New Arrivals
Birds and Water, 4
The third entry in Ben Owen‘s Birds and Water series of recordings. As with Birds and Water, 1 (NTR018), these two sidelong electronic drones reflect Owen’s typically rigorous compositional choices. They display remarkably disparate, rich textures and are extremely immersive, especially when played loud and/or on headphones. Owen once again displays an ability to invite multiple levels of reaction to deceptively complex timbres, ranging from meditative to oppressive.
“The third release of record…
I hope you like the universe
Vancouver-based composer Joda Clement has been widely praised for qualities in his work that could be described as natural: unassuming complexity that elegantly reduces, and an indifference to overt emotional direction. I hope you like the universe brilliantly continues this path, as Clement blends field recordings, shifting synth textures, and instrumental performance. These pieces vividly suggest both exterior and interior environments and the boundaries between them, like peering through laye…
immobilite
Although living in separate European countries, Akama (electronics) and Duplant (organ, electronics) have forged a strong musical bond on a handful of collaborative releases, often with titles related to nothingness, which, in turn, mirrors the minimal, contemplative drone pieces contained therein. As its own titling suggests, immobilité (“immobility”) extends their musical concerns, and distills them in an extraordinarily rich way. More textural than event-based, these pieces are exquisitely pa…
Fukuoka / Osaka
Kahn (American, living in Zurich) and Olive (Canadian, living in Japan) recorded these pieces while on tour in Japan in May 2014. This release features two unhurried explorations for radio, synthesizer, and mixing board (Kahn) and magnetic pickups (Olive). “Fukuoka,” presents a series of gradual unfurlings; pockets of pockmarked, dented and torn glass clusters, tumbling upon and over each other, perhaps briefly interlocking by way of some fragile barb, only to instantaneously break loose. “Osaka…
Space Collective 2 Live
Space Collective 2 Live commemorates Portuguese musician Rafael Toral’s first U.S. tour in several years. Since the 1990s, Toral has been primarily known for his guitar work, but has since been working on the Space Program project, within which he has probed visceral and personal components of electronic music performance, and how they relate to the performer’s experience, not to the resultant product.
These recordings, taken from a live set at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2012, find Toral perform…
Gate & Control Unit
New official full length studio album by Micheal Morley's Gate, joined here by Ninni Morgia and Silvia Kastel's Control Unit! Six hallucinatory tracks of free noise blast, abstract electronics and industrial landscapes. A radical new effort by two projects at the apex of their creative power. Cover Art is a painting by Morley's himself. Limited to 300 copies.
Music of Edgar Varese Vol. 1
In the early '60s, Robert Craft's Columbia recordings of Varèse's works were important contributions to the catalog and hailed for giving this music greater exposure. The album includes Poème Electronique composed and recorded onto magnetic tape to be played from 400 loudspeakers, complimenting the parabolic and hyperbolic curves of Le Corbusier's pavillion at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958
Complete Works
itle of “Father of Electronic Music”. Varèse spent the early twenties as a starving composer in NYC, writing works like the percussionless “Octandre” and “Intégrales”, his first piece to use the term “spatial music”. Upon returning to Paris in 1928, he composed the celebrated “Ionisation”, the first piece ever written for an entirely percussion ensemble (13 percussionist playing 40 instruments). His 1936 piece, “Density 21.5”, written for solo flute for the premiere of George Barrère’s n…
Twisted Strangers
Wildly surrealist experimental hip-hop group Curse Ov Dialect are back after a 6-year hiatus with their socially conscious, zonked-out new album "Twisted Strangers". Renowned for their non-conformist costumery and political ethos the enigmatic Australian group has garnered a strong worldwide cult following. This album includes an appearance from special guest Hemlock Ernst, Curse ov Dialect Japanese ambassador Kaigen, and Ramallah Underground rapper Stormtrap and more... Sonically Twisted Strang…
Hand That Heals / Hand That Bites
Arriving like the mysterious fully formed monoliths in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is the new album from Warsaw, Poland based artist Aleksandra Grünholz aka WE WILL FAIL. Despite the fact this isn't her debut (that was 2014's "Verstorung" also for Monotype Rec.), this new double barreled shotgun of an album entitled "Hand That Heals / Hand That Bites" rings with the boldest sense of arrival you could possibly imagine. With a unique sound that is neither electronic, noise nor experime…
Comme Un Seul Narcisse
French artist Félicia Atkinson teams up with New York-based experimentalist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma for Comme Un Seul Narcisse, their first collaborative effort. Recorded between NYC and the Alps, Comme Un Seul Narcisse is an epistolary conversation of postmodern times between Cantu-Ledesma and Atkinson, who -- strangely enough -- met just once in person, in San Francisco in 2009. But the record is also a detour. Though it follows Cantu-Ledesma's haunting A Year With 13 Moons (Mexican Summer, 201…
The World Unseen
For Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner, music is a divine language, a code to be deciphered, a map riddled with clues. Their latest album, The World Unseen, is a conceptual and liminal document of numinous connection through an experience with loss. It is an exploration of subconscious and psychic bonds between the past and present, and the ways in which the musical devices of repetition and incantation create hands across the chasm that divide the human from the divine.
Through the use …
Deutschland Femdom
The Ligurian duo St.Ride, composed of Edo Grandi and Maurizio Gusmerini, is one of the most ambiguous and lest framed bands of Italian experimental music. Their first works came out for some labels but the rest has all been self-released on cd-r for Niente, diy label that the two members use for their side projects. The only thing that counts is their music, an out-and-out studio made of unexpected events. From the acid, electronic strokes of Primitivo to the successful mix between On-U Sound ta…
Early Electronic Works -- Nommos Visiting
Nommos is an electronic work based in speculative fiction. It was inspired by a 1970s New York exhibition devoted to the art of the Dogon people of Mali. The Dogon are renowned for their cosmogony and for their sculptures evoking their religious beliefs, received from extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Nommos, a group of amphibian humanoids who came to them from the region of the double star Sirius. This very unusual work was written in 1979 by the American-born record producer, composer an…
quellgeister #2 'wurmloch'
The material at hand is the second release in a series of sonic sculptures, these “Quellgeister”, that Stefan Fraunberger has been developing within his extensive travels through Transylvania. Fraunberger seeks out 300 year old organs in abandoned churches and refurbishes them, freeing them of their long-gone service to the institution. The region plays host to a number of small villages which lost the majority of their German population to migration after the fall of communism. In an area curre…
Owl Rave
Owl Rave's debut is dark, melancholic and driven by honest simplicity. Owl Rave use David Lynch's „Twin Peaks“ as their main reference. The album's sonic setting, especially the sound scapes, are heavily influenced by the duality between a seemingly perfect world and deep abysses. They are set in and around the sinister places of Twin Peaks: dreams, visions, brothels and run-down bars. Straight melodies, layered atmospheres and simple beats are enveloped by shapeless drones. Horror jazz and hero…
Kluwekracht
Bas van Huizen is a Dutch artist based in Xi'an, China. He mainly uses guitar, voice, found objects and computer to record work that ranges from beat based electronic music under the moniker Basi Goreng to more abstract works under his own name. In 2013 he added another pseudonym to his discography with an experimental noise album by Shoganai. In addition to music and sound art Bas van Huizen is also active as a video artist creating animation, music videos, live visuals, and video installations…
Atsusaku
Atsusaku is the collaborative output of Gareth Davis (Oiseaux Tempete, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Machinefabriek etc) and Japanese noise mastermind Masami Akita aka Merzbow. A massive wall of sound over two tracks that moves from the shifting low-end structures and the ricochet of howling reeds to the blistering haze of dense white noise and rapid-fire electronic tones. The title Atsusaku, suggests pressure or mechanical compression and it was from this starting point, the idea of Davis' reed sound…
Parallelogram
"Those lucky ducks at Three Lobed Recordings are living the dream. Everyone knows that being a record company is the single coolest thing anyone can do, and now they’ve taken that to a new level by assembling a box set of collaborative albums that seems to be more of a hypothetical wishlist come true.
The Parallelogram 5LP collection takes five musical pairings and lets each one put together a full-length slab of vinyl. And the pairings that Three Lobed has managed to pull off are the cream of t…
It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors
The field recordist and lucid-dream composer Kate Carr conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigation…