New Arrivals
The Persistence of Meaning
New York duo of Joshua Convey and Luke Krnkr. Blistering, overdriven shards of noise obscure the almost entirely hidden melodies. These musical moments are few and far between, as The Persistence of Meaning is more about reveling in destruction and decay, emphasizing raw feedback and hollow, rhythmic loops that shamble like the walking dead. Dirges from the deepest ossuaries can almost be heard, pained notes buried by locust swarms of static. While occasionally the pair engage in erratic Krautro…
Monsters & Miasmas
Brian Cook (TERMINALS) & wife Maryrose make up this long-running project who's releases on Ajax/3 Beads of Sweat & Siltbreeze have continued to tread a line between haunting country-esque ballads & the brand of noise-rock for which the Terminals is known.
The French Collection
To be issued mid Oct. 2010 as a double CD set housed in a custom made gatefold case with artwork by Jesse Peper. It started with a dusty box of DAT tapes. Perhaps it was years since anyone had listened to them despite the tantalising labels,"Paris #1", "Paris #2","Paris #3”... Indeed it was Paris where the Dots played their first residency in 1992. However , these tapes were a document of the Dots' one and only 3-nighter from the 10th to the 12th of March 1994 at the delightful Theatre Passage d…
Rework
One of America’s greatest ever composers gets the remix treatment. What is it with remix albums this week - are they back? Anyway it’s always an odd thing the remix album, basically it’s just an excuse for the great and good to strut their stuff and do something decent on a high profile record.It’s a mixed bag of collaborators from Tyondai Braxton to Cornelius to Beck (who gets an entire side to himself) to Johann Jonannsson to Peter Broderick (still no doubt weeping from our review of his recen…
The Temple Recording
I am currently making recordings like this: I go to a certain place and choose an object Ð mainly it is a landscape, which is interesting to me. I fix a stethoscope with a small built-in air mike onto my temples. The position of the air microphone can be set anywhere near the ears, but I feel that our temples are the best and only place for that. The stethoscope captures vibrations of my muscles and blood flows. Because of the nature of the air microphone, environmental noises are recorded, t…
Excision
Essential collection of previously vinyl only Nadja tracks which work brilliantly as a 2CD album. All of these tracks originally appeared on limited vinyl or cd releases between 2007 and 2009 and are now out of print. 'Jornada del Muerto' originally appeared on the Trinity CD (Die Stadt Musik) and 'Perichoresis' on the Trinitarian LP (Important Records), both of which releases featured solo tracks by Aidan and Leah and one Nadja track. 'Spahn' appeared on Tumpisa (Accident Prone Records), a …
Life Review (1993-2003)
The Shadow Ring formed in the seaside town of Folkestone, England in 1993. Over the course of a decade, and through eight LPs, Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris and later Tim Goss scraped out a unique musical pathway for themselves, armed with only the barest of tools. With each release the Shadow Ring presented themselves as a group in constant flux. Naive acoustic improvisations, dour bedroom sci-fi epics, cryptic D.I.Y. theatre and glacial electronic soundscapes all became fair game in the…
Open Strings: Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East
'Superbly stylish in conception and packaging, it shows that small independent labels can still be an inspirational force' (Daily Telegraph); 'definitive and essential' (Brainwashed); 'stunning in its historical interest and musicianship' (Boston Phoenix); 'phenomenal and mesmerizing' (Dusted); 'one of the major phonographic salvage operations of our time' (The Wire). 'The archival finds are, without exception, phenomenal – and mesmerizing. The oud, the santour and spike fiddle dominate. There a…
Suara alam Indonesia
original field recordings made in Indonesia 2010; the Swiss radical performer presents again a completely different side of his work => environmental recordings of almost untouched nature & wildlife; lim. 200 in DVD box, comes with 5 colour photos
New Sights, Old Sounds
A much-needed reissue of Derek Bailey's 1978 2-CD Japanese release on the Morgue label, the first disc a series of studio improvisations and the second presenting two live performances in Nagoya and Kalavinka.Recorded and originally issued in Japan in 1978, the contents of this two-disc set quickly became something of a collector's item as the album quickly went out of print. Happily, the master tapes were reacquired for release on Incus in 2002, providing further documentation of a rich portion…
In the Beginning
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer/performer known as a pioneer in American experimental music. This series of eight works, created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrates a remarkable extension of Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock… series of 1969–71 using the harmonic and sub-harmonic series. The In the Beginning series exemplifies the idea of model-building as a compositional process. A simple process …
(1975-1991)
Just arrived! The research-performance group kiva was created in 1975 by the American trombonist John Silber and the French percussionist Jean-Charles François as part of a research project at the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California San Diego. During the period of its existence (1975-91) various members (often graduate students from UCSD) joined the two permanent musicians, John Silber and Jean-Charles François, to contribute to the groups artistic production. Two persona…
Motion - Movement In Australian Sound
Motion – Movement In Australian Sound is a generous, 2-CD overview of 22 artists representing Australia’s burgeoning terrain of electronic and experimental music. From Scott Horscroft’s mesmerising piece for eleven guitars, the sublimely sweet, driving tones of Pretty Boy Crossover, Sue Harding’s melodies from dot matrix printers to renown veteran Alan Lamb’s awe-inducing casting of field recordings from the West Australian outback, Motioncasts wide to expose some of the most creative and …
Mali: essential recordings of Carnatic bamboo flute (1969-1970)
Gorgeous double CD issue of two crucial albums by "the greatest living flutist of South India", T.R. Malingham or Mali to millions of South Indians, presented in respectfully opulent stye by Japan's EM reissue imprint. This is meditative, spiritual, and exotic music of the highest order, combining his two most revered recordings from 1969 and 1970 over two very special discs. Mali is said to be able to commune with birds via his playing and that's quite understabable. His virtuoso use of …
Viva Negativa! A Tribute To The New Blockaders Vol IV
Outstanding double CD Featuring a mindblowing line-up of contributors, this double-disc release pays homage to noise music pioneers The New Blockaders, with tracks recorded by some of the avant-garde's leading lights, including Merzbow, Incapacitants, MSBR, Aube, K2, Violent Onsen Geisha, KK Null, Government Alpha, Astro, Cracksteel, Nobuo Yamada, Spiracle, Thirdorgan, Kazumoto Endo, Embudagonn 108, Guilty Connector, Defektro, Kouhei Matsunaga, Veltz, etc. 500 copies only!!!The New Blockade…
Exp
Raster Noton's rhythmic auteur, Frank Bretschneider, presents his first album in three years, a "music-visual project based on the idea that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music". 'EXP' is an attempt to assimilate the qualities of music, namely rhythm, movement, tempo, mood, intensity and compositional structure within the visual aspect. The music for the project is arranged from an array of generated and selected waveforms sourced from pure electricity, magnetism, light an…
Entraxes inégaux Craquer les liants
Reissue of two LPs from Bloc Thyristors label and two groups run by the drummer Jean-Noël Cognard. Empan with Judith Kan, voice, Jac Berrocal, trumpet, piano, Dan Warburton, violin, keyboards, Béatrice Godeau, cello. Tankj with Serge Adam on trumpet, Jérome Noetinger on electroacoustic devices and tape recorder, Titus Oppmann on doublebass. Recorded and mixed by Patrick Müller.
Our Bed Is Green
With ethics that even Igor Stravinsky would be proud of, 'Our Bed is Green' was originally released by the Charalambides on cassette way back yonder in 1992 before it made it onto CD then vinyl and now back onto double CD as part of Kranky's reissue series. Comprised of heavy-psych veteran Tom Carter and Christina Madonia, Charalambides are an aural vulture that picks through disperate genres and styles to find the sound that best matches that in their heads. Opening with the overt fragili…
Forbidden Planets, Volume 2
Subtitled: More Music From The Pioneers Of Electronic Sound. "Further to Chrome Dreams' enormously popular first Forbidden Planets CD comes this superb second volume of music from the pioneers of electronic sound. Compiled and annotated once more by music historian Alan Clayson, and featuring his extensive sleeve-notes, the two discs here, featuring 142 minutes of some of the strangest sounds ever recorded, will again delight fans of this most intriguing and previously un-compiled genre." …
Klavierstücke I-XI / Mikrophonie I & II
Beautiful double CD set, containing a mindblowing Mikrophonie version... Mikrophonie is the title given by Karlheinz Stockhausen to two of his compositions, written in 1964 and 1965, in which “normally inaudible vibrations . . . are made audible by an active process of sound detection (comparable to the auscultation of a body by a physician); the microphone is used actively as a musical instrument, in contrast to its former passive function of reproducing sounds as faithfully as possible” (Stock…