New Arrivals
Eins +
Mark Lorenz Kysela plays contemporary music for a instrumental soloist, sound extensions and tapes. An artist on various saxophones and clarinet. Performs as a soloist, in combination with (live-) electronic or analogue enhancements and tapes. Mark Lorenz Kysela presents six completely different pieces: artistic individual positions focusing on the radical nature of musical language, on shaping and on the soloist. Christoph Ogiermann, 'Druckblöcke und Zeichenakkumulationen BCC' for saxophone, l…
Seitz versus Gendreau
Seitz Versus Gendreau is a collaborative experiment in using concrete music compositional strategies. These pieces were composed with created and found sound captured in San Francisco. 'Chorus After Rains': A strategy where we each use the same raw sound clips with different results. The two pieces are then melded to create one piece of music, the different modules becoming inseparable from each other. 'Things Lost That Will Never Be Found': A composition with live instruments, moving fro…
Ritual Totemic Stone
By now, the significance of Sam McKinlay's extensive body of work is undeniable. After having begun his mapping of the depths of monomania, fetish, addiction, and vice, in the mid-1990s with his flagship project, The Rita, McKinlay briefly halted his work in the early 2000s. Though it was unforeseeable at the time, McKinlay's return to substantial recording output and live performances around 2004 would quickly and permanently alter the landscape of Harsh Noise. The Rita became one of the most …
Zones Without People
**Re-press on vinyl, now with download code redeemable from the label** OPN's 'Zones Without People' was released in 2009 on a highly limited vinyl run for Arbor. All seven tracks featured in his Wire chart-topping 'Rifts' compilation, predating his mindblowing 'Returnal' album (surely one of the best of 2010) and displaying its prodigiously gifted creator amidst some of his most affective synthscapes. From the outset we could consider this to be classic material, as the miniature 'Computer Visi…
Journeys in Sound
This documentary by Oscar-winner Allan Miller and Emmy-winner Paul Smaczny pays tribute to the most fascinating American avant-garde composer John Cage. Shot in America, Germany and Japan, the program premieres rare archival footage; presenting concert excerpts and a set of short episodes, featuring associates of Cage and contemporary artists, playfully delineating different aspects of John Cage. The documentary features interviews with Yoko Ono, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Steffen Schleiermac…
1986-1991
"The Venom P. Stinger retrospective is on. One of the roughest groups of the '80s is back in print on vinyl and for the first time ever on CD, and still nice and hard and rough and wild on either format. File under: punk rock/noise rock/free-of-constraints rock. If you think of Venom P. Stinger simply as the proving ground for 2/3rds of the Dirty Three first, then you're seriously missing it, and fuck you. It was the mid-'80s and everything was going fine. The music underground was its ow…
El Pianista del Antifaz
LP version with CD. French-Catalan musician Pascal Comelade's world is atypical and his inspirations come from many different sources -- from contemporary music to The Cramps -- making him one of the most creative and original artists of our times. At the crossroads of many different arts, never where he's expected, he never ceases to surprise his audience, taking the listener on poetic paths of primitive perception. El Pianista del Antifaz is the latest album in Comelade's galaxy. The artwor…
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.
Self Title
There are no words to say how amazing the Heinz Hopf's debut album is. They are a harsh noise duo consisting of Matthias Andersson and Dan Johansson. The first is the mind behind the label Release the bats, and the second is the man behind the moniker Sewer Election. The result is 32 minutes of pure, brutal and uncompromising harsh noise. Comparisons with Incapacitants is too easy, their love of the Japanese noise is too evident. Comparisons that do not lead to the cloning of a sound. Thei…
Alpen ocean
Alpen Ocean is the final recording of Carole Kojo (Swiss) and Hitoshi Kojo (Japanese) that they left behind as Jüppala Kääpiö, whilst resident in Switzerland. The sound sources are rather familiar instruments and materials for us such as voices, handmade instruments, viola, organic materials and field recordings. However, the style has evolved to a hybrid of our early style: an intense harmonic drone music that has appeared in RAINBOW MASK, and another phase which might be termed as a cosmopolit…
L'Origine / TEMA
Drawing inspiration from the "Action Direct" expanded guitar performances of Masayuki Takayanagi, Fusinato places the guitar at the centre of his work. A few crudely played strings provide the impetus for a long chain of electronics which obliterate the original signal and leaves us with a hyper-kinetic wall of full frequency spectrum noise. Like the piano in David Tudor early 1960's performances of Cage's Variations II, in Fusinato's work, the guitar is the object of a dialectic of simultaneous…
Gored Gored
Terrie of The Ex collaborated with numerous people over the years to get inspiration from and absorbing all elements of all music, but continuing to being raw and unpolished. In meetings with the Norwegian hard-hitting avant-garde drummer, Paal Nilssen-Love, two souls of similar attitude meet, although from very different background. Being a jazz drummer, Nilssen-Love holds his sticks well in the improvised area of music, much more than the average jazz musicians do today.
This CD is hard …
Black Mill Tapes Volumes 3 & 4
Our Head Technician returns with the keenly awaited follow-up to his amazing 'Black Mill Tapes Volumes 1 & 2' as Pye Corner Audio, including the previously digital-only Volume 3 and the as-yet-unheard Volume 4. Lurking in the shadows between deep house, slow techno, Carpenter soundtracks and classic electronica, these sibling LPs transcend genres with hallucinatory, shape-shifting effect, trudging forth from the pastoral whimsy of the first volumes to a darker, less certain point on the horizon.…
I Love It When You Snore
Mats Gustafsson is perhaps the pre-eminent saxophonist of this post-free jazz/improv era. A perfect combination of Peter Brotzmann's fiery passion, Evan Parker's extended technique and Ken Vandermark's willingness to explode genre boundaries, Gustafsson's discography spans over two decades and sports numerous must-hear recordings with a long laundry list of collaborators, including such luminaries as Brotzmann, Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Jim O'Rourke, Derek Bailey, Sonic Youth and The Ex. Illustrio…
Berlin
Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Chris Heenan, alto saxophone, contrabass clarinet. Alexander Frangenheim, double bass. Ofer Bymel, percussion. Recorded 2010 in Berlin.
Qat, Coffee & Quambus: raw 45s from Yemen
Compiled by Chris Menist, Qat, Coffee & Qambus: raw 45s from Yemen features vintage oud and vocal music inspired by the qat-chewing, coffee-sipping, qambus-playing culture of Yemen. Although part of the classical Arabic musical tradition, the music of Yemen takes its rhythmic lead as much from the East African coast (a mere 20 miles across the Red Sea) as the surrounding Arab Peninsula.Little has been written about the music and culture of one of the world's oldest civilizations, and each 45rpm …
Time and language
Pleq, Hiroki Sasajima and Spheruleus manage to overcome the sheer geographic distance that lies between them to produce a really wonderful studio album.Pleq and Hiroki Sasajima are from bustling capital cities; Warsaw and Tokyo respectively, which has naturally had an impact on their sound. Whilst Spheruleus is from a quiet Lincolnshire town in the UK, surrounded by farmland. As a result of the inspiration drawn from their different environments, the solo output from these three artists is all q…
Brombron 27: Nijmegen pulse
Korm Plastics is proud to present the twenty-seventh release in the Brombron series (missing numbers will follow later this year). Originally a co-production between Staalplaat and Extrapool, it is now hosted by co-curator Frans de Waard. In the year 2000 Frans de Waard and Extrapool started the Brombron project. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in …
Trick17
Since the late 1980s, dieb13 is one of the european key figures in the harnessing of tape players, vinyls, CDs, hard dics and IP protocols as instruments. It's been a while since he has released his last Solo album. After extensive touring and releasing CDs among others with Phil Minton, Mats Gustafsson and John Butcher Group, his latest solo output "trick17" is an enjoyment for both the ear and the eye. Side A ("audible") is a 25 minute solo piece that he developed in an Ping Pong method…
Stroomtoon II
"In December 2011 I recorded the album Stroomtoon, which was released by the French Nuun label the year after. The music was constructed using recordings from improvisations with a setup that I was trying out for upcoming live performances. It's the same setup that I still use nowadays, mainly consisting of an old Phillips analogue tone generator and a selection of effects units. When making Stroomtoon, it felt like moving into new territory that was worth explore more. While that album is very …