New Arrivals
The backside suite
'Created and performed by Christian MUNTHE. Upside-down steel 6-string arch top acoustic guitar. Touched by: guitar-pick, palm of hand, fingertips, nails, lips, tongue, teeth, breath, saliva, beer bottle, whiskey tumbler, plastic ball-point pen, paperback book, legs Christian MUNTHE is a Swedish free improviser that since the 1980's concentrates on the sonic possibilities offered by the acoustic guitar in solo as well as various ensemble settings. He has released recordings in his own name and …
Malpais
Malpais is the first collaborative effort between William Fowler Collins and Gog. With both musicians based in the American Southwest (WFC in New Mexico and Gog in Arizona), the music is layered with hallucinatory visions of abandoned mines, atomic bomb blasts, genocide, and space travel. The listener is taken to a place that feels as though it could be the surface of the moon or a scorched earth strewn with bone dust and ash. Photograph by Max Aguilera-Hellweg.
Music for a distance
Music for a Distance is the second release in the small music series. The title of the work in relation to the cover images (abstract photographs of Julius’ wife resembling landscapes merging into a distant horizon) suggests a work of uncommon poetic perception and inspiration. With the opening track "Music for a Distance," Julius achieves a sensitive balance of unpredictability and deliberate design, at times resembling a symphony of insects, complete with crickets and cicadas and rustling leav…
s3d (Ear & Eye)
s3d presents a world of fresh sounds from invented and unconventional instruments with names as curious and evocative as the sounds they produce: mothics, shimsaw, kyurukyuttsu, gloopdrum, corrugahorn, sprong, sundrum and many more. An international collaboration. Twelve experimental instrument builders/improvisors in an inspirational world-first.
Raudales
Rogelio Sosa was born in Mexico City in 1977. His work explores a wide range of aspects that deal with sound morphology, structures of auditory reference, intensification of the acoustic space and performativity. His projects include solo and collective improvisations, music compositions, sound actions and sound installations. All of these are produced using electronic media. He started studying musical composition with Julio Estrada and then electroacoustic music at the Ateliers UPIC and IRCAM …
Chikatetsu - Sax Solo
Fushitsusha Tokyo underground legend Tamio Shiraishi in solo alto saxophone solos from different subway stations in Queens, NYC, a unique voice interacting with an extreme urban environment. "Alto saxophone - Tamio Shiraishi. A set of unique site-specific live recordings from one of the true legends of the Tokyo underground, taped at a number of different subway stations in Queens, NYC. Tamio Shiraishi is one of the legends of the Japanese underground. For over thirty years he has continued to …
Fancies, forbearance
Fancy: a 17th century term generally describing a composition in which form is of secondary importance. Fancies were usually contra-puntal and in several sections. (The Oxford Dictionary of Music)Fancies (2009) served to reconcile previously unsettled material, based upon a scheme that condones disparity between its constituent parts. In the period since its completion, and subsequent issue on cassette, Fancies has come to represent an antithesis to what I originally termed ‘a work in parenthesi…
Leyfou Ljosinu
Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir presents a new album, Leyfdu Ljósinu (trans. "Allow The Light"), recorded live at the Music Research Centre, University of York, in January 2012, by Tony Myatt, using a SoundField ST450 Ambisonic microphone and two Neumann U87 microphones (NB -- it was not played in a concert environment and there was no audience). To be faithful to time and space -- elements vital to the movement of sound -- this album was recorded entirely live, with no post-tampering …
Ballads of the Research Department
The Boats are a duo consisting of Craig Tattersall (ex-Hood, The Remote Viewer, and owner of the Cotton Goods label) and Andrew Hargreaves (Tape Loop Orchestra) as well a rotating roster of guest musicians and vocalists. While Ballads of the Research Department is their 12k debut, it follows up a string of critically acclaimed and genre favorites such as Sleepy Insect Music (Flau/Home Normal, 2010), Words Are Something (Home Normal, 2009), and limited editions released on their own Our Small Ide…
Stop Playing
Wolfgang Mitterer is playing the organ and leaves no tone unturned. The composer beams the traditional instrument straight into the 21st century – feel free to follow suit!The organ is a machine, and Wolfgang Mitterer certainly knows how to operate machines. Quite early on his passion for this complex instrument got hooked up to the manifold possibilities available in a digital studio setting; so, meanwhile the Austrian composer has become both: a much admired contemporary organist with a pencha…
Out of the past
'Featuring Derek Bailey on electric guitar and Steve Noble on drums & cymbals. Recorded in a London studio in February of 1999 and not released until now.'
Air Museum
Air Museum blurs the lines between acoustic and electronic music even more without sacrificing melody or the delicacy of their sound. It is an album of firsts. It was the first album that the acoustic instruments were not processed via a computer. Instead, the processing of the instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitar, cello, accordion, piano, bass etc.) was done using a variety of pedals, modular synths, and other analog techniques. While acoustic instruments were used extensively, …
The Shy Volcanic Society At The Bear And Bird Parade
A split album with Volcano the Bear and La STPO. VTB tracks 1-5 and STPO tracks 6-9. Bears and Birds, oh my! One side keeps the hot hot. And the other keeps the weird weird. VTB’s typically atypical entomological set scratches like a hive that has evolved just to the point of thumping out tribal fealties to its giant insect God-Thing. Environmentally ritualized sub-rhythms mix musique-concrete with actual concrete, forming freakishly minimal foundations for the hive of whatevers to swarm within.…
Limaro
Xavier Charles (clarinet), Nicolas Desmarchellier (guitar), Ulrich Phillipp (doublebass), Eiko Yamada (flute) and Burkhard Schlothauer (violin). Recorded live in concert direct to digital stereo by Uli Böttcher 18-06-07, Bergkirche-Wiesbaden.
Intervals
'Z'EV: percussion. Jason Kahn: percussion, analog synthetizer. Recorded by Jason Kahn April 13-14, 2009 in Zürich and Lausanne, Switzerland. Mixed and mastered by Z'EV. Artwork by Mirt.' label info Jason Kahn, born 1960, New York, USA. Composition, installations, percussion, electronics. Based in Zürich, Switzerland. Z'EV. After studying at CalArts with Concrete Poet Emmett Williams he concentrated on producing visual and sound poetries, and was included in the ÔSecond Generation' show at the Mu…
White Cable, Black Wires
A stunning series of duo improvisations from two of the world's finest string players, whose shared dynamism and intensity of purpose produces fluid, powerful music that ranges from dense viscosity to swift effervescence.With all-strings improvisation there's often a danger of pseudo-classicism, of sounding vaguely like modernist chamber music, replete with refined flourishes and familiar motifs. Edwards and Lee don't just avoid this but go nowhere near it, heading off in another direction entir…
Hibakusha
Cyclic loops agglomerates resting on static drones intertwined by flashes of electronic frequencies; algorithmic manipulations of undefined sound materials moved by bouncing delays and recurring panoramic space variations; a sequence of metallic waves in continuous tonal variation, heavy dissonances and sonic stratifications in progressive and pseudo-randomic composition/decomposition; desolate silences corrupted by resounding echoes of entangled electric rhythmic impulses... Longly awaited re-e…
Abraum
a new subway tunnel is being built in the harbor area of hamburg's inner city. the tunneling produces waste and the waste needs to be disposed of. in this case sand and shredded rubble are mixed with groundwater in order to be pumped out through steel tubes with a diameter of approximately 80cm. the sounds that are produced in the tubes are object of field recordings that i made at different times and places on site. it was immediately apparent that the continuum of the basic sounds that i used …
Our Prayer
Another previously-unreleased gem from South African pianist/composer Chris McGregor and his cohorts in '60s UK free jazz. Our Prayer was culled from the same sessions that produced the also never-released Up To Earth in 1969 and was produced by Joe Boyd and engineered by John Wood at Sound Techniques studio. The previous year they had signed to Joe Boyd's illustrious Witchseason production company alongside Fairport Convention, John and Beverley Martyn, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Ba…
The Collected Poem For Blind Lemon Jefferson
"Ikef continues to mine the extraordinary musical territory of St. Louis's fervent '60s musical innovators with the reissue of the impossibly rare Collected Poem For Blind Lemon Jefferson. Originally released on the late, brilliant saxophonist Julius Hemphill's artist run Mbari label in 1971, Blind Lemon is a highly energetic, raw and primitive avant-garde take on the Blues Mythos. Hemphill, named 'one of free jazz's most visionary composers' (Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide) is in full form as he…