New Arrivals
Bwoouunn: Fleeting Excitement
Alto sax player/improviser Masahide Tokunaga released his second solo album in 2015, and the highly original playing on that recording, comprised entirely of powerful long tones, received critical acclaim. Two years later, his third solo album shows that he has reached new heights. Proceeding in a comfortable way, his performances here consist mainly of long tones, but add subtle changes in timbre and volume with impressive technical skill, producing a highly creative sound space which could eve…
A Thousand Strands 1975-2015
'A Thousand Strands' is the debut long-player from The Dandelion Set, a new collaboration between Glyn 'Bigga' Bush (Lightning Head, Rockers Hi Fi) and PK Chown (James Beige, Mr Liquorice). The album travels back to their formative years in the mid 1970s, with sleevenotes, lyrics and vocals by cult writer Alan Moore (V For Vendetta, Watchmen) and passes through a cavalcade of musical landmarks en route to the present day.
Två porträtt
Två porträtt (Two portraits) is a record that includes two long sounding portraits of two, in different ways, significant figures from the 19th century Europe that in a first glance should not have much in common. But both Hanna Arendt and Friedrich Jürgenson chose in their thinking and in their practice a completely own way. Rainer Maria Rilke appears as a shadow in the wings, as a third for the record important character, whose words has given the two compositions their titles. In Martin Tegen…
Attempt No.6
"Attempt No. 6 is the result of a cooperation between Swedish organist Hampus Lindwall and the Stockholm-based artists Joakim Forsgren and Leif Elggren with the Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. in Halle (Saale), Germany. Upon the invitation of curator Martin Hartung, the audio-visual performance Attempt No. 6 formed the core of the Werkleitz Festival 2016, titled Trans-Positionen, which was addressed to the power of the imagination associated with radio broadcasting. In conjunction with the internati…
Ode (owed) to O
Reading (Story of) O brings together (Story of) O a graphic and semantic reworking of the original story (English and French words coexisting on the page) accompanied by two fictional texts (Story of) A and (Story of) E, and Reading O, a few simple strategies and choices for reading—alone or with others, in private or to an audience, so that you may find your way through it as through you own story. This is the first collective reading in English and French with 9 readers, it lasted 48 mins. …
Chants
This really is a special one. Solo voice carries so many connotations, of speech, of song, of chant, of prayer. It’s the most directly human, personal, unmediated instrument of all. It’s the way we speak to each other, comfort each other, entertain ourselves, reassure ourselves, talk to our gods. Kurka’s singing throughout is quite extraordinary: so refined, balanced, unadorned and controlled. Absolutely nothing is wasted or unnecessary.
Antoine Beuger Christopher Fox Eva-Maria Houben Th…
Listen
"Recently, I have become interested in the idea of music blending with the environment the listener is in, rather than the music creating its own environment. In listen, I have recorded a balance of sounds that occur naturally throughout the day and others created intentionally in imitation of those sounds. the piece is comprised of four field recordings, collected in an area near my current home (Avon, CT) at different times of the day. I listened to each of the recordings and isolated sounds t…
Spectral Arrows : Venice
Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics by Marco Fusinato. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end of his 8-hour day, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and pre…
Substantial
2017 repress of Hauschka's debut album Substantial, originally released in 2004. Piano music is highly personal music, which is the reason why piano solo albums occupy a particular place of importance in a musician's work -- not that Volker Bertelmann wants to hype his first foray to that extent, hence the pseudonym. Nevertheless Hauschka is personal music, simply because it has accompanied him for so long, because it has always been there in some shape or form, because it has always been import…
Endless Sky
Music makes my mind drift uncontrollably. When I saw John Chantler and Johs Lunds perform at Copenhagen’s Mayhem venue I had a vision: I awake suddenly to discover that I have been sleeping on a beach. It’s a rainy early morning and I’m laying on my back in the open on the sand, the hood of my jacket blinding my peripheral vision. I have no idea how I got there and only see grey clouds above and hear the waves and wind. I stare into the sky blinking from light speckles of falling rain, my m…
Embrace
Nice ambient/minimal reissue from the good folks at the Italian label Orbeatize. The duo of Martin Kornberger and Volker Kuhn put out two lone cassette tapes back in the 80s that all but vanished from the public eye bar a few hardcore collectors of the era. The music sits somewhere between post-kraut German synth and the electronic fourth world excursions of Per Tjernberg. Drifting piano and basic drum machine patterns also recall the work of Paki & Visnadi, the new age stylings of Paulin…
Interference
Edition of 100. Five sequentially numbered pieces of phantom electronics, preceded by an opener/overture that pulls you right in, appropriately entitled Intro. An aural investigation, down the rabbit hole. This is Kevin Drumm to the bone. Essential
The Shameless Years
Post-minimalist American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri makes his Umor Rex debut with bold new album, The Shameless Years. Inspired by a troubled socio-political climate, buried melodies punch their way through a bleak cover of noisy drones, periodically veering into some of Irisarri’s most eerily pertinent music to date. LP limited edition of 700 copies pressed on red colored vinyl, includes a post card with original artwork and free download coupon. One of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s most th…
Luxor Necropolitics
Dominick Fenrow's Vatican Shadow returns with a new doublepack for his own Hospital Productions imprint following on from the recent Rubbish Of The Floodwaters 12” for Ostgut Ton. ‘Luxor Necropolitics” was once again produced by Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv, and the vinyl edition also includes a super rare remix from Female of Sandwell District fame.
Clocking in at almost 40 minutes, this is the most substantial Vatican Shadow release since last year’s Media In The Service of Terror LP…
Ethiopian Urban And Tribal Music: Mindanoo Mistiru/Gold From Wax
Double LP version. Includes color insert. Sub Rosa present a reissue of volume one (Mindanoo Mistiru) and two (Gold From Wax) of Ethiopian Urban And Tribal Music, both originally released as two distinct LPs on Lyrichord in 1972. Mindanoo Mistiru and Gold From Wax were recorded by Ragnar Johnson. Ethiopia contains many diverse peoples and many styles of music. It was still an empire in July and August of 1971 when these recordings were made. Over 70 languages and 200 dialects are spoken in Et…
Choix d'oeuvres 1950 a 1985 (Friends Edition)
** worldwide shipping included ** Friends Edition. This limited 400 deluxe Book-like-Folder in outer Holder Box-Set is covering half of a lifetime in music-history of Pierre Henry, the mastermind for Electro-Accoustic and Experimental Avantgarde & Musique Concrete. It is more than a regular Retro-spective, it is the sharing of Pierre Henry’s personal listening organized by progressing themes and by technological progress. The box set emphasizes the unpublished, the comparisons and the cont…
Magic Trip
In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair – a trip made famous in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Kesey was joined on his Magic Bus by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers that included Neal Cassady, the Beat Generation icon immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” This trip ignited the beginning of the 1960…
Nox
Daniel Menche is a prolific musician whose work in the fields of noise and experimentalism displays both savage tactile expressionism and masterful studio manipulations. Aaron Turner is an equally prolific artist whose output veers from violent guitar architectures to textural meditations. Consequently, their collaborative album Nox could have been a brutish exercise in punishing frequencies and aural assaults. Instead, Nox is what Turner describes as “a combo of Daniel’s more free-flowing form …
Chants et danses with strings. Vol III
“Chants et danses... with Strings! (Vol. III) is a rather mind-blowing album by Robert Marcel Lepage, René Lussier, and the Bozzini Quartet. This album is a masterpiece of experimental music, joining together chamber music, noise music, and improvisation. The guitarist and clarinetist are joined here by an experimental and classical string quartet, which serves as support and filler more than anything else. Their role isn’t prominent but certainly gives more body to the record. It's a really uni…
Nordra
Pinprick guitar lines, swaths of ethereal brass, sub-bass thuds, the clatter of distorted percussion, fever dream lullaby melodies - it can be difficult to discern what sounds we're hearing over the course of Nordra’s eponymous debut given the strange and unorthodox context of their combination. And while many tech savvy artists have managed to build strange symphonies and texturally curious electronic exercises within the lonely confines of user-friendly software, those in-the-box tactics don't…