Issue 117: Suzanne Ciani (Magazine + 7'', Red)
This month's Electronic Sound cover star is the supremely talented Suzanne Ciani, and we have an awesome red vinyl seven-inch by the American modular virtuoso to supplement the issue. Suzanne Ciani's long and intense connection with modular synthesis started after meeting Don Buchla in the late 1960s. She soon became obsessed with the Buchla 100 and 200 systems, taking a particular interest in how the voltage-controlled quadrophonic capabilities enabled her to move sounds around a room. More tha…
An Electric Storm
When White Noise’s debut album, An Electric Storm, landed on Island Records in 1969, it must have sounded like nothing else. Packaged in a striking black and white sleeve that pictured a spark of lightning streaking across a black sky, this was an album that - quite rightly as it turned out - resembled as much a scientific experiment as any conventional musical document.
White Noise were first conceived when American electronic engineer David Vorhaus-- following a lecture by BBC Radiophonic Work…
Daniel dans la nuit
"Daniel de la Nuit" is a book/record for kids composed by the french musician Funken. An illustrated story imagined by Carmela Chergui and Timo Hateau (44 color pages - format 16x23 cm - French). Daniel is a nice little squid, everyone will tell you that in Villeneuve-la-Roussette. But today, it's something else. It's nighttime, and he refuses to go back to sleep. And it's not just any night! It's the Night of the Periwinkles! Taking advantage of a moment of inattention from his father, he escap…
Minstrels and Minimoogs
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* Gregory T.S. Walker’s Minstrels & Minimoogs was self-published by a young, nomadic composer and virtuoso in 1988 to accompany an immersive multimedia performance at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium. Created with this outer, and other, world setting in mind, the four tracks find Walker stretching toward an ancient-to-future vision where Egyptian myths and Hieronymus Bosch-ian tableaus are rendered in a screaming three dimensional circuitry o…
Extended Impostor Syndrome
*300 copies limited release* We are happy to share the extended version of Impostor Syndrome by Orbital Patterns. Impostor Syndrome is an ambient electronic album written and produced by Michigan based musician and artist, Orbital Patterns (Abdul Allum).A magnificent sound journey, full of emotions, created by a modular synth workflow that describes Abdul’s signature sound and vision. "A psychological phenomenon where a person doubts their own abilities, internalizing a deep fear of being reveal…
Demonic Trip Through Hell
*2024 stock. 150 copies limited edition* Controlled Death is the dark side project by the Japanese noise legend Maso Yamazaki a.k.a. Masonna. Here on Phage Tapes. Recorded and edited on January 13th and 14th, 2021 at Death Control Studio.
Music for Septal Cartilage
*30 copies limited edition* Two pieces for modular synthesizer and a deviated nasal septum. Recorded and mastered by Velleity. Black 2-sided HQ lathe cuts in full-color printed sleeves with inner sleeves.
Sterne Über Der Stadt
Günter Schlienz is a Stuttgart-based ambient artist whose work uses modular synthesizers, tape machines and field recordings to create emotive and captivating ambient textures. Günter has released albums on diverse labels around the world - Sacred Phrases, SicSic, Goldtimers, Constellation Tatsu, Preservation - amongst others. "Sterne über der Stadt" was first released in 2017 in a handmade four-panel cardboard envelope CDr limited edition of 50 copies on Pantheophania. Inspired by a picture cap…
The Ortho-Project
Returning to the unreleased oeuvre of the master of cybernetic sound Roland Kayn, frozen reeds hereby unveils a new high watermark for longform electroacoustic composition, unfolding across 15 CDs in a luxurious gold-stamped boxed set.
Orphée Aux Enfers
*2024 stock* Orphée Aux Enfers is a comic operetta and satirical treatment of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus by French composer Jacques Offenbach. The classic story of Orpheus concerns a renowned musician who is so distraught over the death of his wife, Eurydice, that he attempts to rescue her from the Underworld, the place of the dead. It’s a myth of enduring love between Orpheus and Eurydice that has inspired artists, writers and composers such as Günter Schlienz.
Buchla Concert at Galeria Bonino New York 1974
Huge Tip! The very first Buchla synthesiser performance by revolutionary composer Suzanne Ciani finally makes its fifty year journey from its switch-on New York art gallery to its long deserved and discerning global phonographic audience. With this previously unheard vinyl pressing, Finders Keepers Records are proud to present an archival project of ‘art music’ that not only redefines musical history but lays genuine claim to the overused buzzwords such as pioneering, maverick, experimental, gro…
Third (It's Always Rock 'N' Roll)
Double CD version. Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's third album Third (It's Always Rock 'N' Roll), originally released on Disjuncta in 1975. Third album from the French space-rock electro combo masterminded by Richard Pinhas. Heldon's darkest work lays another stone in their sonic mosaic: synths, drones, fuzz, and trippy improvisations. There's something wicked happening on Heldon's third album It's Always Rock And Roll. Richard Pinhas's essential attack of searing guitar and space-bound s…
Electronique Guerilla (Heldon I)
Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's debut album Electronique Guerilla, originally released on Disjuncta in 1974. In 1973, 22-year old Richard Pinhas was well on his way to becoming a full-time philosopher. He had almost finished his PhD and begun teaching at the University of Paris. But he also had a hobby: writing music and recording it himself. When he submitted a few tracks to British label E.G. (home of King Crimson and Roxy Music), the imprint was interested, but Pinhas was frustrate…
Delight
Delight, Arushi Jain’s follow-up to 2021’s seminal Under the Lilac Sky, out March 29 2024 on Leaving, carries, at its core, the simple proposition that delight is accessible and that the practice of cultivating it is a necessary endeavor. Weaving together emotions, imagery, and a sense of yearning for beauty, Jain aims to instill belief in the ever-present nature of delight, asserting the need to actively seek it when not readily found. The enhanced perception of this elusive emotion, Jain asser…
Coinos Driftos
Seth Price’s suite “Coinos Driftos“ announces itself with the sound of a rolling coin – a punctuation that repeats throughout the record – before dropping the listener into a storm of harsh winds and far-away bells. When the storm abates we find ourselves in a desolate field of stuttering electric harp and electronic sub-bass. Side B emerges from a mist of gentle tones that soon give way to a juddering contraption of dropped coins and clacking noises, which itself seems to summon the arrival of …
Curiositi
*300 copies limite edition* "Over the last fifteen years, he has been very active dabbler in music notably as a musician: Pyjamarama, La Colonie De Vacances to name very few and as the co-founder of Presque Tout, an ongoing net archive of sonic landscapes from all around the world. Using digital and analog synths, field recordings and his voice, he expands new horizons on his first album under his birth name. The first moves are refined then manipulations scrape and wobble like an orchestra tuni…
Beyond the Flat Earth
Tip! *300 copies limited release* "Fallen Sun, the noise/industrial moniker of Reverse Image from Malaysia, approaches the creation of noise music through the layering of sonic textures aligned with a sense of space and movement. Using Harsh Noise Wall as distant inspiration, she takes the seed of an idea and expands and contracts it, before further compressing and then twisting it, layer upon layer, until the idea has morphed into itself. 'Beyond the Flat Earth’'s ten concise tracks explore thi…
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NPVR is the avant garde duo made up of the late Peter Rehberg and Nik Void. Editions Mego is proud to present their second and final release. No this is not some kind of Beatles synthetic AI that raises the dead reconstructed recordings but rather a new album made by the humans and their machines. The initial meeting of Rehberg and Void was in London in 2016 and despite or due to their mutual awkwardness found solace and compatibility in the fact that they both had a similar electronic modular s…
Issue 104: The Secret World Of Modular (Magazine)
Magazine only. This month’s Electronic Sound lifts the lid on the secret world of Modular Synthesis and we’re bundling the issue with a double CD featuring 31 modular tracks, many of which have never been available on a physical release before.
Our cover feature is a pick ’n‘ mix of modular goodness, including an interview with 1960s pioneer Morton Subotnick, who created his legendary ‘Silver Apples Of The Moon’ on a Buchla. We talk to contemporary talents Loula Yorke, Andrew Ostler, Philippe P…
The First Cause
Drifting, hanging, holding. Hoping, seeking, searching. And then finding. Mark Van Hoen's ninth album as Locust is a cosmic whisper, a tender touch, where candid songwriting commingles with the afterimage of trip-hop and jungle. Across eight tracks, spectral melodies dance between languid breakbeats, and a formless murmur drifts through the ether, seeking a common thread.
Layered in strata, "The First Cause" reveals itself anew with each listen. Delicate tones share space with bass weight. Drums…