Reissues
Assemblage
Born in 1929, Boguslaw Schaeffer crossed the Polish Radio Experimental Studio from 1966 to 1976. Many of his electronic music compositions are obtained mixing concrete sounds. For sixty years Schaeffer has shown a pioneering approach to the creative process, exploring untouched, untapped and even unimagined areas of music. His artistry as playwright, composer, musicologist, graphic artist and his extensive interest in other arts disciplines, makes it wholly unsurprising that his visual work mixe…
Secret poems
The KEW stands for a group of three composers: Krzysztof, Elzbieta and Wojciech, founded in 1973 when they were all students at the Fryderyk Chopin Higher State School of Music in Warsaw. They were a group of friends who enjoyed spending time in good (i.e. each other's) company and collectively coming up with new compositions. They weren't average students. Elzbieta Sikora had already been on probation (1968-1970) in Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris under the guidance of Pierre Sch…
Live '72
There are not too many names that get us more excited here at AZ HQ than Conrad Schnitzler's. Since the mid-1960s, Schnitzler has been one of the undisputed masters of electronic experimentation, and his name is synonymous with Krautrock's innovation and defiant musical vision. A prolific solo artist, he also founded Kluster (later Cluster) with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, was an early collaborator with seminal Kosmische acts Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, and, in 1967, founde…
Imagination at play. Prix Italia and Radiophonic Experimentation
Finally restocked! After five years of intense, passionate and sometimes painful work Die Schachtel (in collaboration with RAI) is proud to announce the release of the long-awaited massive Book (Edited by Angela Ida de Benedictis and Maddalena Novati) with 6CDs boxed edition dedicated to some of the most compelling Italian radio works which took part in the prestigious Prix Italia, a world-famous contest established by the RAI (the National Italian broadcasting company) in the early Sixties and …
Krewton the Knewtron
'Previously unreleased material by the legendary Rick Potts of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), to commemorate his solo tour of Japan. Raw, lo-fi avant-garde experiments with field recording, improvisation and tape music, recorded in the late seventies when Rick was in his early twenties. Featuring contributions by Le Forte Four and Doodooettes on one track, and two recently recorded unreleased tracks. " In 1977 I wanted to make an animated film filled with the strange creatures…
R.G.B. / Pre Optron 1999
This CD is a remastered reissue of a very limited CD-R released by Omega Point in 1999. This is the sixth volume in Edition Omega Point's Experimental Music Of Japan series. Atsuhiro Ito was born in 1965. He launched his career as a visual artist in the late '80s, and in '98 began presenting sound performances at art exhibitions. Ito made use of fluorescent lighting (which is also an element of his art installations) in the creation of an original musical device called the Optron. In addition, I…
And It Could Have Been Dead...
Achim Mohné experiments with the space and time intervals of media, photography, video, digital image production, as well as with sound. His experiments bring to light the surprising uses that lie dormant in today's technology. For The Tapeworm, Achim focused on audiotape itself: as material, as body, as signifier and as sculpture. Some notes on the sources and methods used to create And It Could Have Been Dead... follow: A1., "How To Use This Cassette" is mixed from a 1982 Blaupunkt instruction…
Oedipus Orca / La Orca / Una Spirale Di Nebbia
A double set of soundtrack material for the 70s films of Eriprando Visconti (1908 -1980), the nephew of the great Luchino Visconti, with the CD release of the scores from his most famous movies: "La orca" and its sequel "Oedipus orca", and "Una spirale di nebbia". "The first CD is by the computer-music pioneer and wizard James Dashow: Besides the selected tracks for the original LP album (Cinevox MDF 33/107 - 33:15), about 21 minutes of extra music have now been included. This OST keeps a consta…
Piano work'd
Philip Corner (b. 1933) is an American composer, musician and visual artist. His teachers include Henry Cowell and Olivier Messiaen. While on military duty in Korea in 1960-1961, he studied calligraphy with Ki-sung Kim and many of his works have calligraphic scores. A founding member of Fluxus, Corner has performed with George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. From 1967 to 1970 he taught the course in Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research, which John Ca…
Symphony No. 3: Siddhartha Gautama O El Poder De La Nada
When psycho-spatial composer Nelson Gastaldi passed away in 2009 at the age of 77, he left behind a unique musical legacy that is only now beginning to be unveiled. A self-described “musical nihilist with noble and mystic origins” (as well as an accomplished visual artist), Gastaldi supported himself and his family with a job at an electric company in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while creating an astonishing body of work that went virtually unheard during his lifetime. Synthesizing his wide-ranging…
I Saw The Outer Limits
Mind-stretching analog synth wizardry from the legendary Matsuo Ohno, sound designer for Astro Boy and many other Japanese films and TV programs. His first non-soundtrack release, from 1978, is a massive, undulating galaxy re-released here on CD with a bonus mini-CD reissue of a rare 1970 flexi-disc Play On Animals, rated as one of 2011's top releases by Byron Coley of The Wire. This reissue of his stellar 1978 LP I Saw The Outer Limits presents him at the peak of his powers, combining his maste…
ØØ Void
Double LP edition: Lengths of stretched distortion rattle the grey matter, unnervingly slow and severe. With Sunn O)))’s second album, ØØ Void, the sonic misery nurtured to functionality by Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley stays simple and repetitive, a tabula rasa having yet to realize the full scope of its potential. With this album, Sunn O))) worked as a three-piece, collaborator Stuart Dalquist coming up with its opener, “Richard,” which is a solid fourteen and a half minutes of be…
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 3
Wergo presents the third volume of the Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series. Recorded between 1960 and 1973, the original LPs from which these CDs were taken have long been collector's items. These rare and historically important recordings of international avantgarde music have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The series presents the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that fl ourished in Europe, the United States, Latin …
FRKYS Vol. 8
"Volume 8 in the ongoing FRKWYS series on RVNG Intl. is a double album-length collaboration between Blues Control and Laraaji. Following the 'fodder first' tradition of previous FRKWYS installments, Vol. 8 was birthed over e-mail dialogue between RVNG and Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho of Blues Control. Blues Control's evolved output gracefully arcs with influence and innovation that gleams electronic, New Age, and hard rock terrains. Laraaji's name came up early in that conversation and felt intri…
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 1
Featuring The Manhattan Percussion Ensemble, John Cage (conductor), Paul Price (conductor), Christoph Caskel (percussion), David Tudor (piano), Aloys Kontarsky (piano), Bernhard Kontarsky (celesta), MEV (Ala Bryant, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum & Ivan Vandor), AMM (Cornelius Cardew, Lou Gare, Christopher Hobbs, Eddie Prevost & Keith Rowe). "Wergo's Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series focuses on the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that flou…
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 4
"Wergo's reissues of the legendary Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series have been a big hit with fans of contemporary music around the world. Each set is a treasure-trove of works by a wide range of composers, performed by some of the finest musicians of the time. The three CDs of volume four feature string quartets by Boulez, Scelsi and Earle Brown, works for chamber orchestra by Xenakis, Aldo Clementi, Bo Nilsson, Wlodzimierz Kotonski and Yuji Takahashi and works by Milko Kelemen, Niccolo Cas…
Kibbutz
Outstanding reissue, one of the best Merzbow albums ever made, originally released in 1983 on cassette by the Milanese label Adn, Kibbutz is a mélange of sounds made by Masami Akita aka Merzbow on drums, guitar and effects supported, in those years, by Kiyoshi Mizutani at the keyboards and recorded at Kitijoji Music Studio in Tokyo. In this first period, the sounds produced by the duo were amplified up to the distortion producing long sonic-anti psychedelic jam session. The three tracks on Kibb…
The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock
Michael Chapman, one of the finest acoustic guitar innovators borne of the late '70s UK folk scene, was in Philadelphia early 2010, paying tribute to his good friend, the late Jack Rose, a mighty six-string alchemist in his own right, and a youngster wholly inspired by Chapman's critical recordings. While sharing in the good light of friendship backstage, we asked Michael if he'd ever recorded an LP of purely improvised guitar music. It seemed feasible, as the current state of acou…
Audio Combine
restocked: The music comprising John Bischoff’s new CD ‘Audio Combine’, just released on New World Records, is beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable. Philip Perkins’s engineering and production values are superb.The five tracks on the disc are diverse, representing Bischoff compositions from 2004 to mid-2011. The third track ‘Local Color’ evokes traditional chinese zhong bells, but also especially calls into question the ‘who’ of music performance [in asmuch as some of the bells are compu…
The Master Musicians Of India
Seminal recording (originally released in 1964) by the two men most responsible for opening the West to Indian music. Master of the sitar, Ravi Shankar (age 91) is, of course, famous for his legendary influence on the Beatles, but this recording was made for the American jazz label Prestige prior to their meeting. Perhaps lesser intertwined with the pop music world, Ali Akbar-Khan is nonetheless one of India’s greatest musicians, and the world’s best sarod player. Shankar and Khan play to…