De La Catessen
A label linked to activities, artists, and radio programmes associated with experimental/classical music venue de la Catessen.
Sounds Like Work
*150 copies limited release* Sounds Like Work, a long-lost soundscape composition by South Australian composer and scholar, Chester Schultz, is made available by De la Catessen Records, for the first time since its private cassette release in 1978. Drawing from material recorded in late 1976 in the workplaces of members of the Maylands Church of Christ congregation, subsequently edited at the electronic music studio of Adelaide University in early 1978, Sounds Like Work has an oddly contemporary…
Empyrean Traces
*300 copies limited release* With Empyrean Traces, De La Catessen Records focuses on another aspect of Adelaide composer David Kotlowy’s career – his works for trio. It follows the 2021 release of Final Fragments: Piano Music of David Kotlowy, where Kotlowy’s solo piano compositions were performed by composer and scholar Stephen Whittington. The three compositions on Empyrean Traces are brought to life by the Benaud Trio, whose ability to carry the gentle poetics of such work allows for bravura …
Transfusion: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
*300 copies limited release* De la Catessen Records proudly presents a limited vinyl release of theoriginal score of the Stan Original film Transfusion by AACTA nominated composer Luke Altmann (Franklin, The Leunig Fragments,Fell).
Transfusion is the first film to be directed by Matt Nable, and stars Sam Worthington as a former special forces operative who is thrust into the criminal underworld to stop his son being taken from him. Transfusion had its World Premiere at the CinefestOz Film Festiv…
Superior State
*300 copies limited release* Superior State is the second Leitmotiv Limbo album released by Port Adelaide’s De la Catessen Records, after the 2022 CD Spiritual Disturbance. This time, Leitmotiv Limbo’s isolationist studies have been bumped to vinyl, which feels like the perfect format for these twelve miniatures. The project of Adelaide artist Elijah Värttö, Leitmotiv Limbo has, over the past few decades, tracked a history of quietly insistent experimentation, embracing several technologies – in…
Empyrean Traces
"Exquisitely performed by the Benaud Trio … a meditative stillness and a quality of confiding sincerity … heightened by the unpredictability with which notes appear and disappear … there are special joys here.” - Graham Strahle, The Weekend Australian
Within Our Reach
The first widely available edition of this singular, long-form composition, Within Our Reach: A Symphony Of The Port River: Soundscapes, by Port Adelaide, Australia-based pianist, composer, writer and researcher Chester Schultz, is proudly presented by De la Catessen Records. Originally self-released by Schultz in 1996, on his own Waterhole imprint, Within Our Reach was initially distributed free as a community resource, and not available for sale. De La Catessen’s reissue is an invaluable contr…
Spiritual Disturbance
De la Catessen Records presents Spiritual Disturbance, from Elijah Värttö's project Leitmotiv Limbo. Currently based in Port Adelaide, Australia, Leitmotiv Limbo has developed, slowly but surely, over the past few decades, through international travel and relocation, including 5 years in Estonia (2008-2012), where Värttö set up the Servataguse Muusika concert series. Spiritual Disturbance was recorded in 2020 and released privately as a small run of recycled cassettes - this CD version is th…
Last Blues
*150 copies limited release* "A mysterious folio of sonic snapshots, as much recaptured as composed, by Jon Dale’s project, Moth, in Adelaide in the late ’90s and early ’00s.
From the ready means of guitar, amp, and tape, a congruous but diverse selection of unnamed tracks emerge - musical moments borrowed from oblivion with the as yet unfulfilled good intention of returning them. Their sounds evoke abstract polaroids of winter seascapes flecked with spare, brittle detail, or the scaly-winged fl…
Selected Live Recordings
*150 copies limited release* "Music Of Transparent Means has always struck me as a particularly rock-reverent kind of minimalism, as though Alex Carpenter has removed all the excess baggage that rock has picked up over the decades and focused on its most important aspects: noise and intensity, energy and mayhem. There is, of course, a great tradition of rock minimalism, from the Velvet Underground through AC/DC to Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, on into Band Of Susans, Spacemen 3 and Loop, but Al…
Excavation Patterns
*300 copies limited release* Originally released in a tiny CDr edition in 2005 on the now impossible-to-find and almost literally named Vanished Records imprint, Excavation Patterns is a uniquely pervasive touchstone of Adelaide’s music culture, and has since put down roots around the world among devoted aficionados of minimalism, ambient music, and improvisation. At 52 sprawling minutes in length, it has been lovingly Direct Metal Mastered and exquisitely pressed by RAND in Leipzig, in a hand-n…
Final Fragments - Piano Music of David Kotlowy
** Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Notes by Jon Dale ** By the time I landed in Adelaide somewhere in the mid 1990s, to complete my secondary schooling and get the hell out of dodge – the tiny country hamlet that I’d been living in, in the northern parts of the Upper Hunter in New South Wales, at the foot of the Barrington Tops – I’d already been indoctrinated into a set of ideals through my reading, listening, and the questionable guidance of a few family members. Foremost was a kind of id…
Chord from the Second Delphic Hymn / Emerging like an Infant from the House of Truth
** Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Notes by Jon Dale ** Discovering Music Of Transparent Means was one of the three or so genuine revelations from my fifteen years of living in Adelaide, Australia. I was in my twenties and had spent some time wondering why the city I was surviving hadn’t offered much in the way of genuinely engaging and affecting ‘experimental music’ (all terms used advisedly) during my tenure. I’d also somehow glommed onto the work of a number of American composers and pol…
Idle Hands - Music of Luke Altmann
** 2021 Stock. Comes in a four panel case with 16 page booklet, designed by Sam Songailo ** Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray studied in Moscow at the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music with Professors Tatiana Zelikman and Vladimir Tropp, and the Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany with Professor Tibor Szasz. In 2008, Konstantin won First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition. Konstantin has performed with the Russian National Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Mos…
Holy Fools - Music of Luke Altmann
** 2021 Stock. Comes in a six panel case with 16 page booklet, designed by Sam Songailo ** One-composer records have somehow slipped out of fashion, but the chance to delve more deeply into the psyche of a single composer is a special indulgence for both performer and listener. Luke Altmann's music first graced our music stands in 2007, when we performed the slow and achingly beautiful ‘Prelude to New York’ at Manchester Lane in Melbourne. The piece’s honest conviction, simplicity and deep expre…