Talking with a Dinosaur
Ångström Records presents Talking with a Dinosaur by Aymeric de Tapol. Materials composed by Aymeric de Tapol at GRM, Paris, november 2009. Composed in Bruxelles between november 2009 and april 2011. Digital mailing with Valérie Vivancos, february 2011. English text translation: Chris Farmer.
Ein Klein Nein
** 2021 Stock ** Mysterious and minimal instrumental album by Richard Youngs, dreamt at home and recorded quickly in Glasgow's Green Door Studio. Centered on a single piano chord and bare snare strikes, Richard builds a haunting atmosphere in 4 episodes, featuring his guitar, organ, harmonica, and voice. Another essential work from the prolific and truly unique musician.
Kinetic Tones
** Edition of 500 on bronze vinyl. 2021 Stock ** One of Drone’s most prolific artists, Justin Wright aka Expo ’70 can look back on an impressive discography counting more than 40 albums since 2003, which have undoubtedly influenced many other musicians in the Experimental/Psychedelic/Drone community and attracted a huge followership in the scene. This has resulted in extensive touring, the last one through 11 countries in Europe, and several live releases.
Now Expo ’70 returns with a brand-new s…
Kakapo
** Edition of 500 Green Translucent Vinyl. 2021 Stock ** Incomparable noise legend Merzbow releases a dense, flailing black hole of a droning noise track, 33 minutes spread over two sides of green vinyl. Aside from several very limited releases and multiple adventurous collaborations, it’s the first full Merzbow record to be released on vinyl for a couple of years.
Starting with an intense machine hum, “Kakapo” then shrieks, stutters and wails while maintaining the all-obliterating industrial dr…
Pale Moon
200 copies. Black vinyl in full colour die-cut sleeve. Pale Moon is RM"s third Lp. Prepared, costructed and then deconstructed starting from jams recorded on multitrack using two samplers and various effects units, Pale Moon evokes an imaginary tale of havoc (side A) and desolation (side B). The end isn't written but some hope is still hidden under the ashes of a world which is, at least, finally quiet.
Aatma
**150 copies** Aatma is the re-imagining of my recent journey into Mumbai through sound, place, and moment with a Nagra SD recorder. The work was composed immediately upon my return while these things were, in a very real sense, still resonating in my mind. Part 1 is the arrival. Echoes of the shanka can be heard from a distant past across the Arabian Sea, as waves wash debris ashore and push you deep into the tumult of the city. Here you may experience the current of life and ride old trains in…
Darenth
**80 copies. Sold out at source** In Michael Bonaventure's own words: I have been endlessly busy playing and creating in the sonic universe that is the organ since childhood. I love this instrument because of its kaleidoscopic tonal potential and limitless capacity to sustain sound - qualities that are exploited very fully in the music you are going to hear in this album. Darenth is a massive meditation, a cycle of three tone poems composed almost entirely of drones, tone-clusters and repetitive…
Inwards Opened The Floor.
The Israeli/British collective Staraya Derevnya made an album of pure psychedelic experimentation recorded in the performance space at Cafe Oto. Staraya Derevnya are the Tel Aviv/London based collective that are paving their own path through the world of experimental sound. The band, named after a historic district in Saint Petersberg, certainly cannot be pigeon-holed into a geographical generalisation. The lyrics on the album are directly influenced by the Saint Petersburg poet and artist Arth…
Hibiscus
**Limited edition of 30 cassette tapes with extractable paper crochet holy image on white matte rough paper. Includes digital download** J. Zunz a.k.a. Lorena Quintanilla - better known up until this point as one half of Mexican duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete - with her second release ‘Hibiscus’ marks a move on sonically from earlier comfort zones in her work, arriving at a soundworld in which cyclical synth patterns, eerie ambient textures and cathartic vocal exhortations coalesce into a beguil…
4 Track Guitar Music
4-Track Guitar Music is the unassuming title of a cassette by Swedish composer Mats Erlandsson, which was originally released on Kali Maloneʼs and Maria W. Hornʼs XKatedral label in 2018. Composed using only, as the album title implies, a 4-track tape deck and an electric guitar, the music was later modified on the computer and re-amplified in the machine hall of Ställbergs Gruva, a disbanded Swedish iron mine.
The music is primarily composed using melodic motifs and canonical structures in whi…
Upstream
German pianist and composer Hauschka returns to Sonic Pieces with music for the experimental film Upstream. Together with filmmaker Rob Petit and acclaimed writer Robert Macfarlane he has created a slow-moving dream-flight into wildness and winter through an eerie, hypnotic soundtrack of the Scottish highlands.
The film, which is shot entirely from the air, follows the course of the River Dee in Scotland all the way to its source in the Cairngorm mountains, the highest of any river in Britain. T…
Love Is A Stream
**Edition of 300. 10 year anniversary edition. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu. Design by Farbod Kokabi.** From the original press release: As a member of San Francisco legends Tarentel and Type’s premier astral travellers The Alps, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is hardly a new addition to the label, so it’s hard to believe that ‘Love Is A Stream’ is his first Type solo album. Previously releasing on Arbor, Spekk and his own Root Strata imprint, this latest album marks his journey into the beautifully cacop…
Tenno
For over four decades, Reiko Omura and Tori Kudo have endlessly woven themselves throughout the avant-garde and underground scene of Japan. While internationally appreciated in countless incarnations and contexts (Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Guys & Dolls), if one were to seek out an early moment in which the two artists created something truly awe inspiring, 1980’s Tenno (天皇) would be it. As Noise, the duo experimented with the juxtaposition of Kudo’s extended organ based dirges (be they eerie and/o…
Rat Tapes One
* 2021 Stock * With 18 untitled tracks, there’s no shortage of the mutant voices and clanks from the darkness that I’ve come to expect. However, I was most surprised by the amount of rhythmic material found here, especially on the second half of the disc. “Track 10” could very well be a backing track left over from the Rock and Roll Sessions. Strangely enough, “Track 12” is a techno song with little of the Nurse With Wound signature other than some operatic elements and the oblique, gaping maw o…
Fabulous Paris
* 2021 Stock * An excellent release of classic Trevor Wishart material. Fabulous Paris was commissioned by Swedish Radio, Malmö, and the Birmingham Rumours Festival. This 3-movement, secular oratorio explores our collective and individual experience of the mass industrial society in which we live, through the medium of the human voice. CD release includes extensive liner notes on the 3 pieces.
Dark Ballads
* Edition of 300 * Dark Ballads is the obvious title of this LP, as if this music pre-existed the duo that, without any other choice, was formed around it. Since then, Giotis Damianidis and Audrey Lauro have continued to advance along this straight line that runs through their inner landscapes.
Their music creates a "stretched" emotional space, which evolves in slow motion and captures the fragility of the tone, the tension of the path. Each stage of the record is a mineral evocation of the inti…
Eliksir
* Pro-dubbed clear tape in smokey brown case, cover image printed on transparency film, insert card with a stamp * Alicja founder, painter DJ and problem child Tomasz Kowalski presents his first collection of confounding audio objects: Eliksir. The title track, centrepiece and key to the work as a whole, Eliksir is an augmented radio play that is loosely based around Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room. But instead of an intense focus on auditory phenomena, distraction and interruption divert t…
A New Instability
In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability, a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in Paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to the founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive s…
The harmless dust
The Harmless Dust is a unique release in the discographies of both David Grubbs and the Athens-based cellist Nikos Veliotis (Mohammad). In 2005 the duo were on tour in the U.S. in support of Grubbs’s album A Guess at the Riddle when they took a most productive break at John McEntire’s Soma Studios, over the course of a day laying down something utterly different from the song-based set they were playing most evenings. The Harmless Dust presents the same composition in two arrangements: one for p…
SMDSii
** Edition of 150. 2021 Stock ** There are two ways to use sound: in one way sound is close to music, however, it is also close to sculpture. In fact, it is not the medium that’s important but that you have a beginning and an end and that you can move around in the space. Noise is a material aspect of sound. SMDSii is an exploration of noise, space and time - as they are constituted formally through sound as well as through the tangential relations within and between audiences and the practice o…