New Arrivals
Transparent Waves
*2022 stock.* When does our experience of sound become "music"? In the tradition of John Cage and Morton Feldman, in which sounds – and silences – can just be themselves, Thomas DeLio plays with the spaces between your ears as much as the sounds he puts there. In short, be advised this album is replete with clicks, silences, and brief sound events. Stripped bare, it plays with time and space and the minimum conditions for music. It gives the term ‘experimental music’ meaning. DeLio’s approach to…
Apophany
If you were to connect seemingly unrelated things – Heavy Metal and the symphony orchestra, for example – you might be guilty of apophenia. That friction between opposites has never been a problem for Nick Vasallo, though – his music is equally at home in both worlds. Melding Xenakis, Varese, Extreme Metal, and Dark Ambient with gothic charm, Vasallo conjures up a muscular sonic battle that leads you on an inexorable musical journey to a conclusion where surrender is your best option. Catharsis …
Orchard
*2022 Stock.* “I was born and raised in Kentucky, and for many generations my direct ancestors and extended family have been farmers. So, creating music that is ‘about’ soil, plant life, and the natural world, is my way of honoring that legacy.” Composer Tyler Kline’s tools, though, are not the plow – and vegetables are not the crop – in this collection of brief piano pieces commissioned by and for over a dozen pianists. Instead, Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific…
Transmutation of Things
There is a venerable history of popular songs used as the starting point for elaborate classical compositions, but 500 years ago Josquin and Dufay never imagined using a gargantuan digital orchestra with up to 300 layered tracks pushing architectural proportion and human perception to the max. And yet, that is exactly what composer, MC Maguire, does in his Toronto studio. It’s daunting, it’s overwhelming, and it has to be heard (preferably loud) to be believed. Dubbed “the most irritating and sp…
Signals
Lawson & Merrill are not financial advisors. But if electroacoustic bliss is what you seek, you would do well to make an appointment with them. They – David Margolin Lawson and David Merrill – met a number of years ago while engineering sessions at the revered CityVox Studios in New York City. They discovered they both had a love for “mid century” electronic music and composers like Morton Subotnick, Eliane Radigue, Edgard Varèse, Ilhan Mimaroğlu, and Steve Reich. It wasn’t until recently, thoug…
Intervals 2
*In process of stocking.* “Well, isn’t it always now?” Joel Futterman’s audible smile, in response to my simple query about the time during a phone conversation, bespeaks and accentuates the deeper truths embodied in his creativity. Grounded, sometimes adrift, forced to live in the world of duality, we capitulate too willingly to the whims and whiles of intervals, to their capricious grip on our intersecting realities, to their encapsulation of alternating mood and ebb-and-flow vitality. Doors o…
Sonic Animism: The Emergence
"Sonic Animism" is a site-determined body and sound performance that investigates the state of the sentient-being on the non-human agency brought by technological sonic happenings.
The framework of the performance is an artificial environmental cycle system where each element incorporates with each other in a dynamic process. It permits micro level of properties evolve to novel integrated wholes
With this performance, Yang aims to blur the binary separation between the "objective existence" an…
Galaxy Heart
Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montréal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020. As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, "few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them." Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous …
Waiters On The Dance
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Another unsung hero of the long lost british prog history, Julian Jay Savarin is a keyboard player and composer, poet and science fiction author, hence the association with the most epic and romantic tendencies of the genre. He was born in Dominica (an island between Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean) and moved to the UK in 1962. He debuted in 1970 with Julian's Treatment, a short-lived progressive rock band which his sole album – …
Fleeting Adventure
*In process of stocking.* Andrew Tuttle's Fleeting Adventure is a musical adventure through a reimagined journey from the Australian ambient producer and banjo player. A crew of fellow travellers - including Steve Gunn, Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider and Balmorhea - help navigate a cosmic trip into subtropical landscapes. Golden plucks of banjo, gauzy electronics and cosmic guitar shimmer into gloriously expansive melodies that conjure peace and space, comfort and wonder.
A deepening sense of lif…
It's Nothing, But Still
*In process of stocking* Steve Fors offers deeply physical music on his Hallow Ground debut »It's nothing, but still.« Having already established himself as a composer of visceral drone and noise pieces in various Chicago- and New York-based underground projects, Fors’s first release under his given name is even more dense and evocative than his earlier work. A concept album on the subject of breath, the Siavash Amini-produced record sees the now Swiss-based composer blend field recordings with …
Initial Shock
*2022 stock.* Knurl sits among a very small handful of Canadian harsh noise acts to debut in the 90s and remain active to this day. Among the likes of Ryan Bloomer (Flatline Construct), Sam McKinlay (The Rita) and Pierre-Marc Tremblay (Âmes Sanglantes), Alan Bloor was the first. Coming off of playing in hardcore punk band Binge of Violence, Alan "found" noise by accident while doing performance art, but it had always been a source of interest for him: “While I was working in welding shops I used…
III
"Texture. A nice word, wouldn’t you say, settling into the audible dis-course with whiffs of sophistication, complexity, depth. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us "the constitution, structure, or substance of anything with regard to its constituents or formative elements". Merriam-Webster offers "the disposition or manner of union of the particles of a body or substance". And here, courtesy Barstool Mountain, III, a deep-dive into fractured reservoirs of textural dis-course, whiffs of smudge…
Speaksome
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* For as long as I can remember, Christian Wallumrød's piano touch has done something to me. We met early. The peculiar and surprising, but still somewhat self-evident, melodic twists. Not to mention the far above average well-weighted ornaments. He manages to create completely unique universes, either with his own ensemble or alone. In recent years, he has also returned to electronics and he treats them with a gentle rawness. There has always been something h…
Linde
*In process of stocking.* The trio Slagr releases their sixth album “Linde”, made up of music created in a time of new beginnings. The music on the album is written by Katrine Schiøtt in the middle of maternity leave, giving a new touch to the trios distinctive sound. Postpartum - lack of sleep, emotional vulnerability, an extreme focus on something outside oneself; providing nourishment and love to the newborn. A minor state of emergency where small moments can inspire to musical fragments and …
Krympende Klode
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Krympende klode is a new collaboration between two internationally recognised musicians from Bergen, Norway: music producer Jørgen Træen, who has worked with talents such as Susanne Sundfør, Thea Hjelmeland and Jazkamer, and the unique and eternally inventive guitarist Stein Urheim, whose releases include 6 albums on the Hubro label. On this album they present their personal collections of synthesisers and string instruments from all over the world, and let …
Heroes Of The Second Story Walk-Up
*300 copies limited edition* It's beautiful outside today, though you wouldn't guess it from the darkness of your bedsit. So get up, sleepyhead, I've got a special treat for you. The Fun Years have dipped your madeleine in tea brewed from mescaline. Sip it slowly as you watch the tattered clouds chase passenger jets across the windowpane. Don't miss a crumb on the plate—an extraordinary thing is about to happen.
Or maybe it already did? Rewind, press play. People are talking about sticky shed sy…
Sound Scapes - Denmark's Intuitive Music Conference 2001
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "...the music you can listen here on this CD is result of collaboration of musicians from five countries gathered for participating in DIMC held in Rudme in summer 2001. Some compositions are examples of collective improvisation notated graphically, by different ways. Thus, graphical score can look like a sort of "verbal instruction" for performers, with a prescription how selected musical models interact. It is this way by which pieces by Henrik Rasmussen an…
Improvised Varieties
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "This CD features music from concerts with Intuitive Music Group (founded 1990) and from some of its members' touring activities in Poland and Russia. It centers around composer and pianist Henrik Ehland Rasmussen. There are three long solo pieces, including one based on a formula given by his countryman Niels Viggo Bentzon, in which countless varied statings of the formula produces an astounding number of ever-developing pianistic phenomena. The other pieces…
Béla Hamvas Group For Intuitive Music
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "This is pure intuitive music, full of improvisation and spontaneity. here we have amazing musicians that interact between them in an amazing way creating pasages that despite using heavily experimentation and improvisation are really coherent and also they explore without falling into chaotic musical pieces. I am really amazed by this musicians that are constantly exploring new sounds with their instruments yet retaining a "group spirit" that allows them to …