New Arrivals
Wege
Wege translates as 'path' and it's a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums' four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape. Wege is Belfi's forth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Be…
Dead Space
Blip is a duo collaboration between Jim Denley and Mike Majkowski: two of Australia's most prominent improvising musicians. They began playing together in 2002, as members of The Splinter Orchestra, and formed Blip in 2009. They have been developing their own approach to the woodwinds/strings duo arrangement, deconstructing and reconstructing this format. Blip music focuses on duration, the subtleties of sound, the pitch within timbre and texture, as well as pulse. Wi
Somewhere Out There
Luca Di Mattei is one of the Afe resident artists since the early days of the label. During the years he had several releases under four different aliases: Leeza, Hendy Van Morris, Jabba and Bill Catez. Leeza is his most well-known and prolific incarnation. Generated using laptop computer technology, Leeza's music has its main roots in what was once called Intelligent Techno, and is clearly inspired by the great records published during the '90s by labels such as Warp, Rephlex, Skam, etc.After t…
Live In Leugen
In December 2009 Zebra (Roel Meelkop & Frans de Waard) were invited to play a hommage to Martin Hannett, the legendary producer of Joy Division, A Certain Ratio and Section 25 (to mention Zebra's favorites). This was the start of a long Factory Records weekend in Brussels. Zebra picked their favorite Martin Hannett productions and sprinkled them some further with their extraordinary electronic means to create a groovy, dense slab of music. This album is called 'Live In Leugen'. Leugen is the dut…
C+-
The Phonos ek Mechanes trio was founded in 2007 by three composers and electro-acoustic performers from Wroc aw: Cezary Duchnowski, Pawe Hendrich and S awomir Kupczak. The name of the group comes from Greek and means 'the sound of the machine' which reflects specific methods of artistic creation applied by the three musicians. They play typical instruments such as the piano, electric guitar or electric violin, often prepared and tuned for microtonal music. Sounds that are created this way do not…
Dub & Die plus
Originally released in 1981 as an untitled mini album on Zick Zack, "Dub & Die" completes our re-issue programme of the band's earliest works. Recorded at SADW's Cassettencombinat studio in Berlin, the original 8 tracks represent the first release by this German Avantgarde/Industrial group that was once a member of the "Geniale Dilettanten" movement. Again, comparison with early Einstürzende Neubauten is permitted, altho…
Resume the Cosmos
"Resume the Cosmos" finds the unclassifiable Virginian band Rake performing some of their most diverting and accessible work to date. The five nameless tracks that make up the disc were culled from many hours of studio improvisation, not only on a range of atmospheric instrumentation, but also with studio space and "silence" itself. The elusive membership of Rake play out like reconstructed indie rock fans with fistfuls of Sun Ra/Coltrane/70s Miles/Art Ensemble of Chicago/Henry Cow scattered thr…
Maria Minerva's Cabaret Cixous
Over the course of a 12", cassette, and a stream of ace youtube vids, Maria Minerva has emerged as one of the most interesting artistes to come into leftfield-pop focus over the last 12 months. 'Cabaret Cixous' is her debut album, a coruscating water-bed of mottled '90s dance-pop memes writhing under blankets of slyly sexy new age synths while her dreamy vocals whisper and croon seductively suggestive lyrics. It's not quite aural soft porn, but there's an inescapably lascivious element to …
Post
Post is the solo guise for James Wilkinson, who has gleefully cracked the ground between free jazz and punk in Bucketrider and made sonic cinema with the electro-dub-hip-hop fusion of High Pass Filter. He’s also provided innovative sound design as director for the internationally acclaimed Snuff Puppets, and his adventurous spirit runs free through Post’s pop persona. It’s the same ecstatic abandon shared by the likes of Mouse on Mars, Plaid and Caribou. Post’s playful but stirring sense of comp…
Lassie House / Jumble Massive
This CD compiles two long out of print, obscure vinyls by People Like Us. Almost all (maybe all) were recorded as commisions for Dutch radio. People Like Us plunders her way through the wastelands of vinyl nobody buys, collages them into mostly strange, and at times funny pieces of music. Unlike other plunderphonics, People Like Us keep the voice/spoken word segments to a minimum, which I most hearthly welcome. Extensive spoken words are usually hilarious, but after repeated listening don't hold…
Everything's A Love Letter
Saddleback is the solo project for producer Tony Dupé. In many ways, with its warm and exploratory craft, Everything’s A Love Letter is the culmination of the varying strands in Tony’s musical life.Tony first came to notice in Glovebox, who put an ethereal, ambient twist on the indie-pop scene as far back as the early ‘90s. Glovebox’s swirling sound has been as unhurried as its release schedule, though no matter how spare their output, each album has always found a warm reception. The group were…
As a Leaf or a Stone
For this release Mathieu Ruhlmann uses a lot of sound sources and per track he lists them. We see listed a coffee grinder, ukelin, e-bow, moss, denture cleaner, bubble wrap, dried plant, cactus, speaker and gate (and that's just the opening track!)... The gain is very much alive here, so there is occasionally some feedback leaking through here. That adds a strange component to the highly acoustic music. Ruhlmann plays his stuff with great care. His music is open, spacious, but also intimate. The…
Every action
2004 release ** "12k presents Every Action, the 3rd full-length release from the UK’s Motion (Chris Coode) and the follow-up to 2002’s critically acclaimed Dust (12k1019). In addition to his work with 12k (Dust, as well as a collaboration with Doron Sadja on 12k’s recent Two Point Two compilation, and an MP3 only release on 12k’s term. series) Coode has worked with Fat Cat and also released the debut Motion cd Pictures (now out of print) on his own imprint. The work on Every ActionPictures was p…
Morning And Sunrise
At some point all great explorers, from Amundsen to Kishan Singh Rawat, come to an opening up and cast their minds across a big space. A clearing, a promontory, a look out from a place no one's been before. Jakob Olausson ventured deep on Moonlight Farm, his debut for De Stijl in the winter of 2005. His singular expression returns on Morning and Sunrise, an explorer's codex, a gaze through to what's more important and less seen. The path yet traveled and the sun arcing over it. Morning and Sunri…
Drones
In the beginning there was the piano. As soon as he had mastered the basics, Jean-Philippe Goude discovered the spell of melancholy while working on a little musical piece: an etude ringing out in the style of a somber hymn. Not the dead meat smells of somberness that, according to Picabia, serious people emit, but the earthen gravity of an abyss dug by life itself. Everything is the result of this bedazzlement. At 11 years old, Jean-Philippe Goude closed his eyes. When his eyelids finall…
Shunt
Strøm are Gaudenz Badrutt, pianist and electronic musician (1972) and Christian Müller (1971), clarinettist and electronic musician. Under the name of strøm the two artists from Biel mix since 2001 various ingredients: free improvisation with conceptual music, contemporary music ideas with free jazz explosions, down to earth, drifty energy with spherical sound. The duo mixes electro-acoustic chamber music skillfully with allusions to contemporary pop-aesthetics. Both musicians studied at …
Dispositions Furtives
Through the open sound portals created by his compatriot Castiglioni, the Italian pianist Alfonso Alberti first entered col legno's World of New Music; on his second album, he dedicates his sensitive and brilliant musicality to Gérard Pesson's fragile and puzzling fabrics of sound. A selection of piano pieces has been compiled in a joint effort by the pianist and the French composer; in his interpretations Alberti lets us catch glimpses of musical structures as though they were glittering just u…
Stasis
Zbeen is an electro-acoustic project by Gianluca Favaron and Ennio Mazzon. Zbeen’s improvisational approach is developed from the human-machine paradigm which is represented by the interaction with digital instruments specifically designed and developed for this project. K-Frame, Zbeen's debut EP, was released by Ripples in January 2012. Unlike K-Frame, which was developed as a sonic counter-part to the linear algebra concept of an ordered set of ‘k’ linearly-independent vectors, Stasis elabo…
Burnt Offerings
The Preservation label presents Burnt Offerings, the fourth album from Brooklyn's Padna. As Padna, Nat Hawks initially made his name in the cassette underground on the revered Stunned label with two works of pop experimentalism displaying a bustling -- often boggling -- and vivid imagination. Veritable joyrides in sound and style, these releases were in line with the DIY aesthetic, primitive songcraft and eclectic sonic stew pioneered by the likes of Tall Dwarfs and forwarded by Olivia Tremo…
Februar
Within the four-tenth-hasty Suite February von Luigi Archetti the individual musical-acoustic events seem to have out-pulled in individual sound-pure from the being silent background. Looking for, a "Hinhoeren" and emphasizing hidden, electrifying sound particle. The attempt is to be given to the shade of the music a voice. Klangliche atmospheres through-cross feeling and conception. Fourteen ephemeren sound places, arranges for the listener a music, which reciprocates between imagination, expec…