Plays Hazkarà
Italy’s prince of chill Gigi Masin teams up with multitalented muse Mirco Salvadori for a tender excursion into the world of the piano in an attempt to build a unified poetry of art and sound in Hazkara. I mean, that’s pretty much a guarantee if you include a 48-page book with a CD, words and pictures and all. The first thing I noticed was the prominence of the piano on this one, more so than recent Music From Memory compilation Talk to the Sea, anyway. Yeah, I’m a pedestrian Masin fan. Being …
Grisailles
** Deluxe Ed. Attached onto handmade sleeves using thick card stock with textured debossing/rounded tabs outside sleeve construction. Limited to 300 copies **The glowing momentum captured in a suite of five movements for speechless voice rooted in a flair of earthly instrumental strokes. A sensual twilight where ashes become seeds. An original hand printed edition etching by Timo van Luijk is featured with each copy.
"Elodie is Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk. Grisailles is certainly a sea chan…
Ambient 1 (Music For Airports)
Brian Eno's pioneering Ambient album from 1978. Music for Airports is so delicate, lovely, and aesthetically moving, that it has been known to give rise to sensations of flying, being enfolded in warm blankets, or watching a vision take place in the heavens. If this sounds like an overstatement, you haven't heard the album. A four part 'piece' performed entirely on synthesizer and piano, Eno's composition finds a referent more in abstract painting (one visualizes bold blocks of colour in warm hu…
The Little Glass
The ever-enigmatic Akira Rabelais returns! The Little Glass breaks down clearly over two discs; the first containing four plaintive solo piano parts by Harold Budd and Rabelais, followed by a 2nd disc presenting Rabelais’ hour long, inharmonic, electronic transformation of the preceding material. Rabelais has collaborated with Budd before, he provided his own incredible side-long second CD to Budd’s majestic Avalon Sutra album, and while the piano pieces that make up the first CD here are bloody…
N°3
Gatefold double LP version. "Album No. 3 from Christina Vantzou is the result of a two-year process of composing, arranging, rearranging, experimenting, and melding classical instruments with synths and electronics. Recorded in Belgium with a 15-piece ensemble of strings, horns, woodwinds and micro-choir, the tracks vacillate between orchestral, ambient soundscapes and more structured works that the composer refers to as 'pillars.' The internal core of the record, however, is unwavering. All tra…
First
Tarotplane is the solo project of Baltimore-based musician PJ Dorsey. First, his full-length debut, is a tremendous album etched on the great krautrock and experimental psychedelic records from the '70s. Vintage electronic sounds are mixed with effected guitar parts. It might sound quite familiar at first, but once one enters the heart of the album it all gets spectacularly exhilarating and effortlessly captivating, swirling around the listener. Records such as Franco Battiato's Pollution, Bill …
13
Room40 inaugurates its series of works by American guitarist and composer Norman Westberg with 13. Best known for his work with the seminal outfit Swans, Westberg's output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City's music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema of Transgression to his participation in bands such as The Heroine Sheiks and Five Dollar Priest, Westb…
RE : EM
The brilliant Anna Zaradny's follows up her engrossing debut with this new EP featuring a sumptuous Fennesz rework of her New feat Old, following hot on the heels of Robert Piotrwicz's crushing side, Stara Szkola Ze Zlota, to remind us the ascetic, uncompromising brilliance of Polish experimental music at its best. On the front Zaradny utterly dominates the senses with a pulsating deconstruction of Stop the Chaos; originally a sub-3 minute rager, now distilled and expanded to three times the len…
Rank Sonata
"Colin Potter has been a central figure in the UK's DIY and post-industrial underground since the late '70s. His ICR label, founded in 1981, blurred the lines between post-punk experimentation, crude pop, Krautrock-inspired drone work and contemporary electronica, with releases by everyone from DIY legends The Instant Automatons through Chris & Cosey of Throbbing Gristle, experimental composer Trevor Wishart, drone soundists Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate and Bryn Jones's Muslimgauze. He has also …
Endless Autumn
Each new album by Fabio Orsi is an experience apart. The atmospheres created by the Apulian artist, who lives in Berlin since few years, penetrate the smallest gaps of the cerebral cortex, just where the memory lives. Backwards is proud to present, in collaboration with Puglia Sounds, "Endless Autumn", a work that draws inspiration in its title from "Endless Summer", by the acclaimed Christian Fennesz, but shines with its own light anyway. Entirely recorded between Taranto and Berlin, it embodie…
Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains
On Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains, Tokyo's Chihei Hatakeyama evokes an instrumental poetic grace that marks him out as one of the icons of his generation. Drawing upon a broad swath of aesthetic references, he seamlessly melts glacial ambient drifts with richly harmonic guitar strata that echo the gliding motions of My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Cocteau Twins. Never resolving to clear melody, his interest in unrestrained harmonics creates a depth to his compositions and moreover a pr…
Chantepleure
"The trajectory of Alex Cobb's music over the course of the last decade could be viewed as a distillation of tone and atmosphere to arrive at Chantepleure, his most optimistic and sanguine musical statement to date. The album, however, was created at a time of heartache, isolation, and emotional upheaval and acts as a balm of tender tones where abstract guitar lines circle and suspend in a kind of refined elegance. Noise, once a hallmark of Cobb's music, has not been entirely removed, but manife…
Wizards
This CD reissue of JD Emmanuel's Wizards contains two tracks excluded from the original 1982 LP due to master tape problems. "Wizards was my first deep trance electronic music album. This album was inspired by Terry Riley, one of the earliest people ever to compose and perform long, extended, cyclic pieces in the electronic format. This music was composed and performed in '81 and '82. I consider this album my best work. The instrumentation is three Sequential Circuits PRO-1s, Crumar Traveler…
Glass Walking
Over the years the Menstruation Sisters have through a selective, but incredibly varied output of albums steadily built a reputation among music fans as a unique band. It was never a secret who the members of Menstruation Sisters were, yet the band's aura was shrouded in mystery and confusion, possibly because they would completely reinvent themselves with every new recorded statement. As a fan of the Menstruation Sisters you had to abandon everything you knew with each new piece of the puzzle.…
Untitled #274
Untitled #274 was composed by Francisco López and performed by Kasper T. Toeplitz at GRM Studios in Paris, France. Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of sound art and experimental music. For more than thirty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from th…
Feel the hiss
Some of the tracks on Feel the Hiss, a release Bryn Jonesrecorded LIVE to cassette in early 1995 but never had the chance to remix and polish before he DIED, use the same kinds of devotional voices found on much of Minaret Speaker(ARCHIVE 029CD), but here other voices are present too. Conversational or angry, male or female, English or French or Arabic, almost inaudible or forcing their way to the front of the MUSIC, these "Zilver Tracks" (the name based on a note Jones wrote on the tape) engage…
The Equatorial Stars
Totally essential LP re-release for the first collaboration between Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in over 30 years, that nearly equals the effuse beauty of their celebrated 70s works. "Ambient is a spacious, electronic music that is concerned with sonic texture, not songwriting or composing," says the All-Music Guide. That seems reasonable, although I suspect Brian Eno might take issue with the notion that his music is somehow unconcerned with composition. As with most musical definitions (and …
An Evolutionary Music (Original Recordings: 1972 - 1979)
Double CD version...A masterpiece! RVNG seem to be doing an enviable job of unearthing some of the most pre-eminent performers of progressive synthesizer and horizontalist ambient world music and this guy, whose stunning 'Osmose' is rarely off my record deck, is surely one of the most treasured. His work during the 70s is, quite simply, incredibly important to lovers of esoteric spiritual synth music and will leave you with a massive helpless grin and a notable dearth of tension in your m…
Ruins
"Ruins was made in Aljezur, Portugal in 2011 on a residency set up by Galeria Zé dos Bois. I recorded everything there except the last song, which I did at mother's house in 2004. Iʼm still surprised by what I wound up with. It was the first time I'd sat still for a few years; processed a lot of political anger and emotional garbage. Recorded pretty simply, with a portable 4-track, Sony stereo mic and an upright piano. When I wasnʼt recording songs I was hiking several miles to the beac…
Whispered Visions
Sharing social circles and spiritual ideologies with artists such as Iasos, Connie Demby and Deuter, whilst splitting label release schedules with Laraaji, Laurie Spiegel and Wendy Carlos, the unique Florida raised soul mate duo known as Emerald Web released their privately pressed debut LP at an axis where post-prog rock met proto-new age and ambient electronic music. Notes by Kat Epple When originally released, one music reviewer described Whispered Visions as: “A cosmic tapestry of sound, wov…