Best of 2016
Pythagorean Dream
LP version. Includes printed inner sleeves and download code. Rhys Chatham returns with his first solo album since 2013, the enchantingPythagorean Dream. Having studied under Terry Riley and La Monte Young (with whom he later went on to work), Chatham fused the overtone-drenched minimalism of John Cale and Tony Conrad with the relentless, elemental fury of the Ramones. It was an inspired amalgamation -- the textural intricacies of the avant-garde colliding with the visceral punch of electric gui…
Music of Edgar Varese Vol. 2
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
08.09.13 Collective Improvisation
Marginal Concert is the collective improvisation project made up of Kazuo Imai, Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii, and Masami Tada. All of the members were students of Takehisa Kosugi at Bigakko art school in 1975. They started the project on the invitation of Imai in 1997. Each year Marginal Consort holds from one to several concerts in which they perform continuously, without interruption, for two to four hours. Various electronic and acoustic sounds blend and coexist, and myriad sound colors…
Small songs for Kack Jirby
Steve Roden new double album! "Small songs for Kack Jirby began in 2014, when i stopped performing with the tools I had used since 1993 (pedals, contact mics, cassettes, etc.). As I was trying to find a way to some 'new' tools, various friends had suggested I work with a modular synthesizer. At the time, I didn't know anything about the modular, but it offered me the thing I wanted - something I didn't understand, and to begin again as a musical child. Instead of working for several years to mas…
Professional Sunflow
Professional Sunflow is the first-time collaboration between Laraaji & Sun Araw, two colossal forces in contemporary electronic music. Laraaji's musical radiance has continued to shine brightly over four decades since being discovered by Brian Eno in New York's Washington Square Park in 1979. Sun Araw emerged out of Los Angeles' experimental scene in 2008 with transformative releases on a variety of trend-setting labels (Not Not Fun, Drag City and more).The live performances on this double LP – …
Stille Post (Radio Works: 2003-2011)
Outstanding 4xBOX with 36-pages booklet that includes the bulk of Alessandro Bosetti compositional work of over a decade in which "I found shelter in the simultaneous intimacy and distance of radio. I feel happy, thrilled and relieved to be able to share those five pieces wich form a coherent unity and trace a personal itinerary while making use of translations, misunderstandings, travels, microphones, headphones and sonorous telephone games as creative tools."It includes five radio compositions…
Das Baank
Rekem Records and Fragment Factory are proud to present a solo album from veteran Swedish artist Leif Elggren. Skirting both the area of pure sound, as well as that of symbolism, the record is a powerful statement on the limits of social and political absurdity and corruption in our present time.
‘Das Baank’ is notable for the absence of its creator’s voice, as the sound of Elggren’s characteristic spoken word is nowhere to be found. Instead the music traverses between carefully paced dram…
Vixit
** 2016 restock ** A masterpiece, tiny edition of 200 copies only. Following on from his astonishing "Miseri Lares" on Pan, here we have an uncompromising, poetic and unexpected culmination of Valerio Tricoli tireless experimentation over the past few years. Valerio Tricoli is one of the first name that springs to mind when the talk turns to current analogue synth, reel-to-reel tape fetishism and electronics. And somehow he led the way in transforming the nowadays experiments in sound manipulati…
Crepuscular Hour
Crepuscular Hour is an epic, hypnotic one-hour piece for three choirs, three pairs of noise musicians, and church organ, to be performed in a cathedral or similar location with musicians surrounding the audience. The room fills with sound in an intense, but almost meditative hour, as the voices blend with the distortion, the noise sometimes takes over, and the organ eventually takes the music to a new level. The visual design of this concert is a play on the crepuscular rays -- rays of su…
Biologia Animale e Vegetale
Double CD box. Another breath-taking production library rarity getting its first ever commercial release via the reissue masters at Cinedelic making this set's one of the greatest Italian library of the 70s. Egisto Macchi has explored and experimented in the field of sound and music without ever forgetting about his moral and civil engagement. His compositional work takes shape from the idea that music and arts should be able to create a symbiotic contact between the creator (composer) a…
I wonder if you noticed
The remarkable series of releases from the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi continues with I wonder if you noticed "I'm sorry" Is such a lovely sound It keeps things from getting worse, which presents the entirety of an 80-minute set performed at Tokyo's SuperDeluxe in March 2014. While the trio's 2012 performance was divided into two releases (BT 011LP (2014) and BT 012LP (2015)), the single extended performance presented here ranges widely over terrain both new and fam…
Erda / Suite N
Milestone reissue! Jean Schwarz has always been the wild man of the Grm, and also of Celia, his own label. His musical domiciliary rights are not only in the realms of electroacoustics, but also in jazz and extra-European traditions (through his engagement in the Department of ethnomusicology at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris). These varied influences result in a very peculiar electroacoustic music. The influences are not always immediately traceable, but the attitude in Schwarz’s works is maybe …
Solo Acoustic Volume Twelve
Combining an elemental Appalachian spirit with a modern compositional approach, VDSQ Solo Acoustic Volume 12 serves as the vinyl debut for Sarah Louise, whose deeply ornate and engaging playing adds rich new colors to the palate of contemporary guitar. File under American primitive Appalachian drone experimental...Growing out of the deep discography of Vin Du Select Qualitite Records blooms Asheville guitarist, Sarah Louise’s sophomore releases entitled, VDSQ Acoustic Series Volume 12. As an “in…
Early Experimental Electronic Music 1954-72
Outstanding, unreleased before fundamental electronic In 1954, Henri Pousseur was twenty-five when he composed his first piece of electronic music in the studios of the Cologne radio, where Stockhausen (with whom he had a close relationship) had created most of his famous pieces. Released in our Early Electronic series This seventh and penultimate installment in the series Henri Pousseur had programmed around his experimental and electronic music features his earliest works -his first steps. Hen…
Necro Box
Atrax Morgue is the brainchild of Marco Corbelli as sound project started in the early nineties and focused in various areas related to the field of psychopathology: murder, violent death, sadism, necrophilia, schizophrenia and insanity. The primary influences come from projects as Brighter Death Now and Whitehouse, pioneers of a minimal, evil and visceral electronic; and from the …
Pop Electronique
Remarkable record of 1960’s French electronic library music, of a somewhat experimental bent. Cecil Leuter (whose birth name, implausibly, is Roger Roger) was a busy, ‘proper’ bandleader at the time, but it turns out he had a real knack for crafting wildly unusual electronic miniatures. Pop Electronique is full of them! Reissued on Fifth Dimension. France seems to be the secret kingdom of electronic music, experimental music and movie soundtrack music also known as library music. Roger Roger…
Osorezan / Doh No Kembai
**restocked again, very last copies around** Their transcendental debut, from the lendary Geinoh Yamashirogumi, a music collective formed in Japan in 1974. Their approach psychedelic music with from a rather Krautish point of view and their first album from 1976 about which I write this review is rather a collage of strange noises, screams, a few rhythms patterns and wide open structures that seem to be borrowed from late 1960s psyched out free jazz. And you can bet, this is an ever flowing…
Get In
LP version. After the 2004 release of his last solo album, Get Off (HAPNA 019CD), Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg embarked on a series of soundtracks for the French artist and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Out of this collaboration were planted the seeds for the prolific KTL, Rehberg's guitar/computer duo with Stephen O'Malley. After a surprise return to live performance in 2015, Rehberg now returns to his Pita alias with the full-length document Get In. Get In extends the perennial Pita soun…
'Split'
Sound sculptures and gongs by Harry Bertoia unite the sides of this split LP from Tara Jane O'Neil and Eleh. O'Neil's composition was commissioned by Venessa Renwick for her Medusa Smack video installation (originally screened in 2012 at the Oregon Biennial). The piece is partially created from sounds recorded by Bertoia on his own Sonambient sound sculptures, as well as O'Neil's recording of Athanasius Kircher's Bell Wheel at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Eleh's side consists of 100 go…
Il Deserto / Pittura Contemporanea / Moderna N. 1 & 2
**Lavish 3 CD box set in bespoke packaging, collecting the Egisto Macchi's recent and almost instantly sold-out LP releases by Cinedelic, housed in a canvas covered outer box ** Cinedelic has thankfully made a very limited run boxet in 300 hand-numbered copies, that brings together "Il Deserto" , "Pittura Contemporanea" and "Pittura Moderna n. 1 and 2." Now, taken as a whole, this set is wonderfully consistent, a comprehensive collection of the best material by the legendary Maestro!Released in …