Best of 2017
Stack Music
Having felt restrained by the limits of traditional instruments and the techniques tied to them, composer, music producer, and artist Konrad Sprenger (b. Joerg Hiller), spent years developing various algorithms and custom instruments to realize his work. His recent focus has been on rhythmic patterns based on the Euclidean algorithm, using a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar. The unique system can create complex rhythmical patterns whilst tuning the strings during performan…
Alpha Percussion
Mondo Groove present a reissue of Giovanni Cristiani's Alpha Percussion, originally released in 1985. Alpha Percussion is a cult groovy ambient album of acoustic percussion, pleasant to listen to and full of samples and breaks known very well by DJs and artists like Danny Brown, who used a sample of "Fragments Of Crystal" in "Really Doe", a song off his album Atrocity Exhibition (2016). Giovanni Cristiani is one of the most prepared and complete Italian percussionists. Born in Rome in 1952, h…
Organ Sonatinas And Drones
'Sonatina no. 1' (2016). 'Sonatina no. 2' (2016). 'Sonatina no. 3' (2016). 'drones' (2014). Carson Cooman, organ. Eva-Maria Houben has been performing works for the organ for more than 30 years. As she is related to the “wandelweiser-group” of composers, her compositions are published by “edition wandelweiser”, Haan. Her list of compositions up to now includes works for the organ, piano, clarinet, trombone, violoncello and other solo instruments, works for voice and piano, for wind and chamber e…
Three Days Afterwards
Three Days Afterwards is the fourth solo release from Arek Gulbenkoglu. Within manifests a disorientating assignment of tones, textures, and voice. Hovering around the key words below there is an unsettling psychedelic music - ready ripe and raw for the current foreboding age: Sickness; Rooms; FM synthesis; The fickle; Objects; Rituals; Armenia; Vibrations; The inconsequential; Three days afterwards; Arek Gulbenkoglu. Mastered by Joe Talia. Artwork concept by Arek Gulbenkoglu; Layout by Ma…
Matieres Premieres
A double CD featuring some incredible unearthed material from Bernard Parmegiani curated by François Bonnet. Starting as a sound engineer for French TV in the early '50s, Parmegiani has established a connection between sound and vision which he would explore to the deepest degrees after joining Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in 1959 for a two year masterclass. With his first works composed in 1962 and released in 1969, he essentially headed up the 2nd wave of sonic …
Rubisco
Following Fiume Nero (2014), the young Italian composer has moved from the raw primordial chaos that characterized his first work to develop a reflection on how a hypothetical absence of humans and biological life could modify industrialized and civilized spaces. Using field recordings, obscure samples, and FM synthesis, Epiro draws his abstract landscapes as a series of overexposed and imprecise pictures made by concrete and organic architectures, amorphous rhythmic patterns, and repetit…
Spoiche
United Bible Studies is an experimental and improvisational folk band from Ireland, with members in the UK. There are a few core members such as David Colohan as well as a host of incidental contributors on both the live performances and studio albums. Pastoral psychedelia and traditional song have remained the cornerstones of the band's style, alongside collective improvisation that can take the form of extended drone-works or explosive outbursts of ecstatic noise. The lineup currently in…
Tempo Sospeso
Bruno Nicolai is a leading figure in the world of Italian soundtracks although he is primarily known for being the most important of Ennio Morricone’s collaborators and his orchestra conductor in the period of Morricone's greatest production (60‘ and 70’s). But Nicolai's solo works are certainly not of lesser artistic relevance. Tempo sospeso (Suspended Time) is one of the most representative albums in this sense that it was produced by Nicolai in 1975 without any filters or restrictions,…
Heterozygote / Petite Symphonie...
In the field of biology Heterozygous (Hétérozygote) means: a plant whose heredity is mixed. It implies that Hétérozygote, composed between December 1963 and March 1964, is an attempt to engineer a language located both on the musical and on the dramatic plane. You could call this music "Anecdotal Music" for if the organization of events is purely musical, their choice suggests situations justified at two levels: the music and the anecdote. Luc Ferrari explains the piece Petite Symphonie Int…
People Pleaser
Nantes, France-based drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie presents People Pleaser. Initially rising to prominence in Australia as a drummer in the fields of jazz and improvised music, Guthrie later turned increasingly toward electronics and amplified percussion, developing an idiosyncratic style of electroacoustic performance characterized by shimmering metallic textures, rapid-fire textural transformations, and aggressively high volume. Guthrie has since returned to the drum kit in both…
Wakes on Cerulean
Timely outing from two grand masters of exploratory electronics. Kassel Jaeger is the moniker of French musician François Bonnet who works at the GRM and has released a number of books including the highly regarded The Order Of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, published by Urbanomic in 2016. Jim O'Rourke is known to most through his explorations of the song and shapes, the high and low, the east and south. Wakes On Cerulean is a joint adventure where process folds upon process and the operation …
Estórias para Voz, Instrumentos Acústicos e Eletrônicos
The legendary debut of Jocy De Oliveira - and a landmark classic from the 70s Brazlian Electronic music scene. To quote Keith Fullerton Whitman, this is the "lost Tropicalia / Psych / free-Vocal / Ring-Modulator freakout / jam hybrid that you’ve only dreamt about!"It is difficult to overstate the importance of Jocy De Oliveira. Defined by a body of singular music spanning seven decades, within the histories and continuing legacies of avant-garde practice, she is without equivalent. Her work is a…
Sinergia Elettronica
Sinergia Elettronica, the conjunction between Jooklo and Metabolismus orbiting around the museum of weirdness of Degenfeld (Germany), had always been characterized by instant and unpredictable music, therefore their releases being put out as flashes of the moment, as sparkling and quick. Not the case of this one, the first recording appearing on vinyl, which has been sitting under an old piano for a few years before actually seeing the light of day. Three long pieces of prog-delic angular abstra…
Escaped Language
Recorded during Ina/GRM’s 2016 Présences Électronique Festival in Paris, John Wiese’s “Escaped Language” is a concise and calculated piece which slowly evolved in various settings over a number of years. While 2015’s “Deviate From Balance” 2xLP was expansive and chronicled performances and work employing many other musicians, here Wiese dissects and reassembles portions of his vocabulary alone. Simultaneously dense and sparse, delicate and abrasive, free and tactical, the resulting recording s…
Songs For The Ten Voices Of The Two Prophets
Beacon Sound present a reissue of Terry Riley's Songs For The Ten Voices Of The Two Prophets, originally released in 1983. Recorded live in Munich in 1982 using two Prophet synthesizers and voice, this album is a reflection of Riley's ongoing interest in melding improvisation, electronic music, and the raga vocal stylings of his mentor, Pandit Pran Nath. Terry Riley turned the music world upside down with his 1964 work In C, a revolutionary concept based on 53 modules that can be improvised upon…
Idylls
CD edition. Since Lieven Martens Moana's (Dolphins Into The Future) last lp, the massively overlooked "Music from the Guardhouse", our composer has moved from the islands of Okinawa to the Swampland of Mexico City to the Portuguese countryside, running his Private Press, and composing music for ensemble and commercials. This very pluralistic life-style and commitment has led us to his first full length record in three years: "Idylls". Presented as a 12 page book with an LP disc, the listener fir…
A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound
**US import** Ian Fenton’s Frozen Reeds label finally unveil this epic, years-in-the-making the release of Roland Kayn’s fourteen-hour masterpiece, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, as a sixteen-CD boxed set. Mind-bending. Edition of 750. Audio restoration by Jim O'Rourke. Sweet jeezus...Roland Kayn was a composer who rejected composition, a human who gave machines the benefit of the doubt. A German who began making music in the twentieth century with a pencil and paper, Kayn ended up spen…
Industria N.1
At the beginning of the 70s, in Italy, the revolutionary surge of 1968 was beginning to turn into something grimmer (and definitely not linked to left-wing ideology) but the concept of “factory” still had a key role in the economic and social life of the country. It was not just an alienating workplace, where you often spent your whole life, but also – and overall – the place where demands were made and political struggles took place. Therefore, a feasible imaginary soundtrack for the factory wa…