New Arrivals
Zones Without People
**Re-press on vinyl, now with download code redeemable from the label** OPN's 'Zones Without People' was released in 2009 on a highly limited vinyl run for Arbor. All seven tracks featured in his Wire chart-topping 'Rifts' compilation, predating his mindblowing 'Returnal' album (surely one of the best of 2010) and displaying its prodigiously gifted creator amidst some of his most affective synthscapes. From the outset we could consider this to be classic material, as the miniature 'Computer Visi…
Mauricio Kagel Ludwig van
Mauricio Kagel’s 1970s film Ludwig Van, a rather critical piece of avant-garde cinema, asked pointed questions about the ways in which later audiences appropriate and interprete Beethoven’s music. Pianist F. Blondy and turntablist DJ LENAR reclaim and reinterpret the soundtrack in this post-modern mashup that includes source material such as Herzog soundtracks, a lecture by Alfred Cortot, samples of string playing and percussion from contemporary improvisation records, and numerous other …
Alpen ocean
Alpen Ocean is the final recording of Carole Kojo (Swiss) and Hitoshi Kojo (Japanese) that they left behind as Jüppala Kääpiö, whilst resident in Switzerland. The sound sources are rather familiar instruments and materials for us such as voices, handmade instruments, viola, organic materials and field recordings. However, the style has evolved to a hybrid of our early style: an intense harmonic drone music that has appeared in RAINBOW MASK, and another phase which might be termed as a cosmopolit…
From the Irresponsible Country Sounds
Minimal sound manipulations by the Japanese master, in his usual and unique way.
Dutch Tvashar Plumes
'Dutch Tvashar Plumes' seems to map the changes in Lee's approach to music making over the last 4/5 years. From his initial exposure and subsequent immersion into Jungle as a teenager, he soon began experimenting with structure and sound design which led him to a more 'academic' approach with 'Computer Music'. There were many self-imposed rules he adhered to during this time. These last few years he decided to break with that and make an intuitive venture forward. This record is the first real d…
Vilke
Julian Cope Review on Head Heritage Site: VILKÉ is the particularly fine and sprawling new 2LP by American composer, field recordist and hiker Daniel Menche. Inspired by the wolves of his travels in the N. West and named for the Lithuanian for ‘she-wolf’, VILKÉ presents us with four side-long pieces of haunted and eerie atmosphere music whose dilating post-industrial rhythms, and seemingly ever-decaying, ever-degrading, cicadas-driven post-industrial drone-o-drudge inhabits a parallel half-world…
Technological music
An oblique response to various antecedents of pulse-based electronic music without recourse to drum machines or sequencing (or — in the case of the Four Investigations — synthesizers). Tools include oboe, English horn, analogue synthesis and malfunctioning electric organs and piano. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Gratitude also to Niko Wenner and Monica Scott. Dedicated to Michael Randers-Pehrson, Jeff Bollaro, and HK Kahng — stalwart comrades in my very earliest electronic music misadventures.
Sung In Broken Symmetry
Describing the music of Aquarelle's Ryan Potts is a difficult task indeed. It's related to the hazy, heavily treated output of musicians such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, but one would be remiss to locate it solely within the realm of electronic ambient or drone, as there are often strong organic, rhythmic and composerly elements to Potts' work. In fact, the title of his last record, Slow Circles, might offer the best point of access into the Aquarelle aesthetic, in which compositional trop…
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 …
Boring Embroidery
Boring embroidery features five beautiful, fragile yet raw improvisations for pianos and electronics performed by two of the UK's brightest talents. Picking up from where 2010's Turned moment, weighting release on Another Timbre left off, Boring Embroidery inhabits a slow, precise musical world that references Feldman and Tudor, yet remains resolutely improvised. Recorded in 2010 and 2011, this album possibly marks the end of the duo's piano collaborations but if so, it provides a perfectly matu…
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.
The Stargate Tapes
"Sharing social circles and spiritual ideologies with artists such as Iasos, Connie Demby and Deuter, whilst splitting label release schedules with Laraaji, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos, the unique Florida raised soul mate duo known as Emerald Web released their privately pressed debut LP at an axis where post-prog rock met proto-new age and ambient electronic music. At the turn of the 1980s Bob Stohl and Kat Epple embarked on a ten-year spiritual journey playing at planetariums and laser sho…
(no thing-ness)
"(no thing-ness)" comes hot on the heels of Brian Pyle’s latest highly acclaimed Ensemble Economique album on the Not Not Fun label. While "The Fever Logic L.P." saw him head diving into a sort of ambient goth pop this brand new 12“ appears to be more influenced by industrial, almost EBM-ish textures. The atmosphere seems more aggressive with an almost militaristic touch, and titles like "New Banking System" hint at the source of this anger. Combined with Pyle’s cinematic tension this makes for …
Police Water
Under the wickedly cryptic title of 'Police Water', Gary War delivers his latest psych-pop dazzler on Sacred Bones - also including the two tracks from his 'Reality Protest' 7". Just as everyone begins to catch up with his brilliant body of work from the last two years, he goes and switches up his sound with reinvigorated song structures, a broader tonal palette and far, far tighter rhythm programming. Don't worry, though, he's not lost the inexplicable post-apocalyptic weirdness, it's ju…
Escorting
Escorting is a new massive effort by the Canadian king of Harsh Noise Sam McKinlay, with his most acclaimed creature The Rita who, once again, waves the banner of Uashima, with a luxurious and lustful 3 LP box set dedicated to the world's oldest profession, its leading actresses and enthusiastic johns.For once THE RITA takes a break from its current conceptually driven texture research for returning to its original full-frontal impact, not unlike older works like “Bodies bear traces...”, “Swinge…
Live At Sant'Anna Arresi Jazz Festival
Saturn calls, Istanbul responds! After releasing a handful of beautiful releases last year that brought them to the attention of the free jazz scene, Konstrukt come back with a fantastic album recorded in collaboration with Mr. Marshall Allen, the legendary saxophonist of the Sun Ra Arkestra (aka the best band ever landed on Earth). Cosmic, cathartic, spiritual free jazz in its purest form! When music can make you travel with your imagination like this, building bridges between different…
Trees Have Cancer Too
Duo of Pedro Sousa and Pedro Lopes, two portuguese young musicians, and some of the most exciting in the plastic, tonal and energic exploration of sound in a long time. Using sax (Sousa), turntables (Lopes) and a communal use of electronics, their music is admittedly nervous, obsessively bent over the following moment. Unlike other past forms of improvisation more concerned with listening and a certain purity of sound, this search is as focused as much as frantic in the pursuit of a new d…
The love robots
Jim O'Rourke, guitar. Paal Nilssen-Love : drums. Lasse Marhaug, electronics. Recorded at Gok Sound Tokyo by Yoshiaki Kondo February 2011. Mixed by James Plotkin. Coproduced by Pica et PNL. Gatefold cover. 500 copies. Housing, parasites and hammering textures.
Rufen
Rufen is the second installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) studio album. In four impressive live recordings, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Onnen Bock unfold aural panoramas which can only be described, in the truest sense of the word, as fantastic. Had Claude Debussy not already composed 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun,' then Qluster would have been ideally placed to do so, their transparency and polymorphism so reminiscent of his high Impression…
How To Get Out Of The Cage
From 1982 to 1992 Frank Scheffer worked with John Cage on many different occasions, which resulted in a unique archive of historical audio-visual material. Based on this unique archive, including interviews, musical performances and images of different locations related to his life and work—filmed on 16mm—the filmmaker Scheffer created How to Get Out of the Cage—A Year with John Cage. Frank Scheffer wrote: "The famous artist Marina Abramovic introduced me to John Cage. She thought it woul…