★Unsounds
Hypnokaséta
“Hypnokaséta (2020-2021) is a continuous set of 16 pieces for string quartet, improviser (playing cassettes and any instrument) and live electronics. The source material is based on dreams that I had during the first few months of lockdown, April-June 2020. Accounts of these dreams are encoded in the music that is played by the quartet and also encrypted in the sound textures that surround this. The pieces alternate between quartet as the foreground and electronic interludes, where solos or duos…
Caruso
Irish composer David Fennessy is known for his intricate textures and arresting harmonies: the four works presented on this album, Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun), and the viola driven triptych Hauptstimme, Nebenstimme, and Nox, represent the many facets of his inventive music. The music in Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun) is almost completely made up of very short extracts from gramophone recordings of the Italian tenor opera singer Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) dated between 1903 and 19…
(Amsterdam) Memory Space
*2024 stock* The openness of Lucier's instructions belie the difficulty in dealing with the idea of how one can translate a sound from one medium into another and what kind of transformation of information takes place in that exchange. While interpreting this work, a musician becomes intensely aware of the processes by which one listens, both consciously and subconsciously; how one is constantly decoding sounds in one’s environment, filtering out essential and non-essential information, discerni…
Music For Safe Piece
*2024 stock* Music for Safe Piece is the result of an artistic experiment that lasted for four years, where Andy Moor was creating a live soundscape for a performance of a unique nature. Choreographer Valentina Campora has created a series of semi-private events where she and Moor, new parents of a baby boy, were performing for a small audience with the young child. Campora was dancing with her baby, Moor provided a sound world that supported and harbored the performance. As the boy grew up and …
The Body Imitates The Landscape
The music on this album originates in the interactive sound installation The Body Imitates the Landscape by artist Adi Hollander: she designed a collection of ergonomic objects that are meant to transform music into vibrations felt through the entire body. Hollander was inspired by the Japanese book Karada by Michitaro Tada about the ‘school of the body’. Hollander and Claudio F. Baroni made a live version of the installation where Baroni’s music, performed by Maze, was experienced live by the p…
Fragments
The album Fragments places Gabriele Tinti's poems and Roger Ballen's images in the context of Massimo Pupillo's sound world, where the inevitability of suffering is expressed through Ballen's uniquely dark recitation.
Looking for Daniel
We commemorate the late Phill Niblock with this release made in close collaboration with the composer just before his passing in January 2024. His life and work have had a profound influence on many contemporary composers, performers and artists, so it is a great honour to be able to present here, together with Echonance Festival, recordings of some of his very last compositions. The two works on this album, “Biliana” (2023) and “Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel” (2019) represent t…
Ice In A Hot World
Thermal (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn) formed in 2001, three musicians from different musical backgrounds, evolving along their personal routes to meet in free improvisations. For twenty years they’ve been taking their subtle and explosive music throughout Europe. Unsounds released their first album Thermal in 2003. In 2023 the trio of quiet giants comes back with Ice in a Hot World, a new album recorded live in Avignon. The Thermal powerhouse has become highly confident but spontaneit…
Ridgeway
A set of compositions by composer Kate Moore written around the concept of connecting memory of places and sensory experience, the album centres on the two major pieces, Ridgeway (2009) and The Dam (2015). Moore is at her most expressive in those immersive, visceral works, as she refers to personal experience and memories. In the title piece, Ridgeway, the giant white horse of Uffington, set in the dramatic prehistoric landscape where Moore lived for a time as a child, comes to life as in a powe…
I Don't Want To Be An Individual All On My Own
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* I Don't Want To Be An Individual All On My Own relates the powerful yet incomplete impressions of a childhood memory. The story takes us to a garden party where Genevieve, turning 8, and her mother, are celebrating their birthdays with friends and family. Various characters will come into focus during the evening as young Genevieve moves between her childlike world and that of the adults. We discover the people around her as she experiences them in a new ligh…
Revolver
*2023 stock* Inspired by the kinetic physicality and aesthetics of balance found in Ken Unsworth's work, the music embodies a feeling of suspension between movement and stasis. Evolving and revolving melodies, poised skilfully in polyrhythmic structures, the music creates an intoxicating and emotional impression. There is a feeling of constant motion and flow of sonic currents that typifies much of Kate Moore's music.
The music shifts from the material world, the gradually shifting stone-like cy…
Unprotected Sleep
Tip! *In process of stocking* Christine Abdnelnour and Andy Moor have explored the notion of hypnagogia or ‘Unprotected Sleep’ to drive their process for this improvised album, delving in their own experience and memories. Unprotected sleep is commonly defined as an altered state of consciousness that occurs beyond the proper or intended time of waking up, not sleeping in your own safe bed, or even sleeping without a blanket. Being slightly out of phase, one is vulnerable, fragile, but the mind …
Amiandos
Yannis Kyriakides evokes memories of a site and of the workers of the mines of Amiandos, reflecting on a past not that far gone. In 7 pieces he tells profound stories of loss, and of the fascination for a magnificent and malignant stone. Amiandos is Kyriakides 8th album on Unsounds records.
Clap. An Anatomy of Applause
Clap. An Anatomy of Applause is a compilation of original works by a group of musicians and composers brought together by Andrea Stillacci and Unsounds. The project goal is to highlight the radically different forms and meanings that the sound of applause can take according to its context. The principle was to work from original recordings of each artist’s choice, with sources ranging from the thunderous applause celebrating Maria Callas’ last public appearance to the crowds cheering at the fall…
In Otherness Oneself
Kaja Draksler states that “as a person who speaks and understands different languages, I have an impression that my identity is multifaceted, I have to lose something in myself in order to let the “spirit” of a new language inside me. So in this way I am constantly becoming in otherness myself.” In building this album pianist and composer Kaja Draksler worked on developing specific musical languages for each piece. She attempted to restrict herself to maintaining each language although as she po…
CyberSongs
CyberSongs is a 'transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices' by composer/artist Barbara Ellison. She delves in this work into the sonic intricacies of voice avatars and the ‘musicalisation’ of TTS (Text-to-speech), a type of speech synthesis application that is used to create a spoken sound version of raw text in a computer document. In the 13 tracks of this album, she creates hypnotic textures of vocal utterances through the intensive and extensive use of repetition, as tools and mate…
Pavilion
Andy Moor (guitar) and Yannis Kyriakides (electronics) made a recording In at Xavier Veilhan’s ‘Studio Venezia’ at the French pavilion, Venice Art Biennale. They were in residence there for a few days in October 2017 recording and performing in an open environment.
Face
* Beautiful gatefold vinyl designed by the studio Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam with 12 page booklet featuring the photographic work of Johannes Schwartz and text of Maria Barnas used in the multimedia production of the work. * Face is a multimedia composition for voice, violin, piano, recorders, live electronics and video, based around the use of facial and emotion recognition software. Performers: Electra, Diamanda Dramm (violin), Susanna Borsch (recorder), Michaela Riener (soprano), Saskia L…
The Hum
Anne La Berge, flutes and voice. Joe Williamson, double bass and voice. Flutist-composer Anne La Berge, an American living in Amsterdam, and bassist Joe Williamson, a Canadian based in Stockholm, have formed a new duo. Both artists are known for their eccentric approach to text, either in song writing, or music compositions. With two intriguing text/music pieces that sound like odd radio plays, they introduce the listener to the ambiguities of their unrestricted fantasy. A pleasurable, sometimes…
Tout Ce Que Je Sais
CD edition. The duo Anne-James Chaton and Andy Moor has produced original works where poetry and guitar combine in explorations of thematic axes. With the project ‘Heretics’, of which Tout Ce Que Je Sais (All I know) is the second part, they revive the most obscure, violent, erotic passions, summoning the great figures of their personal mythologies. In the company of Caravaggio, Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs and figures such as Jose Mujica, the duo immerses the listener in another wor…