New Arrivals
Blood In The Coffin
CD version: Leon Dufficy is primarily known as guitarist in the hippie-jam outfit, Hush Arbors, but now he steps into his own as the driving force behind Winter Drones. Sounding like the perfect combination of fuzzed-out ambient drift, shoegaze swirl and propulsive pop sensibilities, Winter Drones have slowly gained attention in their native U.K. with a handful of obscure CD-R/cassette releases and compilation appearances. Earlier this year, the band's debut album, Blood In The Coffin, ca…
Kuopio
With “Kuopio”, Raster-Noton releases the second full length album by Vladislav Delay aka Sasu Ripatti. The record features eight new songs which allow the listener to dive into Delay’s cosmos of deep and likewise organic sounds. Subtle yet complex electronic manipulations are used, resulting in a high degree of variation within every single track and a nearly imperceptible intensification of their density. Progressive and energetic rhythms play an important role as already indicated in hi…
Grand Electronic Suite
Recorded at the Roundhouse 1972, during the ICES Festival."For this show we rehearsed a week in a small village in the south of Holland. The repertoire of the first part was a kind of "frozen improvisation". We made some written plans about the form and structures and then rehearsed it for the whole week. So during these rehearsals things moved from improvisation into fixed form, just by remembering what we have played, and polishing it. This is a working concept that …
Cracked Refraction
Cracked Refraction ties its complex knots with infectious vigor and a predilection for playfulness. Wrack’s melodies are slithering and serpentine, and the music is built of smaller segments assembled in what can seem a slapdash manner, with all sorts of jutting ends and unexpected collisions. What Bruckmann’s done, though, is intentional, placing his players on different planes, with straight lines failing to meet, runs of notes ricocheting at impossible angles, and expected avenues folding in …
In Winter
One more new Gianluca Becuzzi release on Silentes, this time in collaboration with Luigi Turra. Composer of musique concrete and graphic designer whose main interest is the musical balance between silence and the tactile perception of sound, Turra’s works were published by labels such as and/OAR, Unfathomless, Non Visual Objects, Smallvoices and many others. A lot has already been written about Becuzzi, here we would just like to remember his historic Darkwave / Industrial project…
It\'s Time For Tristram Cary
'Classical. Electro acoustic and widdly weird noises from the big brain. Over the last few years intrepid music lovers have been investigating and enjoying the work of pioneering electronic musicians, electro-acoustic artists and all the groovy folks who spent hours manipulating and cutting tape to make new and exciting sounds. It's meant that lots of interesting figures have been brought back into our musical view. But one of the most important, innovative, influential and almost forgotten arti…
Experiments \'80-\'82
self-issued cd collecting two early 80s cassette-only releases (“quiz party” & “life in video city”) by richard bone, both tipped by the mutant sounds crew a few years back resulting in something of a renewed interest in this otherwise obscure figure in the 70s / 80s “minimal synth” wave - jumping back & forth between noisy, arpeggiated sequences & more atemporal modes (i can certainly hear the tod dockstader influence throughout the “quiz party” pieces) this is in many ways the perfect disc for…
Improvisation Anarchy
With a title like ‘Improvisation Anarchy’, you pretty much have the blessed assurance that the record will be either a right-on, spontaneous surge of electricity, or at least an entertaining disaster. Recorded in 1978-79, this patchwork quilt of straight-arrow punk and meandering synth-assisted psychedelia manages to be both at the same time. It should be noted that this kind of music was not common for 1970s West Japan before the ‘bubble economy’ of the 80’s allowed for more impulsive consumpti…
A thousand mountains
To start with, we've always commended Japan's Doubtmusic label for the handsome packaging job that each one of their digipack cd releases invariably receives. This one, though, we'd probably be inclined to buy just 'cause of the especially cool cover art alone! Done by one Tomoo Gokita, the cover suggests an arched window in a brightly patterned wall, looking out on (a photo of) some majestic snow-capped alpine mountain (the Matterhorn, is it?). But in front of the "window", the corpse-painted v…
Up and down the lion-revised
“The only existing recording by this legendary 1979 trio. Alexander von Schlippenbach and Sven-Åke Johansson was a working duo, when Peter Brötzmann joined them for a trio tour in Sweden in the fall of 1979. They were all three part of the strong growth of the free improvised music and free jazz in Europe. In 1979, though, the era of revolutions was already history. They had all played in groups that made any retreat impossible; not to mention their solo works. The music of the trio 1979 could r…
Sublunar
Sublunar is the first full-length release from Kane Ikin who is also known as one half of the duo Solo Andata. Sublunar follows Kane’s solo debut Contrail (7”, 12k2022) picking up where that EP left off and pushing the boundaries outward in every direction into denser, deeper, wetter and more decayed terrain. The word “sublunar” can be read to contain many conceptual layers important to the album. It is music about moonlight, darkness, the faintest hint of light and shadow.... Moons locke…
Dark as the sea
'Architeuthis rex. Leviathan. King. Magnificent sea dweller and haunter of the dreams of Italian artist Antonio Gallucci. Dark of the Sea is that dream, each of the seven recordings an aperture into a horrific underwater world filled with the fear of what lies outside. Together, the album is a kaleidoscope of Don Cherry's Brown Rice, backward masked King Tubby acetates, strange strings, outer space broadcasts of unholy funeral rites, Native American percussion and metaphysical drone. Illustrati…
Superficial Music
Re-release with bonus tracks recorded in 1982. On 1981's Superficial Music masterpiece, French electronic composer Bernard Szajner presents selections from his previous "Visions of Dune" sessions played backwards and at half speed, enhanced through the use of digital and analog devices, as well as "Oswicim," a three-part reflection on the Holocaust that draws on his own family's experience. Szajner's touch is delicate and evocative, making for a powerful, if understated, listening experie…
Vayu Rouah
Cosmic like Three Organic Experiences, esoteric like Password for Entheogenic Experience, Vayu Rouah perform a kind of synthesis of the researches by Alio Die and Aglaia. Vayu Rouah is the primordial wind that join cabala and sonorous alchemies, an inexorable flux with extended electro-acoustic solutions, by a wide range of frequencies. A very long and slow gestation of about eight years have absorbed different musical moods and have stratified itself throw the time.. sound after sound.. t…
Stop Playing
Wolfgang Mitterer is playing the organ and leaves no tone unturned. The composer beams the traditional instrument straight into the 21st century – feel free to follow suit!The organ is a machine, and Wolfgang Mitterer certainly knows how to operate machines. Quite early on his passion for this complex instrument got hooked up to the manifold possibilities available in a digital studio setting; so, meanwhile the Austrian composer has become both: a much admired contemporary organist with a pencha…
Monsters Of Felt
Robert Horton’s musical exploits are diverse, heady and spans over three decades. From his early punk days to joining various groups in pursuit of free jazz, drone and even psychedelic hillbilly, Horton is happily hard to pin down. He also makes his own instruments. One found regularly across the 30-plus releases he’s been involved with since 2005 is the ‘boot’, a four-stringed instrument that plays like an otherworldly dobro or slide guitar. Tom Carter has been a lightning rod-like figure…
Fame
This new CD, Fame, the first all sound poetry release on Pogus, consists of 20 new polypoems produced by noted Italian sound poet, scholar, and sound poetry archivist Enzo Minarelli between 2008 and 2010. Since the early 1970s, Enzo Minarelli has been developing his multiple activities, starting from the written word, which will become related to orality, visuality, performance and television. He has been active in the field of linear and visual poetry, creating several one-man shows and a…
Unknown skies
...Every trio without a piano, or without a drums, or as in this case without a double bass, gains in incline what it loses in “balance”. It only takes a little sometimes. Everyone plays at ease across. Everyone can split themselves. There are no more solos as solos but phases, circles of influence and predominance which do not last. The duos bind and unbind more clearly, the contrasts stand out better. The theme is no longer material to develop but, as in Unknown Skies, a lyrical and volatile s…
Adhesives and grout
Korm Plastics is proud to present the eigtheenth release in the Brombron series. 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 a certain amount of time on a collaborative projec…
Songs of the frogs of Taiwan, vol.1
Taiwan, located between Japan and Philippines, possess a precious natural environment. This 68 minutes long Compact-Disc contains the songs of 16 amongst the 32 species of frogs that inhabit the island. Realized by a sound artist who is also an amphibian enthousiast, these recordings (devoid of vocal or musical accompaniment) are not only audio documents for natural history aficionados, but propose also some listening situation for the pleasure of the ears. This work is an invitation to the deli…