Interzone
Nichola Scutton'Interzone (Nonclassical, 2023) takes inspiration in the state of in-betweenness: not awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, and at the border between daytime and nighttime. Two defined elements emerge fromInterzone: a careful use of electronics, and Scrutton's experimental vocal practice. The album was recorded in two steps, first by the artist herself in her studio in Glasgow, using field recordings and archival materials, resulting in the series of four Interzones which con…
Brot und Ro-sen
*300 copies limited edition* Anna Schimkat's "Brot und Ro-sen" (Bread and Ro-ses) explores the connection between music, collective memory, and women's struggle for recognition through interviews with women from East and West Germany. The piece includes a score of sound and text fragments based on the interviewees' memories, which was first performed as a sound installation at the ODP Gallery in Leipzig, Germany. It was later performed live by young women at the Gallery for Contemporary Art Leip…
Mädchen In Schmutzigen Schürzen
*300 copies limited edition* After 10 years in the making 2021 saw the screen premiere of Kärma Burg's feature-film documentary "Die Experimente des Naum Kotik" (The Experiments of Naum Kotik), delving into the experiments in psycho-physical energy by Russian neurologist Naum Kotik (1876-1920) in the early 20th century. These were adop ted by his grandson Naum Kotik Jr. using his grand father's fundamental research to expand, not to say to revolutionize the possibilities of film making. Kärma Bu…
Tether
Murmer is the long-standing project of American/Estonian field recordist and composer Patrick McGinley, and with Tether, The Helen Scarsdale Agency welcomes Murmer back to our roster, over a decade since he graced us with his last production for the Agency. His field recordings often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Such sounds emerge from a condition as being fleeting, inconsequential, or ephemeral and explode into that whi…
A Constellation of Anomaly
Following his Acoustic Masks, the new record Constellation of Anomaly is Vasco Trilla's 6th solo album, bringing a new palette of sounds with a vast array of percussion instruments played in numerous creative and unconventional ways. Russian Flat bells bowed and played with vibrating objects, a timpani full of wind-up music boxes and spiced up by a transducer speaker, an old zither hit as a drum with two snare drums as resonators, Iranian round bells mixed with gamelan strips, styrofoam and tria…
String Dialogues
String Dialogues is a collection of six duo recordings initiated by the renowned musician, composer, and improviser Peter Soderberg. Here, he investigates different tuning systems and the idea of hybrid instruments. Within various instrumental settings and informed by his musical co-partners and fellow improvisors Katt Hernandez, Stina Hellberg Agback, Mats Persson, Sten Sandell, My Hellgren and Vilhelm Bromander, he has sculpted an album highlighting complex timbres and intimate interplay.The a…
Detour Tunnels of Light
"In my experience listening to the music of both Martin Küchen and Sophie Agnel, I’ve often detected what I perceive to be a (sometimes hidden) strain of romanticism, a deep and dark vaguely lyrical content that one doesn’t routinely identify with free improvisers. With Küchen, this could be heard most prominently in his solo recordings such as ‘The Lie and the Orphanage’ (Mathka, 2010) or ‘Hellstorm’ (Mathka, 2012). I had also heard Agnel give a memorable solo piano recital in Västerås, Sweden …
Black Flamingo
Incomparable bluesman Mike Cooper marks over 50 years of deadly cool and restless experimentation with a masterful melange of free jazz, Oceanic, and Hawaiian inspirations in his umpteenth hallucinatory collage
Neural
Intense, mind-bending, and spectral long-form drone works inspired by the way neural networks self-organise thru repetition, variation and reiteration. Features input of Lucio Capece and Judith Hamman.
Hands That Bind (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for Hands That Bind, by Jim O'Rourke
Issue 9
The 9th issue of Lasse Marhaug's fanzine Personal Best. 100 pages, full colour offset-printed with glued spine. Nearly three years on from the last issue, Marhaug conducts in-depth interviews with: Christian Blandhoel, Martìn Escalante, Russell Haswell, Campbell Kneale, Tine Surel Lange, Greg Pope, Joe Potts (and Los Angeles Free Music Society), Mariam Rezaei and Edward Sol.
Reshape
The cover of Joachim Spieth’s latest album, Reshape, depicts a stony landscape against a moody sky at dusk, silver clouds backlit with soft orange light. His 2021 album Ousia featured a similar sun, only foregrounded by waves. It’s as if some lost, drowned continent rose from the murky depths, dotted with strange fossils and petroglyphs. That contrast is an apt analogy for Reshape — an album of remixes and reworkings from some of the biggest names in ambient, techno and drone in honor of the Aff…
Terrain
With ‘Terrain,’ Joachim Spieth presents the fourth long player on his Affin imprint. The follow-up album to ‘Ousia’ (2021), ‘Terrain,’ reflects on the human relationship with nature. The album title is a reference to a musical language that layers Spieth’s music production practices and intimacy with nature.‘Terrain’ was forged in deep solitude.“ It’s an interplay of euphoric flashes and introspection” – says Spieth. The eight compositions take the listener into a captivating cascade of sonic te…
The Wave Ahead
Gorgeous, pearlescent cosmic ambient flights by London’s Jo Johnson - erstwhile member of ‘90s riot grrrl group Huggy Bear - now in pursuit of astral trajectories since returning to orbit over the past few years. “What is the sound of feeling? In physics, we conceive of sound as waves. Vibrations, undulations, physical manifestations: heard but not seen. Borne by the body, but interpreted in the brain.
Within ourselves, we perceive emotion as waves, too. Rolling in, rolling out: tidal, even. In …
Gyttjans Topografi
Edition of 500 copies w/ printed inner. Swedish drone alchemist Mats Erlandsson is sitting in a fictional room on ‘Gyttjans Topografi’, imagining a virtual chamber orchestra using zithers, tapes, double bass, harmonium, organ, and various synthesisers to draft a treatise on alternative tuning and non-normative harmonic structures. Transcendent material. The music on this recording is performed by a kind of fictitious chamber ensemble situated in an imaginary room outlined by textures that altern…
Helios/Hind
*Limited to 231 hand numbered copies* The Universal Veil is a duo comprised of Sam McLoughlin (Twisted Nerve/Pre-Cert Home Entertainment) and Folklore Tapes head honcho David Chatton Barker. Their improvised live performances with their own handmade "ritual instruments" are by turns meditative, trancelike, joyous and surreal. Helios/Hind is a fascinating sonic artifact which unearths lo-fi cassette recordings from several years of past performances and weaves them together into a new whole, usin…
Nine Death Stages
* Edition of 325 copies, silkscreened sleeve w/ obi (black or kraft), postcard * Kusōzu : Nine Death Stages is the second album by the Tokyo trio Archeus, which consists of Keiko Higuchi (voice, percussion, trombone, shamisen), Shizuo Uchida (bass strings), and Tomo (hurdy gurdy, voice). It follows their debut, self-titled and self-released CD and cassette from 2021 and is further proof – if any were needed – that these musicians, who’ve known each other for some time, but only started playing t…
Picture a Frame
"Picture a Frame" the debut album by the Belgian composer Elisabeth Klinck, was born out of strict isolation and is nonetheless a result of a collaborative process that saw her working closely with artist Oscar Claus. Enriching her compositions for violin with electronic soundscapes and field recordings from their surroundings, the two entered an artistic dialogue that took place inside its own idiosyncratic space outside of conventional time. It is an intimate record in which Klinck’s expressiv…
Gomberg III-V - Airplay
Big Tip! The alter ego, Gomberg, created by Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger is a tool for him to "overcome his own limitations". Gomberg serves as a foil on which a second personality comes to life and does what he wants. The recordings on Gomberg III-V were made between 2006 and 2018, recorded in Vienna and Brest. Some of the tracks are occasion-related compositions or commissioned works, e.g. a signature for an art space or short works for films, some are the results of collaborations for …
Monte Carlo Fallacy
In the lockdown of early 2020, Berlin fell silent. As reflects Nicholas Bussmann, “it felt like the early 90s in East Berlin”, the place where he grew up and experienced social change and uncertainty, and presumably a lot of empty, silent space. Here, on this duo with his long-term accomplice Werner Dafeldecker, we hear the sound of two instrumental practitioners as they explore the nature of their respective instruments with a paced and thoughtful guidance, with little intervention or overt de…