Experimental / All styles

Stephan Micus's first album with the Armenian duduk, an eight-part suite for duduk, kalimba, shakuhachi, dondon, sattar, guitars and voice, all played by Micus. Recorded 1999-2001 at MCM Studios, released by ECM in 2002.

Fifteenth solo album by Stephan Micus, who plays every instrument and sings every voice, among them doussn' gouni, kalimba, dondon, sarangi, dilruba, sattar, nay and shakuhachi. Recorded 1997-2000 at MCM Studios, Mallorca; released by ECM in 2001. CD edition.

1992 release ** "Bruit TTV : Gilles Arteau, Georges Azzaria, France Deslauriers, Robert Faguy, Fabrice Montal, Louis Ouellet, Jocelyn Robert. Bruit TTV is an experimental music group made up of artists associated with Obscure. From various disciplines, they are regrouped in several cells of performers/instrumentalists which can vary, according to the pieces, from 3 to 13 people. At the junction between music/non-music, sound/noise organization, Bruit TTV performance mix voice, actions and sound …

1: Recorded live at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. Overdubbed at C/Psi/P, Lower Hutt. 2, 3: Postal exchange recorded in Lyttleton and Lower Hutt. 4: Live collaboration recorded at Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. 5: Postal exchange recorded live in Christchurch and overdubbed in Lower Hutt. 6: Postal exchange recorded in Lyttleton and Lower Hutt, additional tracks recorded live in High Street, Christchurch.

The first DVD of the new collection “Evidence Video” : Four experimental films realised by bruce licher (guitarist for the legendary bands Savage Republic and Scenic) and a panorama about his letterpress graphic work. An exceptional collector item ! DVD-R zone 0 - NTSC (can be read also in Europe on most PAL systems). Limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies. Released to coincide with an exhibit of the artist's graphic design and letterpress printing work in Paris. Also includes a 6-color com…

Brast Burn was a legendarily obscure Japanese ensemble that existed in the first half (I presume) of the 1970s. For many years, they were known only as an entry in the notorious Nurse With Wound list, with no way for anyone to check them out. Thus this CD. First off, I'll say that it sounds really good. One would never guess that it was a transfer from vinyl. Brast Burn has been cited/promoted at various times as the "Japanese Faust". I feel that this is incorrect. A better analogy would be to t…

Stephan Micus's fourteenth album, built on two West African harps, the bolombatto and the sinding, with voices, steel drums, suling, shakuhachi, nay and tin whistle, all played by Micus. Recorded 1995-1996 at MCM Studios, released by ECM in 1997.

Stephan Micus's cycle of three days and three nights inspired by a stay on Mount Athos, with zither, sattar, shakuhachi, suling, ney, flowerpots and his own multi-tracked voice, recorded at MCM Studios between November 1993 and February 1994.

Coelacanth (june 1992) was a collaboration between Borbetomagus and The Shaking Ray Levis (Dennis Palmer and Bob Stagner).

One of the heaviest live documents of the original Borbetomagus big-band - Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich on saxophones, Donald Miller on guitar and Brian Doherty on live electronics - live at In-Roads, New York, 27th November 1982. This one was originally released on cassette in two different versions, copies of which somehow made it to Japan where it took on the role of some kind of free-noise Rosetta Stone, planting seeds in the helmets of a whole bunch of punks. But nothing beats the glorious p…

Reissue of classic and long hard to find Purge/Sound League album from 1987 by Borbetomagus. Quartet session with the power-bass addition of Adam Nodelman. 1993 CD release “Seven Reasons for Tears beautifully documents the most simultaneously fierce and accessible periods of the band’s history. Converts and heathens can both bathe luxuriously in the radioactive improv-beauty-stream that lights up a room when the record is played at ‘special’ volume. Tears is the living spirit of Borbetomagus’ nu…

Bratra shows some well build rhythmical tracks, as the debut release of Boca Raton. Completely constructed of manipulated or synthesized (contact) mic-recordings, bratra moves on the edges of lo-fi sound and noises in an almost hypnotizing way. These tracks bring a certain sedated feeling which usually appears with the use of drones, isn't it that these tracks are hardly to be labeled droney. There's several layers and elements moving in and out of place, and also in and out of sound so to say, …

With John Zorn (alto sax) and Fred Frith (guitar). Ostertag liner notes, 1990: "This recording is the direct precursor to Say No More. Here I also began with solo recordings, one by John Zorn and the other by Fred Frith. But instead of performing improvisations they merely recorded an "inventory" of the sounds they make. The cd is divided into halves. Slam Dunk is a series of 26 extremely short solos which I performed using only the sounds of John's sax. In Sleepless I use Fred's source material…

Nate Wooley: trumpet, voice. Steve Swell: trombone, voice. Tatsuya Nakatani: percussion._________ is an apparition. marks the first release for the New York based blue collar featuring Nate Wooley on trumpet, Steve Swell on trombone, and Tatsuya Nakatani on percussion. The group, informed equally by the free jazz tradition of the 60s in America and Europe and the lowercase reductionist innovations now revolutionizing improvised music, has found a way to deal with silence, sound, tension, and rel…

Heiner Goebbels' setting of a monologue from Heiner Müller's play Der Auftrag, with Arto Lindsay, Don Cherry, Fred Frith, George Lewis and actor Ernst Stötzner, recorded in March 1988 in New York and Berlin and released by ECM in 1988.

In scandinavia, it's not uncommon to hear of someone's mother, grandfather, uncle, or plumber who drank him-or-herself to death at an early age; and the swedish drone artist bj nilsen has felt the alcoholic pangs which may foreshadow his own demise. in recent years, nilsen has turned to his icelandic neighbors Sigtryggur Berg sigmarsson and Helgi Thorsson (collectively known as stilluppsteypa) in existential sympathy over the problems of their collective lust for alcohol. drykkjuvisur ohljodanna…

Brennivin is an Icelandic liquor vulcanized from the humble potato and flavored with cumin, although you’d be hard pressed to taste much beyond the astringent burn that it leaves in your mouth. Bottled in matte black glass and stamped with ominously simple labels, brennivin appears less like something to imbibe and more like poison; and in that creeping slow death kind of way, it is. For the Icelandic electro-absurdist outfit Stilluppsteypa, brennivin has soaked into every fiber of their being; …

Benny Nilsen writes: 'Fade To White contains material from the making of 3 pieces which were created within a different season and then edited, re-arranged and re-mixed in the summer of 2004. 6 pieces contain outdoor field recordings from travels in mainly central Europe in 2003 [Gdansk-Poland, Narva-Estonia, Sarajevo-Serbia Herzegovina, Arad-Romania, Trieste-Italy], and static indoor recordings from 2004 Stockholm-Sweden, Brussels-Belgium, Amsterdam-Netherlands, Vienna-Austria, Geneva-Switzerla…

New York is pretty different from Lower Hutt. In a lot of ways. But that doesn't mean New York is BAD... its just 'different', y'know? I was down the Lower East Side recently with the guy from Sonic Youth. He was as cool as he looked in Rip It Up magazine! We tuned our guitars and bagpipes, the lights sunk in anticipation, and we buried the audience in a cloud of fairy-dust so thick you could eat it with chopsticks and people with shovels tried to dig their way out of it but it just got deeper …

This collection of three pieces is dedicated to artists and musicians whom Bernhard Günter admires. The collection's title translates to "Enlarged Details," an apt description of Günter's approach to composition. Musically all of them involve a limited vocabulary of sounds interacting with silence. "Four Grey Paintings" uses low rumbles hovering at the very edge of audibility, interrupted with high-pitched tones and metallic twangs. Dedicated to Jim O'Rourke (an early champion of Günter's music)…