Fracture Mechanics
In October of 2014 Fracture Mechanics traveled to Ljubljana to play and record. The recording at Radio Student involved the transubstantiation of base liquids into nectar and thence by an alchemical process into music.
Fracture Mechanics, the scientific study of cracks in any form of material, is a well-chosen metaphor for the examination of music, sounds, shapes and their breaking points. The fact that this has given the word "fracture" a slight semantic degrading is of particular importance. E…
Borough
The Holy Quintet is a new group in Mikroton family with only one artist, namely Johnny Chang, appearing before on Echtzeitmusik Berlin compilation in 2012.
Borough documents the singular meeting of Johnny Chang, Jamie Drouin, Dominic Lash, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, and David Ryan. The group was assembled by Simon Reynell for a one-off recording session at the Borough Welsh Congregational Chapel on February 15, 2013, taking advantage of Chang and Drouin simultaneously being in London for an i…
Hjem
Mikroton Recordings is proud to present a full length release from three masters of quiet sound. Martin Taxt is a Norwegian musican who plays tuba and runs Sofa label, Andrey Popovskiy hails from Saint Petersburg and plays violin with objects, Kurt Liedwart plays ppooll using mostly sinewaves and quiet noises and one can notice his current transition to a more noise oriented sound.
"Hjem" is a joint adventure of constructing the soundscapes of mysterious clouds of harmonic and microtonal sounds.…
No No No, No
Their music generates a hypnotic atmosphere out of musical atoms: sine waves, noise and clicks. Very pure, very fragile, beautifully restrained, creating abstract spaces and voids of many dimensions. Both perform on ppooll, a freeware-project driven by Klaus Filip with contributions from various users, including Noid. The instruments they use for Ease are very much tailored to their needs, but freely available to anyone.
Klaus Filip's sine wave synth and 2D interface is a result of a more that 2…
Instants - Paris
Jason Kahn, Günter Müller and Norbert Möslang, all from Switzerland, comprise MKM trio, spontaneously founded in 2006 in Tokyo during their Japanese tour. They immediately achieved very fine results and collaborate since then. Their sound hovers between the at times harsh rhythmic noise of Norbert Möslang’s cracked everyday electronics and the rich sonorities of Günter Müller’s percussion-based samples and electronics. Jason Kahn’s work on analog synthesizer bridges these two worlds, adding high…
Creative Construction Set™
The Splitter Orchester is a Berlin-based collection of internationally respected Composer-Performers which draws inspiration from many genres and is most comfortable in the creative borderland between composed and improvised music. It is a defiant musical organism that has developed an extraordinary artistic profile - uniting across continents, generations and aesthetics. Utilising a broad variety of extended techniques on traditional, electronic, and especially constructed and tailored instrume…
Foreign Correspondents
In 2013, Noid and Matija Schellander travelled from Vienna to East Asia to meet up with Ryu Hankil and other musicians from Japan, Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Europe. Carrying compositions, sound art pieces and workshop preparations in their luggage to be tested by changing social and artistic settings, by everyday tour life and to be used as starting points for debates in various forms.
The first CD - “Tokyo Office” - is a trio of Noid, Schellander and their main collaborator on this tour…
SQID
Formed in 2011 by Angélica Castelló, Mario de Vega, Attila Faravelli and Burkhard Stangl, the Austrian-Mexican-Italian quartet SQID focuses on live sound art and sound performances that push the bounds of the conventional formats of the concert and recording situation. In July 2012 SQID performed at the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen festival and played a four-hour installative concert entitled “240” in the protestant church. The sound performance was so well received by the audience and critics th…
Blage 3
Exploration of time, perception and place is the recurring theme of the work of Simon James Phillips. Blage 3 was an extended installation and performance piece curated by Phillips — a one-off five hour uninterrupted improvisation with an ensemble of six of Berlin’s most visible experimental artists – Tony Buck (drums and percussion), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), BJ Nilsen (electronics), Liz Allbee (trumpet), Arthur Rother (guitar) and Simon James Phillips (piano).
The ensemble was placed i…
Glück
The international quintet Glück combines percussionists of diverse stripes and their individual pronounced ways of playing. The five musicians are internationally renowned as soloists and with various musical outfits. An extremely sound orientated, fragile and transparent approach to their idiosyncratic percussion sets is what they all have in common. From diverse conjoint long-term projects (Vorwolf, Malatesta/Wolfarth, Misiiki) arose the shared wish to put the musical experiences made within t…
Nachtlieder
Walking through the night. I’m not even supposed to be here today, and so is Silent Bob.New news of dying migrants. No attention for the paperless, what can the sailors do when the captain feels mean? Meanwhile Guy Maddin tells us his tales of amnesia, incest, death, and transfiguration decked out in low-rent expressionism and dime-store surrealism. Such a joy, joy, joy to meet somebody new. The insonnia of the homeless in the Termini train station addressing Heinrich Heine, trying to convince u…
Live in Morden Tower
Rhodri Davies was commissioned by the London Musicians’ Collective to put together an ensemble and present a new work for each of the five nights of the 14th LMC Festival of Experimental Music in 2005. Since then the group has invited a number of musicians to join the core members of the ensemble. The current full line up consists of the trio heard on this CD as well as Angharad Davies and Lina Lapelyte.
Morden Tower is one of Britain’s best-known cultural landmarks. For the past 45 years, hundr…
I Hope It Doesn't Work
“…for it feels like being overwhelmed by an external force, entering an alien world, but full of glorioles, and this doesn’t happen anytime but dependent on specific preconditions, and it takes a special nature glowing from inside, that’s that. A strange occurrence breaking off the everyday chest, and it is a copulation of mind, an excess, a secret…” - Friederike Mayröcker. Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling.
A veritable mind excitement is taking place when Tamara Wilhelm, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and …
A Quartet For Guitars
Can you say something about a quartet for guitars?
Hmm. Where to start?
Well let’s start with why “Affetuoso e sostenuto”? And what about those track tittles: “Ineptitude”, “Awkward”, “Gaucheness”, “Underwhelm” and “Failing”?
Google “Affetuoso e sostenuto” and probably a reference to Haydn will appear on the screen, a nine minute section from his String Quartet Op. 20. No. 1 ( the third movement). For the musicians on this recording after an examination of the score their very first instruction …
Why Is The Sea So Blue
In Why Is The Sea So Blue Margareth Kammerer continues to explore songs in experimental music contexts, elaborately interweaving lyrics into nine wistful soundscapes. Originally recorded in 2006, with the band consisting of Christof Kurzmann (voice, saxophone), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Burkhard Stangl (vibraphone), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), Big Daddy Mugglestone (percussion) and Marcello Silvio Busato (drums), the album’s final shape emerged with the production of Valerio Tricoli in 2011, …
Vtoroi
The first Mikroton release featuring Russian musicians Ilia Belorukov, a saxophonist from Saint-Petersburg, and Kurt Liedwart, an electronic and computer musician from Moscow who also runs the label. It’s their second longplaying work following Obwod which was released on Copy For Your Records. On the new CD the duo goes even further into the realm of unknown contriving to work with silence, space and chance with their traditional means like sinewaves and saxophone’s long tones. Saxophone prepar…
Shifting Currents
The recordings for the piece were gathered over the course of a year from Huddersfield, Stirling, Aberdeen (United Kingdom), and s’Hertogenbosch (The Netherlands). These were used to create an installation consisting of over 100 tracks that were remixed in real time during each performance. The set up varied from show to show, sometimes playing through 6 speakers and 3 subs, and at other times, through 12 speakers etc. The performers were positioned at the centre of the audience, who in turn, we…
Bloody Imagination
Ten years ago, a week before Christmas in 2002, Teruto Soejima, a Japanese experimental/avant-garde music critic, organized a festival at a small live venue called Knuttel House, located in the east side of Tokyo. Named as “Independent Underground Music Festival”, it was held with the following message by Mr. Soejima:
“Today in the advanced improvised music scene, new artists keep coming up one after another. In there, free jazz, contemporary music, techno, prog, traditional music, experimental …
Stodgy
eRikm first met Norbert Möslang in December 1998 at the festival More Scratch in Nantes when they first played together as part of ad-lib quartet gig which later became known as poire_z, a prominent electroacoustic improvisation quartet which existed until the split of Voice Crack in 2002.
Norbert Möslang has been playing in Voice Crack duo with Andy Guhl since 1972, they’ve been working with “cracked everyday-electronics”, modifying and recontextualising the use of home electronics. After the s…
A Floating World
The French WPB3 trio explores areas between abstract minimalist contemporary concrete instrumental improvised music and energetic noisy free jazz with an uncompromisingly totally free approach.
Nusch Werchowska has been involved in improvised music since she met Barre Philips in 1993. A pianist who is able to translate a conversation between Debussy and Cecil Taylor as well as John Cage using all kinds of prepared techniques. She played with numerous musicians in the field of improvised music su…