New Arrivals
Live at café Oto
The Ex guitars meet Nilssen-Love & Vandermark duo. Lean Left throws together two explosive duos - the sax-drums collision course of Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilsson-Love with the piledriving guitarists from The Ex - to make up a positively apocalyptic quartet: an elemental musical force featuring Grade A international players zoning in and scrambling together rock, jazz, noise and blistering free improv into a highly-charged onstage assault, each member taking their sounds and bodies to th…
Free Action
2008 release. "A deep excursion into the laboratory of Germany's most important avant-garde jazz musician. A milestone of breaking down barriers between genres. Feat. Jean-Luc Ponty (Zappa, Mahavishnu). Originally released on MPS in 1967. Unique gatefold cardboard packaging."
Vital
In March 2006, Idea Fire Company made their first appearances in Europe. Core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust linked up with Frans de Waard and hit selected hot spots in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Adding de Waard (Beequeen, Shifts, Kapotte Muziek, Freiband, etc) was a brave gamble that paid off handsomely. Armed with only a tiny digital keyboard (Borecky), a radio/cassette boombox and small echo unit (Foust), and a sawed off MS 20 (de Waard), the trio captivated audiences large…
Garage Music
Bruce Russell has an MA in Political Studies, and works as an information designer. He has previously worked in the field of archives management, during which time he ran the National Radio sound archive. As a sound artist Russell is known mainly for his involvement in New Zealand's longest-running improvisational 'post-rock' group, the Dead C., although he also works in the field of radiophonic composition, and records as a solo artist and with the trio A Handful of Dust. He performs wit…
Sólaris
Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason are two composers used to shrugging off the distinction between experimental sound-art and deeply felt melodies. frost's vast, blackened post-industrial works often crystallize in moments of quiet beauty before disintegrating in pure visceral noise; bjarnason's orchestral music marries brutal modernism to classical aesthetics one moment and soaring ethereal harmonies the next. and yet here, on the tail of two widely acclaimed releases; bjarnason's procession…
1979 - 1983
Michel Bertier : prepared mellotron, doublebass. Sylvain Bélot : visuals and projections. Rodolphe Blois : tape recorders, editing and mixing of tapes. Guillaume Loizillon : synthesizers, vocoder, tapes. Claude Micheli : synthesizers, sequencer, G.S.S.A (semi-random sound generator, electronic device built by Claude Micheli). A French group who existed from 1979 to 1983 in the field of electroacoustic, audiovisual and improvised musics. the group worked with a multichannel system of 10 loud spe…
Hum Crackle & Pop
"The 2nd Digital Primitives release (Cooper-Moore, Assif Tsahar, Chad Taylor) digs in deep to fuse a new sound from blues, folk, jazz & funk, with accents from the music's African antecedents."
Notturni
In the fall of 2011 the pianist Marino Formenti performed four one-hour solo concerts hosted by the Wien Modern festival. The so-called “Notturni” series was centered around the piano oeuvre of Friedrich Cerha. To celebrate the occasion Cerha wrote his first piece for solo piano in twenty years and dedicated it to Formenti. The pianist extraordinaire’s main objective in these performances was to contemplate the music jointly with his audience, to analyze and reanalyze the sounds of the in…
Black Box: Torture Garden/Leng Tch\'e
"The controversial and influential Naked City Black Box couples two of Zorn's most extreme and violent creations. Torture Garden (1991) presents Naked City's intense and groundbreaking music combining free jazz, bebop, r&b, country, funk, rockabilly, surf, metal and grindcore—usually in the same song! The rare, seldom heard Leng Tch'e (1992), released only in Japan and long out-of-print features Naked City in an agonizingly slow, brutal 32-minute assault. This special 20th anniversary ed…
Out Of This World's Distortions
Farmers By Nature – drummer Gerald Cleaver, bassist William Parker, and pianist Craig Taborn – a fully-improvising unit, a complete musical collective. Each of these men are highly regarded & admired composers and bandleaders in their own right; their coming together to create new music is always an auspicious and deeply fruitful occasion. Superbly attuned listeners and masterful players of their respective instruments, they are without question one of the finest improvising units / musical grou…
And IV (Inertia)
With And IV (Inertia), Grischa Lichtenberger presents his first full-length record on Raster-Noton after his participation in the Unun series. For his musical production, he uses field recordings of his environment which are manipulated and broken down to their bare nakedness until only fragments are left. Apart from analog sources, he also uses digital sound data which is likewise turned and twisted until the boundaries between analog and digital are blurred. The arrangement of these atom…
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…
Aurona Arona
Urs Leimgruber (soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone), Alexander Schubert (electronics, violin), Oliver Schwerdt (piano, percussion, organ) and Christian Lillinger (drums, percussion). Recorded April 17th 2008, Leipzig.
Radiant intervals
Radiant Intervals' is the first Eleh LP on Important since '08s 'Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis Vol.3', and follows one of the Wire magazine's (and our) top records of 2010, the incredible 'Location Momentum' for Touch. Continuing with investigations into physically tactile tones and drones, this LP offers four further modular synth expeditions eternally moving towards the distant point depicted on the gorgeous, letterpress printed sleeve. After a stoically inert start 'Night Of Pure E…
Tidings / Amesthyst Waves
Trying to put the last 15 years of music into context, you’d be hard pressed to get anyone to agree on a single thing. If anything, this period has been a collective convergence of all things cool-sounding: naïve experimentalism, academic composition, art-rock synthesis, electronic nihilism/flagellation, and, well, everything else. Mark McGuire could muddy anyones interpretation of the contemporary canon with his buddies in the triadic mega-unit, Emeralds, his collaborative outings in Sun Wa…
Crossing Into The Electric Magnetic
This is an exceptional collection of pieces by one of the pioneers of electronic and tape music. Halim El-Dabh began experimenting with wire recorders in Egypt even before Pierre Schaeffer inaugurated the practice of Musique Concrete in France - one piece here dates from that period ('Wire Recorder Piece', 1944) and is thus of great historical importance. Most of the other works were recorded in 1959 and evidence a remarkable body of work and experimentation. El-Dabh does not sound like his fell…
Perdition Hill Radio
2nd full-length from self-styled black ambient guitar overlord. Like Earth's seminal "Hex" before it, this invokes the ghosts of a lost America & drags the rotting carcass of country music through a swamp of noise & drone. The chugging, blown-out treble & isolated darkness of Xasthur is all present & correct, but there are also echoes of William Basinski & Deaf Center hidden amongst the clouds of radio static.
Under foot
Rusalka is a female noise artist based in Vancouver with past works on What We Do is Secret, Ruido Horrible and Dead Audio Tapes.Under Foot is worship. The worship of women and sound. It is sacred filth. Based on the novel ‘Venus In Furs’ about sexual cruelty, servitude and female dominance, Under Foot strips away illusions. It is a complete submersion into disharmony. The disharmony of desire for degradation. The disharmony of a woman wielding the whip. The desire to be sonically and spirituall…
Daylight
Following on from their highly acclaimed appearance on the Treader Duos, here is a whole CD devoted to the highly compatible and innovative duo of saxophonist John Butcher and percussionist Mark Sanders. Their varied improvisations are heard at two afternoon concerts - one at the 2010 Freedom of the City festival in London, the other nearly a year later at Southampton University