Experimental / Contemporary

Douglas Ewart is no stranger to present moments. He has been a creative force – and AACM pillar – for decades and brings his life-affirming energy and formidable artistic prowess to bear wherever he goes. Emphatic Now finds him in Provo with fellow improvising gurus, Christian Asplund and Steven Ricks. The E A R Trio (get it?) found time to record their musical encounter at Brigham Young University during Ewart’s 2022 residency there (12 years in the making). They planned for a long session in M…

Crescent is the first solo album from acclaimed composer and performer Kamala Sankaram. Summoning a wide array of timbres and styles, the album traces the impact of human technologies on the natural world, fusing the sounds of steam engines, helicopters, and electromagnetic static with field recordings from across New York State in both composed and improvised settings for voice, percussion, and electronics. The song cycle Crescent is a showcase for Sankaram’s expressive singing and use of exten…

Through the medium of a distinctly synthesised, sustained ambience, seasoned artist and composer Jasmine Guffond arrives on OOH to explore the tension between technology and human creativity in an increasingly ambiguous playing field. »Alien Intelligence« came into being during Guffond's residency at fabled Parisian institution GRM in 2021. While learning how to generate sound and make music with the in-house Serge modular synthesiser, the Australian artist noticed the typical role of human inpu…

De Nor is a social sculp­ture made by Dennis Tyfus and FVWW Architects housed at Middelheim Museum / open air sculp­ture park. When acti­vat­ed it hous­es con­certs per­for­mances lec­tures book- and record pre­sen­ta­tions and par­ties, when not acti­vat­ed it remains part of the muse­um’s collection. For 'De Nor 2024’ compilation LP / DL everyone that is playing at De Nor in the summer of 2024 was asked to submid a recording of maximum 2 minutes in length. Some took the liberty to mess with th…

A diagonal chance encounter – chromatic undergrowth blossoming to a myriad tints of inner weatherings. Formations, fields, densities gather and dissipate. Outwards inverted, spiralling across. Orange dawn flowers upon the temple of the addicts. Radiating motionless fire. Sipping the morphium of the aether. Choir of the undertow and the roots of the air. Ljubljana-based piano player Neža Naglič (1984) devoted herself to exploring extended piano techniques in the context of free improvised music a…

Extraordinary, free, and expressive, the trio woo (Wodrascka Owczarek Orins) is the result of the moment and fortunate encounters. Paulina Owczarek and Peter Orins have been playing together for a few years, meeting in Berlin in Satoko Fujii’s orchestra, then venturing into a duo, producing music of subtle gestures, barely perceptible movements, but also of raw and liberated energy. Christine Wodrascka meets Peter Orins within the Franco-American ensemble Sangliers, with Dave Rempis, Keefe Jacks…

*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Blickwinkel welcomes composer and multi-instrumentalist Francis Plagne to the label with a reissue of Asleep in a beached boat, an album that was initially released on his own Mould/Mouse Museum label in 2021 on cassette. The album was mostly given away to friends but now gets a wider release through a limited vinyl and digital edition. Gentle melodies set an airy atmosphere and are intertwined with tensive dialogs between rhythms and textures coming from a wide…

The drone-pop consternations of Ekin Fil emerge through vaporous tone and forlorn, distant song, as if plucked from a dream. These exist on their own accord, moving with their own internal logic of an emotion heaviness that belies any the passing observation of this as mere shoegazing ambience. Her songs, her compositions find themselves adjacent the fragmented etherealization of Elisabeth Fraser's voice from a forgotten scene of a particular David Lynch film, as a Asmr trigger for Proustian rec…

*200 copies limited edition.* Guitarist Clara de Asís and flutist Mara Winter established Discreet Editions in order to locate and highlight links between ancient and contemporary, experimental approaches to music making. Adrián Demoč’s Sen, the label’s third release, treats that mission with especial seriousness. Dusted’s review of Adrián Demoč’s Žiadba meditated upon the ways that the Slovakian composer’s practice confounded the limits of statehood. This time, he has expanded one of that album…

2024 stock. Third volume in MIO's Besombes reissue program (and first time on CD), features recordings made in France between 1972 and 1979. "This 1976 release includes early ballet music that was originally recorded between 1974-1975 for several contemporary ballet groups in Paris. The recording was assisted by Jean Louis Rizet, with whom Besombes was then working in his recording studio. Bonus tracks include two early pieces from 1972 (recorded during his time engineering for Stockhausen, Nono…

“While much of Wanderwelle’s music feels adrift, when they choose to make movements, they’re deliberate and poignant. In fact, they best capture the feeling of cataclysmic weather events with “Drowned Lands”, a track which feels as if it’s trapped underwater, plodding through melodies. Here, they convey a lot with very little, tapping into the feelings hiding within every tiny gesture.” - The Wire

*300 copies limited edition* As an artist and a thinker, Massimo Magee has been consistently drawn towards patterns: traditions, lines of influence, schools and the unexpected intersections of each. This album, Toneflower, presents a solo programme, meditating on many of those concepts. As an entirely improvised set of pieces, it is also inspired by Anthony Braxton’s solo alto tradition and the larger solo saxophone canon. Similarly, it draws from Magee’s prior percussive experimentations with T…

*2024 stock. 200 copies limited edition* This version is a special composition of the music for the performance piece „Wenn uns jemand sieht - sag -wir haben einfach kurz Luft geschnappt“ by Anja Winterhalter premiered in 2010.

 “Falte”, 2011-2012
: The basic sounds of the piece are sinus waves, digital crackles and white noise. This sounds I played back over different external loudspeakers, which I prepared with resonant objects like tin cans, tubes, wooden boxes to add some natural acoustics.…

Irish composer David Fennessy is known for his intricate textures and arresting harmonies: the four works presented on this album, Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun), and the viola driven triptych Hauptstimme, Nebenstimme, and Nox, represent the many facets of his inventive music. The music in Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun) is almost completely made up of very short extracts from gramophone recordings of the Italian tenor opera singer Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) dated between 1903 and 19…

*150 copeis limited edition* Recorded at "Dei Suoni" event, as unique track, splitted in two parts for the cassette release. Limited edition of 150 hand painted and hand-numbered copies. Comes with an original polaroid.

*150 copeis limited edition* Recorded at "Dei Suoni" event, as unique track, splitted in two parts for the cassette release. Limited edition of 150 hand-numbered copies. Comes with an original polaroid.

*200 copies limited edition* Nestled at the center of Natalia Beylis’ music is an intertwined practice of listening and creating. She regularly foregrounds both field recordings and found instruments, building worlds around the curious sounds she comes upon and letting the process of recontextualization create meaning out of unexpected meetings. The picture that emerges is one of her having a profound connection to her environment, whether that is a community of human beings or the vast non-huma…

** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…

When you listen to birds, they usually talk about food, sex/family, or anxiety. If they knew about the true nature of humanity's cruel and exploitative relationship with birds, they would be discussing rebellion. Humanity's current trajectory about birds is to cause the extinction of one-third of all bird species by the end of this century. This record crystallises the borders between memory, beauty, and anxiety. At the core is an amalgam of all the birds we have met and heard, their sounds synt…

Tip! *64 copies limited edition* This aquarium of invisible interconnections doesn’t open by itself, nor does it close on its own. We are a mellifluous scream echoing in the void of a crowded room. Just as every gesture is collective, so is its loneliness. The ministry that tends to it is an organ of collective unconsciousness. The outside pervades us. We peek through a peephole. We are the singular perception of the absolute liminality of the scent of place. A bedroom, a living room for company…

Tip! Other Minds is pleased to present The Light is Real, featuring the trio of Thollem (voice and wavestate synthesizer), Terry Riley (voice), and Nels Cline (electric guitars, effects, and megamouth). This recording is the sixth iteration of the Thollem/Cline trio, with previous installments including performances by William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, and Michael Wimberly. The origins of this recording go back to an epiphany Thollem experienced in Northern New Mexico during the Covid-19 pandemi…

On his first solo LP, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy (the spectacular drummer of Pneu, Binidu, la Colonie de vacances among many other projects) explores a feild between contemporary music, minimalism and sound art.

*2024 stock* "Put on the circuit via Oslo / Norway-based imprint Conrad Sound on December 4th, 2k20 is "Svart / Hvitt", the sophomore album effort created by the multi-membered group named The Touchables which includes a plethora of artists from the countries Jazz and Contemporary Music scene with at least one of its members - Martin Taxt - being a household name to readers of these pages for his deep explorations of microtonal tuba performances. Split in four subsequently numbered, unnamed part…

* Limited edition double CD + 12-Page Booklet. Six panel gatefold CD package beautifully designed by Lasse Marhaug and featuring an exclusive essay on the social and artistic philosophy behind Mutual Aid Music by the composer (including notated examples) * A Double-CD of of Eight Ensemble Concertos by Wooley Performed by Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, Violinist Joshua Modney, Cellist Mariel Roberts, Pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, Percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and N…

Michalis Siganidis seems to narrate through the strings in this absolutely physical, organic way his experiential, intellectual and emotional relationship with the instrument. The accompanying electronic commentaries by Jannis Anastasakis refers to a dialectic of question and answer. Through this pulsating sound environment, the listener receives a musical world deeply internal, a circuit - extremely subtle but also coarse with a fierce intensity in places - of rare in expressiveness psychic vib…

An elaborate, authoritative acoustic re-imagining of Deupree’s seminal electronic album Stil. (2002), Sti.ll is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Deupree and arranger/producer Joseph Branciforte to bring Deupree’s explorations of extreme repetition and stillness into the world of acoustic performance.

*2024 stock* Music for octobass and piccoletti violin.

*2024 stock* Music for Safe Piece is the result of an artistic experiment that lasted for four years, where Andy Moor was creating a live soundscape for a performance of a unique nature. Choreographer Valentina Campora has created a series of semi-private events where she and Moor, new parents of a baby boy, were performing for a small audience with the young child. Campora was dancing with her baby, Moor provided a sound world that supported and harbored the performance. As the boy grew up and …

For 46 minutes Alex Zhang Hungtai punctures our perception of linearity, working like a conductor, encouraging percussive flurries to trip and fall over each other, sometimes tempered by contact mic feedback to help skewer the chronology. He’s assisted by three additional percussionists - Wet Hair’s Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, and Leonard King - while Signal Decay’s Nick Yeck-Stauffer plays trumpet, with each extra voice blurred into the middle distance, curling like pipe smoke into convulsive w…

Avant garde supergroup Better Corners hit sublime stride with atmospheric post-everything second album.

"The only time I met and spoke with Cecil Taylor was in 2003 in the basement of Tonic, the much-beloved and long-gone Lower East Side venue, where he, Sunny Murray, Andrey Henkin and myself were sitting in one of those old wooden wine-cask cabanas they had. Murray’s group was playing there that evening and Cecil had come out to see the band. I remember Cecil whispering a query in my ear: “Mr. Allen, who is your favorite architect?” At that point I was not a follower of architecture but having re…

*300 copies limited edition* An electro-acoustic diary of the Fukushima family that records the "time and sound" exchanged between a parent and child in Niigata, using shakuhachi and a computer to respond. Reishu Fukushima began performing and improvising as a shakuhachi player after encountering the Muramatsu-style shakuhachi on Sado in the 1990s. His son, Satoshi Fukushima, explores the possibilities of interactive and unknown electronic acoustics with players through real-time computer proces…

Step into the ethereal soundscape of Mark Vernon's LP, "The Dramaturgy of Decay." Reminiscent of early fears surrounding recording technology, the album explores ghostly voices, distorted and elusive. Vernon's sonic cinema mirrors the decay found in ruined films, capturing the essence of disappearing places and voices. Amidst themes of death and environmental destruction, the album maintains a delicate balance with humor and familiarity. Through snippets of reworked audio letters, it unveils a s…

The album Fragments places Gabriele Tinti's poems and Roger Ballen's images in the context of Massimo Pupillo's sound world, where the inevitability of suffering is expressed through Ballen's uniquely dark recitation.

Listening to Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody”I get a sudden striking flash of Michel Henritzi at work. To me Michel is first and foremost a working man, be it in Dustbreeders the Metz originating so called “noise” outfit, or in his collabs with a wide and varied range of Japanese comrades such as Tetuzi Akiyama, Fukuoka Rinji and of course Junko, always retaining his name as the anchor point of a free man. Freed from the salaried workers yoke, the worker can claim his own name…

Entering their twentieth year of existence, the GOL orchestra, together with the label Planam, celebrates and starts a new program of collaborations: the Gollaboration series.Volume 1, hence the title "Musique Directe",  shows the band facing the leaders of Roumenian spectralism Ana-Maria Avaram and Iancu Dumitrescu. Electric and intense spontaneous experiments, on the edge of electroacoustic music and primitive avant-garde. Live recordings in Marseille and Paris with the participation of Ansamb…

Big Tip!. Red Vinyl Edition "Chthonic is the result of long-distance collaboration and mutual considerations. Lea Bertucci and Lawrence English met in 2019 at the Novas Frequencia festival in Rio de Janeiro and quickly became friends and collaborators, driven by musings on geological scale, movements – tectonic or otherwise – of the Earth, and subterranean density and pressure. For people on visa in the United States during lockdown, it was impossible to leave and re-enter the country without p…

A Bla tape by this fantastic Dutch soundpoet G.J. de Rook who worked with Greta Monach, Ulises Carrion, Michael Gibbs, Bernard Heidsieck, Henry Chopin, Hans Clavin and many others - he was active as visual poet in the years 1970-1975. He was co-editor of the magazine ‘Bloknoot’ (1968-1981). In 1975-1976 he organized the exhibition ‘International Visual Poetry’ (Utrecht, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Brussels).

Each year, cave12 publishes a recording from its sound archives. This album brings together two artists whose concerts took place a few months apart. This edition has chosen to juxtapose their performances which strangely respond to each other putting them into perspective as if by a mirroring effect activated by our memory.  Gaute Granli "Out there Norwegian guitarist-performer-singer, Gaute Granli, a true prodigy of (de)structured psychedelic song that we have been following since his beginnin…

*200 copies limited edition* And if we thought we couldn't top a line-up, here's this unique quartet who brings a totally different experience. While Garuda Trio with special guest Rodrigo Pinheiro musters a fine balance between classic free jazz and improvisation, this quartet dives deep into the fantastic realm of pure improvisation and textural dialogue : the electronics of Carla Santana, the subtle horn contribution of José Lencastre, Maria do Mar drawing linear lines on the viola and the ev…