★Penultimate Press
Hill Country Piano
Dan Melchior has a wild history, brain and catalogue. Penultimate Press is honoured to add to it. The former and later that is. This is Melchior's first piano recording. “I used my girlfriend Jessica's piano and got a fairly cheap mic from the guitar centre that could just be plugged onto the end of a guitar cable.” The reverb is natural, as the piano sits in a large, mostly empty room. Hill Country Piano is the result of a human music box mind brimming with many a corner somehow aligning with c…
C.D.
Colonia Dignidad was the settlement of a German evangelical sect. After being prosecuted for child abuse in Germany, the group fled to Chile in 1961. Like similar religious sects, it was characterized by the outward appearance of a unified, godly community with well-tempered cultural activities and social welfare, but inwardly and in its environment by oppression, sexual abuse, and exploitation. In the 1970s, it unquestioningly inserted itself into Pinochet's regime of terror, aiding in the impr…
El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics)
*300 copies limited edition* Penultimate Press is proud to unveil a global collaboration that harnesses earth with combined members and atmospheres of Santiago, Chile, Salsipuedes, Argentina, Melbourne, Australia and Berlin, Germany. El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics) was written and recorded by Alvaro Daguer (Glorias Navales/A Full Cosmic Sound/ETCS Records), Pablo Picco (Bardo Todol/Bolinga Everest Records), Tomás Salvatierra (Glorias Navales) and Mark Harwood (Penultimat…
Cycles Of Tonite
*300 copies limited edition* Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song with simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent Janet’s Song weaves mirror elements alongsi…
Afterlife
*300 copies limited edition* Polish composer and sound artist Robert Piotrowicz presents his first work for Penultimate Press, one which outlines an uncanny sound world with a series of fictional organ pieces. Whilst resembling a pipe organ alongside other acoustic sources all material is strictly synthetic. The impression of air being swept through the bellows… false. The spatial organisation suggesting it was recorded in large physical space, false! The long middle solo passage in Noumen must…
15 Coruscations
*300 copies limited edition* Far from the extended still lifes and mises en abîmes of their acclaimed Penultimate Press debut A Sunset for Walter (PP43, 2019), Noetinger & Pateras’ 15 Coruscations weaves frequencies & stirs data into an agitated series of deft psychoacoustic miniatures. Employing electronics as a deformed mirror reflecting joyous lacerations & interweavings, 15 Coruscations borrows from both brut & skilled musical practises, emerging from the current despair to blister light ac…
Soap & Glue
Compendium coffin closer from Pat Klassen’s Barn Sour project. A project where the batshit crazy defies the beautiful whilst relishing in unease. Animals appear as phantasms, humans expel intense emotional states. Borderline music and borderline funny this is not for the faint of heart. Soap and Glue collages material from all six Barn Sour releases on a variety of labels, Staighre, Careful Catalog, 72 Fold Mane etc alongside a small sprinkling of exclusive material. The final Barn Sour release …
Jack of Diamonds/Faro Goddamn
if Alan Licht ever continues with his revered Minimal Top Ten lists then Sam Esh would surely be added to the pile. Penultimate Press is proud to release one of the most audacious and unrelenting entries in the entire minimal cannon. A collection of recordings from a true American eccentric maverick pioneer, Sam Esh. Originally available as 2 x cassettes in tiny editions on Mike Rep Hummel’s Old Age / No Age label these are now bound together on a 2CD set which does not interrupt the unrelentin…
Grace to the Breathe that Void
Komare return with a 4 part document recorded during the apocalypse. Limited to 100 copies.
Offering
Tip! Offering is Mark Harwood’s second LP and is an album of songs about geography and placement and the way people choose to move across the surface of our planet. His simple tools of acoustic guitar, voice, tapes and bric-a-brac give Mark the freedom and clarity of vision to offer hope in song to those who choose to hear him. Offering is more than we deserve in these lousy times - it is calm and it is forgiving, but it is also sharp and can cut. It is wise and all-inclusive but Offering is nev…
E' Vago Fior del Tempo
Tip! * 150 copies only* The four pieces on this Small Cruel Party record all date from the late 1980s and predate any officially released material : "Cords" was entirely realised in Chicago, and the others realised, or at least finished, upon arriving in Seattle in 1990. The pieces were originally privately released on cassette in micro-editions of 5 to 7 copies and given to friends.
In 2009/2010 Petri Supplies, which had a complete set of those early privately released tapes, rereleased some …
Bleu (2Lp)
Following the first ever vinyl reissues of Aurore and Royaume, Aimant + Aimant - Penultimate Press is finally proud to make available the final part of this extraordinary trilogy. Etant Donnés's Bleu is the final gesture and culmination of this period of creation where poésie and la nature form a magical alliance that resonates as an alchemical wedding. Having the conviction that Bleu was the ultimate arc based on the purity of natural sound and poetry, leaning towards a mystical spiritual searc…
Afterfly (LP)
Tim Goss (The Shadow Ring / Call Back The Giants) returns with his first outing under his birth name. Afterfly is a mature and compelling work that observes life as a set of repeating patterns, no matter the apparent differences everything has already happened. After one fly comes another and another and another ad infinitum.
You have the face of an old man, catch me if you can. Afterfly serves as an initiation into a more thorough overview of Tim's current practise followed with a book of rec…
Ten-Room Banquet
The acoustic situations presented in Ten-Room Banquet were constructed by hybridized processes. Their constituent matter explores relationships between an idea of synthetic and of « picked up reality ». Field recording, « sound-designed » spaces, performative situations, synthesizers, analog and digital studio manipulations... are used to experiment different approaches to audio perception. Through concrète compositions, a poetic narrative unfolds, from nervous collages to smoother sequences. Ta…
A Year Closer
It makes less sense to say that Maths Balance Volumes formed in 2002 than to say that, since that year, they have been collapsing into something, again and again. Just as the three members fell together with no plan or allegiance to any style or genre, each track falls together as the broken pieces of songs and sounds meet to make a temporary and frightening whole. Things make their way into a Maths Balance Volumes song when they don’t or won’t work anymore, when they have escaped their owner, o…
A Perfect Punctual Paradise Under My Own Name
Mark Harwood's A Perfect Punctual Paradise Under My Own Name is a two part audio drama that charts the life of a middle-aged Australian man in the throes of an existential crisis, brought about through a series of unforeseen circumstances that collectively threaten to undermine the fundamentals of his existence. It’s a work that explores the sound of a mind collapsing under pressure, where lucidity is traded for mania, and eloquence reduced to a scattershot of primal rambling and abstract self-r…
The Sense of Hearing
**400 copies** Penultimate Press is proud to present the debut full length from Komare, a UK outfit based somewhere between south-eastern edges of London borough and the Swale. Komare is Dominic Goodman and Peter Blundell who also make up two thirds of Mosquitoes. Somewhat of an estranged cousin to Mosquitoes take on re-ruffled rock, Komare resides more as a dub influenced exploration of the outer fringes, creating a thick vibrational delusion.
Somehow like Zweistein mixing a Robert Ashley reco…
God Bless the Death Drive
Literally taking off where the acclaimed Precious Waste in Our Wake LP finished off, London based outfit Triple Negative return with another exemplary amplified jigsaw puzzle. The playback of this reality is garnished with humour, bedlam, beauty and a robust fear of the predictable. As payback for your acknowledgment our international line-up deliver a disparate mix of genres and histographies rendered into a devious dish of rhythm, song, balladry and nerve.This is Not This Heat. A.Kostis/Kosta…
Soft Tissue
soft tissue is a collaboration between Glasgow-based artists Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins. Penultimate Press is proud to present their debut release that has grown out of a collaborative process where recordings from everyday life rub alongside experiments with analogue feedback. Exploring the sonic relationships between physical objects, pre-recorded material and digital processing the duo plays within networks of micro amplification, blurring the boundaries between conscious interventions …