Oneiric Formulary
Master of myriad styles, Sir Rick Bishop takes in baroque, flamenco, surf, and harder to place fusions of phantasmagoric sound design, Gaelic folk and Indian Raga, and more lysergic expression in this bounty of a new album.
Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transm…
Introspection / Migration
From an ocean of black, sometimes there is a slim chance you might emerge clean and translucent, with another life chapter under your belt and a renewed story to tell. J.H. Guraj, our favourite wandering bird, is back with his first proper opus on Maple Death: Introspection / Migration.
Sometimes records lead off into an unknown path that never considers release schedules or the outside world, inhabiting the abysses of the artists’ mind and dropping a hefty anchor in the murky waters. Dominique …
Lpc
Limited edition of 100 copies. Another remarkable album by Manuel Mota, drawing out strands of 'strangely tuned' guitar sounds that wrap around her skeletal melody and then unfurl into more natural geometries to subliminal effect. You can listen to Mota's music from end-to-end over and over, discovering something new with each listen, gleaming with microscopic detail without ever neglecting its visceral, propulsive impact. Manuel Mota is known for the personal vocabulary he has developed for the…
Both
Tip! In process of stocking. With a requisite crackle, hum and drone, you're fixed to slide into the dis-rupture in stereo that is guitarist Bill Nace and - well, THIS is a nice surprise - Bill's got his own record out this time! Sweet - in the past 15 years or so, Bill's been a trusty improv partner to so many: Steve Baczkowski, Chris Corsano, Paul Flaherty, Greg Kelly, James Twig Harper, Samara Lubelski and Thurston Moore, plus Body/Head, to name but a handful. Bill's appeared on probably more…
Western Songs
**200 copies** Western Songs marks the first time Nathan Amundson is releasing music under his own name. This record is his first for Silentes, and features two side-long late night instrumental guitar jams evoking the vast, arid landscape surrounding his home state of Colorado. Minimalist singer/songwriter Nathan Amundson began recording as Rivulets in 1999, when his self-titled debut was issued by Chairkickers Union, the Duluth, Minnesota label run by the veteran slowcore outfit Low.
Since t…
Vanishing Points
All sounds are created with guitar, with the use of echo, delay, and assorted treatments giving these pieces a trance-inducing quality, with repeating rhythm figures and gradual phase shifts creating a warped sense of time.
Riverrun
**70 copies** Sun Stabbed is Pierre Faure and Thierry Monnier / Guitars, effects, amps. Recorded and mixed by Manuel Scalora at Studio A during heatwave in Grenoble.
Repression's Blossom
**300 copies** Aaron Turner's solo debut Repression's Blossom explores the realm of avant-garde and reductionist metal. Avoiding the pitfalls of unintentional monotone, the album's abstract narrative tightropes through viscous noise mayhem and clinical serenity towards the mythical echelons of minimalism with gravity analogous to Kevin Drumm, Caspar Brötzmann and Pauline Oliveros. The drone-supported fragments of exquisitely manipulated audio create a magnificent multi-layered backdrop for Turne…
Scenes From the South Island
Expanded reissue of New Zealand guitar pioneer Roy Montgomery's rare and revered full-length debut, Scenes From The South Island, originally released in 1995 by West Coast experimental / space rock label Drunken Fish. Recorded on both coasts on a pair of Tascam 4-tracks, the album is alternately wistful, windswept, skeletal, shredded, and strange. Solo guitar figures flow and fray through echo and empty space, evoking loss, long roads, and low-lit landscapes.Montgomery's own memories of this era…
Six Moving Guitars
Sofa is very proud to release the outstanding debut record of composer / guitarist Fredrik Rasten. In Six Moving Guitars, the stable sounds of justly tuned consonances are being «activated» by the different qualities of the movements of the guitars. The piece came out of the collaborative work between three dancers and three musicians. The group’s goal was to work with choreography and sound as a unity, erasing the functional differences between dancer and musician and focusing solely on the son…
Solo Guitar Volume 3-1/3
**400 copies** "Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized i…
Empire / Flat Rock
Dark and gloomy string arrangements by Michigan’s Michael Collino (Dog Lady Island, Alien Passengers) on both sides, concluding to an intentional dragged out silence on side B to complete those sounds of loss. “Funeral Zither” at its best.
Earth To Momma
Hairbone is a New York-based power trio of artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple, formerly known as Haribo. Functioning mainly in the art world, Hairbone has inflicted audiences from museums to decrepit basements with their carnivalesque live shows for nearly a decade. Each unique, thematically pointed multimedia performance narrative features frontman de Nieves inhabiting new personae in a sculptural actionist mode, brandishing oversized text-emblazoned props as if they were …
Solo Guitar Volume 2-1/3
"Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized it would take sc…
Solo Guitar Volume 1-1/3
"Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized it would take sc…
Its Shape Is Your Touch
Wendy Eisenberg is an extraordinary guitarist dedicated to the
completely unconstrained exploration of music, language and time. Her
work has taken her from conservatory to DIY space to concert hall, from
performing improvised music and punk-metal to writing the quietest of
songs. On Its Shape is Your Touch, Eisenberg turns her gaze to
the guitar in its most absolute, essential form. Having traversed
musical genres as she has, the intricate improvisations she weaves on
this record have as…
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10 (Art Editio
**Art edition of 100 copies, hand-painted and -drawn by Loren Connors** Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in …
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations Vol. 10
**Edition of 400 copies, sold-out at source** Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in imitation of the dogs that…
R,R,R
Recorded at Ftarri, Tokyo, 28. Limited edition, 200 copies. Lovingly recorded on acoustic guitar, his improvisations have the spiky quality associated with the elder statesman of the freely improvised guitar, as well as some John Fahey touches here and there, but Masubuchi's lines sound as though coated in oil, possessing a slipperiness and liquidity that peeks back at Japanese traditions
Toot! Too
It is with such pleasure that I introduce the first vinyl LP by composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow. Toot! Too culls performance recordings from 1970 to 2014. It focuses on his Wave Music series, which are compositions based around swarms of like-instruments; i.e. sixty clarinets, conch choruses, and an army of drums and bugle horns, etc. A personal favorite is the 1978 piece, “100 Musicians With Lights” which was performed at dusk in Central Park. One hundred players (brass, reeds, percussion…