New Arrivals
Transmission in an Expanse of Firelight, Hear Me!
A linchpin of Montreal's experimental community for over two decades, Jean-Sébastien Truchy has performed with Fly Pan Am, Set Fire to Flames and Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche among countless others as well as co-running the presently defunct Los Discos Enfantasmes label. After a string of tape releases on LDE, Digitalis, Sic Sic & others, Transmission in an Expanse of Firelight, Hear Me! is Truchy's first proper full length record. Combining elements of Musique concrète, field recordings,…
Knock On Life's Door
There’s a particular twinkle in the great expanse of American songwriting. This has seen countless nostalgic exploitations over the years – collections of popular songs strung together under the banner of the so-called Great American Songbook that have reiterated the form of many of these songs without contemplating their depths. In terms of thoughtful, emotive synthesis, few have understood it in the way that Cara and Mike Gangloff understand it on this new album. They take have taken older Ame…
Lichter
Lichter is the first piece in a new series of electroacoustic dub compositions by Mouse on Mars. It is a massive, lurching, up-tempo percussive epic – a long-haul runaway train that keeps switching tracks without ever losing sight of its destination. Like much of Mouse on Mars’ output, Lichter deftly traverses a varied sonic landscape, encompassing elements of jazz, dub, krautrock juke and psychedelia. Lichter incorporates trigger robots built by Sonic Robots’ Moritz Simon Geist and features And…
Arke Sinth
These recordings document the brief and intense life of a group formed at the beginning of the 1970s within the fertile and stimulating cultural environment of the town of Padua (Italy), where electroacoustic and computer music pioneer Teresa Rampazzi had started, a few years earlier, the NPS Group (Nuove Proposte Sonore - New Sound Proposals).
Arke Sinth was a group of four young musicians and artists, who decided to perform their own music, an experi…
Distress Signals I
Unreleased before early version of their stunning debut! Controlled Bleeding's founder Paul Lemos insisted that there are actually two Distress Signals recordings, one of which has never been heard and which is now released on beautiful vinyl thru Toronto-based Artoffact Records
Part of the mystique of Distress Signals comes from Controlled Bleeding's founder Paul Lemos, who, while putting together this reissue series in conjunction with Artoffact Records, insisted that there are actually two…
Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps
Gatefold sleeve. Controlled Bleeding announces its first proper studio album since 2002. Larva Lumps And Baby Bumps is a startling record: it somehow flawlessly mixes industrial noise and prog rock into a beautifully stream-of-conscious work that is at once fairly brutal and lovingly serene. The opening piece, Driving Through Darkness, could be the title of a pop-ballad, until you realize the actual meaning of the word 'driving'; jumping out at you seemingly in medias res, the album and tra…
Body Samples
After several tape-only releases in 1984, Controlled Bleeding released its first album on the then-brand new Dossier label in Germany, a label with which Controlled Bleeding would collaborate closely over the next years. Experimental, noise-laden industrial, Body Samples is at times less abrasive than the previous year's tape experiments and was influenced by ambient soundscapes and rhythmic noise of the mid-80s. The album also eschews the longer pieces found on the tape releases for a se…
Distress Signals II
Unreleased before, and quite different from the Broken Flag tape!! "Released on Gary Mundy's Broken Flag label in 1984, the first Controlled Bleeding album was Distress Signals, an almost impossible to find cassette-only album of brutal powernoise and experimentally distorted and tortured vocals. The near hour-long performance is immediate and harsh, and the tape has a kind of holy-grail quality amongst collectors, not least because of the special status of Broken Flag, but also because i…
Obsolete
CD version. Here's another Gong album no one seems to know about, as this is basically Gong plus poet/musician Dashiell Hedayat (otherwise known as Melmoth). Evidently the lyrical content (especially on the suite "Eh, Mushroom will you mush my room?") is hallucinogen-related, and if you are an early David Allen-period Gong fan, you are sure to love this one as it is classic 1971 Gong, replete with Malherbe sax solos and killer gliss guitar. Hedayat proves to be an adequate guitarist (the album w…
I Have Left You the Mountain
"This 'translation' of absence through song is called këngë kurbeti, migration song. Its drone-based polyphonic form is prominent south of the river Shkumbin—in an area that includes Vlorë and other villages from which thousands of Albanians have left their motherland. These songs, which are part of a shared Mediterranean polyphonic tradition, are unique in their vitality as a life-affirming everyday practice and in their surviving modes of transmission, a fact that was acknowledged prominently …
Wetin You Go Do?
One-sided lp commissioned by m hka - museum van hedendaagse kunst antwerpen as part of the exhibition Bruises and Lustre, 16 october 2015 - 17 january 2016.
I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die
"I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die" is the 4th soundtrack from Stockholm-based visual artist Johanna Billing. The underlying 15-minute film installation is playing in Ostia, Rome, and formulates the utopia of free access to informal learning environments.
A group of young children is leaving the parental dinner party in a restaurant and starts to explore Ostia: ancient ruins, beaches, streets, green backyards and parks. The runaways gain access to an elementary school and discover a storage spac…
Pulheim Jam Session
This vinyl record is part of the exhibition Keeping Time, April 11 June 12, 2016 at Villa Groce, Genova, Italy curated by Ilaria Bonacossa. In cooperation with Hollybush Gardens, London, Kavi Gupta, Chicago and Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica.
"Getting stuck in traffic is a frustrating waste of time. So, watching a video of an orchestrated traffic jam on a country lane for 20-odd minutes might seem like a tedious and annoying thing to do in a gallery. There is, however, some method i…
Stimulus Progression
Eleven field recordings of some of the last remaining MUZAK sound-systems operating in Helsinki, Finland. Recorded in public locations, such as restaurants, malls and parking garages by local film-maker/artist Mika Taanila. These sonic snapshots – ”films without film” – can be seen as a dry contemporary film-take, a variation on the "city symphony” genre in the documentary film tradition. The recordings are site-specific, each track mapping a genuine muzak listening spot in Helsinki. Minimal pro…
Tube Dust DroneBrückenmusik 1995–2015
A long space with a long history: for 20 years, "Brueckenmusik" has invited the cream of international sound art crop to wrest new artworks from the acoustically over-saturated environment of the aging Deutzer Bridge. The works created there are as unique as the space. Over the years the festival has established itself as one of the most prominent and longest running sound art series in Germany. For its anniversary, the book offers a documentary look back at the entire series with celebratory …
Moenai Hai
"Having basically dropped off the face of the earth fifteen years ago, Juntaro Yamanouchi gives Moenai Hai a sense of enigma: some contextual food for thought, and some inconclusive ideas. The sudden, low-hype release of Moenai Hai leads one to believe that The Gerogerigegege’s creative driving force is conflicted, but dedicated, presenting something that needed to be said, but not how Yamanouchi might normally say it. It’s sorta futile to outline The Gerogerigegege’s typical modes of communicat…
Dracula
There is not much to say about the music composed by James Bernard for the Dracula Hammer Films. Everyone knows what we are talking about here. And this version is probably the definitive edition. The new revised artwork includes a rare picture of the late Maestro, taken from his estate's private collection. The complete recordings remastered from the original analog tapes. Master and sound restoring done by Roberto Zamori at Film Music Art Studio.
Scott 4
From the 2013 remasters taken from the original analogue tapes Back to Black is proud to present Scott Walker’s fourth album. This was his first record to be entirely filled with his own compositions. Songs were credited to Scott Engel and the mood became even more reflective. Here the influence to come into play was Ingmar Bergman - and the album opens with the song – The Seventh Seal – his version of the film in five minutes. For many the highlights of this album are Angels of Ashes and Boy Ch…
Through Mysterious Exotic Barricades: Asian & African
Philip Corner (b. 1933) studied composition with Henry Cowell and Otto Luening and musical analysis with Oliver Messiaen. During the 1960s and '70s he was an active member of Fluxus, a founder (along with James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein) of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble, the resident musician and composer for the Judson Dance Theatre, and co-founder of Gamelan Son of Lion (with Barbara Benary and Daniel Goode).
Corner uses a variety of scoring methods, and in his word:"Along with tha…
Plays Sudden Infant'
Joke Lanz travels down memory lane! Two decks a mixer and a dozen of old Sudden Infant vinyls to spin, scratch, manoeuvre, loop and juggle into a narrative new composition. Recorded and mastered by Rashad Becker in Berlin, this album combines Joke Lanz' unique turntablism and intuition for mutant-body-dramas peppered with a great sense of humour from the rhythms of amplified faders and his own breath to spoken interjections of Bryan Lewis Saunders' dream lyrics. You can dance, you can cry, …