Untitled
2024 stock. Christian Kesten - Untitled (solo for accordion). (Written for Jonas Kocher and premiered in Paris in April 2014). "The accordion contains some remarkable mechanical characteristics. In the highest register of the right hand, the last few buttons don’t play the expected tones. The pitches are simply too high. The necessary reeds would be too small and fragile to produce them. These buttons transpose the tones an octave down. The buttons in the neighbouring octave do play the expected…
Jinxed By Being
What might appear to be the most unlikely collaboration of 2024 proves also to be one of the most invigorating listens of the year! Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance are in full aural/metaphysical alignment in their mutual effort to become Jinxed by Being. On first listen, it becomes immediately clear that this fusion of Shackleton's bass-heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs' ritual folksong makes total sense. Longtime listeners know that both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been u…
The Peel Sessions
Unearthed from the neolithic tar that eventually swathes all history, Aerial M’s early-98 Peel Session is once again among us
Mapura Music
Māpura Music is a collaborative and spontaneous music making program for people living with disabilities set in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Its facilitator, Stefan Neville (of Pumice etc.), has been active in the New Zealand underground for over thirty years, personifying an Aotearoa DIY sensibility that effortlessly links melodic song formats with open-ended experimentation. On surface level, this collection of improvised group jams verges towards the latter, but soon structures of a playfully…
The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now
The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now, a ritualistic and expanding collaborative album between Holy Tongue and Shackleton, will be released by AD 93 on the 23rd August 2024. Holy Tongue are a trio composed of Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai. Accomplished musicians in their own right, they combined to create psychedelic, free-form, high energy, spiritual dub-dance music across a trilogy of critically acclaimed EPs and their debut album Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare. Their high ener…
s/t
The power of duality is an inscrutable thing: we’re endlessly fascinated by the interplay between light and darkness, East and West, voice and silence, our senses tingling from the compelling synergies that thrive in perceived opposites. Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Younes Zarhoni, embraces these very dualities in all of his projects, exploring those murky areas of contrast and bringing all their ambiguous…
The Book of Pig
The Franco-Czech duo Kesherul Neg Pineg casts a spell on ritual reductionism, offering unsettling, even gloomy, psychedelic grooves. Frenzied attacks, atmospheric soundscapes, the music remains unpredictable but full of abundant energy and unexpected turns. The two musicians bewilder the senses, creating illusions and deceptions, diverting their instruments, extended trumpet, dizzying analog synthesis, prepared percussion… These two activists of improvised and experimental music met in Prague in…
Psychedelic Jelly
Toc loves encounters and saxophonists. Alongside saxophonist Paulina Owczarek, the trio crafts a music composed of desynchronized layers, a mille-feuille of raw energy where rhythms are both suggested and suggestive. By exploring autonomous temporalities, the musicians naturally converge, with the saxophone finding its place seamlessly within Toc’s improvised kraut maelstrom, where one might even glimpse a few psychedelic jellyfish, a flapjack octopus, or a harp sponge. Regularly crossing paths …
Modfase
Crumbling tape loops, broken glass sounds, micro-cassette feedback and songs for piano, voice and guitar sit side by side on this uniquely tender release by Danish artist Franciska. Submitted to the label on a cassette sent via mail with typewritten credits, 'Modfase' is masterfully restrained, constructed with a care and gentleness that's hard to find in today's "ambient" and "experimental" music circles. Each side contains multiple pieces which quickly shift between musique concrete, tape musi…
Varder 1
Big Tip! Varder is a new LP-series dedicated to unearthing early Norwegian electronic music. When this new form of music began to spread in the 1950s, it required large studios with expensive equipment, and the outcome was often considered not commercial enough for record labels to venture into. But despite the meagre means, Norwegian composers threw themselves into new sonic adventures such as electroacoustics, musique concrète and computer music, travelling to studios in Norway, Sweden, Poland…
The Kitchen Counter Experiments & Other Electronic Works 1959-1984
Big Tip! For over sixty years Maj Sønstevold (1917-1996) and Gunnar Sønstevold (1912-1991) were a driving force in the Norwegian music scene. The couple became famous for their sonic adventures into genres such as jazz, contemporary and screen music, writing some of the most well-known soundtracks and theme songs of their times. This 2LP focuses on the electronic experiments conducted by the two composers – ranging from drone music, electroacoustics, minimalism and improvised electronics – firml…
Potapanje Brodova
The Croatian experimental virtuoso releases an album of reworks from a rusting usb stick residing at Rijeka's museum of modern art.
Hexa
Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera has re-emerged with Hexa, their sixth release and third for the Touch label. Steven Hess recorded sessions in the group's practice space, handing them over to Vallera, who in turn added his home recordings, mixing and manipulating them. The final product provides only the barest of hints to any instrumental points of origin, such is the extent of their intermixture.
The Palace II
*32 copies limited edition* When I was a teenager living in the desert, my brother and I and a couple close friends had a secret smoke spot behind some bushes in the sandy flats near the wash. The perfect spot because as long as no one saw us going in, once we were inside, the thick brush kept us hidden. We slowly made upgrades, like dragging a van bench seat we found or other makeshift furniture or decor, such as a “flooded” street sign. This kind of place is what I think of when I picture "The…
Normal Sounds
It’s not difficult to find beauty in the sounds of nature – ocean waves, birdsong, rainfall – but it's easy to overlook the charm and wonder of everyday anthropogenic sounds. Equal parts reverent and playful, Normal Sounds is built around field recordings of human-made, non-musical sounds: fridge drones, grocery store beeps, car horns. Lia Kohl alternately hallows and mimics them, offering them to the listener in a new light. Using a textural cloud of cello and synthesizers, with a few notable c…
Held There, Beside The Signified
This is the second edition of the Idle Chatter curated series. "Held There, Beside The Signified" was curated and designed by Drekka (aka Michael Anderson). It features new music by the Drekka, Pillars and Tongues and Skrei. This triple cassette set comes packaged in a white plastic three-cassette album. Working under the name DREKKA since 1996, Mkl Anderson has released large body of work on his own BLUESANCT label and many other labels internationally, including a series of three full-length L…
Community Garden
This Da Vinci Classics album stems from a friendship and a cooperation. Its protagonists are two musicians, Walter Prati and Alvin Curran, each contributing his own experience, musical principles, creativity and openness to artistic encounters. Walter Prati’s musical background is as unusual as it is fascinating. He describes it as a “mix of non-academic provenances and academic experiences”. His first approaches to music performance date back to his early teens, when he began playing the bass i…
St Ann's
Glass mastered CD in a gatefold card sleeve, with a separate inner slipcase. Clay Pipe is pleased to welcome back the Tinderstick’s keyboard player David Boulter to the label. Since his Yarmouth LP in 2020, and the spoken word-based Lovers Walk the following year, Boulter has concentrated on his soundtrack work. He has produced scores for documentary maker Volkan Üce’s Displaced – and Tinnitus, a visually striking film by Brazilian director Gregorio Graziosi. He has also released a series of lat…
Arise (A Cold Spring Sampler)
A massive double CD featuring 33 tracks from our current releases. An unrivalled collection of Industrial, Esoteric, Dark Ambient, Noise, Ritual, Drone, Doom, Experimental, Electronica, and Dark Soundtracks. Unearth the world of Cold Spring! Ltd x 4000 copies in a gatefold ecopak.
Visions Of Darkness (In Iranian Contemporary Music)
A gathering of majestic, heavy, dark ambient, ritual, drone and noise music from Iran. Highly original and monolithic, with stunning production, Visions Of Darkness stands shoulder to shoulder with the giants of the Dark Ambient scene. In a country where youth culture has been heavily restricted for so long, it’s significant when a cultural form such as this has an opportunity to reach a wider audience – aided by the abstract nature of dark ambient, drone and noise. In comparison, the dance musi…