2016 release. Dominions is the second full-length release from Canadian electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi, following 2015’s Barons Court. A slightly more demure approach is at work here, shifting from the brooding textures of her previous work to softer tones and more delicate movements in structure, as in side openers ‘feeler’ and ‘ordinal’. Recorded primarily at her home base in Vancouver, Davachi returns with her typical assembly of electronic equipment, mostly consisting of vintage synt…
It’s easy to forget that Norway shares a short stretch of frontier with Russia, right at the northernmost tip of the country. That region is where Geir Jenssen, the Norwegian electronic producer behind Biosphere, comes from, and where he has been composing his austere, disturbing and deeply textured ambience since the early 1980s. Biosphere has released many albums to date including 'Substrata,' voted the greatest ambient album of all time on the Hyperreal website, and has collaborated with Arne…
“All This I Do For Glory” is a reasoning and exploration of the machinations of ambition and legacy, an examination of the concepts of afterlife, and the first half of a doomed love story in the model of the greek tragedies. As a narrative, it exists temporally somewhere between 2015’s “Never were the way she was” (with Sarah Neufeld) and the first volume of the NHW Trilogy. With this, his first solo outing since 2013’s “To See More Light”, Colin Stetson ventures into territory both famil…
The first part of Leyland Kirby, aka The Caretaker's, 'Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was' series, originally released back in 2009 and now finally reissued. It's a prescient hauntological elegy somewhere between Vangelis’ Bladerunner OST, Lynch & Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score, Erik Satie’s solo Piano works, William Basinski’s gradual tape decompositions and James Ferraro’s washed out visions, like a slowly abstracted Berlin/Manchester night-scape. Tbh it seems to have even more …
A Dutch composer's private synthesizer odyssey, 1977. Andriessen conjures a 'trance symphony' on Minimoog and Rhodes: luminous, minimal and quietly euphoric, drawing on Berlin and Düsseldorf electronics rather than the concert hall.
2017 repress, originally released in 2012. "A compilation of the most popular music circulating the Sahara desert on the unofficial network of cellphones -- where mp3s are stored, played, and traded in very literal peer to peer bluetooth transfers. The contemporary West African sound from the new school of DIY production with little or no commercial release outside of their locales, from spaced out Tuareg autotune, Ivorian club jams, Mauritanian synth, and Malian hip hop electro. Collected from …
2017 repress. "Contemporary pop music from the Sahara desert, where songs are stored on cellphones. Collected in Northern Mali in 2010 (since taken over by extremists who've banned music on cellphones) the second volume expands into new sonic territory - from dreamy Niger guitar ballads, Bamako club juke, and hi energy Moroccan child Raï - with a focus on the Autotuned DIY creations circulating the desert." Includes insert with liner notes.
A disquieting record to accompany the nightmare of now. Baldruin documents this darkness, finding some hope in the helplessness. Buried within these grooves, lies a dizzying array of crepuscular sonics. Barely alive, it drips with dread. Rachitic loops return to us, like traumas. A sticky submission. My goodness, these earworms are infectious.
We just knew last year's debut Visible Cloaks offering for RVNG, the Miyako Koda-featuring Visible Cloaks single Valve, would be the prelude to something greater from Ryan Carlile and Spencer Doran. Reassemblage marks the Portland pair's second album and further expands upon the Visible Cloaks 'verse, calling on Motion Graphics and Root Strata alum Matt Carlson for assistance.
Inspiration for the album stems from a video essay of the same name by Trin T Minha-ha, which explored the impossibi…
Two years after the release of the critically acclaimed, Pondfire, Paul Beauchamp returns with his second solo album, Grey Mornings. Once again tapping into geographical influence for inspiration, the nine tracks of ambient drones reflect the feelings and emotions experienced during the early hours of grey, foggy mornings in both the Piedmont region of Beauchamp’s birthplace in North Carolina and the Piemonte region of Northern Italy where he now resides. Beauchamp continues his research into ex…
Bored of working for years on microsounds, crick & crocks, drones and field recordings, Matteo Uggeri launches a new project based on field recordings, drones, crick and crocks, microsounds and ignorant beats. Each of these four tracks is then built using only 1 drone, 1 field recording, 1 sampled drumbeat. Then a lot of effects. Inspired by the letters of Charles Robert Darwin to William Darwin Fox. "I am at work on the second vol. of the Cirripedia, of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I…
Electro-Acoustic Composer, Cornetist Rob Mazurek continues to focus on the Brazilian side of his musical production, and that’s good news. Even better when we notice that “Chants and Corners” is something else than a new São Paulo Underground enterprise – some of the contributors are the same, but the project has another confection and this signifies that it’s multiplying in different perspectives, like the flowers of a plant. Playing a modular synth, a sampler and a piano besides his cornet, Ma…
Franco Falsini's Sensations' Fix are one of the most mysterious and enthralling entities to come out of the rich italian 70's prog rock scene. Unless many of their contemporaries such as PFM, Le Orme or Osanna, which leaned heavily on the British sound of prog giants Emerson Lake & Palmer, Genesis or Soft Machine, Sensations'Fix music was always more akin to the experimental tendencies of German krautrock bands like Neu!, Can, Amon Duul II or the more adventurous directions those musicians took …
"Communist Dub is Pan Sonic member Ilpo Väisänen's second solo album for Editions Mego (Asuma having appeared 2001). This striking new release is a statement against technocracy and the erosion of human community. Whilst Jamaican dub and ska are often cited as an influence on Väisänen's work, this album utilizes dub as strategy as opposed to genre -- the precise manipulation of sound and the removal of all extraneous material to create a disorientating landscape of austere spaces. Pulled in…
Fabio Borgazzi – aka Fabio Fabor – played literally every known style of music, from baroque to “satanic” electronic, in his library music albums released during his career which lasted almost seven decades. Born in Milan in 1920, Fabor was one of the great artisans of post-war Italian popular music. Author, arranger and conductor with a classical background, he started writing songs (in the 1950’s and 1960’s) for popstars such as Nilla Pizzi, John…
Electronic musician and Buchla extraordinaire, Todd Barton, has returned for his second release with Ultraviolet Light. On this tape he focuses solely on compositions for the Hordijk analog synthesizer designed by the legendary synthesis guru, Rob Hordijk. 3 color fluorescent silkscreen cassette cover. Edition of 150.
Kyle Eyre Clyd began her solo noise project using unclaimed electronics left behind at her residence, Brooklyn’s Silent Barn. Since then, her semi-outsider status—as a Southerner among the Northeast’s local scenes, a non-musician amongst musicians, a woman amongst men—has allowed her to develop a unique voice, tangential to the harsh noise genre. On "Eaux", her debut release on Ultraviolet Light, Clyd combines ARP 2600 synthesizer performance, mixer feedback, tape/digital manipulation and field …
"Lescudjack" is one of the finest moments in Michael Chapman's epic discography. Originally featured on 1978's "Life On The Ceiling" album, the instrumental track melded the British guitarist's distinctive finger picking style with throbbing synthesizer lines and heavy space rock influences. Famously a favourite of Daniele Baldelli, and a long-standing secret weapon of Kosmiche-minded DJs, Chapman's peerless original version is joined here by a brilliant Lexx edit that subtly extends it into a m…
"In this double album named after the famous Beatles' album but having little or no artistic relationship to the same, we have decided to throw aside all preconceived notions of what music has been and recreate the wheel in a rocking fashion, utilizing a myriad of miscellaneous and sometimes famous musicians to put together a concoction of je ne sais quoi. There is a giant spider picking away at and eating your face one piece of flesh at a time, Larry. I like slow songs, and I like fast songs. I…
First ever re-issue of this mythical Maurizio Bianchi tape from 1980. Mörder Tape was recorded in Milano at Mectpyo Studio using concrete sounds and radio waves. Another very fascinating M.B. early experiment. Limited edition of 150 copies in digipack. Cover images are original M.B. artworks from 1980.
The master of atmospheric magick and nuance, Brian Pyle a.k.a. Ensemble Economique returns to Denovali with the latest findings of his endless search in the shadows. With In Silhouette the revered artist and engineer commits some of his sharpest, most absorbing synthesis at the service of a cryptic, underlying narrative which never fully gives up its secrets but keeps you guessing by way of adroit inference and suggestion. Quite crucially it all feels somehow fresh yet deeply timeless, distillin…
Finnish multimedia artist Jan Anderzén returns to Alter in characteristically singular style under his Tomutonttu guise. Kevätjuhla (translated as "Spring Celebration") is his second release for the label following a split 7" with Oneohtrix Point Never in 2010 (ALT02) and his first vinyl long player since 2011. Lately Jan has been busy within visual art, making mosaics, quilts and creating installation work for which the music of Kevätjuhla was initially composed. Inspired by the multitudes of…
Sophomore album from minimalist improviser, Ben Vince. Monuments comes into an age of global uncertainty, demanding a response. From an axis of improvisation, Vince’s saxophone works embrace the contours of more dynamic, emotive landscapes where rich motifs coalesce and feel their way around each other. In a departure from the more rigid looping of his debut, The Purge, this album explores much more progressive minimalist structures that undulate in and out of phase whilst not being afraid…
"Gente Di Rispetto"is a dramatic 1975 film directed by Luigi Zampa and starring Franco Nero, Jennifer O'Neil, James Mason. Rotten atmosphere surrounding a young teacher who moves from Sondrio in Sicily. Here the young woman finds a home at the powerful lawyer Bellocampo’s house and she has a love affair with Professor Belcore. Her life is in constant danger after being finished in the gears of a very dangerous human society ...
Ennio Morricone has been able to perfectly represent in mus…
Swirling guitars and proto-ambient electronica sounds from many light years away! The Astro-Sound of Magnificence, from Beyond the Year 2000...a unique capsule of a funky, psychedelic rhythm section jamming, with snarling, stabbing and swooshing cranked-up-to-infinity electric guitar voyages piloted by Wrecking Crew veteran Jerry Cole, polished and primed for takeoff with a string section playing eerie, beckoning melodies in unison. These are the sounds of epiphanies concerning the future, …
After the success of their debut EP, post-punk art rockers Y Pants performed regularly in NYC and other East Coast venues. In 1981 they toured Europe for six weeks and upon return went into the studio to record their only LP, Beat It Down, released in 1982 on Neutral Records (Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca et al). The album extends the band's signature pared down rollicking minimalism. The 10 songs are varied, using surprising and inventive instrumentation. The music is at once filled with a s…
"'In the late '70s and early '80s everyone had very fluid art identities. One day you were a filmmaker, the next day a musician, and Y Pants was very much a part of it... The lyrics are ironic without being callous, the voices are sultry, the music is repetitive and trance-like... [with] a sense of urgency - like something being driven out.' --Kiki Smith. Y PANTS were a three-woman New York band: Barbara Ess, Virginia (Verge) Piersol and Gail Vachon, all visual artists. They played in clu…
In the late 1950s, when Mexican-born Space Age Pop avatar Esquivel was in his prime, orchestra leader/composer/arranger Bob Thompson was his American stylistic counterpart. They recorded for the same label (RCA Victor), employed many of the same musicians and vocalists, and experimented with sound in the same Los Angeles studios.His RCA albums, Mmm, Nice!, Just for Kicks, and On the Rocks, embody 1950s orchestral pop: brimming with sparkle and sophistication, an appealing soundtrack for the…
It seems bizarre that this LP’s original copy was pressed in such low numbers in 1969 that it has become an unusually expensive and wanted collector’s item that hasn’t been repressed on vinyl (and never released on CD) until now. Soulset were, after all, in the late 1960s one of the most popular pop groups in Finland. Their recorded legacy is relatively short, and when this split LP was released, Soulset were already about to call it a day. Here Soulset perform five fine cuts of jazzy Fenno-soul…
Agrim Agadez is a compilation of contemporary field recordings of guitar music from the Sahelian empire of Niger. Focusing on guitar music throughout the country, from meditative starlight ballads, fuzzy Hendrix covers, rag tag wedding bands, to political minded folk guitarists. A beautiful encapsulation of the diversity of guitar as it exists today, recorded over years of travels. Like most of the Sahel, the guitar is found in every corner of Niger. Whether acoustic, electric, or built …
After 40 years since its theatrical release, presented here for the first time on vinyl is the phenomenal soundtrack for Il Gatto dagli Occhi di Giada (also known as ‘Watch Me When I Kill’) - directed by Antonio Bido (director of THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW). This top-notch score is undeniably catchy, yet has its creepy moments.The film’s score was created by a supergroup specifically formed for this project and consisted of Adriano Monteduro (vocals and guitar; known for his 1974 record in which h…
Bruno Nicolai is a leading figure in the world of Italian soundtracks although he is primarily known for being the most important of Ennio Morricone’s collaborators and his orchestra conductor in the period of Morricone's greatest production (60‘ and 70’s). But Nicolai's solo works are certainly not of lesser artistic relevance. Tempo sospeso (Suspended Time) is one of the most representative albums in this sense that it was produced by Nicolai in 1975 without any filters or restrictions,…
The Italian funk god Luis Enriquez Bacalov is celebrated here with this unmissable 7-inch record, featuring two of his grooviest tracks ever: on the A-side, the legendary Carrefour is maybe his funkiest soundtrack piece, here released for the first time in its entirety, with an unexpected introduction via a powerful horn section, which was cut from the original 1976 RCA 7’’. Behold an eternal jazz-funk masterpiece with solid drum breaks and hip hop heavy beats, funky congas, wah wah guitar…
One of the rarest and most sought-after Italian holy grail soundtracks ever is finally back from the grave! Originally released in 1966 on Beat Records (45-BT 024), the Kriminal main theme was written by Romano Mussolini (Raymond Full in the opening credits) and Roberto Pregadio for this sleazy crime-pop movie directed by Umberto Lenzi, and based on the cult Italian comic hero. Actually, this could be considered one of the best swinging jazz-beat themes from the 60s, with its wonderful hor…
Tilt" is the amazing debut album by a band whose members were not newbies at all. The six musicians' combined former experiences had led them to the roads of jazz and prog rock (even the very young, masterful drummer Furio Chirico had played in The Trip's last two albums) for some time, so their expertise was quite obvious and quite impressive as well by the time "Tilt" introduced Arti + Mestieri to the eyes of the world. The jazz-rock oriented sound delivered by the band serves as an appropriat…
Recording of the first performance of the original 60 minute version of this new composition for string quartet in 4 parts. Recorded at the Hermann Nitsch Foundation, Vienna, 2016. Fullcolour 6-panel digipak. Edition of 300 copies.
Released 2017, co-produced with Florence Giroud. In 2014, artist Florence Giroud invited five musicians to work around texts for her Opera XXS' third chapter, taking form in a long play recording. The music and texts deal with the disappearance of onelself in the beautiful island of Corsica in the mediterranean sea. Featuring Romain Hervault (La Société Etrange, Pan Pan Pan), Romain de Ferron (Balladur, Vinci), Pierre Bujeau (Tanz Mein Herz), Mathieu Tilly (Tanz Mein Herz, France) and Jeremie Sa…
Is This Right? is Seymour Wright's third full solo record and comes as a 2 discs set in a beautiful oblong sleeve. 5 tracks recorded between 2014 and 2017 in Bologna, London and Paris. Is This Right? continues where his last solo - Seymour Writes Back - finished, further developing a set of relationships between ideas, places, people and time, as Wright puts it, documenting 'learning about the saxophone - actual and potential - as rhthym, shadow and text'.
Signifying a return to form that heralded one of the most prolific periods of his life, this special collection features some of Jansch’s finest work. Living In the Shadows includes an extra disc of demos, alternate versions and never-before heard tracks, transferred from Jansch’s personal tapes, alongside the three studio albums of the 1990s: The Ornament Tree, When The Circus Comes To Town and Toy Balloon. This trio of works represents quite different facets of Jansch’s talent; where Circus is…