A New York Minute
"Alan Licht wears many hats. Over the years, he's been a curator of music as well as a tireless performer. And he's as well-known an author as he is a musician. It's one thing to have eclectic tastes; it's another to make a practice of them. While Licht's earlier records have seamlessly melded his improvisational guitar playing with extended plundered sounds, A New York Minute takes things a few steps further. Instead of fusing the many sides of Licht into one monolithic mega-mix, this disc sepa…
Live
Nine tracks, including covers of a Spiders tune, The Ronettes' "Be My Baby", etc. Most staggering of all is the cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction", which neatly transforms Jagger's baby-in-a-Perspex-box mixture of rage and boredom into truly on-the-edge jumpy paranoia.
Aizier. St-Martin-sur-Mer. Dieppe
Featuring Eric La Casa (processing, contact microphone recording), Eric Cordier (long string recording devices, mixing), and Jean Luc Guionnet (condenser & contact microphone recordings, filtering, processing, mixing). Afflux employs an on-site electroacoustic device in order to work out a set of live interactions with the site. The device connects the three improvisers to the place at the same time. This set of connections creates an infinite interplay of interactions and possibilities. The dev…
Music and Words
As a member of British experimental group Morphogenesis Adam Bohman was no stranger to wayward sound experiments when recording this solo CD. Favoring acoustic sounds over electronic he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments. The standout on this Paradigm CD is a cassette piece which the artist made of candid recordings of mundane experiences and conversations, using the stop-start technique to construct a collage of text and environmental sound.…
Orla
A.M is Antony Milton, once again stripping back to just his initials for a noise/sound based record. The concept for this album is a pretty simple one, Milton received an Orla chord organ (an instrument that pretty much begs to be used for drones) as a present from a friend and decided to use it as the primary source material for this album. You might be tempted to think Antony has gone and sabotaged himself by chaining himself to such an instrument for an entire album but, through some skilful …
Å
Å (which is the first and the last letter of some Scandinavian alphabet) is a young trio of musicians on violin, exotic percussions, theremin, guitar, synth and piano, who have created a remarkably original world of sound. Although one can hear occasional influences from kraut rock style and the early minimalism, this sound is uniquely Italian in its sense of sound, space and time. An imaginative, meditative, bizarre, courageous and nostalgic music consisting in spontaneous compositions and impr…
Take Your Time
2003 release. A CD of works for solo piano from "Blue" Gene Tyranny.
Thirty-five of the 36 songs in this "audio storyboard" are individually
built around an atmospheric primary chord, counter-rhythms, and a body
of notes which creates a potential melody that unfolds bit by bit. The Driver's Son
is scored for a narrator, a chorus of five people creating fifteen
voices, an electronically modified orchestra of folk and concert
instruments and parts for a lighting designer and a live video ani…
L'Ombra di Mezzogiorno
An extended voice album by Enomìsossab (or, vice versa, Simone Basso) suspended between rock and experimentation, between popular culture and avant-garde roots, to testify of a complex artistic personality and of a “physical” and “emotional” attitude, absolutely uncommon. Overtone chant, guttural sounds, linguistic deformations, the “calembour” and the vocal contortions.Sometimes few notes or a little melody are enough to fell in love with an artist. Sometimes you need to search, to go deep in t…
Azioni
** very last copies ** Il Gruppo was a brilliant and prolific composer's collective exploring extended techniques and new sound sources through the medium of improvisation. Although very much a product of its time, their music remains timeless. They were instrumental in founding a radical tradition of western musical improvisation that owed little or nothing to anybody and created some of the strangest music ever made. They were utterly unique. (from John Zorn liner notes, NYC 2006)
This delu…
I Luoghi del Potere
Art Fleury's “I luoghi del Potere” is another gem that we excavated from the past, which makes us wonder once again on how intense and creative the Italian avant scene of the seventies was, and how much we have forgotten about it. This is timeless music that redefines the borders of our experience and perception, and urges us to reconsider the impact of an Idea, when it functions as the soul and the engine of an artistic work. ... while i can certainly hear nods towards Henry Cow (with whom they…
Xenakis (A)live!
ASPHODELZEITKRATZER - Reinhold FRIEDL, "Xenakis (A)live!""Equal parts composer, performer and curator, Berlin's Reinhold Friedl is a veritable renaissance man. In conjunction with his highly regarded orchestra Zeitkratzer ("Time scratcher" in German) as well as in collaboration with such artists as Lou Reed, Lee Renaldo and Merzbow, Friedl has helped set new standards for Europe's new music scene, crossing every conceivable line that separates chamber from computer music, and piano from st…
multiple Otomo
"On Monochrome Otomo presents 18 pieces that illustrate the entire range of his solo work from pieces constructed entirely of feedback, static and randomly generated radio noise, to sine wave experiments that bring to mind the humming of the solar wind as it wafts through intergalactic space. There are also rhythmic bursts of feedback and percussion that are almost danceable and subtle Zen like meditations full of slow sustained notes that fill the air with otherworldly overtones. The Mult…
divide by zero
+ Zbigniew KARKOWSKIReleased : September 2007. Co-release together with a carrier (San Francisco). Antimatter (Xopher Davidson) from San Francisco and Zbigniew Karkowski from Tokyo have joined their forces once again to present a third part in a trilogy that started in 2002 with their release "function generator" on sirr and "KHz" on auscultare-ground fault 2 years later. Now they show "Divide by Zero" on Antifrost with collaboration of a carrier The thick - more analogue than digital -…
Watch me getting back the end
Christa Pfangen are Andrea Belfi and Mattia Coletti. The name is an homage to Nico, although the music has obviously no relation with the icon of the New York avant garde scene. They belong to the new electroacoustic/improv/avant-rock scene which is taking shape in Italy and includes such names as 3/4 Had Been Eliminated, Valerio Tricoli, Å, Stefano Pilia and others. Working with percussion, treated guitar and an array of different objects and noises, they have given birth to a dynamic wo…
A year of the aural gauge operation
3/4's new album, A Year Of The Aural Gauge Operation, was recorded in their own studio in Bologna along 2004. It features nine songs composed after live improvisations, all of them quite different in genre, but again 3/4's aim is to create a psychedelic musical flow, one in which new elements and different styles can be superimposed to enrich and develop the peculiar narrative of the album. We generally think of it as a opera.
"A collection of off-centre songs verging on…