★Sub Rosa
The Tower of Mirrors
25 years ago, David Shea released a crafty piece of complex philosophical and narrative audio collage: The Tower of Mirrors. Composed and produced in New York City, during September-October 1995, it includes 24 tracks, and features guests such as David Morley on analog synthesizer programming, Dave Douglas on trumpet, Zeena Parkins on piano and prepared piano, and Jim Pugliese on percussions.This is what David Shea had to say about it in 1995: "In 1994, I wrote a work based on the Hsi-Yu Chi nov…
Wall of Sounds: Drones, Patterns, Noises
Wall of Sound is a music of sonic sensations. It is a physical and sensual approach to the phenomenon of thick sound worlds. Sound waves become physical objects, four-dimensional sonic sculptures to be experienced, bodily and mentally. Ulrich Krieger's Wall Of Sound is a series of CDs about music that invites the listener to indulge themselves in sound. It doesn't guide an audience through a narrative, like a song, but offers the listener slow changing and developing soundscapes, acoustic sculpt…
Dr. Boogie Presents Shim Sham Shimmy
A fundamental collection devoted to rare and lost recordings from the 1920s to the 1960s. Is it really possible to imagine what modern music would sound like if a few pioneering geniuses had not had the idea of electrifying their instruments, especially guitar and harmonica, between 1945 and 1950? Some purist will regret this evolution, but, in the '50s, the new sound will be heard in all the studios and night clubs of the United States; it will become a staple on the radio, in stores, at weddin…
Conversations With the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archives
Double CD version. Includes color insert. Double LP/CD curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Sub Rosa. Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it …
Phosphorescent Dreams
CD version. Available for the first time outside Japan, and on LP and CD, Phosphorescent Dreams is another epic album of symphonic schizophrenic avant-rock from Univers Zero, originally released in 2014 -- only on CD -- on the Japanese label Arcàngelo. Phosphorescent Dreams presents at the same time, in the same track, even on a single moment, the complex musical schemes and ways of Univers Zero, ranging from maximalism to minimalism, classical avant-garde with a 2020 vibe in a constant flux. In…
Works 1958-1979
2019 repress. "This is a wide panorama of Nam June Paik work as musician -- 'Hommage à John Cage' (1958-1959), 'Étude for Pianoforte' (1959-1960) and 'Simple' (1961) are good exemple of neodada music and de-structuration in the late 50's, this is basically irreverent audio-collages. 'Prepared Piano for Merce Cunningham' (1977) captures an improvised performance by Paik on a de-tuned piano. While 'Prepared for Merce Cunningham' was later mixed and edited for use by Merce Cunningham, this raw, str…
Broken Music
**Much needed small repress avaiilable** Milan Knizak 1979's masterpiece never re-released before. Presented as a gatefold with the original design. Before everyone else - Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide - there was Milan Knizak. In 1964, Milan Knizak, a member of Fluxus from behind the Iron Curtain, sat down on a sidewalk near the Charles Bridge in Prague, laid down a paper carpet right into the street, and starts tearing pages out of books and burning t…
String Quartets
Violin was Milan Knizak's first instrument. He has composed hundred of works of this ilk; the first one DHK, 45 years ago. Next to his destroyed works, Milan took notations of different composers, cut them and put them together (with his own score) into a collage, expressing his feelings and his apprehension of music.Fama Q is a string quartet founded in 2005 in Prague. Its members, being also orchestral musicians with the Prague Philharmonia, were always devoted to chamber and string quartet mu…
Institute of Sonology 1959-1969
This is a collection of electronic works composed between 1959 and 1969 at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Once again, Sub Rosa offers a chance to reflect upon a rare lineage of electronic music's origins, a revolution of the fifties and sixties when an art form was emerging without a base -- ex nihilo -- a new music produced by machines designed to construct the new. Utrecht University's large complex of studios that comprised the Philips laboratories housed an extensive collect…
Kalmykian Archaic and Soviet Folk
Since the beginning of its foundation, Sub Rosa has been interested in ethnographic recordings - among the milestones: the Inuit anthology, the Bhutan recordings by John Levy... More recently, the works of David Toop (Yamomami shamanism) and Ragnar Johnson (Yemen, Ethiopia, recorded in the early 1970s). The time in which the recording is done, it matters a lot because it also captures the air of that Time. On the other hand, the label can only feel it from where they are. It is in this state of …
Instrumental
Swiss electro-acoustic artist Israel Quellet's fifth opus, Instrumental, is a new work focused on the Church organ. Complex and mysterious, secular and modern - it makes for another challenging listen. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1972, Israel Quellet worked in the psychiatric field for several years. At 16, he discovers on his own some different soundworlds, such as Miles Davis's electric era, Sun Ra, Dub, German cosmic music, Magma, Zappa and many more. In 1997, he stepped into the action a…
Spectra Ex Machina: A Sound Anthology of Occult Phenomena
"Have a gramophone in every grave..." --James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) The anthology Spectra Ex Machina brings together rare documents pertaining to so-called occult phenomena, most of them taken from little-known archives. In the course of three volumes, this series traces an audio history of parapsychology through the exploration of spiritualism and haunted houses (Vol. 1); musician mediums (vol. 2); experiences of extrasensory perceptions (clairvoyance, psychokinesis, etc.) and electronic voice …
Preludes, Variations, Studies and Incidental Music
These two discs reveal Christian Wolff as a composer fully exploring, in different ways, the continuum between music which is highly fragmented, embracing extended silences [composed or indeterminate], to that which is more progressive and seemingly driven, albeit taking in disarming and unconventional routes. As a body of repertoire, these works are remarkable for their freshness of musical thought and energy (John Cage considered Wolff to be the most 'musical' of the experimental composers).Ch…
Cloud Atlas/Vertical Study
Cloud Atlas is a collection of ten short pieces composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi between 1985 to 1999. Vertical Study gathers rare pieces composed by Claude Ledoux. Both are performed by Japanese pianist Kaoru Tashiro. "Kaoru
produces serene, yet rich sound texture; the fluctuation of beat and
the perspective of the motif are ingenious. I hope many more people will
taste this joy of finding a grain of gold with your own eyes and ears,
from her commercialism-unrelated, sincere and an experimental…
Talking About The Weather
Talking About The Weather: Teacher and student. Past and present. Two drummers. Two men. Two fathers. Friends. A conversation. A dialogue of the drums. Following up on a drum/percussion duo Eric Thielemans and Billy Hart did in the Summer of 2016 at the Jazz Middelheim festival, these two drummers decided to dedicate time to continue and deepen their versatile dialogues on and around the drums. The meeting and recording of Talking About The Weather took place on January 7-9, 2018 at "Figure 8 Re…
Just Like a River
Edition of 400 copie, on marbled vinyl. Yannick Franck (Orphan Swords, RAUM) presents his new project: Mt Gemini. A deconstruction of ska, rocksteady, and skinhead reggae from the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Rather a passionate deconstruction of a genre than compositions or remixes per se, this incantatory tribute favors abstraction using loops, distortion, compression, variations of speed and height, and effects (delay, reverb, chorus). Recorded in different states of altered consciousness, Mt Gemini…
Classics Remastered (1993-1998)
Double LP version. Cristian Vogel\'s best techno tracks from the \'90s, remastered in 2015. All tracks originally recorded between 1993 and 1998 in Brighton, UK. Cristian Vogel is a composer and music producer, known for his DJ sets and live performances as well as his studio composition and production (having worked with artists such as Radiohead, Maxïmo Park, Chicks on Speed, and Thom Yorke). Vogel was born in Chile 1972 and grew up in the UK; he has been touring consistently since 1992 as DJ …
The Noise Of Art: Works for Intonarumori
Double LP version. Gatefold sleeve, embossed; Includes four-page booklet. The Noise Of Art: Works for Intonarumori contains seven compositions, created by the Opening Performance Orchestra, Blixa Bargeld, Luciano Chessa, and Fred Möpert.
All the pieces relate to the theme of futurism and employ intonarumori,
instruments invented and used more than a century ago by the Italian
Futurists in their noise compositions. CD version includes 16-page
booklet. "In antiquity, life was nothing but silen…
Greek Experimental Electronic Music 1966-2016
An Anthology of Greek Experimental Electronic Music 1966-2016 aspires to map the heterogenous landscape of Greek experimental electronic music in all its contextual, sociopolitical, geographical and aesthetic disparity. With a single exception: it zeroes in on post-80s music. It comprises works of very different kinds by composers of all sorts of backgrounds that, still, can be thought of, as both "Greeks" and "experimentalists". Experimental electronic music is generally expected to be highly v…
Yom Kippur 1973
The record you are holding in your hands is a previously unheard masterpiece of Israeli multimedia artist Ami Shavit. As a professor of both philosophy and art and established kinetic artist in the 1970s Shavit was fascinated with new and interactive technologies. While mostly focusing on visual art and mixed-media installations, a trip to New York in 1972 introduced him to synthesizers and triggered his curiosity to do some explorations into the world of music or "sound" as he preferred to call…