★Discrepant
New York April-July 2013 / Two Names Upon The Shore
Collection of two thoughtful EPs by Cairo based artist Bosaina. Bosaina is a Syrian/Egyptian singer, songwriter, and producer known for her work in the Kairo Is Koming collective, as well as her involvement in music-space-turned-club-night VENT. Her autobiographical work takes on a magical insular quality through field recordings and sentimentally driven compositions that unfold in stolen time. On both EPs, presented here, her love affair with cinema, interrupted by decaying urban life -- New Yo…
Antologia De Musica Atipica Portuguesa Vol. 2: Regioes
In 1959, Michel Giacometti moved to Portugal and dedicated the following thirty years of his life recording traditional music all over the country. In the present decade, Portuguese music has been thriving and finally travelling abroad, long gone are the days those hidden gems were kept in secret in this distant corner of Europe. The discovery of current Portuguese music sparked an interest to Portuguese music, past and present. With both of those ideas in mind, Giacometti and the interest in Po…
A Life Is a Billion Heartbeats
A Life Is a Billion Heartbeats continues Yannis Kyriakides and Andy Moor's
exploration and mining of the rich and mysterious terrain of Greek
rebetika music from the early 20th century. Their first release of this
project (simply titled Rebetika (2010)) was for the most part
taken from a live recording at the Centre for Contemporary Arts,
Glasgow, in 2006. In the years that they have been performing the set
since, the songs and improvisations featured on this LP have grown and
expanded in…
Oooo
Earlier this decade, when Óscar Silva chose his alias Jibóia, he was already thinking of the variations his music would take on in each record. Jibóia is Portuguese for boa constrictor and by his fourth record his instincts and ability to change over his sound and search for different collaborators to reach his intentions was manifest. After collaborating with the likes of Makoto Yagyu, Sequin, Xinobi, Ricardo Martins, and Jonathan Saldanha on his previous records, in OOOO he goes deep into i…
Tropical Gothic
It's 2018 and it's time for some new discoveries into Mike Cooper's limitless exploration in his collection of guitars. The title itself, Tropical Gothic references Cooper's beloved areas of "the South" with a Gothic, dark, remote interplay... he explains: ''Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources.'' On each side, Mike…
Make Mine, Macaw
We should be grateful to live in the same era as Spencer Clark; in a time when we hear that there’s nothing new to be done or discovered, his musical career has shown that there are myriad worlds available to be found. Earlier this century he created a sound phantasy with Skaters and after that he pursued a new alchemy under various aliases (Charles Berlitz, Fourth World Magazine, Monopoly Child, Typhonian Highlife, etc.) and projects (like Egyptian Sports Network, Tarzana or The Temple Defector…
Stridulations
For stridulations, Pali Meursault confronts recorded and performed sounds, composition and improvisation: field- recordings of animal communication (insects, birds and bats recorded in France, Japan and South America over almost ten years) mix and dialog with the ‘sonification’ of fluorescents tubes. Orthoptera, hemiptera and chiroptera recorded in Japan, France and Brazil between 2007 and 2016. Electromagnetic fields of prepared fluorescent tubes sonified with pick-up coils and process…
Tele-n-Tech-Da
Japanese artist Sugai Ken presents a kaleidoscopic radio play inspired by the traditional Japanese art of Mingei. In Sugai Ken's own words: "In recent years I have been researching old Japanese culture and customs in order to deepen my musical production. I am still excited to find that there are many untouched roots yet to be discovered which only motivates me to pursuit my research further. As I dig deeper, I'm always struck with the general idea that 'everything has its own ground', ot…
Musique Con Crete
Starting with an artist residency Tasos Stamou visited the Greek island over the course of three summers, collecting field recordings, performing with local musicians, producing electronic compositions and gathering old records and tapes of traditional music of the region. The project resulted in the assembling of a unique sound collage which reflects his personal experience as a music visitor to this part of the Mediterranean. Tasos Stamou is an electroacoustic music composer, performer, altern…
Dian Long
Another unique document of Kink Gong's, aka Laurent Jeanneau, collection of surreal soundscapes of augmented field recordings, this time turning into his love/hate relationship with China into a mesmerizing soundscape of unclassifiable music. Jeanneau on Dian L: "Before becoming Kink Gong I had different names, one of my projects, designed by cultural circumstances in China at the beginning of the 21st century, was Dian Long ('electric dragon' in Chinese). I landed in Shanghai in 2000 in …
Death In Haiti: Funeral Brass Bands & Sounds from Port
15 dead, 15 funerals, 16 funeral processions, one procession with no dead, five churches, one cemetery, onewake. 15 hours of recorded sounds are condensed into a vivid sound portrait depicting the way funerals and burials are lived in Haiti. Recorded in Port au Prince by sound artist Félix Blume in early December 2016, this plunges the listener into a world of pain, loss, and solemn celebration as each funeral comprises its own live jazz band as well as a plethora of characters like the jok…
Wide Open Spaces
Originally released on CD in 2003. The hour-long performance on this disc was captured live on October 5th, 2002 when Wobbly, People Like Us, and Matmos circled their wagons in the lecture hall of the San Francisco Art Institute. Having mutually agreed upon a country and western theme, Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), and Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt (Matmos) pored over their archives of honky tonk classics, chopping and dicing Nashville's finest almost beyond recogniti…
More Bitter Fruit
South Californian dons of occult electronics, German Army return to Discrepant with their first solo vinyl LP outing for the label after an inaugural tape back in 2015 and a split collaboration with Old Komm in 2016 (CREP 033LP). Taking the events described in the 1982 book More Bitter Fruit, the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, the duo eloquently translates this textbook case of bullying relationship between the United States and the Third World. Using some US government documents and interv…
Optimized!
Third volume in Discrepant's irregular split series. This time, they pair two artists at the top of their "collagist" game: People Like Us and Porest. The Parallel Broadcasts presents Porest's recordings from the covert sector of his archives. Culled from shortwave and FM broadcasts, these selections were intercepted via prepared radio -- finely tuned to receive what is known in certain circles as parallel broadcasting. Content explores the trauma of emerging global consciousness, acute cultural…
The Forest, The People And The Spirits
Originally released as a limited tape in 2015. This vinyl reissue of O Morto's (aka Mestre André) immersive electronic tryptic piece dedicated to the Ba'Aka people and its spirits is remastered here on green vinyl . Albeit, his music is now closer to a soundscape composition approach, O Morto actually started as a free improv/noise project in 2012. However, after releasing his debut Memento Mori (2012), O Morto slowly began to drift away from the harshest soundscapes to seek a new directi…
Ariha Brass Quartet
Originally released on CD by Beirut based Al Maslakh Recordings in 2015. Mark Corroto about Ariha Brass Quartet in All About Jazz upon its initial release: "The practitioners here, three trumpeters Axel Dörner, Franz Hautzinger, Mazen Kerbaj, and Carl Ludwig Hübsch on tuba, practice a unique approach to their instruments. All four musicians set aside a traditional approach to playing, substituting breath for notes, abandoning a mouthpiece, and applying amplification to microscopic sounds. Th…
Fabrication of Silver Dreams
Founded by Lebanese visual artist and musician Raed Yassin and Swiss musician Paed Conca in 2006, Praed is a band whose music can be described as a mixture of Arabic popular music, free jazz, and electronics. Over the years, the duo has collaborated with renowned musicians from across the globe. Praed explore the terrain of shaabi (Arabic popular music) and its interconnectedness with other hypnotic music genres. Through their research and thanks to numerous concerts in various Egyptian cities, …
The Mecanoncentric Worlds of Pierre Bastien
Discrepant present a magical live recording from the legend that is Pierre Bastien, showcasing his mecanoid orchestra at its intricate best during a performance at Studio M, the historical studio-concert hall of Radio-Television of Vojvodina, Serbia. Around 1986, French composer and multi-instrumentalist Pierre Bastien started creating and building his own orchestra called Mecanium: an ensemble of musical automatons constructed from meccano parts and activated by electro-motors, that "play" on a…
Reluctant Swimmer / Virtual Surfer
The 'icon of post-everything', Mike Cooper, returns to Discrepant with a recording of a live set recorded at the Controindicazioni Festival of Improvised Music in Rome in 2003. The music moves very slowly through four movements: ‘’Reluctant Swimmer’’, ‘’Movies is Magic’’, ''Virtual Surfer’’ and ‘’Dolphins’’. 'Floating in out of the exotic ether and disappearing like smoke, engulfed in the alien hugeness of nature... a very elegant set by a visionary artist.' Mike Cooper says 'the first half is p…
Pyramid of Skulls
Inspired by the common task and the people of Pamir in Tajikistan, filmmaker and sound artist Carlos Casas deconstructs far-away sights and sounds to create a unique field recording experiment that equally worships past, present, and future traditions. Nikolai Fedorov thought the Pamir to be the cradle of humanity, the hidden and forgotten nest, a pyramid of skulls that held the secrets of past human kinship. He believed that most of Asian myths of human origin pointed the Pamir region as their …