★Erstwhile Records
Earnest Rubbish
After a solo on Kye, the Australian writer Matthew Revert comes back with the American sound artist Vanessa Rossetto. Together they mostly work with field recordings, editing and mixing them in a narrative form, adding some texts and voices. Whereby …
Amorphous spores
Unusual sound work from the Japanese duo of Takahiro Kawaguchi and Utah Kawasaki (Astro Twin), using self-made instruments and electronics to create unexpected sonic emissions that follow curious paths that are separated by periods of quiet or textur…
Busman's holiday
This album is a meditation on the inner mental environments that one encounters and endures during times of work-related travel. The music contained herein should be well suited for headphone distraction in airports, bus stations, train stations, sub…
Three Exercises
Devin DiSanto is an New York-based artist and composer currently focusing on labor-oriented approaches to performance. This work revolves primarily around functional uses of common/everyday objects in both solo and group situations, emphasizing the p…
Severe Liberties
ErstAEU is a new CD imprint, launched by Erstwhile Records to help document the work of young American experimental musicians working in a post-electroacoustic vein. Kevin Parks originally hails from New York. He is a graduate of the Conservatory of …
Parazoan Mapping
With fifteen untitled vignettes and varying source material, Parazoan Mapping often feels like an aural scrapbook. And when looking through any scrapbook, the different photos and pieces of ephemera always point to something bigger: a sort of unrav…
Matterings
Field recording artist Jeph Jerman and percussionist and sound designer Tim Barnes are finally out with this fantastic collaborative work - here’s a certain patience that’s required to fully engage with Matterings. It’s a good twenty minutes longer t…
Schwarze Riesenfalter
An evocation of “Nacht,” Graham Lambkin and Michael Pisaro’s chilling, malefic collaboration directly references Giraud’s collection of poems, Pierrot Lunaire, and Arnold Schoenberg’s melodrama of the same name. Despite the continental subject matter…
The Abyss
The Abyss is an epic, dynamic statement that shows the wide range of sound these two esteemed artists are capable of creating. The lengthy list of instruments used, plus the year it took to assemble, gives an indication that there is a grander mod…
II
The label doesn't want to do notes anymore about his new releases. So we have to write some with our very good English. With these two names you can imagine that for sure the music will be closer to silence than to wall of noise. First we must say t…
Objets infernaux
Two great korean artists working with feedback, turntables, opened hard drives... What they call infernal objects. A stream of noise accidents. A molten, scalding stream of sound. Looking back, I see it's only been about seven years since, via the re…
Detour
A stunning construction and a fantastic recording, seemingly endless layers of depth and ways to listen. A composition using field recordings by Toshiya Tsunoda and Manfred Werder, recorded in Japan in 2013. A bit past the 40-minute mark, there's a c…
Photographs
Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet stand side by side in the vanguard of contemporary sound exploration. Since the initiation of their collaborative endeavors in 2006, the duo have crafted a nice combination of audio vérité and musique concrète, tog…
This Place / Is Love
An extended work from Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro, defined by six stanzas written by Beuger, Anna Swir, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugger and Edmond Jabes, a subtle cycle on love and permanency realized in tone and voice."
"The work begins in very un-Wa…
Making a
Graham Lambkin first heard Keith Rowe's sixties work in AMM as a teenager growing up in Folkestone, a small town in Kent, England, and for him it was very influential. That same year, Lambkin formed his now legendary band The Shadow Ring and Lambk…
Touching
"Erstaeu 003 is, at once, the most "traditional" of the first three releases and, perhaps because of that, the most difficult to approach, at least for this listener. My previous experience with Graham Stephenson's work (I think this is my first expo…
Dystonia Duos
Contrary to the effects of the titular condition, which I'm given to understand afflicts both musicians, and as also implied in the images of distorted and pained hands adorning the cover, there's some seriously steady and decisive music contained…
Sinter
Something very cool about erstaeu 002's existing in such a different world than its numeric predecessor (and 003 is altogether different as well). After the sublime compressive intensity of "Dystonia Duos", "Sinter" injects vast amounts of oxygen int…
Untitled
This was the 10 PM set on 9/11/11, and makes for a perfect pair with the Rowe solo - two very different extremes. Where the Rowe set is in your face visceral, Unami and Malfatti created a gentle atmosphere within the pitch-black room (lit solely by…
September
This was the much anticipated final set of Keith Rowe's week in NYC, following five duo sets with various collaborators. It took place on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the Manhattan atmosphere was uniquely charged. As he almost always does, Ro…