New Arrivals
Lost Prayers
Originally released in a tiny pressing of just 200 CD-Rs by Digitalis Industries, this early James Blackshaw release is brought back in print by the Tompkins Square label, who on the back of last year's 'Cloud Of Unknowing' are intent upon reintroducing the guitarist' back-catalogue to his growing legion of fans (of whom there is almost certainly more than 200). 'Lost Prayers And Motionless Dances' is a single thirty-five minute composition, opening with droning harmonium passages and only…
Live installation at Loop-Line recorded by Toshiya Tsunoda
USW56, USW57, USW59, USW61, USW113, these five hand-made electronics hanged from a ceiling have an ultrasonic wave transmitter, a reciever and an amplifier. Each frequency of the ultrasonic wave is about 40khz but slightly different. And when each instrument swings, each frequency changes a little caused by the Doppler effect. On thier instruments we can hear beat signals between transmitted and received ultrasonic waves changed in frequency. (Manabu Suzuki) Where does art work appear? How do pe…
Recyclopaedia Britannica (Selected Works 1992-2002)
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly "topical" audio-jokes at the expense of one's raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being "groovy", the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw m…
Here comes the sun
Barbara Romen, hammered dulcimer. Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet. Gunter Schneider, guitars. All music by B. Romen (AKM), K. Fagaschinski (AKM), and G. Schneider (AKM). Recorded by Christoph Amann at Amann Studios, Vienna, May 31st, 2008. Mixed and mastered by Christoph Amann with Schneider and Fagaschinski on October 31st, 2011. 300 copies.
800 000 Seconds In Harar
'CD digipak. CM von Hausswolff says: 'I was approached by my old friend and Radium 226.05 colleague Ulrich Hillebrand, now director of Angered Theatre in Göteborg. He informed me that there was a new play in the process of being written by author and theorist Michael Azar called 'Jag r en annan' (I is another) stemming form the famous letter written by Arthur Rimbaud in his youth. The play uses Rimbaud's life from being a young poet in Charleville ending with him being the trader in Harar,…
The Last Recording
Final solo alto sax blasting from the late legendary Japanese underground hero Kaoru Abe. Abe was an inspiration to free/jazz and Japanese noise lovers world-wide, lived a fast and hard life and ripped his guts inside out on each and every of his many releases. Extreme music for those who need it.
Old Sights, New Sounds
Recorded at Incus HQ, London, in October 2010, this duo is a delight that should refresh even the most jaded ears. Lol Coxhill and Alex Ward are both veteran improvisers and regular participants on the London scene, so it was inevitable that they would eventually play together as a duo. As evidenced below by YouTube, that happened in August 2010 at John Russell's annual Fete Qua Qua; the pairing was repeated the following month at Sybil Madrigal's monthly Boat Ting gig on the Thames (on the…
Scandinavian parts (immersive live salvage supplement)
The size of the stage, position of the equipment, monitor position and height, hall architecture and acoustics, capacity and attendance, temperature and humidity, and sound level (dB) or Leq Meter limiting all varied from event to event. Each of the final recordings documents the performed audio output, each hall's acoustics, the audience's reaction, and their proximity to the recorder, all from an onstage position, while retaining the auditorium's spatial impression. Recordings failed, or…
Tetralogy (1978-1982)
'A 2-CD set containing four very different settings all featuring Paul Rutherford (trombone & euphonium): two festival solos - one with electronics and the other without; a festival brass quartet with George Lewis (trombone), Martin Mayes (french horn) & Melvyn Poore (tuba); and a studio trio with Paul Rogers (double bass) & Nigel Morris (drum set). The electronically enhanced solo and the brass quartet are unlike anything else in Rutherford's discography. All previously unissued.'
Caves
Riccardo Dillon Wanke’s Caves was composed and recorded in 2006 in Alfama (historical district of Lisbon, Portugal) using acoustic and electric guitars, saxophones and natural sound elements starting from pure radical improvisation evolving into the investigation of drones and static and looped music related to minimalism. At the center of these works are the binaural beats in musical composition, the results lying between classical composition, minimalistic improvisation and a "folk" sensitivit…
Vivian & Ondine
A brand new album from one of the most revered and acclaimed ambient composers of our time, Vivian & Ondine takes the form of a single, three-quarter hour piece, once again constructed from William Basinski's signature style of tape loop manipulation. While the narrative ebb and flow is largely pinned to a single tape fragment, Basinski merged a further "dozen or so" that sunk into the mix in just the right way, adding to the aura of fluctuation and continuous evolution that's so essential to th…
Thought for Food
Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web details on The Books are sketchy, but I have ascertained that they're a duo consisting of guitarist Nick Zammuto, who lives in North Carolina and has released some solo material under his surname, and cellist Paul de Jong, who lives in New York and has composed for dance, theater and film. After that, the pool of Books information dries up fast. The music is similarl…
347
'Tim uses several boxes of speakers and Seijiro uses a snare drum as a resonance box, with microphones. They put boxes for their music in another box = the space. They create different levels of universe within the space. From micro to macro. Always with one clear intention: to improvise listening and to organize sonic space together in a very delicate way.Thanks to La Comète 347, Paris. 'Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to i…
33 bays
Format: Glass-mastered CD. Packaging: Recycled Chipboard Sleeve. 33 bays was recorded in October 2009 in Kyoto, during a Japan tour by the duo of Tim Olive and Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, the two untitled tracks were chosen from a number of pieces captured over several days, showcasing the duo's attunement and dramatic sense of structure. Olive (one-string electric guitar) and Costa Monteiro (electro-acoustic devices) produce a rough, feral music …
Aural histories
Kristin Norderval (composer, vocalist) cut her musical teeth touring with Einstein on the Beach in 1992, went on to record works of American composers such as Tania Leon, David Lang, and Anne LeBaron, improvised in the New Circle Five with Pauline Oliveros and Susie Ibarra, and co-founded the electro-acoustic duo Zanana with trombonist Monique Buzzarté. Now she has released a solo CD of her works for voice and laptop. The composer writes: Aural Histories is a compilation of works for voic…
Cristallisation
Over 4 hours of improvisations were recorded over these two days in april 2010. We then trimmed the sound sequences and the silence, while keeping our specific interactions and phrasing of sounds between us and with the location. But sound is a flexible material and what remains of this session are frequencies that are like vestiges to be reinvented. To help this there is some 'presence'. The acoustic character and the intense immobility that fill the air of the chapel of Las Planques, in the da…
Rastakraut Pasta
1st release from the duo of Dieter Moebius & Conny Plank, originally released on Sky Records in 1980. As the title suggests, this album is heavily influenced by dug & reggae & those rhythms are incorporated into the ambient space-rock one would expect from these German pioneers of Kosmische musik.
Only
Pieces by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Hanns Eisler, Giacinto Scelsi, György Kurtag, Frederic Rzewski, Henri Pousseur, Théodore Botrel, Rudolf Siecynski, and Sephardic songs. Performed/interpreted by vocalist Marianne Pousseur. "I like to listen to music in places that haven't been designed for it. I like when music mixes in with noise. Only came from a very personal desire to open the doors of my musical world to the concreteness of daily life, to tear down the fictional barriers between places a…
Pharmelodies
A colossal and epic post-ambient symphony in three movements, where echoes of string instruments, deep drones of indecipherable origin, layered synthetic waves, slowed-down and distorted dark sonic masses challenge time with a para-immobility in constant turmoil, in an unpredictable, progressive and sometimes cyclic combination of statuesque sonic forms whose physiognomy is often known and familiar, while at the same time elusive, disturbing, arcane and mysterious... Another highest and …
Watershed
If the three compositions proposed by Denis Fournier have already been recorded, they merit to be here as resurgences, like scenarios encouraging the freedom of transformation without which free interpretation is nothing. “I often say that I don’t make improvised music, but that I improvise music. In other words, I put together there and then elements of my life, of my history, of my culture…” In other words, no structure commands the action. Every structure opens to the action (to sharing) whic…