New Arrivals
Seven stars
Fennesz's first solo release since Black Sea (2008) is a 4 track 10 vinyl, with a CD version soon available. Using acoustic and electric guitars, bass, synths, computers, Fennesz continues to engage and entrance us in equal measure. 'Liminal', 'July', 'Shift', 'Seven Stars' (with Steven Hess on drums). Fennesz writes: Seven Stars was recorded in Vienna in January 2011. I recorded and mixed the album within 3 weeks. Liminal and July were existing pieces which I have reworked. (I wrote an early ve…
Delusion Of Hope
With an eldritch terror that could just as easily be from another dimension as the darkest ocean comes the latest release from Ural Umbo, Delusion of Hope. Feedback and melody barely escape from the murky crevices, tinged with a sense of grinding tension. Sharp, acidic percussion slices through the blackness with violent urgency, while electronic blasts and organic drones entwine and ensnare. Some dim instinctive memory vaguely resurrects a shadowy scene wherein black drums roar madly, and monst…
Llavi Vell
Edition of 150 copies. Compostion by Ferran Fages (acoustic guitar, contact mics and speakers). The nature of this recording is a distorted image that came to my mind during the composition of the piece. I worked on Llavi vell during 3 months from july to september 2010. The sound is the result of bowing the strings of the guitar in different fret positions, with a bow made of a long metapiece. The fret positions were related to the different divisions of the lenght of the strings: half, third, …
Resolution Of Remembrance 1992-1999
Edition of 500 copies 4xCD box from Lasse Marhaug’s Pica Disk label that works as a career retrospective for Mr Yasutoshi Yoshida’s Government Alpha project. Spanning the years 1992-1999, the box gathers previously unreleased early material alongside limited edition cassettes, lathes and CD-Rs. In the booklet that accompanies the set (which also includes full-colour reproductions of Yoshida’s amazing collages) Yoshida cites Nurse With Wound and Accept (!?) as his formative influences and the ear…
C93-Box Sets in Fine linen Folder
Finally arrived, very few copies available left, both wooden Boxes (VOD74 and VOD75) delivered in deluxe silk-screened and embossed fine-linen folder to complete and protect the 2 wooden boxe. Already sold out at source, an extraordinarily beautiful and monumental release from Vinyl on Demand
Repaired/Replaced
Touch presents a 7" from Mike Harding as part of the Touch Sevens series. Recorded in West Wittering in Balham using DPA 4060s onto a Nagra Ares P-ll digital recorder. Cut by Jason at Transition. Artwork & photography by Jon Wozencroft.
Lux Payllettes
Turntablist and concrète composer eRikm is one of the more readily recognisable names contributing to the revelatory Entr'acte label, and his disc Lux Payllettes is a typically excellent work. Stretching out over a thirty-minute-plus duration, the Marseille-based composer cuts and layers a huge variety of sounds cultivated from the sonic idioms of Western cinema. A bracing and immersive collage of fractured soundtracks, dislocated foley work and strange re-combinations, Lux Payllettes comes high…
Vergezichten
Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek is a master of self-made sound and time-stretching, sensitively handling organic recordings and samples on countless releases, and regards preset sounds in an organ or a cheap keyboard as a tonal find, as a part of the cacophony of everyday life. These bontempi-rhythms plus the computer-stretched sounds of saxophone (Espen Reinertsen) and voice (Mariska Baars) are the base elements of "Vergezicht 1" and "Vergezicht 2." It is stunning how Zuydervelt man…
Sonopsys N° 4
2007 release, complex book (texts in French with a translation into Engish) richly illustrated, containing a precious CD with Luc Ferrari's earlier concrete music pieces, dated 1959.Luc Ferrari trained in music since a very young age and continued his composition and piano studies, until a case of tuberculosis in his youth interrupted his career as a pianist. From then on he mostly concentrated on musical composition. During this illness he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the radio…
The icy echoer
'The Icy Echoer constitutes a premiere in many respects, for both, the label and the artists. After countless collaborations with the likes of Leif Elggren, CM von Hausswolff, Bryan Lewis Saunders and others (mostly released on CD), this 7' marks the first time that Esposito's works are published on vinyl, while the same applies to the Fragment Factory. Likewise, believe it or not, it's the very first appearance of Drumm on a 7' platter. Michael Esposito is an experimental artist and long…
Dropsonde
2012 repress; originally released 2006. Biosphere is Norwegian composer and performer Geir Jenssen, and this is his fifth release for Touch. In the early 1990s he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic and enduring. Dropsonde isn't a soundtrack like the interwoven Substrata nor an episodic journey in the way that Autour de la Lune is. Here Geir Jenssen is pushing new directions towards the jazz colors of Miles Davis a…
Ersatz II
The second release from Dieter Moebius and Karl Renziehausen. The tracks were recorded in 1991-92 and released on Nova Era in 1992. Reissue with special miniature paper sleeve. Digitally remastered version, limited to 1,000 copies
Shoals (Edition)
Shoals (Edition) is a companion release to Taylor Deupree’s 2010 full-length CD Shoals. This limited edition 7” record has a shortened version of “A Fading Found” (from the album) on Side A and a B-Side called “Sere.” While the 7” format only allows for brief works - and in this case extracted from much longer compositions - Edition creates intimate and physical vignettes into these highly acoustic and tactile recordings.
La chambre claire
Quentin Sirjacq, a native of Paris, is a young composer, best known in the free improvisation scene for his collaboration with Joëlle Léandre. The album aesthetic is reminiscent of 19th and 20th centuries’ French literature (Barthes, Baudelaire), American minimalists (Philip Glass, Steve Reich) and neoclassicism (Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, Robert Haigh). Quentin Sirjacq’s music is romantic and symbolic. La Chambre Claire has a timeless beauty, all the while being the perfect accompaniment to mo…
Triptyque de l’oeil
This album, Yôko Higashi's fifth as hamaYôko, features a triptych of pipe organ improvisations recorded at St Augustin's Church in Croix Rousse, Lyon. Higashi likens these tracks to a 'an old painting of a foggy landscape'. They are augmented by two silent passages and a fourth track, Panthere d'Erebos. Edition of 300 copies.
Little Mornings
FLEXI DISC // CLEAR // 33RPM // SQUARED // 1 SIDE // 1 SONG handmade clear screen-printed cover on holographic paper, killer modular synth experiments by Brooklyn's "Venezuelan in-exile" and No Fun label boss Carlos Giffoni
III
III is as immediate as a truck with failed brakes crashing through your living room wall. The third and final installment of a trilogy entitled Ceremony, its opening moments rage and wail, with distorted guitars pulling out in front of the drums like hellhounds that have slipped their master's leash. But this isn't a mono-dimensional freak-out. Smith paces himself, pulling back into brooding drones and pensive picking before lashing out once more. As befits a journey that's taken three di…
Willow
Latest entry in Touch's bitesize Touch Sevens series, with typically lush cover design and photography by Jon Wozencroft. This one comes from NZ native Paul Douglas aka Rosy Parlane, and was recorded in Auckland back in 2008-9. 'Willow' is a blast, its radiant widescreen drones and shimmering surfaces - which corrode and curdle over the duration - calling to mind the work of labelmate BJ Nilsen. 'Morning' is more reserved, elegiac even; rotary organ tones and delicate processing conspire …
OvalDNA
In many ways, O, released on Thrill Jockey after a nine-year break, was a second debut album for Markus Popp aka Oval. A radical break with old concepts and methods, a new beginning. While Popp's artistic approach in the 1990s and early 2000s was more of a structural, theoretical nature, O was just about the music itself. Themes such as the means of production, limitations, dogma and concept took a back seat to a musical sensibility. Instead of writing new software to synthesize and process soun…
Heavy metal drones
Hand-numbered edition of 300 copies art edition set that features a 10” on clear vinyl, a CD and an accompanying art book/manifesto from this obscure Japanese/South African avant garde performance troupe. Reputedly starting off in 1976 through tape experiments at home, much of Ellende’s work is based on the writings of founder member Wim Bontjes, who passed away in 1995 and if the contents of the booklet are anything to go by they share a healthy obsession with sex, ritual and radical per…