New Arrivals
KRAFFT
KRAFFT for orchestra was composed in 2016 as a commission of the French State, and was premiered in Paris and Marseille, France. The composition has a similar kind of metric structure as String Quartet No.3: all instruments play in rhythmic unison throughout. KRAFFT is an ironic-onomatopoetic wrong spelling of the German term "Kraft", meaning "power" or "force". The listener should feel exposed to a sonic undertow. The notion of huge power and force is often connected to the existence of clandes…
G2, 44+/x2
Room40 present a reissue of Phill Niblock's G2,44+/X2, originally released in 2002. Matte laminate embossed sleeve; includes insert card and 24-page book with liner notes from Bill Meyer, interview, and photos. Design by Traianos Pakioufakis.
Liner notes from Bill Meyer: "In 2001, Phill Niblock wrote, 'You should play the music very loud. If the neighbors don't complain, it's probably not loud enough.' In 2019, Niblock can no longer host his annual six hour-long solstice concert at the Experimen…
Peaks
Black Truffle present Peaks by Australian cellist Judith Hamann, her debut release of electro-acoustic music. Known mostly for her live performance work with composers including Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young, here she steps away from the cello, moving into an intimate dreamscape woven from recordings gathered over years of itinerant touring. Peaks is a work in two distinct parts, crossfading between different landscapes and apertures; from roo…
Con
Bureau B present a reissue of Conrad Schnitzler's Con, originally released in 1978. Conrad Schnitzler: In the electric garden by Wolfgang Seidel, May 2020: "... Whilst on shore leave in Düsseldorf, Conrad Schnitzler heard about a professor at the School of Art (Kunstschule) who also accepted students into his class without high school diplomas. Conrad Schnitzler became one of them. The spirit of a fundamental new beginning bonded this generation of artists together, with Karlheinz Stockhausen an…
Con-struct
About the Con-Struct series: Conrad Schnitzler liked to embark on daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. Finding exceptional sounds with great regularity, he preserved them for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances. He thus amassed a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When the m=minimal label in Berlin reissued two Conrad Schnitzler albums at the outset of the 2010s, label honcho Jens Strüver was granted access to this audio …
Total Digital
Having completed his military service as a naval radio operator, Gunther Wüsthoff was in the midst of his German and fine art studies when he encountered Rudolf Sosna and Jean-Hervé Peron. It was May 1969 and each of them had a guitar so they decided to make music together. Polydor International headhunter Uwe Nettelbeck tracked them down on February 23 1971, prompting them to form the legendary krautrock band Faust with three other Hamburg musicians a few days later. Wüsthoff stayed with the ba…
Live at the Sky Church - September 3rd, 2004
The first new Sun City Girls release since Funeral Mariachi (2010), Live at the Sky Church is a performance that melds their signature alien-jazz improv, Asian-tinged psychedelia, and Middle Eastern meditations together with their ranting psychodrama. An audio and visual recording from Seattle in 2004 shows a group that is both aware and committed to its history, while still demonstrating the power of the experimental to drive an enormous cudgel through the heart of those who believe to have all…
EXD
**Embossed matte laminate CD, 6 panel fold out poster, featuring a collage work from Masami Akita created in 1982** Across the middle years of the 1990s, Merzbow (Masami Akita) refined a stochastic language for harsh noise that had emerged from his studio experiments at the beginning of that decade.This technique, which involved a combination of self made instruments, synthesisers, tabletop effects and, in the case of EXD, drum machines, often recorded at incredible levels to create a uniquely v…
Apparition Paintings
**Clear blue swirl vinyl, matte laminate sleeve, printed inner void** Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that’s not it, or it could be if you want it for yourself but not for me, not now; for me it’s about the teeming proliferation of complex events in the world, their vivid, hyperreal intensity as this human life steps closer to its end and their sense o…
Undercurrent
Black Truffle announce Undercurrent, the new LP from the long-running Milanese duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti. Following on from high-profile releases on Boomkat Editions and Shelter Press in the last few years, the eight untitled pieces making up Undercurrent continue the pair's hypnotic and disorientating practice of improvisation based on tape loops. Often sitting halfway between electro-acoustic technique and beat-based production, the music of Bellows obliquely recalls aspects of h…
Sonus Ruinae
**12inch vinyl LP with handprinted covers by Lorenzo Mason Studio, Venice** Tape loops are a closed path, a cyclic river, a ring around a far planet. They’re similar to our memory, continuously reenacting an artefact that belongs to a precise point in time, brought back in a process of recall where that artifact slightly and slowly becomes imprecise and shifted. An unrested repetition carved into an old pavement, in a city where every generation leaves a new mark, a new incision and maintains an…
Breaking the Elephant’s Legs
Marc Behrens presents six extended surrealist songs ranging from psycho rock to dismantled R&B, crossing into doom jazz and spoken word. Animal field recordings; electronic boom and buzz; synths; detuned sitar; violins played by Portuguese master musician Carlos Zingaro. None of this is in any way what you would expect.
To Eeyore
**Edition of 200** Nika Breithaupt aka Nika Son aka Nikae is one of the most active and sensitive artists in Hamburg. Her versatile and multi-layered work bears witness to her ability first to allow things time to develop their full impact and then to listen and look very carefully before modifying and assimilating them creatively into her own work. Nika’s most recent release is “To Eeyore”, a very special cartography of moments and feelings. - Thomas Venker
Allon (Kaye) from Entr’acte had asked…
Horror Vacui
**Edition of 250** Music nowadays is a crime. The whole dark art consisting in whether the composer opts for death by suffocation (maximalism) or death by strangulation (the perennially fashionable anti-fashion that is minimalism). Jon Doe One’s debut record, Small Numbers, involved layer after layer of obsessive construction. Faced with its delirious palimpsest of rhythm and sound, listeners — those curious lost souls, I count myself amongst their ranks, alas — had no choice but to gag on the e…
Introspection / Migration
From an ocean of black, sometimes there is a slim chance you might emerge clean and translucent, with another life chapter under your belt and a renewed story to tell. J.H. Guraj, our favourite wandering bird, is back with his first proper opus on Maple Death: Introspection / Migration.
Sometimes records lead off into an unknown path that never considers release schedules or the outside world, inhabiting the abysses of the artists’ mind and dropping a hefty anchor in the murky waters. Dominique …
Italian Airs
When Simon Van Honacker (°1994, living in Ghent BE) approached me to do an intern with ECN he caught my intention with his plan to study Flemish Folklore, yet from a Deep Listening perspective. Imagine the sound of fanfares, people getting drunk during braderies (tr. street fairs), cover bands, the general buzzing atmosphere during reenactments, … All aligned as parts of an Organic Symphony for deep listening. I don’t consider pioneering, or the striving for the freshest new idea, as purely nece…
Insular Monographs
Two albums, slightly touched...
'Ke Ala Ke Kua': a flashback to july 2010, when I created this afterimage in the timespan of more or less one week. An afterimage of paying a visit to Joan Ocean’s hotspot, the Kealakekua Bay, and to islands of Hawai’i and Oahu. Miss Ocean wrote a few books about her hanging and having conversations with dolphins at Kealakekua, thus i couldn’t resist going over there and seeing what it’s all about.
'Canto Arquipélago': recorded under a volcano on a portable fourtr…
This Valley Of Old Mountains
This Valley Of Old Mountains quietly creates the folklore of an imaginary land. From a hemisphere apart, Taylor Deupree and Federico Durand share simple sounds with complex stories. Their music balances an edge between translucency and exploration, focusing on obscurity, repetition and a shared fascination of the mountains between them. Recorded in La Cumbre (Córdoba, Argentina) and Pound Ridge (New York, US) between July 2019 and April 2020.
South from the Future
**Limited edition cassette. Risograph artwork** The debut album by C. Blumberg (living in Berlin DE) is a series of composite images. Anecdotes with distorted perspectives. Documents or maps - impressions...? However if you look a bit closer you see something very different, quite like a technologic fantasy.
The second track, 神奇森林上海 (tr. Shanghai Magical Forest), holds a certain key to enter the psyche of the album. Here Blumberg is inspired by a photo found on Flickr. The author of the photo ga…
Cascade Symmetry
**Edition of 200. 12" Vinyl LP. Risograph print cover** The ability to create moving music with no words, no beats and no conventional instruments is rare, but San Francisco Bay Area-based modular synth artist Austin Cairns - who records under the name r beny - is such an example. Belgian label Dauw are reissuing his first four albums separately and as a box set.Cascade Symmetry was his 2017 sophomore effort.