New Arrivals
Live
Magnificent reissue of this tape obscurity from 1980, Cluster's eighth album (the first of three live LPs) originally released on the YHR label (which was curated by Pump's David Elliott), also including archival material never before issued on CD. With so much stuff from this era coming to the surface recently it's sometimes easy to get blasé about it all, but this is one you really ought to give your fullest attention to. As the title says, this was recorded live in Vienna in 1980 at th…
M.O.S.
'A new series designed by Clare Cooper. M.O.S. is Ingar Zach's second solo release for Sofa, six years after the critically acclaimed 'Percussion music'. M.O.S. reveals a large and almost monolithic sound world. Zach's horizontal bassdrum (gran cassa) functions as a gigantic, resonating membrane, where metallic and ceramic percussions create articulations over the bass vibrations in a ritualistic dance of pulses and overtones. The music moves slowly, but with a continuing drive, and stretc…
You'll Be Safe Forever
CD version. You'll Be Safe Forever marks the first release from Locust in 12 years. Mark Van Hoen, who made a string of influential releases as Locust on R&S records in the 1990s, all but retired the alias at the end of that decade. In May 2012, Van Hoen was invited to perform a live set on WFMU radio. In order to make the set more spontaneous and add a further dimension, he asked friend and fellow musician Louis Sherman to collaborate. While improvising new material in Sherman's Brooklyn …
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
Charlemagne & Pippin
Single 35+ minute excursion in typical BtC drones w/ added violin. Really organic sounding, loads of textures.
Cellos
The association between Ulrich Mitzlaff and Miguel Mira promises an unforeseeable sound meeting. The specific, personal and different ways of their distinguished expression is the base for their very dynamic and interactive music. They create sounds where the improvisation moves with great fluency between the establishing of textures and abstract musical ideas and the switching in the musical discourse to singular, rhythmic and melodic affirmations. They construct the sonar explorations using th…
Unheard spaces
'Absence and Presence (2006). Absence and Presence was originally written for five musicians and four loudspeakers positioned throughout the site of performance in order to explore the traction between amplified and acoustic space. The performance was predicated on a set of directions that determined the combination of musicians at specific times and the duration of their performance. Within these structural parameters the musicians chose what they played and how they responded to one another. T…
Mubomuso
Mubomuso is a neologism, made up from two extant words. Mubo suggests the unadorned and unaffected, while muso means to be in a state without thought or preplanning. All parts of the release lead the listener towards the consideration of a very specific topic Ð namely, war and violence, and the deeper connections to human nature. Stripped of the clothing of civilization, etiquette and socialization, we slowly become aware of reactions and purposes that exist deep within us embedded comma…
Map in hand
Seaworthy, a three piece collective based in Sydney, Australia that revolves around core member Cameron Webb as well as Sam Shinazzi and Greg Bird, was formed in early 2000 to explore melodic and experimental approaches to the construction of minimalist sound scapes from looped guitar, warm drones, piano, electronics and field recordings.Map In Hand often blurs the lines of conventional categorisation with elements traditionally considered part of “indie” or “post” rock blended with processed mu…
1934-1935
More than seventy years since his death in 1937, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan retains his reputation as one of the greatest singers India ever produced. Possessed of an elastic, honied voice that poured out like mercury, he influenced generations of singers including Mohammed Rafi, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and Pandit Pran Nath. Born at the end of the 19th century to a family of musicians that extended back in time for centuries, his art was formed in the culture of the courts of the maharajas under Briti…
Perpetuum Mobile
“Perpetuum Mobile” is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic “open source” compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers (collage-posers?) Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other's work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but what makes this record d…
Joy Shapes
To say that the words "unique" and "singular" are over-used in describing music is to state the obvious. To apply these words to the sounds created by the various duo/trio configurations of the Texas group Charalambides over the last decade plus would be understatement. To be sure there are numerous antecedents to their music; to deny this of any artist's work would be akin to saying that they are deaf. But they have surely broken new ground in the primitive/folk/mystic/improv/psych valley in …
Final archives
This is the final chapter for this project run by Gianluca Becuzzi - well known for his old dark wave project LIMBO but also for his solo works and collaborations with Fabio Orsi. FINAL ARCHIVES is a sort of collection of rare tracks recorded from 1999 to 2006 totally reworked and remastered in 2009. ABSOLUTE GREY is the title that Kinetix gave to his graphic artwork selection exhibited with an ambient score specifically composed for the exposition space. The exhibition is made up of ten grey sc…
I Wish I Didn't Dream
Wish I Didn’t Dream, the new album of duets by guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Langille, was cut in just a few hours of studio time. But the pieces started falling into place 15 years earlier on the 10th floor of a nondescript building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was there, at the old location of the Brecht Forum, that Connors got to know writer and WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk, who was curating a concert series there. On occasion Tom Abbs (now President of Northern Sp…
Liquid Architecture 13 - Antarctic Convergence
Liquid Architecture 13: Antarctic Convergence has been conceived by the curators as a way of investigating the philosophical, social and environmental ramifications of the growing human presence in Antarctica through the activities of a diverse set of artists who have produced works from first hand encounters of the continent. Specially curated by Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis, this program draws on a range of Australian and international artists who have undertaken fieldwork in v…
Grandfather Harmonic
The Preservation label presents Grandfather Harmonic, the new full-length album from Sparkling Wide Pressure. The alter ego of Murfreesboro, Tennessee's Frank Baugh, Sparkling Wide Pressure has drawn from a seemingly infinite well of sonic inspiration to record at an incredible rate since 2008, having his work appear on labels such as Digitalis, Stunned, Housecraft and Students Of Decay. This transfixing entry into his weighty catalog pinpoints Baugh's increasing fascination with song-forms…
Teeming
'Magda MAYAS and Christine ABDELNOUR SEHNAOUI both play acoustic music that is diametral, a space they conquered by changing the traditional ways of their instruments: modern alchemy. Together they express a strong physical experience. MAYAS is a master of sparse fragments of motion and SEHNAOUI works in a flux of changing sounds. The multiple layers of their performance create a shivering moment of existence, which reminds me of the words of the Danish artist Malene Bach: 'Art finds its own re…
Natsu No Sebone
Alto saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe and percussionist Toshi Ishizuka recorded this extended improvisation at Tokyo's Apia Club, quietly ferocious music with a unique physicality. "Thrilling, blood-shaking, soul-scraping and defiantly non-sexless improv set from two Japanese titans. Recorded live at the Apia club in Tokyo in December last year, this set showcases Urabe's uniquely physical approach to improvisation -- ferociously concentrated, contorted, sweating and eruptive with physical power. Hi…
The Visitor
The Visitor is a seriously all-O'Rourke affair: all the sounds you hear are Jim and Jim alone, recontextualizing everything he's done over the years & throwing out the bullshit. The one thing you won't hear is his voice. Some of The Visitor is tracked so deep, it took two hundred tracks to hold it all. It doesn't sound like it though - to Jim's credit, the mix sounds very minimal, very straightforward. There's moments of low comedy next to high drama & juicy melancholy with a seeming lack of reg…
Unit
A journey to the Chinese Qinghai province (Tibetan culture region of Amdo) was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut China. Its purpose was to experience the province and to produce art works to be presented at The Third Guangzhou Triennial, subtitled 'Farewell to Post-Colonialism' in the same year. The sound installation Unit and a series of photographs called Cutting Qinghai resulted from this journey, during which I took photographs and made audio recordings. The installation was presente…