★Sofa
Sonic Drift
Sofa Music continues to release Microtub’s unique research into the microtonal tuba. The music on Sonic Drift achieves an even greater depth and leaves the listener sucked in to the trio’s extraordinary complex band sound. Sonic Drift is Microtub’s fifth album since their debut in 2011. Whereas the first four albums were recorded shortly after the music was composed, the music for Sonic Drift evolved considerably through the process of playing live concerts throughout Europe. Initially developed…
First Room
*2022 stock.* First room is the debut solo album from microtonal tuba player and composer Martin Taxt. The album is the first in a series of works investigating possible relations between architecture and music. First room is a tribute to the Japanese tearoom and the tatami mat. The floor plan as shown on the cover has been used as a foundation for the musical score, performed by Inga Margrete Aas on viola da gamba and double bass, and Martin Taxt on microtonal tuba and sine waves. The album is …
Musique Pour Deux Corps
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music and Full Rhizome-Sonoro are proud to present the new album of Ingar Zach/Michele Rabbia – Musique pour deux corps. Born with the same passion for sound, "Musique pour deux corps" brings together the duo Ingar Zach/Michele Rabbia for their second release. The two percussionists present an album full of invention, research, and development of a new percussion-music, using an unlimited and inexhaustible material that only percussion can offer. The skins are used as surfaces…
Works for Listening 1-10
Tip! *2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to present the solo debut album of Norwegian composer and sound artist Tine Surel Lange. Works for Listening is a series of spatial electro-acoustic works developed at Notam (NO), MISC (LT), and EMS (SE). All the works are made in 5th order ambisonics but have been presented in many different formats- as in this stereo decoding of the works.In Works for Listening, there is a strong focus on listening-aesthetics and our psychological categorization of sound.…
Sonic Drift
Sofa Music continues to release Microtub’s unique research into the microtonal tuba. The music on Sonic Drift achieves an even greater depth and leaves the listener sucked in to the trio’s extraordinary complex band sound. Sonic Drift is Microtub’s fifth album since their debut in 2011. Whereas the first four albums were recorded shortly after the music was composed, the music for Sonic Drift evolved considerably through the process of playing live concerts throughout Europe. Initially developed…
Floating Layer Cake
Over the course of the last few decades, Ingar Zach has been an important force in contemporary and experimental music. Through his solo percussion music, his regular bands Dans les Arbres, Huntsville and Mural, and countless other collaborations, he has redefined the role of percussion and expanded the possibilites of his instruments in a highly personal way. In his four solo percussion records, starting with Percussion Music released on Sofa in 2004, one can sense a clear material and formal d…
Undulate
Sofa Music is thrilled to invite a new artist on board the Sofa catalogue with the adventurous album Undulate from the danish, Oslo-based artist Niklas Adam. When the Sofa team first heard Adam's music, there was no discussion about including the album in our catalogue. His music deserves to be heard: it's an album that grows on you with its complexity of beautiful and genorous sounds. It's a concert. It's a lecture. It's a drum solo, a homage to Tudor, an opaque invitation, it's a conversation …
Six Moving Guitars
Sofa is very proud to release the outstanding debut record of composer / guitarist Fredrik Rasten. In Six Moving Guitars, the stable sounds of justly tuned consonances are being «activated» by the different qualities of the movements of the guitars. The piece came out of the collaborative work between three dancers and three musicians. The group’s goal was to work with choreography and sound as a unity, erasing the functional differences between dancer and musician and focusing solely on the son…
Off the Coast
Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø and Daniel Lercher met in the Czech country side in 2010, as part of an improvising orchestra comprised of Austrian, Czech and Norwegian musicians, and started working as a duo shortly after. Finding common ground in fine grained and slow pulsed music, the duo went through a research period, striving to develop a common material void of all things unnecessary, where the impact of acoustic and electronic sound elements were truly balanced. While Nørstebø refined his arsena…
Silfr
Sofa has been following Vilde&Inga since they started playing together back in 2010 and when they contacted us with the music from Silfr, there was no doubt in our minds. On Silfr they continue to develop the remarkable interplay from their first album, Makrofauna (ECM), but this time they turn the level up a couple of notches. On Silfr Vilde&Inga presents chamber music of international caliber. Each piece on the album dives into a microclimate which eventually reveals small musical pearls. The …
Space Happy
In the first episode of the new Twin Peaks series, a man - a security guard or janitor kind of guy - is staring intensely into a human sized glass compartment. There is nothing Inside it but the image of his own reflection, but the intensity of the scene and the man’s gaze is high, as if a monster could appear inside the compartment at any time. We get the feeling this box is a portal to another dimension. Space Happy sounds like this kind of mysterious box or portal. Several pieces are built ar…
Like Driving
Streifenjunko has taken a shift towards electronic sounds. Their previous albums "No Longer Burning" (SOFA 2009) and "Sval Torv" (SOFA 2012) was remarkable in the magnificent sound achieved only with a saxophone and trumpet. With the seemingly endless possibilities of electronic instruments their strategy of finding simple tasks has been put to the test, and in the making of this album Streifenjunko was put back to the starting position to re-discover their focus and recognisable simplicity. The…
Cinder : Ember : Ashes
Stunning solo debut albumfrom Melbourne based musician Aviva Endean. Aviva is a clarinet player, improviser, composer and performance-maker. Her work with sound spans a wide variety of performance contexts including experimental and improvised music, creating immersive sonic environments, new chamber music, band projects, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Cinder : ember : ashes is Aviva’s first solo release and marks a move towards a more introspective sound. A collection of both composed a…
Before Nightfall One
Sofa is proud to present this new collaboration with the labels own Ingar Zach together with the critically acclaimed contemporary ensemble Speak Percussion from Melbourne, Australia. Eugene Ughetti and Matthias Schack-Arnott in Speak Percussion invited Ingar Zach for the first concert in their series named Before Nightfall One. The idea behind this concert series is to experience and document the result of one single day of collaboration, culminating in a concert in a carefully chosen space in …
Sissel
John Tilbury and Keith Rowe have performed together within the legendary improvising ensemble AMM, as well as in numerous other contexts over the years. Duos for Doris (2003) was their first meeting as a duo, E.E. Tension and Circumstance (2010) was the second before the 4CD box on SOFA, enough still not to know, was released in 2015. enough still not to know also introduces the norwegian video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen as a collaborator, in this case as the producer of the album. Bjørgee…
Playmates
Muddersten was established as a trio in 2015, and released their first album, Karpatklokke, on SOFA in January 2017. Their highly unique trio have been presented at festivals like Le Guess Who? and All Ears. While the music from their first album was developed during a tour in Russia in February 2016, the music on Playmates was recorded during four intense days at the SOFA studio in Oslo in September 2017. The front cover of the Scandinavian trio Mudderstens new release “Playmates” give as…
Husene våre er museer
Oker is an acoustic improvising quartet based in Oslo, consisting of Adrian Fiskum Myhr on bass, Jan Martin Gismervik on drums, Torstein Lavik Larsen on trumpet and Fredrik Rasten on guitar. The music combines material from expanded instrumental techniques with open tonalities and deconstructed grooves. It can be described as rich textures in gradual change, but also as responsive and spontaneous. The ensemble balances between airy gestures and dense collective blocks of sound.
Oker is ma…
Lieber Heiland, laß uns sterben
In Martin Küchen own words: Poetry and reality. The music goes in and out of, and away from, and into again. Reality and poetry. The music is uninterested in genre denominations and ideological markers. Music grows and is shaped by and out of realities, living and artistic. Sound is an audible reflection of you. Even you in silence. And you from sound, from the particular music that invaded your way of life; the ever-increasing global audible pressure chamber in which your spirit falls aga…
Cut Air
Jim Denley has been playing flute since 1969 - after 50 years of a curious love/hate relationship with the instrument this is his first solo flute-only recording. He aims to situate this music within a global outlook, with a pacific perspective. Being from a continent, Australia, where there is no flute tradition, he’s taken cues and elements from flute traditions that still have power and currency — the European flute with it’s purity, brilliance and dexterity, the earthy simplicity of bamboos …
A Pond in My Livingroom
A pond in my living room’ is the second solo album of Montréal-based sound artist and wind player Philippe Lauzier, and his debut album for SOFA. On this record Lauzier is using multiple tracks of bass clarinet to create a luxuriant field of overtones and meticulous micropolyphonies. The result is a beautiful record with overlapping and long mesmeric sequences of sound.
Philippe Lauzier (b. 1977) is an active musician from Montreal, Canada. Working with several projects, Lauzier has been touring…