★Utech Records
Quantum Entanglement
*2023 stock* Quantum Entanglement is the final release of Utech Records' first decade. Lasse Marhaug has been a supporter and participant since inception and selected Runhild Gammelsaeter to collaborate with on this release. Two of the most genuine and creative artists in Utech Records' catalog have recorded a fitting close to ten years of the label’s history.
If I Die Before I Wake
After three years Suzuki Junzo returns to Utech Records with If I Die Before I Wake, his fourth full-length release for the label. Junzo is joined by Ikuro Takahashi of LSD March, Kousokuya, Fushitsusha and High Rise. If I Die is a record comprised of roaring space blues and empyrean haze. Nothing less than imposing and exquisite, If I Die is conceivably Suzuki Junzo’s greatest recorded work.Released initially on cassette, the expanded vinyl adds one unreleased track and offers the two live reco…
Lights on Water
Lights on Water is the second Sum of R album on Utech Records after their self titled debut, and the first full-length as the duo of Reto Mäder (bass guitar, electronics, drums, piano, samples) and Julia Valentina Wolf (guitar) after the Ride Out The Waves EP. The album finds the Swiss duo discovering their roots within a prehistoric ceremonial context. Those roots go back to times where the sounds of nature were reigned in, ritualized and utilized as food for the soul. They are the cries…
Portrait of Madeleine Elster
Portrait of Madeleine Elster is the third solo album for Utech Records by Japanese psychedelic troubadour Suzuki Junzo. A 21st century drone/space electric-blues album in the style of Ode to a Blue Ghost and Eight-Sided Infinity. Crystalline guitar passages soaked in reverb and distorted sadness. Junzo is joined by Ikuro Takahashi of LSD March, Kousokuya and ex-drummer of Fushitsusha and High Rise.
Nothing Changes No One Can Change Anything
Recorded at H sei University, Tokyo, April 26, 1996. 'No band on Earth has ever sounded like Fushitsusha. Sure, there are antecedents to their mind-scraping, soul-searing roar: Blue Cheer's in there, as is Hendrix circa 1970, when he'd given up the showmanship of 1967 and '68 and aimed himself straight at the heart of the music, but nobody ever exploded the rock power trio form the way Keiji Haino, Yasushi Ozawa and Jun Kosugi did. Clad in black, impassive and stoic, the bassist and drummer buil…
Uncrossing / Ice Mole
Mamiffer’s "Uncrossing" differs from their contribution on the split LP with Oakeater, focusing more on subtle textures and sparse, plaintive piano. The quiet background slowly becomes deeper and more cavernous, reverberating everything around it before dropping to silence, disrupted by a deep, echoing gunshot-like drum beat. Soon the track builds again, bringing in a massive organ drone and a huge wall of scraping and grinding sounds over the disquieting rhythm. While the track on the Oakeate…
Mirrors & tides
Eyes closed, ears wide open, we are given freedom to dream the void. Sweeping, intricate, sometimes ominous yet always exuding a warmth and depth of emotion, The Stargazer's Assistant produces pure cinema of sound. For the new EP, David J. Smith (Guapo) is joined by Circle vocalist Mika Rttö', who sings on the heart-breaking 'Coral Butterfly'. David also had the honour of playing the late Finnish jazz drummer Edward Vesala's Sound & Fury collection of unique metal percussion. Ancient fore…
Lammergyer
The Lammergyer. A spaceship created by a race thousands of generations dead. With a stardrive so shitfire lethal that just to enter an inhabited system was to trigger a fatal ecological cataclysm. Lammergyer. To say it was to hear the slamming of sarcophagus lids in hell. The anti-genesis. The world killer. –Kicking the Monolithic Habit, Heavy Metal, Vol. 19-1Burning Tree consists of Dag Erik Knedal Andersen on drums and Dag Stiberg on sax. The duo have created a harsh free jazz record inspired…
Another temple of the great beast 666
K11 is a project of Italian sound artist Pietro Riparbelli and lives within the world of radio signals, transcommunication and other invisible phenomena, to create a dimension where the main sound sources are signals from shortwave radio receivers. Another temple to the Great Beast 666 has been composed from said sound sources recorded during an Instrumental Transcommunication Action realized within the Temple of Diana in Cefalù, Sicily. The temple is famously known for its association wi…
Cities
Strong field recordings capture more than just the sound of an area, they capture a mood and spirit of the place and people. On Cities, local color and nature recordings clash with riots and discord, capturing the full human experience across the world. Literal and metaphorical “found music” appears: the booming stereo of a passing car or distant church bells, as does the rhythmic engine hum of a bus or the chirping of birds. This tour is a fast paced one, rapidly weaving through the geog…
Primeval Man Born of the Cosmic Egg
In Chinese mythology, Pan Gu is the primeval man, born of the cosmic egg. One day the egg split open. The top half became the sky and the bottom half the earth. Pan Gu, who emerged from the broken egg, grew ten feet taller every day, just as the sky became ten feet higher and the earth ten feet thicker. After 18,000 years Pan Gu died. Then, like the cosmic egg, he split into a number of parts. His head formed the sun and moon, his blood the rivers and seas, his hair the forests, his sweat the ra…
Ephemeral as Petals
Ephemeral as Petals conjures a nuanced, emotion drenched world from a minimalist core of voice and piano. Higuchi’s voice slides from bombast to mournful chant effortlessly, channeling Diamanda Galas as much as Freddie Mercury, with the instrumental space between vocal passages serving to amplify its affecting resonance. From interpretations of jazz standards to her own compositions, this is album makes for a difficult but captivating new direction in sound.
The Ominous
Jacob is the new project by David Cordero (Úrsula) and Marco Serrato (Orthodox). The duo first collaborated on the arrangements that would become the Emma soundtrack. With a mutual love for sci fi and horror films, Jacob push their dark sonics further on The Ominous, a piece for el cine de la mente. Atonal, dissonant string scrapes meld together in discomforting walls of noise, while hidden forces project an ambiguous malignance lurking in the deep fog. Bleak atmospheres and an abyss of s…
Polaris
Dutch sax/drums duo Dead Neanderthals aims directly for the jugular with their new album Polaris, an all-acoustic tour de force mastered by the king of noise: Lasse Marhaug. This abrasive duo ventures into more abstract territory, where they firmly uncouple their music from structure, leaving behind any restrictions that the seemingly reasonable combination of sound and rhythm might bring and which results in an unhealthy dose of acoustic noise
Kampanerura
Kampanerura is the name of a boy appearing in the children's story Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), Japanese poet and author of children's literature. A boy with pure soul transmigrates and becomes a dissipated man around a trip to the bottom in Asia. From accompanying text by Masayoshi Urabe 'What are my legs on? What are my feet standing on? Sand? I feel something sharp and pointed! And a gentle breeze where am I? The sea? I feel it flowing! I've crossed ove…
Centering and displacement
To manipulate a recording of the improvised process is to directly dilute spontaneous conception, and thank god for that. Centering and Displacement was composed in the winter-summer of 2008 in Chicago. A body of improvised source material was collected, segmented and organized by a simple chance operation. These segments were then orchestrated into a sound program and arranged by order of the strict composed form. At times, the score also regulated post-recorded effects to manipulate the origin…
Bengt
Bengt is the new solo recording by Mats Gustafsson and is dedicated to Bengt Nordström. Mats Gustafsson plays a plastic alto sax. A classic Grafton sax. The type of sax that was used by Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Bengt Nordström. Nordström is best known having produced Albert Ayler´s first recording Something Different!!!!!! on his Bird Note imprint. It is in his own role as a sax player Bengt was truly inventive. Bengt was playing solo sax improvisation already in 1962 (!!!) Nor…
Dark Places
Certain places are more horrifying than others, closer to the source of primordial terror, be it the netherworld, the glacial outerspace of Lovecraftian ancient evil or simply the subconscious. Such places are sources of myth and awe. For their second album, Owwl tapped into these sources. Dark Places channels the world's sinister sites. The results are minimally shifting walls of drone, oppressive and entrancing like stars in a forlorn place or the historic pitfall of ground drenched with…
Anro
A narrow path of safety extending through the gloom, its edges bleeding into the fearful zones of disorder and formlessness that enclose it. Paths create borders, they limn the known from the unknown, the clean from the unclean, the citizen from the exile, the present from the past. But while paths create boundaries, they themselves are ambivalent, neither here nor there, neither now nor then. The act of making a path where none existed always involves the subjugation of the unknown and f…
It All Falls Apart
The debut release from Polish composer Adrian Aniol, It All Falls Apart, is a slow, fog-enshrouded journey upriver into the mouth of madness. Slow, frigid waves of sound seep in from the misty distance. White noise clashes with subsonic percussive crashes piling on the unease and tension that builds to an appropriately lunatic conclusion. The B-side features a remix of the entire piece by Steven Hess (Locrian, Ural Umbo). No computers were used on the remix. The piece was literally done …