Immediate Landscapes
Sound artist Akio Suzuki crisscrosses the world with his self-made instruments. British tenor/soprano sax player John Butcher is a leading figure in improvised music. These two musicians have been carrying out duo performances since 2002. The six tracks on this CD are recordings of their duos in Scotland in 2006 and Tokyo in 2015. In June 2006, an event was held in which Suzuki and Butcher visited and performed in places around Scotland that have highly distinctive acoustic characteristics. Butc…
Attempt No.6
"Attempt No. 6 is the result of a cooperation between Swedish organist Hampus Lindwall and the Stockholm-based artists Joakim Forsgren and Leif Elggren with the Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. in Halle (Saale), Germany. Upon the invitation of curator Martin Hartung, the audio-visual performance Attempt No. 6 formed the core of the Werkleitz Festival 2016, titled Trans-Positionen, which was addressed to the power of the imagination associated with radio broadcasting. In conjunction with the internati…
Spectral Arrows : Venice
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics by Marco Fusinato. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end of his 8-hour day, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and pre…
Slowscan Vol. 3: Electroacoustic Applications in Electronic Mus
Original copies, few in stock, long out of print. Larry Wendt is an extraordinary but very little known pioneer of live computer electronics and text-sound, while Nicolas Collins is here with the legendary 'Devil Music'. Devil’s Music is a performance piece about global media, local culture and individual interference. It developed in 1985 out of the confluence of Collin's fascination with early Hip Hop DJs, a Cagean love of the splendor of radio, the introduction of the first affordable, portab…
Slowscan Vol. 9: Electroacoustic Music Analog And Digital
Original copies, few in stock, long out of print. Gordon Mumma is best known for his pioneering role in the development and evolution of electronic and live-electronic, and this selection is truly important, as it contains pieces that are only available here, as Schoolwork (1970) recorded with the help of David Behrman and Katherine Morton
Tapes 1
Tapes 1 represents the first ever sound recordings to be released from the archive of cult Dutch film director Frans Zwartjes. The sound is unlike anything you may have heard -- dream-like, disjointed, disturbing, peculiar, sexy, unexpected, and totally unique. Frans Zwartjes is famous for his art-house films. A Dutch underground auteur, his prolific output dates from 1968. A unique talent, Zwartjes produced, directed, and edited his own films, but more importantly he created and improvised the …
Poems and Metapoems
Recital present a reissue of Dick Higgins's Poems And Metapoems, originally released on cassette by New Wilderness Audiographics in 1982. Label head Sean McCann on the reissue: "Since the beginning of Recital, I have been trying to publish the work of Dick Higgins. He is a chief figure in my artistic world, a hero of mine. And now, with the assistance of Charlie Morrow, it has finally happened. The first vinyl album ever published of Higgins! Many know Dick Higgins as the father of intermedi…
Breakthrough
This rare & highly collectible original 7" single from 1971 introduced electronic voice phenomena (EVP) to the wider British public. Recorded by Konstantin Raudive & issued to accompany the publication of his seminal book 'Breakthrough - an amazing experiment in electronic communication with the Dead'. Grab yourself a copy in its original sleeve still with the orginal erratum insert plus new sleeve notes from the publisher explaining the origins of this remarkable & highly influential recording.…
Peripheries: Sound portrait Belgrade 2014 – 2016
Katharina Klement was born in Graz, Austria, and is a ‘composer-performer’ in the field of notated and improvised, instrumental and electronic music. She has participated in numerous crossover projects in the areas music-text-video-performance, several works for mechanically and electronically customised piano, sound installations, and is the founder or a member of many ensembles for improvised and composed music. "In 2014, I spent nine weeks in Belgrade, focusing on the questio…
Blank Forms, Vol. 1: Magazine
Magazine is the inaugural issue of Blank Forms' journal, bringing together a combination of never-before published, lost, and new materials that supplement the non-profit's live programs. It is envisioned as a platform for critical reflection and extended dialogue between scholars, artists, and other figures working within the world of experimental music and art. Following "Let Freedom Fry" -- a short statement by Joe McPhee drawing out the contemporary political climate in relation to his pract…
Stanzas or The Law of the Good Neighbour
Henry Andersen is a Brussels-based visual artist and composer. Trained as a minimal and reductionist composer under the wings of Peter Ablinger, he moved from music into visual art, writing and sound performances. His debut vinyl is a recording of the longrunning piece ‘Stanzas’ or ‘the Law of the Good Neighbour’. On each side, a pair of his friends reads simultaneously from a list of words. The list is an unfinished result of a word game Andersen has been playing for several years. Stanzas… see…
Not A Bird / Transcarnation One
Thomas Müller (b. 1970 in Munich) is a Berlin-based video artist, experimental musician, painter, and photographer. For an exhibition in 2005, he burned three of his oil paintings and displayed the resulting pile of ashes as a sculpture entitled "three of my favourite pictures". These particular ashes were reused in new paintings, some of which have again been burned to produce further ashes for further paintings. Thus began a cycle of ash-based works entitled "not a bird", ranging from large ca…
AI Deviation #1, #2
Yasunao Tone on AI Deviation #1, #2: "I have had an idea if I apply the neural network to create my sound work for long time. When I had a performance at Centre Pompidou with Peter Rehberg and other friends I tried to talk about the idea with a French guy from IRCAM. But, he couldn't understand my idea, which by using neural network the sound I create would never have any repetitions. That was 2002 and I had to wait until 2015 when I had a grant from New York State Council on the Arts through IS…
Fly
What you hear on Fly is Yoko Ono's disarming combination of opacity and visceral, personal transparency in full bloom. It's one of the most unbridled, most captivating soul albums ever made. And that's right where she wants you: vulnerable, wide open to any-and-everything, ready to have your world tipped onto its head. She's a master of spinning your head around. First, you get the Bar Band from Hell of "Midsummer New York" to kick things off. It's about the last thing you'd expect from O…
Feeling the Space
If you've listened to Feeling The Space, Yoko Ono's personal-is-political 1973 album, it should come as no surprise that the once-reviled artist is inspiring a new generation of activists in 2017. On such songs as the righteous chant "Woman Power," the empathetic ballad "Angry Young Woman," the hilarious proto-grrrl "Potbelly Rocker," and the satirical "Men Men Men," Yoko sings in surprisingly straightforward fashion about the burdens carried by women and the mandate for feminism. Support…
Approximately Infinite Universe
There's a fury at the core of Yoko Ono's 1973 rock opus Approximately Infinite Universe that was not apparent on previously recorded efforts. Ono has always been a master of turning pain and sadness into art, but here, there's a clenched-fist intensity that sets it apart in her deep, unparalleled catalogue. Ono is angry. She proved that one can carry a boundless love for humanity and still be furious – furious at male/female relationships, at war, at your partner. Meanwhile, on a sonic leve…
Private Pleasures
Gerwald Rockenschaub is one of the most wellknown visual artists, currently living in Berlin. Apart from making art he has been deeply involved with music from the start, playing in bands, DJ-ing, organising parties in his former hometown Vienna and occasionally composing music which got released mostly through his own Definitely Something label. Private Pleasures is his first album in more then 5 years, a perfect showcase of his weird and very personal hybrid of half-defunct techno rhythms with…
Orgelkonzert Jesuitenkirche
Hermann Nitsch playing the church organ in the Jesuit church of Vienna, November 20th, 2013. Four heavy drone pieces, mastered by Martin Siewert. Double LP version comes with an eight-page booklet with artwork and an essay by Nitsch about music (in German). These four tracks of Nitsch performing solo on organ are made of sustained drones that are soothing and intense. Music is beautiful and meditative, as it slowly evolves and transforms, full trills that shimmer with celestial light and glide s…
Elemental Studies
book, 44 pages, color photos, 100 copies. A photographic survey of Ohta's wonderfully minimal installations.
Takamitsu Ohta is a contemporary artist, Born in Osaka, Japan. He is using material from the exact place and builds his own works. By a process of transformation, he makes things visible that everyone knows of, but doesn’t pay particular attention to in daily life. He features sound recordings and cassette loops.
Resonant Spaces
More than a half century into its development, free improvisation remains nearly impossible to define. Of course there are concrete definitions, canons, and well trod paths - familiar idioms, structures, relationships, textures, and tones, but by its very nature - something free, when practiced with faith, it is elusive - constantly shifting and reforming in the hands of those who call the art form their own. Of the improvisers emerging from the remarkable European contexts over the last …