Electronic / Improvised

n 2018 Mikroton Mikroten Festival offered a special occasion to record five important musicians from the Swiss experimental music scene. Joke Lanz was born in Basel in 1965 and now lives in Berlin. He is a pioneer of the electronic independent scene and a crossover artist whose work spans improvised and experimental music, noise and turntablism, performance art and musique concrète. In addition to theatre and film music, radio works, installations and objects, there are two constants in his work…

It took 15 years since its foundation to release their first album. Sink was formed in Berlin in 2004. Though their music is improvised, Sink play, perform, sound and feel as a band with a distinct band sound. Their sound ranges from typically Berlin Echtzeitmusik related mixed electroacoustic and acoustic soundscapes which can, but need not, result in a minimalistic groove. Sink already appeared on “Echtzeitmusik Berlin” compilation we produced in 2012. Andrea Ermke is a sound artist from the s…

The story of the making of the album was complicated, almost mythological. Instead of retelling the original story we give a word to Federsel, the initiator of the project: It all began in 2002, or it might have been also in 2001, I don’t remember anymore. For whatever reason, I had an idea to remix songs of Czech country hero Wabi Daněk, who’s music I remembered from my childhood, from singing around the fireplace. I thought this will be some sort of funny game for me, with which I will spend f…

The science fiction yearning for utopia sometimes falls into dystopian space. Kurt Liedwart with Ken Ganfield and Petr Vrba tried to follow the impulse of getting to the ideal world but their most powerful and fearful predictions and prophesies came to the fore and “Something Wrong There” happened all the time. Liedwart recently became dissatisfied with the improvisation’s disability to create sonically fresh sound worlds and completely remixed the studio recordings. Did it prevent him from maki…

Petr Vrba explores non-idiomatic improvisation using trumpets, clarinets, vibrating speakers and other electronics which made him one of the most active experimental musicians in Prague. He works with a lot of projects like Prague Improvisation Orchestra, Poisonous Frequencies, NOIZ, Doppeltrio, Rouilleux and Junk & The Beast. “Punkt” is his second release on Mikroton following “Trailer” with Veronika Mayer released in 2017. Kurt Liedwart, a Moscow-based musician and curator of Mikroton Recordin…

On their new album Third Issue Trio Sowari continues its musical investigation of asymmetric structures and multilayered ambiguities. Gravitation, Suspension, Exploration and finally Levitation, the four tracks on this CD present different fields of interactive possibilities. No signs of dystopianism or retrotopianism here, but undaunted and spirited ways of facing a complex and bewildering present. Bertrand Denzler on tenor saxophone, Burkhard Beins on percussion with Phil Durrant now also invo…

Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler have been known for building their sonic worlds for 17 years since their first album Bart. After 6 years of studio silence, here comes Neue Bilder. Their 5th allbum is a constant flux of musical juxtapositions, collisions and balance of their tour de force with analogue synth and computer. The album features two tracks created from two concentrated performances in Münster and Wels, both being magnificently reworked stereo versions of their quadrophonic live conc…

The second appearance of Alfredo Costa Monteiro after critically acclaimed Contour with Keith Rowe, Kurt Liedwart and Ilia Belorukov, and the first physical release of Miguel A. Garcia after Uropygi with Kurt Liedwart, Ilia Belorukov and Dmitry Krotevich on Mikroton Digital. The album is titled after “Aq’ab’al”, the Mayan Astrology Sign about polar opposites — dawn and dusk, hot and cold, black and white which represents renewal, change, the end of boredom or new beginnings. The album takes off …

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“…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 …

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 …

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, …

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…

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…

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 …

The ever progressing sophistication of the Internet brings with it not only many positive aspects but also a more and more tangled convolution of data threads, a twisted web that can, like bundles of tangled fishing net, make trawling for and distributing useful and meaningful information difficult or even impossible. Good thing there’s klingt.org, a clear, straightforward forum that for the past ten years has provided a community of musicians and artists with an Internet platform free of charge…

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…

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…

Limmat is the second CD from Günter Müller, Jason Kahn and Christian Wolfarth, following their first album Drumming released in 2005 on Creative Sources. Recorded during one afternoon in Kahn’s Zürich studio, “Limmat” features three unedited improvisations melding microsounds, percussive mastery and swaths of noise and static into a mesmerizing whole. Originally from Los Angeles, Jason Kahn has lived in Europe since 1990. He has performed or recorded with musicians such as Günter Müller, Norbert…

Over three decades Jason Kahn developed his unique sonic language, now exploring the interaction between sound and space using a compact setup of percussion and analog synthesizer. He has performed and recorded albums with Günter Müller, Norbert Möslang, Kim Cascone, Arnold Dreyblatt, Steve Roden, Dieb13, Richard Francis, Ryu Hankil, Jon Mueller and many others. He ran his own Cut label from 1997 to 2008, releasing 25 albums. Asher is one the most interesting new composers in the United States, …

It is now 5 years that I travel to Latin America. My home base in Buenos Aires; and from there to almost all the other countries. When I arrived there first, I did not know much about the music scene, especially about any scene committed to “New Music” or “Improvisation”, but with the time i encountered a lot of movement, a lot of interesting music (of any form or genre) and I encountered musicians, that if they had been born in the so called “civilized West” would be within the most important p…

Cym_bowl is Günter Müller’s fourth solo CD. On cym_bowl he follows even more consequently the idea he already realized on his last album reframed; focused on the sound of one cymbal and one singing bowl; he feeded his iPods with dozens of variations of processed sounds. Afterwards he conceived with recorded material from sessions he improvised with processed cymbal and bowl sounds only the 4 pieces for his new album. cym_bowl could easily go as a symbol of getting lost in time.

**160 copies with silk-screened NWW patch and insert** Cassette re-issue of the timeless Nurse With Wound debut release from 1979. Described by Sounds at the time as a record that "makes The Faust Tapes sound like Carousel," nothing has changed to alter this view over the last 40 years, and to say that this work is the "Sgt. Pepper of the avant-garde" would not be an hyperbole."The album came about when Steven Stapleton was working as a signwriter in London in 1978. Completing a job at an indepe…

Merzbow (メルツバウ) is the main recording name of the Japanese noise musician Masami Akita (秋田 昌美, Akita Masami) Since 1979 he has released in excess of 350 recordings.  The name "Merzbow" comes from German artist Kurt Schwitters' artwork, "Merzbau". This was chosen to reflect Akita's dada influence and junk art aesthetic. In addition to this, Akita has cited a wide range of influences from progressive rock, free jazz, modern classical and musique concrète to BDSM and Japanese bondage. Recently he h…

FEN (Far East Network) is a group project made up of musicians from Singapore, Japan, China, and South Korea who play improvised music. It was first started on the suggestion of globally renowned musician Otomo Yoshihide in 2008 for a French festival MIMI. Each member is an artist who works individually on the experimental music scene in his respective country. They have been supporting each other's activities by organizing concerts in their own countries, and this relationship became the motiva…

Au-delà is a collaborative record by La Scie Dorée and Meakusma. It features eight pieces of music by La Scie Dorée affiliates. For the 2018 Meakusma Festival, La Scie Dorée and Meakusma set up a collaboration that brought performances by Timo Van Luijk, Steven Stapleton, Christophe Heemann, Daniel Denis, Bart De Paepe, Kris Vanderstraeten & daniel duchamP to the festival in Eupen, Belgium. This was followed up with a night organized in the province of Limburg in Belgium featuring performances b…

Richard Pinhas, the founder of '70s legends Heldon, is one of France's best-known experimental musicians and is a key figure in development of rock music fusing with electronic music. Live at Bam Balam is solo guitar and processing as well as drone electronics with the use of a Metatronic Delay system: no re-recording. This brilliant collection of solo improvisations was recorded in Bordeaux (France) on April 16th, 2016 and April 21st, 2018. Limited edition vinyl-only release for the French Reco…

**75 copies** A free improvised music duo recorded on February 28, 2018, at Flimflam night in Ryan’s Bar, London.  Alan Wilkinson: bass clarinet, tenor saxophone - Tasos Stamou: diy synths, Korg Volca FM, digital horn. 

**200 copies** Fean started as a musical artist-in-residence project in a little church in the Frysian village Katlyk. The group consists of Jan Kleefstra, Romke Kleefstra, Mariska Baars and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek), who also form the quartet Piiptsjilling. For Fean they are accompanied by Belgian guests Annelies Monseré, Sylvain Chauveau and Joachim Badenhorst. The Fean project gets its inspiration from the ecological decay of peatland in the Dutch province Friesland and in other part…

**last copies** Kassel Jaeger lives and works in Paris. He’s a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) and his album is a weave of improvisations executed on various instruments (koto, rebab, positive organ, Coupigny modular synthesizer), captured and then treated as if they were field recordings. It’s about reducing the instrumental gesture to simple expressive material, shaping it while loosing control over it, letting it grow until there is no more readability in terms of ways of p…