The Loft Sessions
"Pulses, subtle interactions within common noise-sound surfaces that glide along in a leisurely, relaxed manner and yet are always in a state of flux. This is how briefly and succinctly the music of the quartet around the pianist and synthesiser player Philip Zoubek, the trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, the electronic musician Ignaz Schick and the drummer and percussionist Tony Buck could be put into words.
One could add to this brief description: diverse percussion sounds, bowed sounds, glissandi, s…
Then Through Now
Henry Dagg and Evan Parker improvised together for the first time as part of the Free Range series in Canterbury, Kent, on December 2, 2021. For the performance, Evan played soprano saxophone, and Henry developed a new electronic instrument called the Stage Cage, to both process Evan’s live sound as well as generate its own sounds. The Stage Cage includes four valve test-oscillators, a pair of ring modulators, frequency shifter, chromatic zither, and a variable tape delay system (consisting of t…
Music for Counterflows
For the 2021 online edition of the Counterflows festival, Glasgow-based Kay Logan (aka Helena Celle) created the hour-long electronic Music for Counterflows, accompanied by an interview with Stewart Smith. For the CD and digital release, the music has been mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and the interview along with visual artwork by Kay are included in a 20 page booklet. The first Helena Celle album, If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, was released on the Night Sc…
Not One, Not Two
Y Bülbül is back on the controls accompanied by Yumurta, a percussionist from Istanbul. Pingipung introduced the London based artist in 2020 with his psychedelic, synth-laden debut “Fever”. “Not One, Not Two” is based on a one-way transmission of improvised drum recordings from an industrial estate in Maslak, Istanbul to another one in Tottenham, London, where Y Bülbül laid down fragmented layers of bass, synths, guitars and field recordings over Yumurta’s singular drum takes. The result is…
Live In Antwerp
*In process of stocking* Nuke Watch wade out into liquified ephemera and ride their muggy percussive loops to safety. A foamy, landfill jazz collage originally performed in Antwerp now committed to tape.
Rotten Luck
Yes Indeed The emphatic duo of Laurie Tompkins and Otto Willberg return for their third release, rotten luck - a record we fell in love with watching the duo, synth player and bass shredder, gleefully headbanging in time, shrouded in the much beloved fog of spanners club. Their first lp exorcise, clobbered those that dared drop the needle with a brand of shrieking dadaism that lay impermeable but to the insane. It freaked us out, that cacophony soup.
On "Rotten Luck" there are tunes instead, go…
Anagrammi
*2022 stock* "The piano: the perfect balance between harmony and melody. Processing a piano is always an adventure; having 24 recordings of free improvisations performed by Francesco Arrighi and Mara Lepore is an incredible sound palette to have available. These recordings were deconstructed into individual phrases and micro fragments and then reassembled, both serially and in parallell, to follow a unifying compositional idea. At the same time the tracks were dilated and processed with filters,…
Fire Point
Tip! *Edition of 100.* Fire Point is multicolored and elusive. The sounds contained therein are agitated, fluid and amorphous, as if listening to the sonic realizations of various characteristics of multiple landscapes. Branches intersect, tree foliage collectively billows, and groundwater seeps into the encompassing substrate. The interactions of these three musicians are effortless, and is the result of both remote and physically-collaborative engagements. Starting with percussion tracks laid …
Old Light
Tip! Surveying late 20th century underground music - sounds that largely emerged before the internet delivered the illusion of interconnectedness - the most noteworthy often sprang from second cities, small towns, and backwaters, rather than cultured metropolitan centres like New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Boredom, marginalisation, and relative isolation seem to have been essential, counterintuitive components to the becoming of great art. Nowhere was this more true than in NZ/Aotearoa, the…
Permanent Draft
*300 copies limited edition* Conceived as a manifesto for eponymous all-female label Permanent Draft, this limited flexi comes with a booklet of poetry and pictures based on the prime number 13. Permanent Draft aims to highlight works showing a certain taste for fragmentary, irrepressible creative eruption and lo-fi experiments. Leaving the grandiose apart to pay and bring attention to the sounds, details and anecdotes of everyday life, picking up raw material from the ordinary. Bitter truths, m…
Shattered Reel(m)s
Tip! *200 copies limited edition* «a desperate act of randomness» the tape recorder’s on/off switch «am I lying to myself ?» «wings on the pavement» «put your ear against the wall» «can you hear them crying ?» «remember me to push you away» «escape the making of the world» another short percussive pattern «he walks, greeting my fall» tiny bells «I hate glass» a rumble crush - carbonic acid «I am nothing» a drone - a rusty motor - a fly - resonance feedback «there is nothing here» the sound of a…
La Mort Aura Tes Yeux
Tip! *In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies, offset printed covers with risoprinted interview.* "Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee". We're very proud to present the most exciting all-acoustic percussion based releases in years. Alexis Degrenier handles time and space as the master drummer that he is, with the finest of touches. Each breath, friction, percussion, whether manual or progammed (metronomes, clocks) is skillfully executed and high-spirited. Degrenier's poetic appr…
Black Box 3
* Edition of 500 * Arbitrary presents the third in the Black Box series of releases by Mads Emil Nielsen. The release, which showcases a more sample- and grid-based side of the Danish musician/composer’s work, is part of a sequence of publications with music and audio originally made for theatre, radio soundtracks and more.
Black Box 3 is based on sound pieces produced for Sprækker (Cracks), a dance performance & installation in Denmark, 2021. The starting points for these pieces are improvisati…
Nemo Point Soundmap for Terrestrial Melanoheliophobics
Representing Ahad's Flux Worlds 1, the lengthily titled 'Nemo Point Soundmap...' album is the very latest solo offering from this Hungarian sonic traveller now based in Berlin, Zsolt Sőrés. Spread over the two discs are seven pieces that take a combination of viola, bass, piano strings, voice, mellotron, dictaphone, percussion and all manner of other instrumentation and objects into a realm where inner space folds in on itself and unwittingly assumes the guise of multitudinous journeys to those …
Tathata
Tathata is a central concept in Buddhism, literally translated from sanskrit as 'thusness' or 'suchness'. Tathata expresses appreciation of the true nature of reality in any given moment. As no moment is exactly the same, each one can be savored for what occurs at that precise time, whether it is thought of as being good or bad. However, Jeph Jerman and Doug Theriault are trying to give us the possibility to meditate on this word, they recorded three long improvised pieces for the same-titled al…
Systema Munditotius, Vol 1
NYC-based electroacoustic improvisation trio Bloodmist presents Arc, their third full length album.
5 {Zwischenfälle}
5(zwischenfaelle) is the latest release by dutch electronic musician Roel Meelkop. It is a special release in Meelkop’s catalogue because it is consist of five piece that were originally used in the context of sound installations running over a certain period of time in specific special surroundings. For 5(zwischenfaelle) Meelkop has set himself the task to compress these soundscapes into five dense and still minimal audio pieces that could work outside the context of the original installations.…
The Prey And The Ruler
"The first time I witnessed Senyawa was in the early 2010s. We shared a bill at the MonaFoma festival in Hobart. Some memories hold strongly in your mind and Senyawa’s performance that day did just that. It was a monstrous portent of things to come. A promise, in sound, of the energetic force that has since come to mark them as one of the truly unique and visionary musical pairings from South East Asia. This project, The Prey And The Ruler, finds its root in the unsteady months of mid 2021. As t…
la non-pareille
Tip! *Limited edition of 200 copies* Lava music, maybe. Lava music, always evolving, always surprising, always exciting because we don’t know what the other will bring to the music that we start improvising and exploring together. We’ll see what bubbles will form in this lava music and sometimes an idea comes up, a bubble pops and it becomes a track. Lava, like the wax that was melted to press the record. Lava, like energy flowing, slow. Improvising most of the time, you really connect with the …
Musica Liquida
*In process of stocking* Ingar Zach’s new album Musica Liquida is the first audio document of his ongoing artistic research project at the Academy of Music in Oslo. The project is called The Vibrating Drum and focus on vibration of the membrane, activated by vibrating speakers in contact with the drumskin. Musica Liquida is Ingar Zach’s 7th solo album, and we find him diving into an ocean of sound and orchestrating the complexity of interfolded layers in the impressive acoustics of Emanuel Vigel…