New Arrivals
Elegy for Bangalore
The sound/video installation-project 'Eye Contact with the City' (recipient of an Honorary Mention at PRIX Ars Electronica 2011) was the outcome of an artists' residency in Bangalore in the autumn of 2010. The primary materials used in the installation were the field recordings made and video footage shot at various locations in Bangalore. Materials also included retrieved audio from old reel-to-reel tapes found at the city's flea markets. The extensive repository of field recordings and other a…
Hemp Is Here
Leven Signs' Hemp Is Here came and went in 1985, as both a cassette release (Unlikely Records) and vinyl release (Cordelia) in the blink of an eye. The duo of Peter Karkut and Maggie Turner managed to craft one of the strangest, most affecting albums of new wave experimentalism of the era, but due to the album's impossible-to-find status, it's been largely forgotten and continuously overlooked ever since. A chance encounter with the cassette version of Hemp Is Here led Brad Rose of Digitali…
Probability A: three studies for compositions of infinite lenght
Probability A collects three pieces composed by William Hutson between 2009 and 2012. Over the past seven years Hutson’s project Rale has evolved to incorporate more negative space into the music. The three pieces herein contained were recorded as proofs-of-concept; they are tracks that Hutson made to loop indefinitely in his house as he built up the courage to use long silences in what is supposed to be a noise/drone act.
William Hutson began recording and performing as Rale in 2006. He …
Mountains Of Tongues
Important collection of recordings documenting and preserving "fringe" or under-represented folk cultures and voices from a unique region at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. It spans a diverse cross-section of music by Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens and many other ethnicities which fall outside their country's definition of national folk music - Azeris from Georgia, Kurds from Tbilisi, Avars and Lezgis from Azerbaijan, or Molokans in the South Caucasus - giving room for al…
Chiapaneca
A great, vivid recording of some wild playing, using the entire kit, rolling about on the various skins and cymbals. Recorded at Festival El Nicho Aural by Daniel Goldaracena at Centro Cultural España Mexico D.F 12 mayo 2012Mastering and cover design by Lasse Marhaug
Armed Courage
With nary a praising documentary, coffee table photo book or tribute band to their name, The Dead C are nonetheless one of the most respected, longest surviving groups in the history of rock. Still sporting the original band members (Michael Morley on guitar, vocals, Bruce Russell on guitar, Robbie Yeats on drums) from their first assemblage in 1987, The Dead C's renown has a lot to do with their stubborn unwillingness to compromise in any form. With a varied and challenging discography, the ban…
Mitosis
"12k kicks off its 11th year with a new release that takes the label down new sonic pathways. Caught between the organic and electronic minimalism that 12k is known for and the unconventional Japanese pop musings and songwriting style of Happy, Moskitoo's Drape is an infectiously strange, bleepy, and dreamy debut release. Sanae Yamasaki (Moskitoo) hails from Sapporo, Japan in Hokkaido, the country's northern-most prefecture. Perhaps a reaction to the cool climate of her home, her multi-instrumen…
Psychedelic Sax
Grey-area exact LP repro edition, originally released on Fahey's Takoma label in 1967. Charlie Nothing was the fractured-psyche pseudonym of author, organic farmer, beekeeper and philosopher/clown Charles Martin Simon, inventor of the dingulator (guitar sculptures made out the metal from American cars). The Psychedelic Saxophone Of Charlie Nothing made a minor splash in the European free jazz melting pot upon its initial release, but the album's non-dingulating psych sax improvisation, acc…
Intervisions
Intervisions documents select live actions by Andy Votel, Sean Canty of Demdike Stare, Jane Weaver, and N. Racker's NeoTantrik syzygy over the last 12 months. It breaks down to five parts recorded on location in Bristol, Rotterdam, and Stockport -- some previously issued on tape -- in mutating alignments of personnel all deeply focused on common goals of abstract sonic transcendence uniting a mind-field of mimetic and sensual references to nu-religious and metaphysical phorms. Three pieces…
Rules of the universe
Kye is proud to announce the release of Rules Of The Universe, a fully authorized anthology of archival audio work by the renowned Dutch artist Anton Heyboer (1924-2005). Heyboer's stature in visual arts is well known and internationally celebrated, but documentation of his audio work is scant and difficult to locate. Heyboer's only previous vinyl release - 1976's ill-fated 'She And She As One' LP (EMI) introduced a music so resolutely personal and uncommercial in nature that EMI ordered …
LOVE
LOVE is a harmonious partnership between two dissimilar characters.LOVE (for two percussionists) was composed in 2004 by Kunsu Shim and recorded in 2012 by Nick Hennies (drums) and Greg Stuart (sustained sounds).
Kunsu Shim was born as the son of re-migrants from Japan on September 15, 1958 in Busan, South Korea. The ocean provided the adolescent Shim with the experience of spatial openness and expanse. This notion can be seen later as the basis of his production. He twice won the first pr…
Ten Thousand Points Of Light: The 20th Anniversary Edition
Kitsch alert! Worshipper at the shrine of Elvis, fans of unabashed bad taste, followers of pop culture, take note. Ten Thousand Points Of Light, originally released in 1991 and now available on DVD for the very first time, is a wry, understated and terrifically funny look at The Townsends, a suburban Atlanta family who, every holiday season for eight years, transformed their Stone Mountain area brick ranch house into a meteoric blaze of Christmas lights. Known as both "the Christmas House" …
The Falling Rocket
This is true cosmic music!!! Stephan Mathieu is at the top of his game with The Falling Rocket, this is some seriously pensive & brooding minimalism that runs the gamut of the emotion rainbow without tossing you around rollercoaster style, with mostly just a Farfisa organ, Hohner Electronium, and radio at his disposal, Mathieu concentrates on a dense & lightweight essence, the sound of civilized silence carved out in the blankness of your mind, surrounded by inaudible hiss & hum, a delicate stat…
Character
Opportunities for introspection have come few and far between for Canadian-born, New York City-based cellist Julia Kent. After coming to prominence as a member of the cello-driven group Rasputina in the ‘90s, she went on to arrange and play on numerous recordings and tour extensively as a member of Antony and the Johnsons, among other projects.The opportunity to explore her own emotional and creative world came with her solo LPs, Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011), and it is something she ap…
Hassaniya Music from the Western Sahara and Mauritania
In 2006, Hisham Mayet returned to West Africa to continue his search for an unknown musician he had heard six months earlier on the radio in a Morocco hotel room. Knowing only that it was Sahrawi music -- music of the south -- he headed down through the vast and remote desert landscape of the Western Sahara and Mauritania in hopes of finding someone who could identify these revelatory recordings. The story of how he finally found this elusive artist is the stuff of ethnomusicological legend. But…
Proceed with Caution!
Whereas the earlier black jazz album Shawn-Neeq had its share of riff-based funk, Calvin Keys' second outing Proceed with Caution! (1974) sticks close to straight-ahead jazz verities with the 30-something guitarist in the studio with seven similarly young, on-the-rise musicians including Charles Owens (saxophones, flute), Oscar Brashear (trumpet), Al Hall Jr. (trombone), Kirk Lightsey (electric piano), Henry Franklin (bass), and Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums). Keys can really play the guitar, e…
2nd Movement
Continue reprints of the amazing tapes by Pierpaolo Zoppo aka Mauthausen Orchestra released on Aquilifer Sodality in the early eighties. Tape after tape Mauthausen Orchestra constitute, in a few years, the backbone of what we will know as an alienating and extremist style, made of metal nightmares and sonic torture , often dilated, dissected and extended up to the limit of endurance. 2nd Movement carry us, once again, as real rituals of a civilization without gods, in a pure world of suffering. …
Live from Festival au Desert, Timbuktu
Two days before the 2012 rebellion in northern Mali. Soldiers are everywhere. Guns mounted on pickups; low-flying surveillance planes. Several thousand people have gathered outside Timbuktu to celebrate the music and culture of the Sahara at the 12th edition of the Festival au Desert. Three months later, Sharia descends on northern Mali. A millennial history is suppressed. Shrines destroyed. Secular music banned. Before, the streets were alive with music. Weddings, baptisms, celebrations …
Moved by magnets
Stunning release from Cristian Vogel and SØS Gunver Ryberg as SGR^CAV for The Tapeworm. The label informs us that "Their compositions encourage the listener to observe and explore the resonances of a powerful musical awareness" and 'Moved By Magnets' exhibits a keen sense of spatial perception, tone and presence which entirely justifies that claim. Over four pieces they explore diffuse, free-formed spaces charged with a slow-moving, chaotic sort of energy ranging from the shuddering metallic res…
Things fall apart
Jason Kahn : drum set, voice, metal objects, radio, mixing board, contact microphones, magnetic coil, speaker, computer, chairs, plastic bags. Recorded in Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zürich, Switzerland on April 14, 2013. Mixed and mastered May 2-31, 2013. Cover design Jason Kahn. Audio CD, 6 panels digipak. 'Back in 1981 I was studying at the University of London in the School of African and Asian Studies. One lecturer had us read Chinua Achebe's novel 'Things Fall Apart.' Aside from the book moving …