New Arrivals
The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture ...
*2023 stock* This book tells the story of the influential group of creative artists—Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin—who connected music to technology during a legendary era in California's cultural history. An integral part of the robust San Francisco “scene,” the San Francisco Tape Music Center developed new art forms through collaborations with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, David Tudor, Ken Dewey, Lee Breuer, the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, t…
Coverscaping Discovering Album Aesthetics (Book)
*2023 stock* Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to car…
The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles (Book)
*2023 stock* Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinkin…
You’ll Know When You Get There - Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Book)
*2023 stock* As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and el…
Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…
Earth Sound Earth Signal Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s…
Heroes Of The Last Glare
"Ten adventurers searched for the Temple of Crystalline Joy, which exists somewhere in the perpetually snow-covered Valley of the Eternal Dream. None of them found it, but in their quest, they performed brave deeds that become legends. They are... the Heroes of the Last Glare."
He had charmed us with the long track called "the Pyramid" included in HDK Dungeon-Synth Magazine #3, now Orcus is back to HDK with an exciting, hypnotic, amazing full length: a timeless synth-music spell!
Each song is a …
La Pastorale Del Destino (The Pastoral Of Doom)
In September 1986, the first comic book dedicated to the character of Tomas Caine was released; it was entitled "La Pastorale del Destino" (The Pastoral of Doom). It could have been one of the many comic books that filled the shelves of the Italian newsstands of those years, but it wasn't like that: the success of Tom Caine was extraordinary. Balancing horror atmospheres typical of the time, irreverent irony, and love stories, Tomas Caine immediately met the tastes of the young Italians of the 8…
Il teschio brilla nella notte
“Il teschio brilla nella notte” was an Italian board game for children aged 6 to 10 set in a haunted house. The winner of the game was the player who was the first to reach the end of the course after passing the four rooms of the house. A gimmick of the game was that inside the box there would be an audio cassette to listen to in the background during the game.
The musical commentary was commissioned to the musician Simonetta Frixi aka Ad Cryptas, who created a soundtrack for each of the rooms …
The Golden Knight
Make way for the Golden Knight! The sword of Sir Richard of Warwick is always ready to defend the good guys from the bad ones... or just to fight as a pastime! His costume is flamboyant, his soul noble (or so he likes to believe), the world in which he lives is a strange Middle Ages where the crusades and the space race are both popular activities. Despite his princely appearance, Sir Richard is a vagabond: under the guise of going to fight the infidels in the Holy Land, he wanders the world (an…
Formationer På Gyldne Græsgange
This is the second release from our dear friend Sebastian Bruun. He makes truly beautiful ambient music, with a slightly melancholic but still optimistic sensibility, uniquely his own. His music is primary based on warm synth-loops and Field-recordings recorded to tape. This is a quite minimal release hence the limited nature of 4 track tape recording, but the compositions are filled with emotion and care for detail in sound. This is a beautiful tape that we are happy to put out.
tornskadekirke (1-4)
Bysund is in my humble opinion one of the most interesting Danish noise projects these days. With releases ranging from minimal and dense guitar noise to sharp and unpredictable computer music. This is the first non self-released Bysund album, and probably the projects most varied output yet. One hour of meticulously composed textual exploration. This is by the way the first album in a planned trilogy of guitar-based releases.
The Voice of Theseus
From Yann Novak In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos’ minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any orig…
Danze Degli Scorpioni
Dark moon music. If you are interested in the moon. Music concentrated in the process of discovering music, taking any risk. Extreme.How extreme is the exploration of one’s instruments, body, memories and stories. Vibrant, fast but at the same time calm music; slow.In search of the sound. Of movement that becomes sound. Of sound that becomes voice. That becomes movement.We dedicate this music to Coleman Hawkins, master improviser.
Orbita
The live performance recorded in the ancient Church of S. Giuliano, in Vercelli, encompasses some of the music conceived and written over the last few years, which Francesco Aroni Vigone spent in Valle d’Aosta. The recording location was chosen for its particular acoustics, perfect for a saxophone ‘solo’ and its aptitude for meditation. The performance took place during worship hours to have an unusual ‘audience’ in an unusual ‘liturgy’. The pieces are monodic songs that can be traced back mainl…
7 rocks
"This is the whole improvisation session we had on the evening of 25 April 2014, after a day spent recording some duets for Enrico’s project “Girotondo”. In the afternoon I had recorded with Mario Arcari “La prostituta e il soldato”, one of his compositions. The next day I was going to record my song “Il soldato e la cameriera” with Alberto Mandarini. So, during the evening break, after years of not playing together anymore, a little bit on my insistence, because Enrico seemed to want it too, we…
This Is What People Think Mountains Look Like
*100 copies limited edition* An absolutely gorgeous long-form piece for trombone, its sustained tones billowing into spectral rumbles that open up trance-inducing harmonic spaces. Simultaneously monumental in scale and introspectively meditative, This Is What People Think Mountains Look Like leaves the brain swirling for days with its reverberations. The venue is vital to the overall recording given its reverberant nature, allowing Barbier to follow the sound of their own trombone as it develops…
Fen
*100 copies limited edition* Fen is a selective evocation and invocation of a Kildare fenland. Focusing on the vocalisations and physical communication sounds of three bird species, it is comprised of field recordings of Grasshopper Warbler, Sedge Warbler (both Summer migrant breeders) and Snipe (resident breeder), alongside tuned percussion and synthesiser textures. As a birdwatcher and sound recordist the communication and language of birds fascinates me. The singular sounds made by the these …
Aether Ore
*300 copies limited edition* New album from Josiah Wolfson’s X Or Size project, all washed out and reverberating dub. X Or Size throw just the right amount of darkened ambiguity into proceedings to render the sound at its most compelling, borrowing from the classic dub techno playbook with wave after wave of luxurious, eroded dub chords and fractured percussion somewhere between vintage Chain Reaction and the more contemporary wave of late night zoners as best exemplified by Actress’ ghost-in-th…
High Tide In The Lowlands
Born in 2012 when the three were living in the same apartment building in Cairo's Agouza district, the trio's instrumental improvisation-based explorations are propelled by Louca's North African percussion loops and shimmering keys, Shalabi's West African tinged free jazz guitar and grounded by Bishop's driving Krautrock-style acoustic bass.
High Tide in the Lowlands was recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus on September 5, 2017 and is quite an intense experience. Most performances and reco…