Ballads
"Ballads“ ist the first collaborative album by two key figures of the Norwegian noise, improv, experimental, whatever-you-call-it music scene. Anyone expecting a rackety wall of distorted feedback guitars and voices will be gently surprised though by the sparse and intimate sketches to be found on this wonderful record. Songs are stripped down to their raw bones using only the most essential elements to reveal the soul behind every single sound. Superfluous effects seem to be completely absent,…
Colors don’t clash
Finally, here it is! An album we’ve been waiting for since starting the label a few years ago and it was worth waiting every minute. While maintaining a busy release and tour schedule with Jazzkammer (now called Jazkamer, a duo with Lasse Marhaug) which recently included their new glorious metal album for Smalltown Supersound (aptly titled „Metal Music Machine“), the „Panic“ CD on the Bottrop-Boy label and concerts all over the world (including South America, South East Asia, Japan, etc.), his m…
Home, unspeakable
Home, Unspeakable is a collaboration between Duncan and Günter based on Samuel Beckett's last work, an opera libretto entitled Neither that he wrote on the back of a card for Morton Feldman. Although Günter and Duncan both claim Feldman as strong influences, this work sounds little like Feldman, but is instead a "series of musical 'places,' which in their entirety form the topography of a 'landscape' we feel might be described by the final words of Beckett's text: unspeakable home" (from the lin…
New York in the 1960s
These recordings are solo efforts on electronic organ - the awesome Vox Continental, guitar and viola as well as collaborations with saxophone player Terry Jennings, violinist Tony Conrad, Velvet Underground guitar player Sterling Morrison and the VU's original drummer Angus MacLise. Thanks to Tony Conrad, who was a co-member in La Monte Young's group The Dream Syndicate, these tapes are finally available to the public.
Empty words (parte III)
John Cage's empty words is something of an epic in reverse: a diminutive vocal exercise divided into four distinct parts that gradually breaks down the writings on sound from Henry David Thoreau's Journal into pure vocalise. Disarticulated, distended and utterly transformed, Cage's recitation utterly abandons all connection to linguistic meaning and becomes pure aesthetic glossolalia. The nearly three hour performance documents Cage reading from the third part of empty words at Teatro Lirico in …
Optic
Two of the most adventurous musicians around today, John Butcher and John Edwards have been working as a very compatible duo for some years now. This CD contains concert performances from Brussels and Barcelona. 59 minutes -- previously unissued.
Requests and antisongs
Saxophonist John Butcher and violinist Phil Durrant had been playing together on the English improv scene in various formations for 14 years when they decided to start a live electroacoustic project in 1997, a project not unlike Evan Parker's own unit at the same time. The Butcher/Durrant duo released a first CD, Secret Measures, on Wobbly Rail, recorded live at the beginning of the experiment. Requests and Antisongs is a studio performance taped in January and February 2000, over two years late…
13 friendly numbers
John Butcher appeared on six records, beginning with the 1984 LP 'Fonetiks, before he first released 'Thirteen Friendly Numbers' on his own Acta label in 1992. But the disc is still something of a debut; it is the first document of his peculiar language for solo saxophone, which he had fashioned by purging his vocabulary of the instrument's familiar sounds and jazz-associated gestures, and filling the space with carefully selected sounds located at the periphery of instrumental control. Butcher'…
Aperture
Bischoff qualifies his work as the realization of a reflective intention, where he determines sonic structure not only through the predetermined elements which go into a piece, but also through the active process of listening to the music as it happens and responding accordingly. Aperture opens the possibility for multiple readings through a series of diverse techniques ranging from additive synthesis to FM synthesis to sampled-based processes. Each of the pieces within the album was recorded in…
Viroulegu forsetar
'Virthulegu forsetar' contains one hour-long piece for 11 brass players, percussion, electronics, organs and piano. It's presented as an ordinary stereo CD and as a DVD-Audio with a high resolution 5.1 surround mix. The piece had its live debut in Hallgrimskirkja, a large church in Reykjavik and the city's towering edifice, and was named "the most memorable musical event of 2003" in Iceland's leading newspaper. The piece has Englabörn's quiet, elegiac beauty, but abandons the brevity of the firs…
Voice is the original instrument
Collection of Joan La Barbara early works and her first vocal compositions, originally released on LPs in the 1970s and early 1980s on her own Wizard Records. "One of my earliest pieces, "Hear What I Feel", was a self-exploratory, sensory-deprivation experimental work, designed to help me discover new sounds, delve into psychological aspects, as well as communicate with the audience on a pre-verbal level of awareness. After spending an hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut and not touching a…
Happy days
Back in stock. Released: 1997.Jim O'Rourke is a rarity: a genuine bridge between the avant-garde and the underground. From his production work (Smog, Wilco, Faust) to his own freewheeling excursions as a solo performer and member of outfits like Gastr del Sol and Sonic Youth, his work continues to bring the out there in here. Happy Days pits a lone guitar against a phalanx of hurdy-gurdies, a decided shift away from the composer's electronic-based work. A roiling hornet's next of activity that F…
What a wonderful world
Despite the title of the album and several of the selections, listeners who approach this disc expecting something in the vein of Louis Armstrong will likely be disappointed. Then again maybe not, if it's originality that's prized. Jérôme Noetinger and Erik M had, by the late '90s, established themselves as driving forces in contemporary electronic improvisation, performing and recording with virtually anyone of note in the field. For this album, they at least partially venture out into di…
Spaghetti’s club. La conclusion
Composition from Jean-Luc Therminarias with David Moss, Bénédicte Debilly, Eric Houzelot, Stéphane Pelliccia (voice), Florent Haladjian (percussion), Ali N Askin (sampler), Jean Lambert-Wild (text).
Spaghetti’s club
A composition from Jean-Luc Therminarias with David Moss (voice), Eric Houzelot (voice), Florent Haladjian (home made spring instrument), Ali N Askin (sampler, synthesizeur), Jean Lambert-Wild (text).
Drumlike
Music composed by Jean-Luc Therminarias and performed by Quatuor Hêlios, Ali N. Askin and Eric Houzelot, with a text from Jean Lambert-Wild.
Soundmatters
'Soundmatters is the first major compendium of the recordings from French-Canadian sound artist Jean-Francois Laporte, including his highly acclaimed composition Mantra. In balancing formal precision and intuitive expressionism, Soundmatters results in a series of visceral compositions that build upon the traditions of minimalism, graphical composition, and phonography. Laporte reveals his colossal talents for experiential composition through deftly processed recordings of tumultuous windstorms …