic ecosystem. (The Wire, Julian Cowley)3
Comedy
Original 1st editon, Comedy is Drumm’s third album, recorded over two years ago. It floated around in a provisional version, entitled Organ, for quite a while and caused a genuine bidding war between labels, at least five of them, which caused our Kevin to retreat in his special endearing way, and ultimately decide not to do anything at all with it. During this hibernation, Organ underwent some changes, being dissected and bisected and now including three electronically generated magnifications,…
Land of lurches
Land Of Lurches is the new release from Chicago’s Kevin Drumm. Two sidelong tracks of diarrheic hailstorms. Land Of Lurches is maximalist diarrhea created in the spirit of true Heavy Metal. That is... it’s ugly, loud, disturbing, courageous, triumphant, and totally fucking POWERFUL! What starts out as a thick relaxing drone quickly turns into a brutal and bloody animal fight. This is the sound of a seal ripping apart a human body while a crowd of 90,000 cheer it on. Kevin is a modern day barbari…
Beauvais cathedral
The long-awaited reissue of KENT CARTER's highly-acclaimed first solo album. As well as some solo cello and double bass improvisations, there are some collages in which he plays nearly all the parts himself courtesy of over-dubbing techniques. Carter had previously been heard with the groups of Paul Bley and Steve Lacy (among others), but such work did not prepare one for the unique music heard in this collection. Three previously unissued items (including a one-man string quartet) have been add…
Rabbit Run
Keith Rowe: tabletop guitar, electronics Thomas Lehn: analogue synthesizer Marcus Schmickler: digital synthesizer, computer
Honey Pie
Live recording, Musique Action Festival, Vandoeuvre-Les-Nancy, France, May 26, 2001. Thanks to Dominique Répécaud and Nicolas Franer. C+P GROB 2004 Packaged in a six-panel Digipak.
Duos for Doris
This word - improvisation - no longer seems adequate to describe the forms that emerge from playing without a score or pre-determined structure. These categories are invidious anyway, but improvised music history, or that part has its roots in communality and spontaneity, raises certain expectations in the listener that may have become anachronistic or simply naive. Take Duos For Doris, dedicated to Tilbury's mother, who died two days before this recording was made. A double CD containing three …
Dial: log-rhythm
Two concerts of experimental improvisation from Eddie Prevost and Christian Wolff, two giants of conceptual improvisation and composition, recorded at Ikletick in London in 2015 and at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2016; with superb pacing and brilliant execution, these dialogs between keyboard and percussive instruments explore unique sound worlds with depth, inquisitiveness, and a sense of wonder.
"The set documents two concerts - 1, recorded at Iklectik in London in Septembe…
Live at the LU
Recorded in May of 2002, almost a year after Fennesz' surprisingly successful (commercially) release, Endless Summer, one might have expected that this pairing would produce an intriguing collision of opposing forces. On the one hand you have all the pop-influenced, steamily melodic and erotic explorations that Fennesz had developed in the prior years. Countering that, one could readily imagine Keith Rowe as saboteur, finding rifts in the smooth mass to deviously penetrate and deflate. This does…
s/t
ErstLive is a new series of releases from Erstwhile Records, documenting notable live sets associated with the label. The discs are designed to simulate a concert experience, each in the same template design using two colors chosen by the musicians involved, with a photo of the concert on the back cover. Each will be in an edition of 800 CDs and not reprinted. The initial releases will be chosen from the AMPLIFY 2004 festival which took place in Cologne and Berlin in May 2004. ErstLive …
s/t
ErstLive 005 is from the quartet of Keith Rowe, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Otomo Yoshihide, the centerpiece show of AMPLIFY 2004: addition, the "four hour quartet". ErstLive 005 contains three individually packaged slimline CDs in a slipcase with original artwork by Keith Rowe, which wraps around the entire box, front, side, and back, as well as liner notes from all four musicians and numerous pictures from Yuko Zama. ErstLive 005 documents only the second performance of this quartet, a…
The room
"This was one of the first occasions on which I worked with Keith Rowe, who bore more or less the same relation to the electric guitar as David Tudor did to the piano (I put that in the past tense because by no stretch of the imagination could you now call them guitarist or pianist respectively)."-Cornelius Cardew, 1966 More than forty years later, Keith Rowe is still adding to his remarkable legacy of sound and color. This latest release, The Room, marks the third full-length solo recording of …