New Arrivals
Nigeria Afrobeat Special
Nigeria Afrobeat Special is the fourth addition to the Nigeria Special series, a project initiated by Miles Cleret, owner of the Soundway Record label back in 2004. Cleret’s ambition to distinguish the blossoming music scenes of 1970s Nigeria has lent to an indispensable series of CD and LP compilations documenting the influence of western blues, rock and disco amongst artists and musicians versed in the local musical styles of highlife and juju. It was Fela Kuti and his musical and politi…
Filmworks XXIII: El General
Eleven cues recorded for a striking documentary focusing on the life of controversial Mexican dictator Plutarco Elias Calles who was called everything from a nun-burner to the father of modern Mexico. Beautiful and dramatic, the music is scored for guitar, marimba, accordion/piano and bass and subtly draws upon Mexican, Spanish, minimalist and soundtrack traditions. Zorn's fifth film score in as many months is a pure delight. Moody and exotic music for a creative and revealing film dealing with …
You'll Be Safe Forever
CD version. You'll Be Safe Forever marks the first release from Locust in 12 years. Mark Van Hoen, who made a string of influential releases as Locust on R&S records in the 1990s, all but retired the alias at the end of that decade. In May 2012, Van Hoen was invited to perform a live set on WFMU radio. In order to make the set more spontaneous and add a further dimension, he asked friend and fellow musician Louis Sherman to collaborate. While improvising new material in Sherman's Brooklyn …
Dispositions Furtives
Through the open sound portals created by his compatriot Castiglioni, the Italian pianist Alfonso Alberti first entered col legno's World of New Music; on his second album, he dedicates his sensitive and brilliant musicality to Gérard Pesson's fragile and puzzling fabrics of sound. A selection of piano pieces has been compiled in a joint effort by the pianist and the French composer; in his interpretations Alberti lets us catch glimpses of musical structures as though they were glittering just u…
Centralia
Mountains’ music is defined by slow builds, and subtle transformations, textures and melodic lines that evolve in a variety of ways to create grand soundscapes and acutely detailed compositions. For Centralia, the duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg wrote and recorded in a way that mirrors the pace of their music. While the current trend in experimental music is towards hyper-prolificity, Mountains have taken their time on Centralia, resulting in an album that is as precise as it is boundl…
Ex 30: 30 Years of The Ex
30 years of The Ex - a double album compilation featuring songs from all Ex albums from 1980 until 2006, absolutely compehensive. All songs remastered for this release by Colin McLean at OT301, Amsterdam.
Vacation Music
For a couple of years Ryoji Hojito, together with his wife Yoshiko, were coming to Lithuania for a one week autumn vacation. We've met in the course of their explorative journeys around the country and without thinking too much went to a studio for a spontaneous session and a year later played a concert at St. Catherin's Church in Vilnius. Both of us were happy about the music we've got on tape and today we want to share with you seven impro peaces!
Selected passages / Set.grey
Selected passages : During the winter of 2008, I stayed on the campus of a small college in Vermont where I had previously recorded the material for a piece titled 'intervals'. When I first arrived I made recordings of a small radio which was in my room, I would listen to that radio throughout my stay and captured many different sounds from it. I also spent quite a bit of time both indoors and out recording the environments, and made recordings playing some of the pianos which are in vari…
Lassie House / Jumble Massive
This CD compiles two long out of print, obscure vinyls by People Like Us. Almost all (maybe all) were recorded as commisions for Dutch radio. People Like Us plunders her way through the wastelands of vinyl nobody buys, collages them into mostly strange, and at times funny pieces of music. Unlike other plunderphonics, People Like Us keep the voice/spoken word segments to a minimum, which I most hearthly welcome. Extensive spoken words are usually hilarious, but after repeated listening don't hold…
Recyclopaedia Britannica (Selected Works 1992-2002)
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly "topical" audio-jokes at the expense of one's raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being "groovy", the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw m…
Cristallisation
Over 4 hours of improvisations were recorded over these two days in april 2010. We then trimmed the sound sequences and the silence, while keeping our specific interactions and phrasing of sounds between us and with the location. But sound is a flexible material and what remains of this session are frequencies that are like vestiges to be reinvented. To help this there is some 'presence'. The acoustic character and the intense immobility that fill the air of the chapel of Las Planques, in the da…
Under foot
Rusalka is a female noise artist based in Vancouver with past works on What We Do is Secret, Ruido Horrible and Dead Audio Tapes.Under Foot is worship. The worship of women and sound. It is sacred filth. Based on the novel ‘Venus In Furs’ about sexual cruelty, servitude and female dominance, Under Foot strips away illusions. It is a complete submersion into disharmony. The disharmony of desire for degradation. The disharmony of a woman wielding the whip. The desire to be sonically and spirituall…
Boolean Blues
ASESOME NEW RELEASE! Josh Hanson is another of Portland, Oregon’s underappreciated sons. Having come up through the ranks of long-time, long-forgotten faves Hochenkeit, he also spent time as a member of The Davis Redford Trio. But Hanson’s path diverges into a totally different sphere nowadays, spinning solo modular synth exploits to the stars. Influenced not just by the likes of Subotnick and Cluster but also various types of Eastern sounds, Hanson is looking forward, trying to find new pa…
Milwaukee Volume
Revered reeds and drumming duo Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilssen-Love return to Smalltown Superjazzz with another magisterial set of live improvisations. Released alongside their Chicago Volume, this disc was recorded live in concert at Milwaukee's Alchemist Theater on 10th June 2007 (the Chicago Volume was laid down the following day) and finds these two free-jazz maestros on blistering form. It's a joy to hear how the improvisations evolve - on 'Clean Sweep' the pair …
Quattro illustrazioni / Suite N° 8 \"Bot-Ba\" / Cinque incantesi
Crazy about the sound: the composer as a medium fHis bizarre way of composing earned Giacinto Scelsi not only fame and respect; he was also mockingly accused of dilettantism. Scelsi regarded himself not as a composer in the traditional sense, i.e. one to combine form, rhythm, pitch and sound in an intelligent way and note the result down on paper, but as a tool. His music was created during periods of meditative contemplation recorded by him on tape, to be noted down only afterwards. Eastern rel…
Live in Paris
The release of this, our fifth album, coincides with the tenth anniversary of our first concert together, in Philadephia in 2000. Thanks to all the friends, fans, promoters, and producers who have made it possible for us to continue playing, recording, and touring together all these years. It’s a privilege and pleasure for us and we look forward to sharing the next decade with all of you.
Erroneous: A Selection Of Errors
Lovely collaborative project, result of the meeting of Italian cult band Larsen and Steven Stapleton’s ubiquitous creature Nurse With Wound. Almost 2 years of file swapping and occasional conceptual meetings led to a multi-headed collection of deformed sounds based on one long NWW piece and two Larsen tracks (that both bands have written specifically for this project) then deconstructed and rebuilt by each other into totally brand new opuses.Erroneous also features Neu! and Kraftwerk original me…
New Music For Old Instruments
Curated by Jozef van Wissem the “New Music For Old Instruments” festival took place all over the world: in Brussels, New York, Paris, Utrecht, Antwerp and other cities. The idea was to rid traditional instruments of their clichés. When one thinks of a lute for example the Robin Hood image comes to mind of the player standing under a balcony serenading a lady and getting a flower pot thrown at him. In order to update the instrument, to make it mature and give it it’s recognition it deserves, one …
Unit
A journey to the Chinese Qinghai province (Tibetan culture region of Amdo) was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut China. Its purpose was to experience the province and to produce art works to be presented at The Third Guangzhou Triennial, subtitled 'Farewell to Post-Colonialism' in the same year. The sound installation Unit and a series of photographs called Cutting Qinghai resulted from this journey, during which I took photographs and made audio recordings. The installation was presente…