New Arrivals
When We Were Eating Unripe Pears
The seven pieces on this LP were developed over a period of about five years; 'Rain in Coffee' is built on a Hyperborean Trenchtown-era demo, while 'Pinq Drinq' -- sorrel, for the record, and neither guava nor antacid as certain wags have already ventured -- was reanimated directly from the cutting-room floor, 11th hour, 2012. As a whole, they should probably be considered the proper 'sequel' to Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico, extending that record's preoccupation with the drea…
Hassaniya Music from the Western Sahara and Mauritania
In 2006, Hisham Mayet returned to West Africa to continue his search for an unknown musician he had heard six months earlier on the radio in a Morocco hotel room. Knowing only that it was Sahrawi music -- music of the south -- he headed down through the vast and remote desert landscape of the Western Sahara and Mauritania in hopes of finding someone who could identify these revelatory recordings. The story of how he finally found this elusive artist is the stuff of ethnomusicological legend. But…
Traces Two
2014 repress, Recollections GRM presents four "forgotten" and compelling electro-acoustic pieces from the institute's world famous archive. Recollection GRM, a label within the Editions Mego family of labels, offers a second selection from the vast archives of Groupe De Recherches Musicales (GRM). "The idea of the Traces series is to unearth from the GRM Archives short, forgotten, or ignored pieces of music. This second volume, which gathers works prior to 1976, features the 'early' works of f…
Freedom Of Speech
The second album of the Phantom Band is quite different to the predecessor. The line-up features the spoken word performer Sheldon Ancel on the microphone instead of bass player Rosko Gee. Whilst the debut album revealed many Caribbean or African influences and a generally positive frame of mind, "Freedom of Speech" is a somewhat darker avant-garde rock manifesto, interspersed with individual dub or reggae pieces. All they have in common are Jaki Liebezeit's inimitable monotone polyrhythm…
Gamma
""Vinyl of the Month must surely go to the epic "Gamma" by Italian quartet VipCancro, whose startlingly out there performance pitches the ensemble against such Krautrock epics as German Oak, Yatha Sidra and early Guru Guru. Indeed, for anyone requiring brain tissue abandonment Gamma will entirely do you justice. Their peculiar line-up of two synthesists, bass player and samples places VipCancro into a pure avant-garde territory, allowing splendid outbursts of canon-like percussion, and cin…
Imaginational Anthem Vols. 1-5
"Since 2005, Tompkins Square label's Imaginational Anthem compilations have featured some of the greatest acoustic guitarists in the world, with recordings spanning five decades. More than mere samplers, these albums have served as state-of-the-art dispatches from the front lines of the art form. Imaginational Anthem Vols. 1-5 is a specially priced 6CD box set, limited to 999 copies, featuring the first five volumes in their originals packaging, plus an exclusive live bonus disc from Willia…
Ask the dust
Hailing from Northern California, John Davis is a sound artist, composer and filmmaker who has released music on labels such as Root Strata and Digitalis. With “Ask the Dust,” he offers up a moving suite of compositions made using a plethora of instrumentation including guitar, piano, tape loops, Max/MSP, field recordings and the newest addition to his arsenal, a complex assortment of Blacet synthesizer modules. Davis uses the synth not as the crux of his recordings but as a tool among many in h…
Petite Geante
Recorded in 1208 Saalfelden, 01-0209 Brest. Stephen O'Malley: Electrical guitar, Supro, Fulltone tape echo, sine wave, field recording. Originally commissioned for the Enter sound installation series at Tou Scene, Stavanger, Norway curated by Anne Hilde Neset. Appears as a 4 channel work which loops for a full day, on a cycle with 9 other artists, every tenth day, for at least two years. More information about Tou Scene and Enter can be found at www.touscene.com. Published by Ideologic Organ (BM…
Ritual Totemic Stone
By now, the significance of Sam McKinlay's extensive body of work is undeniable. After having begun his mapping of the depths of monomania, fetish, addiction, and vice, in the mid-1990s with his flagship project, The Rita, McKinlay briefly halted his work in the early 2000s. Though it was unforeseeable at the time, McKinlay's return to substantial recording output and live performances around 2004 would quickly and permanently alter the landscape of Harsh Noise. The Rita became one of the most …
Live in Israel
Iancu Dumitrescu 'Liminal involvement' for ensemble. 'Le silence d'or' (Israel version) for ensemble and computer sounds. Ana-Maria Avram 'Lux animae XII' for ensemble and computer sounds. 'Telesma' (Israel version) for bass clarinet, ensemble and computer sounds. Contemporary Music Ensemble from Tel Aviv under direction Ilan Volkov with special guest Stephen O'Malley.
Diluvial
Local preoccupations with rising sea levels fuel Diluvial - a work that dwells on the dynamics of flood geology and global warming; creation stories and climate change. Diluvial is an evolving soundscape and environment by Bruce Gilbert and Beaconsfield ArtWorks (David Crawforth & Naomi Siderfin). This work was initiated on the Suffolk coast for Faster Than Sound, Aldeburgh 2011 and then developed for a show at Beaconsfield, London later that year. Taking rising sea levels as its theme, Diluvial…
the 15,000 day boat trip
november 2009 release ; pristine electro-acoustic work from cenotaph’s john w. fail (responsible for both a criminally under-appreciated quadruple tape-box on c. spencer yeh’s dronedisco &, partially, the “lied music vs. boy-band tax returns” lp on ultra eczema ... as well as full-length collaborations with spiral joy band & ben reynolds) ...inhabiting similar head-space as graham lambkin’s recent “softly softly copy copy,” the piece in question here takes it source material from live-played ins…
Open Space
I've been composing graphical scores since 2004. Each score has been done for a particular group, and not just for a certain set of instruments but also for specific persons, each with their own personal sound and their own distinct approach to improvisation. The scores hover in the gray region between composition and improvisation. They create a situation where the players are free up to a point to improvise but in which they could also find themselves in juxtapositions with other player…
Surfaces
Gianluca Favaron returns on Silentes with the second release in the prestigious “Private Sounds” series. Besides having published some solo works, Favaron is part of Under The Snow along with Stefano Gentile and collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen project. In the past he has released music as Ab'she and was part of Lasik Surgery along with Pierpaolo Zoppo. Among his most recent releases we remember his collaboration with Corrado Altieri entitled "The System of Objects". "Surfaces" is a m…
Sous Juju
A collection of darkly shining northern diamonds, Sous juju is a two-CD compilation of the musical work of Kuupuu from her first releases in 2003 up to previously unreleased material from 2012. Kuupuu, known by her parents as Jonna Karanka, is a self-taught musician and visual artist from Finland who inhabits a semi-magical world where the mundane and the mysterious meet and make wonderful music together. Using tapes and loops, instruments both traditional and modern, Kuupuu's blend of low-tech …
In Sirenis
A deluxe edition LP, documenting and salvaging the sonic particularities of the Ravenna harbour."By “noise” we mean all the sounds that surround us every day, but the idea of an uncontaminated natural landscape, or of a singular sound event isolated from the context is impossible to realize and undeniably limiting. The artificial is now an integral part of contemporary sound and image landscape, sometimes almost a synonym thereof.In Ravenna harbour area, largely industrialized spaces intermingle…
Record Store Record
If you cant come to our shop, then maybe our shop can come to you. no, this is not a collection of in-store performances, there are no bands or artists trying to impress you with their skillz and technique - this is a collection of location/environmental recordings made inside our record stores, just the sound of regular everyday customers looking at records, talking about records, buying records - oh yeah, and record store owners boxing up records for mail-order customers - audio verite, sound …
Nocturnes
'Nocturnes' is William Basinski's first new solo recording release in four years. It comprises two typically sanguine, extended compositions; 'Nocturnes' written between 1979-80 during his post-grad period in San Francisco, and 'The Trail Of Tears' recorded in 2009 for the Robert Wilson opera, 'The Life and Death of Marina Abramovich'. If there's any one way to measure the efficacy of his music, it's by how drowsy one feels after consumption. We could either do with a snooze or a strong c…
A World Out Of Time
Both words in Eternal Tapestry's name say something about their music, but it's the first that's key. This Portland band's expansive psych rock sounds like it could go on forever, and most of their releases have in fact been culled from longer, open-ended improvisations. The way they slowly build these jams-- adding parts, increasing volume, and cresting in unison-- you get the feeling they're always playing, and their records are just glimpses of an endless stream.For A World Out of Time, Etern…
Music For Fireworks
In 1978, Philippe Genion bought a guitar for 1000 belgian francs (25€). He connected it to his hifi amp, quickly learned how to play "smoke on the water" and a few punk songs with two fingers and within two weeks, pushing the amp more and more to the limit, blew his 200W speakers out. Later, around 1980, he bought an old ARP synthesizer from walloon band "Jo Lemaire plus Flouze" and started playing with these instruments and a few old flanger and distorsion pedals, and started recording so…