Impermanence
Neti-Neti is the lo-fi ritual music duo of Matt Evans (drums/electronics) and Amirtha Kidambi (vocals/electronics) that formed amidst their mutual experiences surrounding grief after the death of loved ones. The duo shapes a vessel for processing this loss using hazy rhythmic interplay, dredging piles of noise, and serene moments of ethereal melodic counterpoint. Neti-Neti, translated as "It is not this, it is not that" from Sanskrit, is a contemplation on the nature of reality, life, death, bir…
Habitat
*Limited Edition of 400 copies. Habitat, an environmental music collaboration by Berlin based composer Niklas Kramer and percussionist Joda Foerster, is inspired by the drawings of Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. Each of the eight tracks represents a room in an imaginary building.
In Habitat the duo layers, loops and merges sonic textures and patterns into fluid blocks without the restraint of statics. African log drum, Bolivian chajchas, vibraphone, kalimba and various other percussion instr…
Leone
*2022 stock.* Leone is the first meeting of electric guitarists Loren Connors and Oren Ambarchi. It’s somewhat surprising it’s taken this long as these two are connected by ongoing collaborators, like Jim O’Rourke and Keiji Haino. Connors, for more than 40 years, has continued to develop an iconic sound tethered to radical permutations of the blues. Ambarchi’s own multi-decade transfiguration of the guitar inhabits a rarefied realm of abstracted tones and dissonance pitched between improvisation…
Within Reach Of Eventuality
The debut album from Swedish duo David Bennet & Vilhelm Bromander features their co-created piece Within Reach of Eventuality. Following a semi-open score by Bennet, the duo is treating elements such as complex textures, non-pitched sounds, microtonality, beatings and intense pauses in an improvisatory and careful manner.
From the liner notes, by Peter Margasak: "This isn’t music where we need to know exactly what’s happening or trace how it proceeds. It exists to entrance the listener within th…
One Hundred
*2022 stock* David Cunningham: guitar, footpedals, delays and kalimba. "When I'm having a bath I often feel strangely privileged that I can listen to music on the radio - a century ago I would have had to have a bigger bathroom and enough money to hire a string quartet." - David Cunningham
Yasuaki Shimizu: tenor saxophone, piano, delays. "He is a truly one and only performer, for power, spirit and pride. He has the ability to encompass any kind of music." - Haruomi Hosono about Yasuaki Shimizu
Wisps
On 5 April 2022 I e-mailed Anne about working on a follow-up to our album Oehoe (released by Where to Now? Records in 2020). On April 7 she recorded a bunch of violin, viola and vocal improvisations at home. Gorgeous sounds and melodies, a gold mine to work with. The material basically wrote itself. I started editing and adding electronics (mainly virtual instruments, I don’t own a real harp), and by the end of that month, the album was finished. I always found the music that Anne and I make a b…
Duo Geloso
Black Truffle is thrilled to continue its program of archival releases from Arnold Dreyblatt with a recently unearthed concert recording from Dreyblatt and Paul Panhuysen’s "Duo Geloso". While isolated examples of Dreyblatt’s collaboration with the legendary Dutch multi-media artist appeared on the CD reissue of Propellers in Love and Black Truffle’s wide-ranging archival Second Selection, this is the first release to document the variety and playfulness of the concerts that Duo Geloso performed…
Unison Polyphony
Temporary Super Offer! Christoph Gallio and Markus Eichenberger, both born in 1957, have known each other since the early eighties and have played together a lot during this time, listening to music, visiting bars and occasionally taking a dip in the Rhine. At some point, their paths got lost until they crossed again in 2018 to regularly sound out their musical languages and create something new. Their performance at the "40 Years of WIM Zurich" festival remained unforgotten for many.
Eichenber…
To Call Out Into The Night
Full recording of one of the most engaging and beguiling Late Junction live sessions we’ve ever heard - the one off first meeting between Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha and writer and performer Roy Claire Potter. Park Jiha plays the saenghwang, a Korean mouth organ which she blows in long multiphonics to set pace for Potter’s words. Together they unfurl a scene slowly in front of you, rich and focused, shifting your field of vision and drawing you in, elsewhere. It’s impossible not to f…
Distels
"Gorgeous debut LP by a new Belgian duo made up of Annelies Monseré and Steve Marreyt. Steve has been active in a lot of places. I believe I first ran into his work as a member of the folk-psych collective, Silvester Anfang, but he has had his hands in a lot of pots (as it were). Annelies has a long recording history as well, with many fine and floating sides out there to prove it. The pair have known each other for a good long while. Steve appears on a couple of Annelies' albums, and they previ…
Fauces
Invoking imagery of a narrow, perhaps perilous passage, or its dual meaning, the back of the throat, musicians Amanda Irarrázabal and Miriam Ben Boer Salmón named their collaborative 10-track album, Fauces. In this recording, the duo plays with both concepts in a process of improvisation, creating fiercely lush landscapes, layered with texture, ragged hazy wood against strings. The soundscapes are sometimes imperceptible, shadowy horizons emerging from dim light, and rising, something threatenin…
Bitter Desert
Tip! *110 copies limieted edition. In process of stocking* 'Bitter Desert ushers in an intensely reflective listening induced by the sounds of clarinets moving restlessly through progressions of granulated tone, soaring harmonic, gnarly growl, and wild fluttering. The ground here is only apparently firm; rather it is sand-like, constantly shifting beneath the feet of our ears as it surveys a vast sonic expanse turned profoundly inward.' – Adam Zuckerman
Unnameable Element
*100 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* 'Trumpet, piri, and Vocalnori (amplified gongs via the voice) unfold a splattering of sounds, gurgling textures, gestural outbursts, and fragmented melodic runs. With their uncanny doublings and waves of resonance, these sounds accumulate and disperse in a confounding of the senses, increasingly attuned to the interstices of its sonic reflections and refractions.' – Adam Zuckerman
Make That Flight
Temporary Super Offer! 'Even a cursory revisiting of Houle and von Orelli’s previous recordings confirms that the stark forum afforded by a horn duo strips their music to its essentials, their shared ability to make unorthodox forms and materials sing and dance being the most salient. Fresh, distanced, and potentially transformative perspectives abound on this album, and not just about the music of any other artist; but, more importantly, the tug and pull between the continuity represented by tr…
Paranza Corta
*250 copies limited edition* "I’ll definitely listen to Eric Arn & Margeret Unknown’s frantic, two-guitar improvisation LP Paranza Corta again for sure. When these two really get going with their unusually-tuned, well mic’d acoustic interplay, it sounds like the perfect soundtrack to an ant colony documentary, sped up 100x. It’s pretty berserk." - Jay Hinman, Dynamite Hemorrhage
Marker
*100 copies limited edition* 'There are many things that go unsaid of true artistry. The building of a craft for the sake of self-betterment, and to more deeply explore that which makes us who we are, and perhaps even better defines the things we feel we need to say or have left unspoken. One cannot think of a better example of true artistry than the works of Kaily Moon Schenker & Nick Keeling. Two artists that continually strive for the most sincere, deepest explorations of sound and human expr…
First Passage / Excommunicated
*50 copies limited edition* Archaic Vaults presents First passage/Excommunicated. Ancient rituals and pilgrimages. a labour of love. Composed and arranged by Severin Black & Vanessa Bedoret. Mastered by Owen Pratt Artwork by Severin Black
A Short Story
For almost ten years, Ruben Machtelinckx has followed an extraordinary path in Belgian and European improvised music. As a guitarist, but equally as a composer. It began in 2013, when the quartet Machtelinckx/Badenhorst/Jensson/Wouters released their debut, ‘Faerge’. The album was praised by international press and was listed ‘Best Belgian jazz release’ by Knack magazine. In 2020 he won the Klara Award for Best Belgian Jazz release for his latest record: Porous Structures (Aspen 009). In between…
Two Duos
Tip! “Two Duos” is pressed from cellist Okkyung Lee’s most recent OTO Residency; the first side a duo with Jérôme Noetinger on Revox B77 and the second with Nadia Ratsimandresy on Ondes Martenot. Cut together, the two meetings seem to raise three cellos in the search for expressive voice: the cello, it’s magnetic reproduction, and the dual controls of the machine invented to expand on its musical qualities. On the A side Noetinger’s opening tape hiss establishes a current; an electrical partner …
Spectre
Improvisers Xavier Charles and Bertrand Gauguet have been playing duets since 2013. They produce frequency landscapes that change slowly and thus move the listener towards a contemplative listening. With the multiple sounds of the clarinet and the saxophone, other inflated spaces based on breaths arise... Spectre, which was released on CD in early May 2020 at Akousis Records, contains six pieces exploring multi-phonic spaces on the clarinet and alto saxophone (Phonomnèse 1, Phonomnèse 2 and Pho…