Black Truffle is delighted to offer up a rare serving of unheard works by legendary Swiss artist Anton Bruhin. Active as a visual artist, poet, and musician since the 1960s, Bruhin has created important work in forms as varied as concrete poetry and landscape painting, imbuing everything he does with wit, humility, and absurdist humour. A recognised master of the jew’s harp (or Trümpi, as this ancient folk instrument is known in Swiss German), Bruhin’s sound work also encompasses tape collage, s…
Real Real World is the first collaborative effort from Nantes-based Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie and Australian keyboardist/composer James Rushford. Primarily recorded in a fluid, spontaneous studio session in Nantes, with overdubs added later in Melbourne and Nantes, Real Real World presents five spacious, unhurried pieces that inhabit a unique sound world characterised by wheezing, half-voiced organ chords, chiming metal percussion, and eruptions of small sounds. Beginning wit…
Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Backfire of Joy, a previously unheard recording from Phew, John Duncan and Kondo Tatsuo, documenting a concert at Tokyo’s Hosei University in 1982. Though the fertile exchange of ‘zines, tapes and records between the Japanese underground and the Los Angeles Free Music Society meant the artists were familiar with each other’s work, this performance (occurring on Duncan’s first visit to Japan) was their first meeting and only performance as a trio.
Duncan is h…
Black Truffle announce the first vinyl reissue of Rafael Toral's Aeriola Frequency, originally released by Perdition Plastics in 1998. Toral made his name in the world of mid-90s experimental electronics with two releases, Sound Mind Sound Body (1994) and Wave Field (1995), both now recognized as classics and reissued on vinyl by Drag City, which saw him exploring the potential of electric guitar and pedals to immerse the listener in seemingly endless waves of sustained tones. On Wave Field, ins…
Black Truffle announce Ashioto, the first international solo release from Japanese drummer-percussionist-composer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. Active for over a decade, Yamamoto has performed and recorded extensively with artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, and Akira Sakata, as well as participating in innumerable improvised and ad hoc groups. Ashioto presents two wide-ranging pieces that combine Yamamoto's percussion work with piano, field recordings, electronics, and contributions from guest …
Black Truffle present Peaks by Australian cellist Judith Hamann, her debut release of electro-acoustic music. Known mostly for her live performance work with composers including Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young, here she steps away from the cello, moving into an intimate dreamscape woven from recordings gathered over years of itinerant touring. Peaks is a work in two distinct parts, crossfading between different landscapes and apertures; from roo…
Black Truffle present Meith, a new composition in two parts from prolific composer/theorist François Bonnet. Usually operating under his Kassel Jaeger moniker, Bonnet is a major figure in contemporary electronics and electro-acoustic music, collaborating with artists such as Lucy Railton, Jim O'Rourke, and Stephen O'Malley, and releasing his work on labels including Editions Mego, Senufo, and Shelter Press. Always meticulously detailed yet immediately affecting, Bonnet's work situates itself at …
2020 repress. Oren Ambarchi's Editions Mego release, Hubris, gets the remix treatment courtesy of electronic music legend Ricardo Villalobos. Villalobos expertly transforms Ambarchi's layered web of countless sustained and pulsating palm-muted guitars into a funky, mesmerizing and propulsive long-form piece. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin March 2016. Photograph by Estelle Hanania. Sculptures by Daniel Druet. Design by Stephen O'Malley.
Black Truffle announce Undercurrent, the new LP from the long-running Milanese duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti. Following on from high-profile releases on Boomkat Editions and Shelter Press in the last few years, the eight untitled pieces making up Undercurrent continue the pair's hypnotic and disorientating practice of improvisation based on tape loops. Often sitting halfway between electro-acoustic technique and beat-based production, the music of Bellows obliquely recalls aspects of h…
Black Truffle present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his 1970 piece I Am Sitting In a Room (LCD 1013CD). He has written a remarkable catalog of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, often using pure electronic tones produced by os…
Still sealed copy of the 2020 double LP set on Black Truffle with compositions from the mid-2010's for electric guitars and ensemble, performed by Stephen O'Malley and Oren Ambarchi among others.
Black Truffle’s documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier’s works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross (recorded by two core members of the Ever …
Continuing Black Truffle’s series of releases documenting the recent work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, String Noise presents three major works for violin solo and duo composed between 2004 and 2019. Lucier has developed his compositions in close collaboration with many instrumentalists over the years; the three works presented here are performed by the violinists for whom they were originally written, Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, who together make up the inn…
Black Truffle is thrilled to announce ViewFinder / Hide & Seek, a new release from acclaimed American experimental composer David Behrman, presenting recordings made in collaboration with Jon Gibson and Werner Durand between 1989 and 2020. Last heard from on Black Truffle as part of the collaborative art song/live electronics madness of She’s More Wild, these recordings find Behrman continuing the pioneering work in interactive electronics that have established him as one of the major living exp…
Unreleased album from 1981, a collaborative project by David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon and Anne Klingensmith recorded at Mills College in 1981.
Black Truffle announce Genetic, the first release outside Indonesia from contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat. Alit is a major force in contemporary Indonesian music, presenting his work extensively throughout Asia, Europe, and North America and collaborating with renowned ensembles such as Bang On A Can and Ensemble Modern. Involved in the composition and performance of works for Gamelan ensemble since he was a teenager, in 2007 he founded Gamelan Salukat, a 25-membe…
LP version. Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie returns to Black Truffle with Nist-Nah. Like his previous solo record on the label, the abrasive hip-hop concrète of People Pleaser (BT 027LP, 2017), Nist-Nah
finds Guthrie branching out in a new direction, this time in a suite of
six percussion pieces primarily using the metallaphones, hand drums,
and gongs of the Gamelan ensembles of Indonesia. The music presented
here is grounded in Guthrie's travels in Indonesia a…
Black Truffle announce the release of Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O’Rourke, offering up two side-long realisations of Ferrari’s tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe in 2014, revised and mixed by O’Rourke in 2019. The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean sea, the tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar…
Black Truffle is pleased to present Realejo, the first vinyl release from Brazilian sound artist and composer Manuel Pessôa de Lima. Having composed works for diverse contexts including cinema, contemporary dance, theatre and television, Lima’s live appearances often take the form of self-reflexive lecture performances that combine electro-acoustic sound, red light, video and spoken text, moving unpredictably from the hilarious to the distressing.Realejo consists of two side-long pieces of highl…
Black Truffle invite you to an evening of drunken revelry in the Batcave! After a chance meeting at a local supermarket in Poughkeepsie, New York, Joe McPhee and Graham Lambkin have performed together as a duo extensively in recent years, in addition to their joint work excavating some of the wildest tapes from McPhee's archive for Lambkin's now defunct Kye label. Live in the Batcave documents an evening the two friends spent together in the company of Joe's brother Charlie and Lambkin's son Oli…
Black Truffle present In Real Life, the latest in a flurry of releases from Berlin-based guitarist and composer Julia Reidy. Having drawn acclaim for solo performances on 12-string acoustic guitar that bridge microtonality, 'American primitive' stylings and classic minimalism, Reidy’s recent releases have utilised an increasingly broad sonic palette, fleshing out guitar-based composition with electronics, field recordings, and – most strikingly – heavily auto-tuned vocals.On In Real Life, Reidy …
CD Edition. Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece drops us immediately into the maelstrom, ab…
Black Truffle present Reservoir 1: Preservation, a gorgeous piece by American composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies. Sarah's work explores a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. The Reservoirs are a series of three one-hour pieces based on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious human mind. Jung and Freud described the unconscious mind as a reservoir, a repository for memori…
Black Truffle announce the release of this genuine head-scratcher, the first collaboration between DJ / mixtape-compiler Kayo Makino and underground legend Tori Kudo. Originally created to be played between acts at the launch of Eiko Ishibashi's acclaimed The Dreams My Bones Dream (2018) and then reworked and refined for LP release, the two side-long pieces are sonic environments constructed by Makino for Kudo's piano to inhabit, or, as the LP's credits suggest, a "cinéma pour l'oreille" in whic…
Small repress available. Black Truffle present the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom's legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975. This is an expanded double-LP edition with over 40 minutes of additional contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley, and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with t…
Black Truffle announce the release of Australian composer-performer James Rushford's The Body's Night. Known to many through his collaborative works with Oren Ambarchi, crys cole, Kassel Jaeger, Klaus Lang, Joe Talia, and many others, this LP is Rushford's first solo release in a decade and the very first he has composed, performed, and recorded entirely alone. Primarily recorded in Los Angeles in 2017, The Body's Night is a single electro-acoustic suite stretching over thirty minutes, utilizing…
Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements presen…
Black Truffle announces the release of Songs Without Throats, a collection of recordings from Paul DeMarinis. A key figure in the history of electronic music since the 1970s and collaborator with the likes of Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and David Tudor, DeMarinis is a pioneer in the development of gallery sound installation and digital music technologies. All tracks have been selected in collaboration with the artist, focusing on DeMarinis's exploration of synthesized voice and the digital ana…
Edition of 500. Black Truffle present the first-ever vinyl reissue of Ruedi Häusermann's Galerie Randolph, a masterpiece of solo multi-tracking originally released on CD by Unit Records in 1995. Born in 1948 and residing in the medieval Swiss town of Lenzburg, and virtually unknown outside of the German-speaking world, Häusermann is a multi-instrumentalist and enormously prolific composer who works primarily in the medium of absurdist music-theater. A virtuoso wind player and free improviser who…
The recently composed "Ricochet Lady" (2016) is the only work for solo acoustic glockenspiel by the American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Following in the manner of his pieces "I Am Sitting In A Room" and "Vespers", "Ricochet Lady" embodies Lucier's approach toward sound's individual function and mobility within space. This CD defines this approach through four realizations recorded in four dissimilar spaces, ranging from the standard to extraordinary: a university rehearsal hall with wal…
So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour-long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her. So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) was originally commissioned by Documenta 14 and first performed as part of Documenta in Athens in 2017. Two key, and for…
Since launching in 2009, Oren Ambarchi’s
Black Truffle has been making quiet waves in the underground,
its growing catalog unfurling the unexpected aural connections
which only appear when a label is led by an artist’s ear and
heart. Initially orbiting around Ambarchi’s own output, and that
of the community which immediately surrounds him, the imprint
has increasingly endeavoured to establish cross-generational
links, issuing and reissuing stunnin…
Two Words is the debut release from the duo of Canadian sound artist Crys Cole and Australian songwriter Francis Plagne. Building on a series of experimental live performances in which the pair toyed with possible common languages for their seemingly unrelated approaches to music, the LP's two sides present a single piece that brings together abstract texture and slow-motion song in a sonic space where genre cedes to the logic of dreams. The piece begins with a long, nearly static sequence built…
Face Time is the second release from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, and James Rushford, following on from their 2016 debut Pale Calling (BT 020LP). Recorded at the GRM studios in Paris in June 2017, the record immediately returns to the idiosyncratic sound-world of the trio's first release, a simmering stew of electronic smears, pitched-down animal moans, and mysteriously emotive microtonal organ chords. But before long the record takes an unexpected turn, as sounds that initially ent…
condition (4LP/CD/book/box): M / M / M / EX
Edition of 500 numbered copies (this is 158/500).
A box recorded during the festival held for Alvin Lucier's 85th birthday at the Zurich University of the Arts, 12 to 14 October 2016. Lucier himself performs I Am Sitting in a Room, where his voice is replayed into the room until only its resonances are left, and Music for Solo Performer, played by amplified brain waves on percussion.
Later pieces include Double Rainbow for Joan La Barbara and oscillato…
Tint is the first new solo recording from Joe Talia in over a decade. Australian-born but now based in Tokyo, Talia is known to many listeners as a drummer (frequently collaborating both live and in the studio with artists such as Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke) and as a recording and mixing engineer responsible for dozens of releases across the fields of contemporary experimental music, wayward pop, and jazz. Alongside James Rushford, he is also responsible for one of the most legendary r…
Black Truffle present a reissue of a landmark UK release, Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, Paul Burwell, and David Toop's Whirled Music, originally released on Quartz in 1980. Remastered and cut at 45RPM by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering Berlin. Includes a 24-page booklet with archival materials and notes from David Toop, alongside contemporary reviews, flyers, notes on the instruments and performance documentation; Gatefold sleeve."[Whirled Music is] one of the key documents of the inventi…
What happens when Oren Ambarchi is backed up by the world's greatest monster riff legends from his beloved homeland? Find out in the second volume of this infamous series where endless riffing and ecstatic shredding is the order of the day. Bonus intro track features some band from New York. Yah Boobay! Deluxe sleeve with photography by Crys Cole and Theresia Pfaender. Design by Stephen O'Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
Black Truffle presents a new issue of Annea Lockwood's classic 1970 tape piece "Tiger Balm", unavailable on vinyl for over thirty years, accompanied by two exquisite unreleased works for percussion and voice. "Created while Lockwood was living in the UK, the side-long 'Tiger Balm' is a singular work within the cannon of tape music. Inspired by research into the ritual function of music, the piece explores the possibility of evoking ancient communal memories through sound. Breaking entirely with …