New Arrivals
Day Is Done
Day Is Done, a major new video work by Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley, is a feature-length musical. It enunciates a career-long interest in American subcultures and folk events through the re-staging of 31 carnivalesque productions intermixed into a meandering semi-narrative. Each reconstruction is a live-action scene that has been extrapolated from photographs found in high school yearbooks. Their subjects are the kinds of institutionalized entertainments practiced within the American e…
Plastic Materials
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010 Over the past decade, Marina Rosenfeld's work has come to represent one of the most progressive approaches to experimental sound emanating from New York. Rosenfeld is equally known as a composer for large-scale performances and groundbreaking turntablist. Her sonic palette - entirely drawn from hand-crafted dub plates she imprints with blips of vinyl static, bursts of instrumental noise, conversation, and other audio detritus - evokes both the ecstatic electronic artifice…
Suite For Five - Summerspace - Interscape
n 1954, Robert Rauschenberg became the Resident Designer to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a position he held for ten years. During that time these friends and collaborators, along with the musician John Cage, created some of the most iconoclastic artworks of the 20th century. This three-DVD set showcases these great artists' work, along with the work of another, filmmaker Charles Atlas. The DVDs are accompanied by an illustrated essay by Bonnie Brooks. Charles Atlas has directed and …
Siberian Field Recordings/ Interview with a whale hunter
ultralimited to 100 copies only, a series of field recordings from Siberia, Chukotka, from Radio frequency scans to ambiental landscapes, a sonic journey into one of most desolate and extreme environments in the planet.
Sound body
2006 release, first time in stock: David Toop populates the five strung-out and diffuse compositions on Sound Body with sonic events captured all over the world. The Japanese sound artist Haco plucks rubber bands in Kobe; guitarist Rafael Toral captures oscillating feedback in Lisbon; Günter Müller knocks stones together in northern Switzerland. These contributions are not so much blended as balanced, like the loops and spheres of an Alexander Calder mobile; they shiver and sway in the artificia…
Shirotama
'A CD and DVD beautifully packaged to discover the work from sound artist Tetsuya UMEDA. CD : Soundtrack : Sten¡C, recorded in a room, 2007. Metz, recorded at an installation at Musiques Volantes, Metz, France, November 8, 2008.Bubbles, recorded at an installation in Kobuchisawa Tunnel, Sapporo, July 12, 2009. Classroom #4 [with Takashi Ueno] recorded at Arcus Studio, Moriya, Ibaraki prefecture, March 28, 2008. Lonkama recorded at a workshop at the University of London, UK, May 10, 2006. DVD : D…
Works
An amazing and fundamental boxet with 3 DVD and a book featuring Hatsu-Yume, considered by many to be Viola's finest work, a spiritual allegory equating light and dark with life and death. The title refers to Japanese folklore, wherein things done on the first day of a new year are significant. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like is an epic journey in five chapters, as well as a personal investigation into the inner states and connections to the animal consciousness we all possess. In a stream o…
Vibractions, 1978 - 2012
Vibractions, a sound installation and performance by Ferruccio Ascari, was conceived and created in 1978 within a program of sound installations organized by the center for visual arts Sixto/Notes (hich included site-specific works by Giuseppe Chiari, John Duncan, Walter Marchetti, Gianni Emilio Simonetti, along with contributions by representatives of the most radical researches of those years: Ant Farm, BDR Ensemble, Chris Burden, Paul Mc Carthy, Fredrick Nilsen, Barbara Smith, and Demetrio St…
Great Bear Pamphlet Series
Complete set, originally published between 1965 and 1967, the Great Bear contributors were a who's who of the sixties avant-garde: George Brecht, John Cage, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Nam Jun Paik, Diter Rot and Emmett Williams, were just but a few of the artists/authors in the series. All of the pamphlets were staple-bound and 16 pages in length (except for the Manifesto issue, which was 32 pages). While they shared the same format,each title in the series was printed on v…
Bodyanalysis: Actions 1964-1970
A core member of the artist collective around Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler -- instigators of Viennese Actionism -- it was during the early 1960s that Viennese painter, performance artist, graphic artist and writer Günter Brus staged his first actions in Vienna. Due to the radical nature of his works, Brus soon found himself at odds with the Austrian authorities. Sentenced to six months of close arrest, in 1970 Brus absconded to Berlin. During the subsequent years, his…
Manual for the construction of a sound
Surface Tension Supplément N°4. 'Organized as a temporary working group, the Manual project set out to explore sound and auditory experience as platforms for social meeting, urban intervention and environmental investigation. Developed in collaboration with Atelier Nord and the Ultima festival and staged in Oslo in 2009, the project brought together six artists from around Europe engaged in experimental media practices. The project functioned as a series of process-oriented field studies of the …
Squadra Omega
Squadra Omega is a psych/avant/kraut rock collective with former and present members of the Mojomatics, With Love and Be Maledetto Now! devoted to free improvisation, psychedelic jams and mind blow ups. It is said that all empires are built upon the ruins of previous empires. It is said that destruction breeds construction. In times of deadlocked aesthetics and stylistic stagnation the time is nigh for a destruction of the old and the construction of the new. From the rubble of a post-post moder…
A forest dark
Conceived as as a soundtrack for the silent movie “Inferno (1911, Milano Films)” A Forest Dark is the new album from Satan is my Brother, after four years from the eponymous debut on Boring Machines. This new chapter sees the band expanding to five stable elements, with the addition of Antonello Raggi’s keyboards. A Forest Dark sounds less noisy and chaotic than its predecessor, electronic hiss remains now mostly in the background as a layer where acoustic instruments make their moves. It …
Un Autre Chemin Vers L'Ultime
Keiji Haino is an individual that never ceases to provoke new ideas in the minds of those that meet him. And so, although he is usually surrounded by amplifiers, a myriad of effects pedals, and cables plugged into his guitar, he nonetheless amazed his audience with the power of the simplicity of his purely vocal performance and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 2008, as part of the InFamous Carousel Festival. The following year I had the opportunity to get to know him a bit better, acting as inte…
The Original Ultra Bide
Originally released in 1984, this Hidjokaidan side project Ultra Bide, lovely and far more listenable than most Japanese noise-rock bands, throwing space-rock, psychedelia, electronica, traditional Japanese sounds
UL8
Written and recorded in Whitby, York and Rotherham (UK) during summer 2010 by Mark Fell (one-half of the duo snd). Mastered at Dubpates and Mastering Berlin in 2010 by Lupo. Part 1: The Occultation of 3C 273. Using 32 operator frequency modulation synthesis configured in 16 pairs of operator and modulator. Frequency, modulation ratio and amount determined by linear interpolation between two spatial extremes, with further interpolation over variable temporal divisions. Panned at equal positi…
Improvised Music from Japan 2009
Improvised Music from Japan 2009 takes a look at improvised/experimental music festivals and concert series in Japan. Covered in the book are 33 of the many festival/series events taking place around the country. The articles (some written by the organizers themselves, others based on interviews of the organizers conducted in person or by e-mail) reveal the ideas, aims and feelings of the people on the small improvised/experimental music scene who work tirelessly to hold these events on an ongoi…
Galactic Tornado
The conception, the idea, realisation and sound sources of this CD are all based on original sound material (loops and sounds) from Rapoon's “Tribal Sci Fi” CD-ROM (courtesy of Sony/Sonic Foundry). Not the entire original Rapoon's tracks have been re-mixed or re-composed, but the general “sound” (or the sound aesthetic of Rapoon's music) instead. All the artists have provided their own original compositions, that less or more based on the audio-sources from Rapoon. The album “Galactic Tornado” …
why use a proxy
Strongly Imploded is the supergroup composed by part of One Starving Day (Beta-Lactam Ring) A Spirale (Fratto9/ Deserted Factory) and Weltraum(Lona e Toxo Records), a blend of electro-acoustic, free improvisation and elements from heavy sounding music styles such as noise, hardcore and power electronics, that results in improvised /new obscure music. "In their radical improvisations they mix sources of acoustic and electronic origin. In the quiet and open passages their music fails to attrac…
GQ - Jean Tinguely
Beautiful and elaborate edition, a quarterly magazine for graphic work (GQ) issued in the 1970s. The magazine was re-produced in 2008, and the newest issue devoted to kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely was completed in 2009. Unfortunately most of texts are in Japanese, but many pictures are so great! artwork by Ushio Shinohara (Neo DADA) dedicated to Tinguely (coloured version for this edition), his partner Niki De Saint Phalle's paintings, original photographs of his first one man show at Minami Ga…