New Arrivals
Twenty Systems
Twenty tracks made on 20 synthesizers spanning 20 years, accompanied by a 60-page color book with a foreword by Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud, Twenty Systems is Benge's acclaimed concept album, first released in 2008. His 10th solo album, this ambitious project combines an audio CD of new music with a hardbound full-color book containing photos and diagrams of the electronic instruments used, along with a detailed history documenting the development of synthesizers between 1968 and 1988. The purpo…
Pink pearl
Frans de Waard (1965) has been producing music since 1984. First as Kapotte Muziek, but throughout the years, he also worked as Beequeen (with Freek Kinkelaar), Goem (with Roel Meelkop & Peter Duimelinks, both of whom are also a member of Kapotte Muziek these days), Zebra (with Roel Meelkop) and such solo projects as Freiband, Shifts as well as his own name. He played various solo concerts as Goem-FDW in Japan, as part of a package tour with Pan Sonic. Frans de Waard also likes to play sets of i…
Gate
A new 7" from Sissy Spacek on Wendy. If you have asked yourself this you know how this new vinyl sounds.Short crazy blast of terror, insane fast drums, screaming vocals, feedback and shards of noise. Play it loud. Play it at 45rpm. Flip side. Do it again. This time SS are John and Charlie. Essential lineup.
Five Poems for the Swamp Ghost
Recorded at Soopa studio and featuring Arthur Doyle (sax, flutes and voice), Jonathan Saldanha, Gustavo Costa and Filipe Silva (assorted percussions and electronics), this is a beautiful, wild, cut, with Doyle's touch being so deep, rough and gentle at the same time, while his band gives him plenty of room to spread out through minimal rythm patterns and a hypnotic work on bells and cymbals. Closing with an anthem that will give you shivers down your spine, this recording will bring you to an an…
Blue Clouds
Some cream for your acid-folk tea - hitherto unreleased sides from the two and a half bards (well, two bards and a maiden - forsooth!) who self-released All On the First Day back in '72. These include studio recordings from later in the 70s, a couple live songs and an outtake from the legendary album itself! Well, the first legendary album anyway - for Blue Clouds is clearly another.
Galaxies
Laurence Vanay is the pseudonym for Jacqueline Thibault, wife of producer and musician Laurent Thibault (Magma). Her debut album "Galaxies" (1974) is pure genius: almost all instrumental, with gorgeous keyboards of many types, acoustic/electric guitar, even a little Zeuhl bass. There are wordless vocals on many of the tracks, although she occasionally sings in a soft, seductive manner. Incredible, spacey “avant-garde progressive chanson,” a Holy Grail for most collectors of 70's underground Fren…
Mutations et Protheses
LP version (initalia copies are coloured). Rare recordings by pioneers of industrial noise music, 1979-1983, never released before on CD or LP. Etat Brut was an industrial/noise band from Brussels that operated from 1979 until 1983. The duo (Phillippe x and Philippe X, today academic scientists) released dozens of cassettes, various flyers and Xeroxed booklets. Some collective concerts were organized at that time with Club Moral and Pseudocode. Cassettes like Emissions 1 (1981) or Géomé…
Eye of the microphone
A somewhat surreal audio rendition of the sounds of The City of London. BJ Nilsen (b,1975 Sweden) is a sound and recording artist. His work is based on the sound of nature and its effect on humans. Heprimarily uses fieldrecordings and electronic composition as a working method. He has worked for film, television, theatre, dance and as sound designer. Track notes: In 2012 I received a scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust for a one-year Artist in Residency at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, …
Under A Single Banner
It's been a busy couple of years for the producer behind the Shifted project. On top of an extremely well-received album for the Mote Evolver label, the producer has edged further out into the fringes of electronic music under a number of aliases, taking in noise/ambient variants as Covered In Sand, as well as more distorted, technofied productions under the Alexander Lewis moniker, a sound described by the Blackest Ever Black label as "S-M techno." His new album as Shifted, Under a Single Ba…
Day and night
Saxophonist Gerd Dudek's 2012 concert in London at the Vortex in a quartet with Hans Koller (piano), Oli Hayhurst (bass) and Gene Calderazzo (drums), with Dudek and Koller picking some of their favorite jazz tunes including works by Nichols, Shorter, Coleman, Wheeler, &c. Gerd Dudek (soprano & tenor saxophones), Hans Koller (piano), Oli Hayhurst (double bass), Gene Calderazzo (drums). Gerd Dudek came to London early in 2012 to give a concert at the Vortex. The next day the quartet went to…
Processes & potentials
So much music claims to capture the moment. But as Processes & Potentials proves, in-the-momentness can be a malleable concept. The result of three years of studio work, the album sees Bjarni Gunnarsson following his longstanding interest in exploring liquid states, transformational activities and the complex relationships between cause and effect. It is music which behaves differently, unexpectedly, veering off into surprising directions and never staying in one place for too long Ð it is certa…
Ten Thousand Points Of Light: The 20th Anniversary Edition
Kitsch alert! Worshipper at the shrine of Elvis, fans of unabashed bad taste, followers of pop culture, take note. Ten Thousand Points Of Light, originally released in 1991 and now available on DVD for the very first time, is a wry, understated and terrifically funny look at The Townsends, a suburban Atlanta family who, every holiday season for eight years, transformed their Stone Mountain area brick ranch house into a meteoric blaze of Christmas lights. Known as both "the Christmas House" …
Exile in Paradise
Established in 1978 by Truus de Groot in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, she tinkered with toy and electronic instruments in her flat - amidst the explosion of Punk Rock. Even though Truus was very active in that genre and “New Wave” as well, the more experimental side gradually took over and the concept of Plus Instruments was born. Plus Instruments released their first e.p. single in 1979 on Dutch label Plurex:
Playing odd electronic instruments, Bass and vocals, most of their performances were im…
Message Bag
We come burdened with the glorious purpose of having readied the latest recordings by Messages, a double LP set called Message Bag. It's a set of pieces that imparts a vibe rife with history, and yet clearly focused on the future. You buy these 2 LPs, poster and insert in a bag, but in all of its formats and strategies Message Bag operates as a return to an unresolved system, as an alternative to the rest of yr choices, and bestows something that can't be bought. We call it Wisdom.
Hasselt
Three open improvisations recorded in concert at Kunstencentrum Belgie Hasselt, Belgium in 2010 by sub-groups from the Electrocacoustic Ensemble, plus an extended performance by the whole ensemble: Richard Barrett, Peter van Bergen, Lawrence Casserley, Peter Evans, Agusti Fernandez, Barry Guy, Ishikawa Ko, Paul Lytton, Paul Obermayer, Evan Parker, Walter Prati, Ned Rothenberg, Joel Ryan, Marco Vecchi.
Convulsive Threshold
Two heavyweight explorers of sound and technology, Russell Haswell and Yasunao Tone, both undertaking separate rigorous experiments into the synthesis of sound and all its remits, converge for one helluva collaborative work. ‘Convulsive Threshold’ is the result of years of research and experimentation, Haswell’s systems of hybrid analogue/digital audio generation acting as one of the starting points for this relentess piece of material, which are then subjected to Tone’s MP3 Deviation tec…
Bits & Pieces
The history of - behind which we find Nico Selen of O.R.D.U.C, E.M.M. and many other guises - and Freiband, the name of Frans de Waard when it comes to all sorts of computer based, goes back for over 20 years. Selen was the first to release a LP by Kapotte Muziek (De Waard's other music enterprise, among many!), in 1990 and they have been off and on in contact. Earlier 2013 released a very limited CDR, which De Waard quite liked and in the next days he kept returning to it, eventu…
Frequencies
Nicolas Bernier’s Frequencies (Synthetic Variations) is his first piece made entirely of synthetic sounds. Having evolved within the musique concrète and field recording traditions, Bernier wanted to break with habit — the result being 15 short movements of warped and crackling textures, vividly articulated sine waves and rhythmic bursts of pattern. The piece is designed to be listened to at random (the sound sample above is such a sequence), offering a new duration and dynamics with every heari…
Capitaine Present 5
Monsieur Laurent Gerard, aka Él-g, aka one third of Ghedalia Tazartes' Reines d'Angleterre has been slowly building a little world of his own with several homemade records, cassettes and CDr's through the past few years and also through several interesting collaborations. Capitaine Present is his most intimate project with already 4 volumes released on CD, cassette and DVD. This fifth outing (and first on vinyl) consists of a hallucinogenic promenade inside his psyche. Cut up spoken words, poetr…
Piano Music
Two compositions exploring the decay of the piano from Wandelweiser composer Eva-Maria Houben. Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing.“Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing. And the awareness of fading sound may become the awareness of presence.” Halfway through Eva-Maria Houben’s abgemalt, the pianist unfurls a …