New Arrivals
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 …
Trio
The expansive length of Morton Feldman’s Trio (1 hr., 45 min., 22 sec.) requires a new approach to listening, which takes scale, the physical experience of sound, and novel uses of musical memory into consideration. With his delicate manipulation of musical materials, Feldman blurs the listener’s sense of time as their musical memory struggles to distinguish between past and present sounds - listeners are free to lose themselves in the beauty of each musical moment. Aki Takahashi and Rohan…
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…
ØØ Void
Lengths of stretched distortion rattle the grey matter, unnervingly slow and severe. With Sunn O)))’s second album, ØØ Void, the sonic misery nurtured to functionality by Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley stays simple and repetitive, a tabula rasa having yet to realize the full scope of its potential. With this album, Sunn O))) worked as a three-piece, collaborator Stuart Dalquist coming up with its opener, “Richard,” which is a solid fourteen and a half minutes of bending low end and v…
Songs About Nothing
Stunning double disc collection of mind-erasing loops, avant classical drone and minimal cold wave threat from Jason Lescallett, presented as a back-handed tribute to Big Black’s notorious 1992 album Songs About Fucking: Songs About Nothing is the sound of pure entropy, moving from ear-scalding feedback sculptures through nod-out minimal synth repetition through scrambled choral works and widescreen soundtrack drones. The first disc unfolds in a series of stately movements linked by a form of ob…
Fukushima!
A double CD inspired by a lecture given by Otomo Yoshihide at Tokyo University of the Arts on April 28, 2011, 'The Role of Culture: After the Earthquake and Man-made Disasters in Fukushima'. With John Tilbury, Greg Kelley, Annette Krebs, Chris Abrahams, Burkhard Beins, Choi Joonyong / Jin Sangtae / Hong Chulki / Joe Foster, Mural, Magda Mayas, Mark Wastell & Jonathan McHugh, Michael Pisaro & Greg Stuart. All the money collected will go to a non-gouvernemental organisation - Japan Society …
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…
The Art of the Improviser
"The Art of the Improviser", a 2XCD, is Shipp's most audacious attempt yet to answer the enigmatic question of what it means to be a modern jazz musician. Already having explored the possibilities of electronically infused jazz on critically acclaimed projects with the likes of DJ Spooky, Scanner, and Anti-Pop Consortium, Shipp revisits an acoustic sound for this fearless voyage into the psyche of the improviser. Shipp's "idiosyncratic genius" shines through on this album, explaining once again …
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." …
Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978
"The Koeln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through "the complete continuance of creative music," and on towards the next millennium. The "success of the future" is not a lost cause as long as there is music like this in the air."-Graham Lock"Although Anthony Braxton does not play on this double CD (whose contents were released for the first time in 1995), his presence is certainly felt. He conducts the band through a fairly free improvisation and five of his compositio…
Studio C
This 2CD pair features performances in Tokyo in 1996. Sod and Sodie Sock documents a performance at the P-House Gallery, where the three musicians performed together and separately. The action extended beyond the gallery, into the street in front, and down the block to a local hair salon. Recordings documenting the simultaneous activities of Kelley, McCarthy, and Violent Onsen Geisha have been combined to allow the listener to experience the entire group of, spatially separated, performances at …
Elegy for Native Tongues
Heavy, ominous psychedelic free-improv from Tokyo, Japan. Julian's Cope album of the month . Tetragrammaton is a trio featuring Nobunaga Ken on drums and percussion, Cal Lyall on electronics and guitar, and TOMO on hurdy-gurdy, saxophone and electronics, and have in the past collaborated with members of Zeni Geva, Acid Mothers Temple, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Damo Suzuki from Can. On Elegy For Native Tongues, however, it’s just the main trio at work, displaying a love for high-volume improvised…
(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…
Suspensão
'Ernesto Rodrigues - viola, harp, metronomes, objects. Guilherme Rodrigues - cello. Gil Gonçalves - tuba. Nuno Torres - alto saxophone. Abdul Moimeme - prepared electric guitars. Armando Pereira - accordion, toy piano. Carlos Santos - electronics, piezo elements. José Oliveira - percussion.' (label info)
Sudoku 82
Specially priced CD single stickered with glowing reviews from Howard Skempton, Kyle Gann, and The Wire. This spare, beautiful, spacious 20-minute piece for eight pianos was composed utilizing systems derived from sudoku puzzles and GarageBand software.
Rare Material
Totally essential two cd collection of some of the most elusive Moondog material of all . When the "Viking of Sixth Avenue" single volume compilation was reissued, we pleaded that here was truly a taste worth acquiring. Louis Hardin somehow managed to find the musical continuities between Bach, native american Sundances, be-bop, Stravinsky and yet still pursue his own musical paths and sound utterly unique. Strong claim, but the music truly bears it out. Drawing the entire disc one from the ultr…
Tramp (Deluxe Edition)
2CD deluxe edition includes the album, demos for each album track, plus a bonus track demo. Repackaging includes a self-portrait & liner notes about each song taken from VAN ETTEN's journals. A startling collection, filled w/ as much defiant rock as pious, minimal beauty. There are declarative hymns, & remarkably sultry numbers. Guest appearances from Jenn Wasner (WYE OAK), JULIANNA BARWICK, Zach Condon (BEIRUT). NO CANADA/NO EXPORT(SAKI)
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…
Along the way
'From Chinese traditional music to avant-garde freestyle improvisation, this beautifully-packaged double-CD features the music created by the meeting of these two extraordinary artists of different cultures and even different generations - violinist Malcolm Goldstein (born 1936), one of the greatest maestros in the field of freestyle improvisation, and Chinese pipa virtuoso Liu Fang, young master on the traditional classical music of China.' label info
Essence of Ellington/Live in Milano
Preeminent jazz composer/bassist William Parker has been working with large ensembles from the very beginning of presenting his own work as a leader in the mid-70s. His Essence of Ellington project is the very latest manifestation of his orchestral concepts, following in similar form on the extraordinary Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield project which was definitively presented on record by the acclaimed 2010 release, I Plan to Stay a Believer (AUM062/63). The Orchestra here interprets selections …