Best of 2015
Pacific Tubular Waves/Immersion
Restocked. Packaged with 3D cover art; includes Anaglyphic 3D glasses. "Pacific Tubular Waves" (1979): Electronic music for Synclavier digital synthesizer. "The first four movements frame different visions of the energy delivered by the rolling waves as a kind of auditory surfing on the crest and into the trough of the wave (movements 1-3), followed by a high speed crossing within the tubular cyclone (4). The piece ends with easing waves at dusk... In terms of the making, 'Pacific Tubular …
Natural Information
Eremite presents the first CD edition of Joshua Abrams's acclaimed 2010 LP Natural Information, now out of print on vinyl. Abrams's first record for Eremite is another fascinating entry in his discography of recordings that gather aesthetic input from all over the map into vivid personal statements. At the heart of Natural Information is the guimbri, a three-stringed animal hide bass traditionally used by the Gnawa people of North Africa in healing ceremonies. Combining solo, trio, and qua…
Sleepwalkers In A Cold Circus
On Sleepwalkers in a Cold Circus Belgian sound artist Koenraad Ecker creates a biotope of musical characters that is sober, delicate, complex and vivid, with a restrained intensity, a “cold fire.” The characters discuss, hesitate, fight, pull closer, push back. Through the use of microtonality and recordings of acoustic instruments it is the elusive sound of a somnambulistic travelogue. “I’m searching for ways to create an intricate narrative, switching perspectives and voices within one form, t…
Deviate from Balance
John Wiese's long awaited Deviate From Balance is the artist's first album since 2011's Seven Of Wands (PAN). Recorded throughout Europe/UK, Australia, and the US, the album includes scored ensemble pieces including over 20 musicians on each, recorded in Melbourne and Portland, as well as audio documentation of installation pieces Wind Changed Direction, a four-channel sound piece presented in the garden of the Getty Center (curated by Liars), and Battery Instruments, an eight-channel piece…
Outer Planetary Church Music
A friend of Aguirre recalls meeting Tim Robertson by chance in a thrift store in Barcelona, while eyeing a dusty Hammond organ: "He was born in Honduras, but moved out of there at a young age to several other countries such as Perú, France, and Norway. His parents were devoted to some religious organization and they were spreading the word all around. The last place they were sent to was Barcelona, hence the reason he was there. He learned to play the keyboards as a kid and performed in c…
General Tempo
Second full length for the duo of Riccardo Mazza and Matteo Castro. Two long compositions that, while presenting the usual elements of the duo, made of tape works and field recordings, move forward, in a path in which the skeleton of the pieces is built on sounds of mechanisms and engines, manipulated through reel to reel, tape machines and digital effects. Tense and dynamic, the traces of this work move between a careful observation of the landscape and those repetitive, somehow …
Live at Metro Al-Madina
Restocked again, very last copies, hurry up....Awesome one! This one is very easy to describe: among all qbico and a-star records combined together (around 150/200 LP), this is among the three most powerful ones. imagine a cross betw Kluster and Taj Mahal Travellers with a Middle East feel (musicians are from Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon); their 1st record, rec. live in Beirut. the sound that you hear at the end of the second clip it's not a monster's breath. THE ticket to the ride.
Sounds from There
Swiss electro-acoustic artist Israel Quellet's fourth opus on Sub Rosa: a complex and mysterious work for symphonic bass drum, symphonic tympani, organ, Tibetan horn, homemade horn, triangle, tubular bells, shocks inside the church, anvil metal tank, and church bells. A challenging listen, but so rewarding.- "Music of expectation and experience, controlled recklessness. In his obsession with the possibilities of sound, Israel Quellet takes us to exciting places." --PopMatters - "Quellet's …
Absorb / Fabric / Cascade
Restocked / Second solo LP from Causa Sui guitar player and producer Jonas Munk. This is pattern music, characterized by slow builds and subtle, but refined transformations, where gradual tectonic shifts and tiny harmonic gestures generate vivid emotional responses. Instead of imposing any direct intention or meaning, it's an album that can create a mental environment for the listener to expand and open up into. "Absorb," taking up the entire A-side, is a piece of meticulous balance, stru…
Sombras Incendiadas
Portuguese multi-instrumentalist David Maranha has made no secret of his appreciation for Tony Conrad’s music over the years, and so it’s not so much of a shocker that this duo encounter with Sweden-born, Philadelphia-based cellist Helena Espvall renews that association. After all, the pairing enables him to explore the productive clash of bowed, amplified strings, a friction that’s at the heart of Conrad’s sound. But this music doesn’t really behave much like Conrad’s mathematically der…
Quasar <-> Lanterns
Sergei Tcherepnin's "Quasar <-> Lanterns" was originally produced in 2009 as an 8-channel installation with Ei Arakawa at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Remixed to stereo for this release, Tcherepnin's trio of works combine analog synthesizer recordings and other instrumental sources with field recordings captured during the artists' travels to Turkey and Georgia. Each piece introduces a separate facet of Tcherepnin's compositional practice, respectively probing the boundaries between perception/halluc…
Cut And Bleed (Sounds From Ehtiopian Metal & Korean Gongs)
very very few copies restocked, act fast! Ideal label once requested a cassette to percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love, and with the help of Lasse Marhaug he recorded a rich and dynamic album, far from his typical crude approach, this one is intense and meditative. \"The title says it all. We asked Paal Nilssen-Love to make us a cassette release. He called his pal Lasse Marhaug and his tape deck and he recorded these two pieces over at Paal\'s place in Oslo. It ended up being simply amazing, dee…
A Readymade Ceremony
Relocated in the french Alps following a 5 years exile in Belgium, Felicia Atkinson returns on Shelter Press with A Readymade Ceremony, a concrete / post-digital oratorio in 5 parts.Composed and recorded at home and on the Oregon coast, the opus documents a full range of bridges happening in Atkinson’s work. It documents the gather of her early-musical studies with her actual musical practice, the reunion of her two main projects — under her own name and Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier — and finally …
Eroina
There are still so many treasures to be discovered out there, but once you find a gem like this you can definitely put the research on hold for a little while and give it a deep listen. Recorded at Fono Roma in 1971, Eroina is a series of haunting improvisations - each one inspired by the effects of a different drug - made of whirling electronic glitches, skronky horns, pounded piano, funky drums and weird tape experiments delivering the best drone/spaced/drugged out free jazz performed b…
Suijin
Komodo Haunts is the psychedelic drone solo project of Ollie Tutty (aka Mt. Tjhris), from Lincolnshire, UK. With his music he explores drone structure, sonic textures, meditative zones and personal fictions. Making use of analogue and digital technologies; tape jams playing on human familiarity, natural ambiances, faux-exotica, mythologies, "reality therapy".
Taking inspiration from drone masters and new age wanderers the Suijin album is all about getting into "the zone” and could be the so…
Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments
Spectrum Spools presents the first reissue of American minimalist composer and electronic music pioneer David Borden's 1981 masterpiece, Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments, a work of the highest archival significance. A radiant achievement in sonic elegance, experimentation, and ambitious composition technique, Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments contains four pieces, each utilizing three players and six keyboard instruments. - Borden was a central figure in the development of America…
infrantumi
Much needed vinyl reissue of a legendary Italian album from the 90s, finally remastered and housed in truly deluxe edition. Starfuckers' "Infrantumi" was recorded in the summer of 1997 in Massa, in the cramped attic of the Bocci house, all the equipment we had was: a sampler, a small mixer, an analog synth, a digital multi-effect, an electric guitar, a cheap transistor amp, a low wattage monitor, a vintage drum kit and a turntable. For recording we decided to use a mini-disc four-track reco…
Happiness is Overrated
"Originally from the land of throwing sausages, eggs, beans AND tomatoes on one plate for BREAKFAST, though residing in the land of the freaks, Dan Melchior travelled many roads, between wreckless R&R bands or duo's with Wild Billy Childish, to solo collages on Chocolate Monk or Kye records, to the beautiful collaborative works he created with Letha Diane Rodman Melchior, Dan's partner who sadly passed away in November 2014, and who this record is dedicated to. Knowing this makes it uneasy to wr…
Open Like a Flute
Finally!!!! Here it is, in stock. This double album is a combination of two Ariel Kalma releases under the same name ‘Open Like a Flute’: the original Astral Muse cassette released in Canada 1982, and the Nightingale cassette from 1984, recorded from 1981 to 1984 in Montreal, Paris and Hamburg.
For these records, Ariel converted his 1/4’’ analog tape masters from the 80’s to 24bit digital tracks. Ah, the analog warmth! Released just after his classic album ‘Osmose’, these tapes are a perfe…
Cores / Eruct
"In Coppice we create a nexus of integrated forms connected by our primary focus on sound, audio, and music. Cores/Eruct is an album about «what is kept in.» The five tracks are compositions dated between 2009-2012.In them we’ve intertwined instrumental interaction with electromagnetic interference through structuralist constraints to form complex timbral horizons that engorge, tip and hemorrhage. The instruments heard are prepared pump organ (Kinder), shruti box, funnels, tape processors…