Best of 2019
Ikiru Or The Wanderer
Samll repress finally available. We welcome Louise Landes Levi to the Oaken Palace Records family and invite you to join her on a musical journey through the life and fate of the Monarch butterfly. Ikiru, which is Japanese for "to grow", starts with "Butterfly Graveyard", a musical assessment of the current state of the Monarch butterfly, whose population has declined by over 80% over the past 20 years. On "Butterfly Brain", this worrying development is contrasted with the bravery and wonder of …
Conversations With the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archives
Double CD version. Includes color insert. Double LP/CD curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Sub Rosa. Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it …
Extract From Field Recording Archive
Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda is a master of the art of field recording who discovers the hidden properties of sound and vibrations in the material world, from road surfaces to the sea. Through acute mic placement, field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda captures the unusual vibrations of everyday spaces. The recordings contained in this amazing box open up an expansive soundfield of subtle modulating frequencies and dramatic suspensions of time and space. Sounds such as these would be the envy …
Dome 4
With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July, 1980), Dome 2 (October, 1980), and Dome 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome 4 was released on the Norwegi…
Dream Character
**300 only, this is stunning** Matt Jencik is back on Hands in the Dark with his new album, 'Dream Character', the follow up to his first solo record 'Weird Times' back in 2017. Whilst all the songs on his debut album were created using the same sampling method on the same instrument, this time the Chicago artist’s approach is slightly different. Using a combination of 4 track cassette, digital recording & sampling, he added live improvisations and a wider selection of instruments including gui…
Awake In TH' Red Desert
**The first vinyl reissue of the zoner masterpiece, originally released in 1968. Edition of 500** "For the first release in Feeding Tube's Unknown Province series -- a run of records dedicated to exploring little known nooks of the Canadian underground, curated by Alex Moskos -- we are delighted to bring you the first vinyl reissue of the 1968 zoner masterpiece by poet bill bissett and his fellow Vancouver freaks. We have always been shocked this LP was not included on the NWW list, but Canadian…
Mort Aux Vaches
**2LP Limited Edition 125 copies. Transparent Blue Vinyl.** First time on vinyl, brand new mastering, and new cover design (a 1974 drawing by Charlemagne Palestine). This is the first release in the 'GodBear' series, a project consisting in the re-issue of existing works and production of unreleased material by Charlemagne. In partnership with the Charlemagne Palestine Foundation. It’s hard to believe now, but until the mid-1990s, many of the most important figures American musical minimalism - …
Wind
2019 super limited repress. Italian electronic musician Gigi Masin's much sought-after 1986 first album, Wind, restored and remastered from the original tapes. Never commercially released, the LP was only given away at a number of small concerts, with many of the remaining copies destroyed during floods in the Venice-based musician's house. Quickly gaining recognition as something of a landmark ambient album in recent years, Wind is now lovingly presented again in its entirety. True to its origi…
Moto Perpetuo
This is killer. Marionette starts off 2019 with an extremely special collaboration record by Kilchhofer and Anklin, titled Moto Perpetuo. Michael Anklin is a drummer and percussionist based in Switzerland. He’s involved in various bands, collaborations and interdisciplinary projects. Anklin has previously appeared on a few recordings from Kilchhofer's Album The Book Room. Kilchhofer uses his main instrument the modular synth in a more electroacoustic manner, where he derives and processes voltag…
Loudspeakers
Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945) can be regarded as a central figure in American music, and on several fronts. As a composer, he's been pervasively innovative in two genres: text-sound pieces, in which he can draw engaging rhythmic processes from wacky word assemblages such as 'rainbow chug bandit' and 'church car rubber baby buggy bumper'; and natural-sound electronic pieces which go far beyond the usual confines of musique concrète to create long, poetic sound narratives poised between collage an…
Chemical Flowers
Luke Younger yields his most engrossing work as Helm with the sorely romantic dynamics of ‘Chemical Flowers’, his follow-up to 2015’s ‘Olympic Mess’. Bolstered by J.G. Thirlwell’s rich string arrangements, it’s a hugely ambitious work that extends from whirling, panoramic vistas to insular, pulsing dynamics, somewhere between Earth, Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino and Actress. Recorded in long, sustained sessions in the Essex countryside, giving him breathing room from the choke of London, ‘Chemica…
Barracas Barrocas
Selva Discos fulfills its duty of giving a new life to Fernando Falcão's long lost LPs with the reissue of his album Barracas Barrocas, originally released through Egberto Gismonti's cult record label Carmo in 1987. Somehow, an original copy of this album is even more elusive than its predecessor Memória das Águas and it is a pity that such a stunning piece of music was kept apart from listeners worldwide for so long.The follow-up to Memória das Águas was recorded in São Paulo after Fernando Fal…
Occam Ocean Vol. 2
There’s little argument that Éliane Radigue is among the most important composers working today. She a titan of the avant-garde, forever pushing into the unknown, bending the very notion of what music is, with the depths it can penetrate, into a singular territory, entirely her own. Until the early 2000s, Radigue’s deeply meditative works sprang almost entirely from an intimate relationship with her ARP 2500, but, over the years since, she has turned her focus to a remarkably collaborate way of …
Abies Firma
**Last copies! Edition of 1000. 20-page pamphlet holding program notes, scores, & a new essay on American Gamelan by Jay Arms Complimentary CD version with additional 20-minute suite** The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form. “We were like children pla…
Epistasis
Following the success of her 2018 solo debut album Kontrapoetik (PRTLS 017LP), the Swedish composer Maria W Horn returns with Epistasis, her most ambitious record to date. The title track, "Konvektion" and the two parts of "Interlocked Cycles" see the XKatedral co-founder explore radical approaches to composition that combine avant-garde methods with electronic means. While Kontrapoetik highlighted Horn's strength as a conceptual and political artist, Epistasis is to be understood as an advanced…
IsoMonads
Killer. edition of 50 copies. “For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.” ― Eugene Thacker - Jarra’s artistic exploration started with painting abstract artworks in which he aimed to minimise his part as a painter. The technical approach, craftsmanship and the concentration devoted to this process should define the artwork in its final state. Jarra’s perspective on sound has been in a similar way when he started with field recordings in the late '90s. He consequ…
Things Opening
Second Editions presents Things Opening by Lori Goldston. Lori Goldston's approach to the violincello is true and immediate. Describing herself as "classically trained and rigorously de-trained", Goldston indeed defies all conformities of genre, style and technique. Her playing reflects as much of Baroque as it does of American roots or experimental traditions. It is elegant, gritty, restless, delicate, irreverent, utterly pure. This album comprises of two parts, highlighting Goldston as both a…
Spectra Ex Machina: A Sound Anthology of Occult Phenomena
"Have a gramophone in every grave..." --James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) The anthology Spectra Ex Machina brings together rare documents pertaining to so-called occult phenomena, most of them taken from little-known archives. In the course of three volumes, this series traces an audio history of parapsychology through the exploration of spiritualism and haunted houses (Vol. 1); musician mediums (vol. 2); experiences of extrasensory perceptions (clairvoyance, psychokinesis, etc.) and electronic voice …
Nelson Angelo E Joyce
(180 gr pressing) Incredible early work from Joyce – the completely fantastic female singer who would go on to transform the sound of Brazilian music in the 70s, and have a huge global legacy for years to come!This set's got Joyce working with Nelson Angelo – a bandmate of the singer in the group A Tribo – and the pair write and perform songs with a vibe that's similar to her later work, but maybe a bit darker and moodier too!"Incredible early work from Joyce – the completely fantastic female si…
Planetary Unfolding
Emotional Rescue is honoured to reissue the benchmark in new age ambient music, Michael Stearns' epic Planetary Unfolding album. Unavailable on vinyl for over thirty years, here is Stearns masterful electronic symphony in six movements, recorded using his Serge modular synthesizer at the Continuum Studio in 1981. The culmination of years of exploration in "space" music, Stearns' journey, to the album release, was one of learning and application. Involved in music since his teens, he graduated fr…