The Last Man in Europe
Reality had the honour of working with pioneering electronic composer Zbigniew Karkowski on two occasions. In 2007, as part of the Recording Angel Ensemble’s accompaniment to Wojciech Has’ film “The Saragossa Manuscript” at the National Film Theatre and finally, for the last time on the 31st October 2013 when, already gravely ill after learning that he had advanced pancreatic cancer, Karkowski premiered his music to the BBC 1954 teleplay production of George Orwell’s “1984 - The Last Man in Euro…
Computer Music, Musica Elettronica+
Handy collection of all of Composer James Dashow's early Computer Music issued in the vinyl era, including his 1982 Edipan "Computer Music / Musica Elettronica" LP, plus his track from the "Computer Directions" collection on CRI & the piece "La Pianta Di Livio" tucked onto the end of the soundtrack to the film "Oedipus Orca" released on Cinevox. Dashow started out in the Chicagoland area, studying with J. K. Randall amongst others before heading to Italy on a Fulbright in the late 60s where he s…
Deflections
Fabio Perletta and Asmus Tietchens’ hermetic micro-cosmos of Deflections unfolds by exploring instability and physical decay of sound. Built upon liminal forms and atonal passages, the six near-silent pieces of the work traverse empty space by means of elementary sonic emissions and drifting nano-structures. Among sound collisions and evanescent masses, the almost immaterial yet corporeal nature of Deflections, embodies sound in its most subliminal and contradictory form.
Fabio Perletta cr…
A Script For Machine Synthesis
“The latest work from Florian Hecker A Script for Machine Synthesis is an experimental auditory drama and a model of abstraction. A Script for Machine Synthesis presents a complex simplicity that spirals in an unending manner as an audio image of the uncanny valley. It is the third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces Hecker has collaborated with the philosopher Reza Negarestani. A resynthesized voice outlines procedure as procedure itself unfolds. The suggestive encounter with a pink ice…
Les geometries souterraines
The first LP by Fusiller allows an intimate exploration of his very own musical language presented through his crafted electronic instruments, skills coming form his engineering background. This coupled material and theoretic control, leads to unique meaning structures where haunting evocations join spectral contrasts in a very pure form, evenly poor and massive, inherited from industrial and electroacoustic music. The LP is a precisely arranged progression of selected experimental sound objects…
Crisis Of Representation
LP versions. 140 gram vinyl. Includes CD. Budapest-based composer Gábor Lázár debuts on Shelter Press with his second full-length album, Crisis Of Representation. Continuously defining his unique composition skills over the years, Gábor Lázár shared a first release with Russell Haswell for his now defunct imprint Last Foundation, quickly followed in 2014 with the album I.L.S. on Lorenzo Senni's Presto!? label and EP16 on Boomkat's The Death Of Rave label (RAVE 006LP), before collaborating in 201…
Musique Numérique
Creel Pone treatment of this Private-Press LP of late-70s spectral computer music by Daniel Arfib. Aside from Conrad Cummings’ review of the LP in the fall 1981 issue of Computer Music Journal, I’ve seen nary a mention of Mssr. Arfib’s early Digital Synthesis work, which seems something of a glaring omission in the historical annals given the particularly misted nature of these pieces, often utilizing an upgraded spec of Stockhausen’s rhythm-to-pitch methodologies & sharing something in common w…
The Shape of Failures Past
Athens based Yannis Kotsonis better known as Sister Overdive returns with a limited edition of 100 copies following his releases at Organised Music from Thessaloniki and Somehow Ecstatic Records. Kotsonis explores the techniques of audio collage in order to create his own universe of crooked pscychedelia. Carefully picking and processing fragments from old vinyl records, discarded tapes and miscellaneous field recordings, Kotsonis produces an AM radio scanning adventure where a noisy thriftstore…
Nuum
Timos Alexandropoulos (b.1988) is a multidisciplanary artist/programmer based in Athens/Greece. Under the moniker No God Ritual, he has releases in both foreign and local labels. His main interest is the use of algorithmic systems and the use of different programming concepts and techniques -such as tactical media ideas, internet, hacking, data elaboration etc- in order to create complex synthesized sounds. He has performed both in clubs and galleries while he is member of the Null Pointer Const…
Silencer
Eldritch electro-acoustic explorer and uncompromising sound artist Luke Younger aka Helm presents his first new material since his Impossible Symmetry (PAN 027LP) album. Issued as a split release between PAN and his own Alter label, Silencer documents four studio actions conducted in the wake of his renowned LP, charting the alchemical relationships between base, stripped-down rhythms, cruddy electronics, and acousmatic source material manipulated on cassette tapes. Features foghorn brass fro…
Prototype EP
*The debut by Black Sites, a collaboration between Hamburg based artists Helena Hauff and F#X* Black Sites' 'Protoype EP' debuts the rapidly ascendant DJ/producer Helena Hauff and her Golden Püdel pal, F#X in a proper rugged warehouse showdown. From their base at Hamburg's unanimously adored nightclub they've brewed an uncut take on classic hardware funk importing inspiration from Drexciya to Unit Moebius and blending it with a direct dockside attitude demanding a physical response. Thei…
New Release (1)
*Regis and Haswell finally debut their Concrete Fence project - 12" mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Bill Kouligas & Russell Haswell* Regis & Russell Haswell's Concrete Fence is a tantalising proposition for noise and techno freaks. As a duo they first rallied under the aegis at the 2012 Blackest Ever Black party in London's Corsica Studios with an improvised live set that veered bet…
Convulsive Threshold
Two heavyweight explorers of sound and technology, Russell Haswell and Yasunao Tone, both undertaking separate rigorous experiments into the synthesis of sound and all its remits, converge for one helluva collaborative work. ‘Convulsive Threshold’ is the result of years of research and experimentation, Haswell’s systems of hybrid analogue/digital audio generation acting as one of the starting points for this relentess piece of material, which are then subjected to Tone’s MP3 Deviation tec…
Palace of marvels (queered pitch)
Marcus Schmickler's new release following his acclaimed Altars Of Science (EMEGO 082CD) is a must-have for those interested in the rising field of contemporary computer music. It reconfirms Schmickler's interest in the liaison of sound, phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Schmickler, therefore, utilizes a new interpretation of 1960's discovery, the Shepardtone, discovered by Roger Shepard, which creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually rises or descends in pitch yet ultimately …
Punani Xerrameca
Last coy, slight wear due to storage. The 7th part of Evol’s Punani series contains two pieces for solo computer edited from live recordings at: Superdeluxe, Tokyo (12.01.08), Fylkingen, Stockholm (26.02.08), CAPC, Bordeaux (24.05.08), and SND Studios, Sheffield (03.12.08).The word “xerrameca” is Catalan for “babble”. Key words: simulated speech synthesis, fractals, algorithmic composition, noise.Contains 2 locked grooves.EVOL is a computer music project by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (Barcelona, 19…
Atavism
Finally, after a long long wait, the first new SND album proper in almost 7 years drops on the wonderful Raster Noton label. Followers of these pages will no doubt be aware of our long, drawn-out love affair with this project, beginning back in 1998 with the anonymous arrival of their first self-released 12", through the series of albums produced for Mille Plateaux, the 'Blir' releases and all the way up to last year's amazing '4,5,6' triplepack. The sound they make is an oblique and utterly unp…
The Drive
Billed as a soundtrack to an imaginary road movie this latest album from Jon Egeskov's Pixel project (his third in all) reaches into your subconscious and yanks out whatever images are lodged in there. Using a basic palette of miniscule percussive elemnts and delicately manipulated amplifier hiss Egeskov instils a sense of gentle motion, sounding out dream-like engine noise that propels the listener down whatever shady lane they're prepared to venture down. The floating hum and crinkled analogue…
InharmoniCity
The Italian label Synesthesia Recordings is ‘to be intended as a repository of live improvised electroacoustic works. The main goal is to retrieve the late Renaissance praxis of ‘Ricercare’ intended as exploration of a technical device playing it, subverting it in different ways’. Translated to the world of audio, this is done by the U.S.O Project, a duo of Matteo Milani (from Milan actually) and Federico Placidi, both of whom I never heard. Both have a background with digital sound synthesis an…
1978-1983
John Bischoff, Jim Horton, Tim Perkis, David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Rich Gold. 'The League of Automatic Music Composers was a band-collective of electronic music experimentalists active in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1977 and 1983. Widely regarded as the first musicians to incorporate the newly available microcomputers of the day into live musical performance, the League created networks of interacting computers and other electronic circuits with an eye to eliciting surprising and new '…
Vertebra
Former WFMU dj, denizen of New York’s A Mica Bunker scene, former Krackhouse (not head) member, and ARP whiz – now living in The Netherlands, having studied elektronische musik in Utrecht. At last, his long overdue first cd. Matt says: “My music runs without stopping, and at a vertiginous speed. The architecture is simultaneity. …Not to perceive noise as music, but music as noise. This is a recording of a live performance: one member of a set of possible solutions. Vertebra is a computer program…