Gli Abissi Fomoriani
Il Gran Diavolato is a territory that we have occupied and that we try to explore by playing every corner of it. This album represents its banchisa and its abysses, populated by the Fomori. These creatures confined to the depths and pervaded by pre-human ideas rarely grope on earthly beaches. To hear them is human, to listen to them is diabolical.” - Louise Burgers
Louise Burgers: voice, pre-human pedals. Gianlorenzo Nardi: drums, organ, voice, pedals. Recorded through subterranean direct record…
De l\'Un et du Multiple
Richard Pinhas's De l'un et du Multiple, originally released in 1996. 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.
This solo album was recorded at his home studio in Paris between June and September of 1995. Solo guitar and processing - Drone electronics with use of a Metatronic Loop system. No re-recording.
Casts
Originally released in November 2014 when we had just started out, we're incredibly pleased to reissue one of our very first releases and one that we truly believe deserves more attention. Composed, Performed, and Recorded by Sarah Hennies in Austin, TX & Ithaca, NY 2012-2014.
The Reinvention of Romance
“The Reinvention of Romance,” a new work for percussion and cello that examines the care and empathy that emerge when two lives share space. Over the course of 90 minutes, a series of repeating patterns creates a peculiar kind of harmony in which two musicians are rarely “playing together” but are nonetheless intimately bonded. The Knoxville-based duo Two-Way Street (Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion) commissioned Hennies to compose “a very long piece;” for this recording they step into its two intertw…
Concentration Patterns
* Hand-numbered limited run of 300 copies * C.R. Gillespie is a Canadian musician and sound artist. Born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, coastal living on Vancouver Island influenced his textural overlapping of “waves”; focused layering of soothing tones that tremulate and merge in a vast and expansive synthetic ocean. This aesthetic is at the forefront of his new release, Concentration Patterns, a sprawling 75-minute ambient suite which envelops the listener in a vibrating collage of drifting tex…
AAHH!!
The instrumentation is deliberately reduced to the essentials: monolithic drums and analog synthesizers. In this desire for simplicity, meticulous care was taken in the sound recording, then the recording benefited from the work of two experts in the alchemy of sounds: David Fenech and Patrick Muller. Véronique Vilhet: drums. Dominique Grimaud: synthesizers.“A sonic nugget in the shape of rock... Flamboyantly artless and irresistibly direct.” - Julian Cowley, The Wire
“Un cri de liberté, ce qui …
Arkhaios
Jeremie Mathes is a French field recording artist (known for some excellent CDs on Unfathomless) living in Cambodia since some years. For "Arkhaios" he combined cavernous object drones (recorded at an abandoned factory site) with various instrumental sounds from ancient Khmer instruments (Tro u, Khim), all highly processed. You get the impression as being under the earth in a place populated by metallic amoeba or other smallest creatures, inside sewerage ducts or an deserted mine, exposed to the…
Fielding
**Edition of 300, 2020 Vinyl Reissue.** Desastre and Worstward Recordings present the first vinyl issue of Hala Strana's second full-length album "Fielding". Originally released in 2003 on the Jewelled Antler label, "Fielding" is the sprawling, epic leap forward from Hala Strana’s self-titled debut full-length—a psychedelic collage of traditional music, field recordings, and sonic landscapes. Started in 2002, Hala Strana was the summation of Steven R. Smith's interest in the traditional folk mus…
BOW
Brussels-based string quintet BOW celebrates musical freedom. Juggling between their own written music and pure improvisation, the ensemble has worked since its creation on a personal and modern approach, digging into their instruments' capabilities and blending a large scope of influences.
Its debut eponym LP, due to be released on Sub Rosa, gathers five instantly-composed pieces that were recorded live by Christine Verschorren in the Echo Collective studio in Brussels. During the day, BOW repe…
La Flourenn En Mars
Wonderful lo-fi synthpop/collage LP by Marseillaise duo Jean-Marie Mercimek. Something has been brewing in France in recent years. Underground record shops, small venues, micro labels, and young musicians are creating a new vibe in various parts of the country. A broad range of styles and genres get randomly mixed into a melting pot with refreshing results. Jean Marie-Mercimek is one of those projects coming out of this new scene. The duo of Marion Molle and Ronan Riou revisits French lo-fi synt…
Ozeanische Gefühle
irr. app. (ext) is the work of California-based sound artist Matt Waldron, whose collected body of work is far too important to continue to be forgotten. During the past decade, only two full albums -- Dust Pincher Appliances (2003 on Crouton) and An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding in Conversation (1997 on Fire, Inc.) -- have seen the light of day despite the fact that perhaps a dozen albums have been completed. The public silence for irr. app. (ext) was never by Waldron's design, a…
We Share a Shadow
Murmer is the pseudonym for Patrick McGinley, a man with several passports which have taken him to many a foreign land in search of found sounds of the unsettled, the forgotten, the mysterious, and the beautiful. His field recordings of activated environments (e.g. resonant industrial spaces, windswept telephone lines, bowed branches, gasping ventilator systems, etc.) originate from all of the locations where he has traveled; yet, the documentation of these sounds is not the terminus of McGinley…
Samoa Highway
**Edition of 500** RV Paintings were born in California. Humboldt County, to be exact. It is nearly impossible to imagine their origins being elsewhere since the brothers Brian and Jon Pyle, who currently pilot RV Paintings, constantly mine the metaphysical properties of their homeland through a heavy-lidded psychedelia. The redwood trees that majestically rise from the rugged terrain may have been one of the endemic objects that inspired RV Paintings to “jam nature”; but Humboldt County’s other…
Works For Cassette
Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb -- also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tap…
So Long
A journey through time, perhaps, for a daydreamer floating in a small boat amidst the radiant hues of a midnight sun. that daydreamer in this instance is the icelandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, best known for his electro-surrealism in stilluppsteypa. he has long been an artist of extremes and absurdities -- mania fueled performances, wildly scribbled drawings, and haflerian audio shock-therapy, on one side; and on the other, a profound meditation on austere shape, form, and mood cast th…
The Unlistening Place
The core tracks of The Unlistening Place were recorded in 2015. At the time, these were intended to be part of what was to be the final Fossil Aerosol album, scheduled for a distant release. But history circled back on itself and the result was a reworking of future tracks, alongside more new material. Historiography eating its own tail. Tradition, referents, and resolute nothing from the place that does not hear.
Scaath Catfish
Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approac…
Slow Music
Records are almost always more than they seem. For all the sound and joy that they bring, they are works of art in multiple that indicate vast networks of happening, history, and ideas; beacons to be chased, leading to understanding beyond themselves. Particularly in the case of historical works, whether they emerge from dusty crates or as reissues and archival releases, these objects can reveal unexpected creative intersections that defy our notions of what was. Aguirre’s first-time reissue of …
South from the Future
**Limited edition cassette. Risograph artwork** The debut album by C. Blumberg (living in Berlin DE) is a series of composite images. Anecdotes with distorted perspectives. Documents or maps - impressions...? However if you look a bit closer you see something very different, quite like a technologic fantasy.
The second track, 神奇森林上海 (tr. Shanghai Magical Forest), holds a certain key to enter the psyche of the album. Here Blumberg is inspired by a photo found on Flickr. The author of the photo ga…
Eistla
**Edition of 200. 12" Vinyl LP. Risograph print cover** The ability to create moving music with no words, no beats and no conventional instruments is rare, but San Francisco Bay Area-based modular synth artist Austin Cairns - who records under the name r beny - is such an example. Belgian label Dauw are reissuing his first four albums separately and as a box set. Eistla was the final one of these, first released at the end of 2018.