Bakunawa
Easily among our favorite records of the year - issued in a very limited vinyl edition of 300 copies by Cortizona and Stuk - Pak Yan Lau's latest, "Bakunawa", is a truly stunning thing to behold. A continuation of her long-standing "Book of Toy" project, expanded for the first time to incorporate the contributions of a five-piece ensemble, it's a sprawling expanse of deep harmonics and percussive rhythms that channel the magical and poetic into the realms of experimental music, deftly nodding to…
A Journal of Elasticity
Richard Scott and Axel Dörner’s »Journal of Elasticity« is a two-part site-specific composition recorded at the big water reservoir in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Playing once with the empty space’s acoustics as a third actor and once in front of and with the audience’s presence, their bohemian drips debut is a riveting study of space and intensity.
Music from Organ
On his new EP ‘Music from Organ’, producer and live musician Giulio Aldinucci offers up four tracks of layered and meticulously-crafted ambience. In his own words: “The EP explores the interaction between the pipe organ and the sound environment, in terms of architectural space and soundscape. Every single sound of this work is created from pipe organ recordings using different techniques related to sound reflection, from granular processing to filters that “carve” the sound emulating the phonem…
Paracas Ritual
** Edition of 300 copies. Album includes booklet of 12 pages with photos and liner notes ** Manongo Mujica is a Peruvian percussionist, composer and visual artist. His constant search for sounds, from native to electronic, has even led him to compose music from silence. Norway’s Terje Evensen specialises in improvised modern jazz combined with electronic elements, creating spacious and dramatic soundscapes of profound intensity. Paracas Ritual, the new album by Manongo Mujica and Terje Evensen, …
Petojen Tavat
** Edition of 65 ** Shakali's first album 'Petojen Tavat' was recorded during 2016-2020 in Imatra (Finland) and Brno (Czech Republic). Enigmatic ambient works with a dreamy tribal essence. “These contemplative psychedelic tracks were recorded layer by layer, peacefully over the years, in the nighttime, with a focus on preserving their original energy and character. Set in circular motion with solar-powered synths, prepared flutes, tapes, percussion, electric violin, field recordings and modular …
When instrument is in tune, music happens by itself / Harpolek
** Edition of 75 ** Ikuisuus presens "When instrument is in tune, music happens by itself" by Antti Tolvi and "Harpolek" by J. Koho. Antti Tolvi - When instrument is in tune, music happens by itself : "I remembered that ”When instrument is in tune, music happens by itself” was Ellen Fullman´s thought. Then I checked what she actually said was ”When you are really in tune, the music plays itself”. And I also noticed that it wasn’t Ellen´s own thought, she had heard it from her North Indian vocal …
Songs from the Shore
In Japanese folklore, Afuma indicates a time of day marked by spiritual or mysterious encounter. In Latin, one who inhales. Together as Afuma, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Taketo Shimada breathe sepulchral energies into the brooding, cosmic fringes of guitar-based song vernacular. Tcherepnin’s baritone and Shimada’s lap steel guitar intertwine, smearing across world’s-end horizons that propel Tcherepnin’s ragged, foreboding vocal delivery and its lyrical portents of departure, of life’s vessel unmoore…
Lower Hope Reach
Another sublime installment from Dean Brown’s Little Skull. This 5 track 10” moves through minimal, naïve, folk/chamber territory on into darker, more twisted waters. Hand-made covers and inserts featuring three different lino-cut images. Each record comes with three inserts on transparent stock and features one of those images on the cover. Therefore there’s three variations of outer sleeve design. No requests!
Comme au Moulin
After NEF's album in 2019, Ici Bientôt is happy to present today the reissue of "Comme Au Moulin" by Nyssa Musique. Paris 1985... ‘Extra-European’ Traditions meet Jazz and Minimal Music. An unusual array of instruments turn music into a dialogue. For a unique record ... vivid, full of texture, somewhere between Midori Takada, Don Cherry and Jon Hassell. Beginning of the eighties, 5 musicians rehearse in a contemporary dance class hall, upstairs from the ‘’New Morning", renowned Music venue in Pa…
Squeeze the Lids Through Coming Window
** Edition of 300 transparent red vinyl. 2021 Stock ** A piercing hum awakens alien skreeks and insect antennae and fluttering seedpod drifts and curled leaf wails… reedy twirlings dance above organic-machine wheeling thuds… hopping whistles accompany descending klangs, producing a rushing stasis, a clattering bliss, a reverential noise. Vibracathedral Orchestra’s trademark levitation drone returns to earth to offer two sidelong utopias, a revolving array of instruments selected in turn by the m…
Mad Song
** Edition of 300** Oaken Palace Records is excited to present its 20th release, a sonic journey to the roots of drone music, performed by Bombay Lunatic Asylum. The musicians behind this name are no others than Louise Landes Levi and Bart De Paepe, who already played together on Ikiru (OAK-013), our fastest selling release so far. On Mad Song, they are joined by Koen Vandenhoudt, who also recorded the album. De Paepe’s harmonium and Vandenhoudt’s shruti box form the perfect backdrop for Levi’s …
Tenno
For over four decades, Reiko Omura and Tori Kudo have endlessly woven themselves throughout the avant-garde and underground scene of Japan. While internationally appreciated in countless incarnations and contexts (Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Guys & Dolls), if one were to seek out an early moment in which the two artists created something truly awe inspiring, 1980’s Tenno (天皇) would be it. As Noise, the duo experimented with the juxtaposition of Kudo’s extended organ based dirges (be they eerie and/o…
Burn the Night / Bruciare la Notte: Original Recordings, 1983-1989
Burn the Night / Bruciare la Notte: Original Recordings, 1983–1989 is the first archival collection of music by the Italian minimalist composer Tiziano Popoli. In his music, Popoli framed the Italian avant-garde and New Wave of the 1980s through an architectural aesthetic distinctly detailed by a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, Roland TR-909 drum machine, and early sampling technology.
Vivification Exercises I
* Limited edition of 225 cassettes with hand stamped covers * Ka Baird’s Vivification Exercises, a recording for piano, voice, and electronics that references an invigorated consciousness, is primarily based on a presentation at Roulette’s Brooklyn theater in May of 2018. The event added to Baird’s history of performances that embrace the physical and visceral, though the musical, provocative sounds this time exorcised from both her body and the piano’s. Written, performed, produced and mixed by…
Quattro
Tanz Mein Herz’s latest, Quattro, out via Standard In-Fi, encounters the French collective pushing at the boundaries of folk tinged experimentalism, psych, and drone. Sprawling across two LPs, it’s an absolute burner of throbbing, hypnotic sound and stunning creative interplay, and easily one of the best records we’ve heard in the early months of 2021.
Motore Immobile
To quote Pitchfork, this is 'one of the most sumptuous, spiritual ambient albums of any era or provenance.
Glowing Sounds
Harry Bertoia's Glowing Sounds LP contains three versions of the same composition, each transferred at different tape speeds in accordance with the artist's instructions. This is the third LP to be released from Bertoia's extensive tape archive and it's the first, of many, to be released using instructions left behind by the artist himself.
Bertoia wrote the concept for this Glowing Sounds LP on a note in 1975 and slipped it into the master tape case where it sat unread for 45 years. The idea wa…
Impedance
** Packaged in a deluxe, heavy duty tip-on gatefold sleeves printed by Stoughton; cut by Golden Mastering and pressed at RTI ** Alina Kalancea's Impedance is an entirely instrumental album spanning four sides, contains powerful rhythmic sequences, heart-beating frequencies and hypnotic loops that are paradoxically encapsulated in carefully crafted compositions which are full of secret passages and hidden doors. Kalancea's work creates ungraspable sonic experiences, which overtakes you, immersing…
Le Plan de Paris
Tip. Edition of 500. Pascal Comelade and Richard Pinhas met in Paris in 1974, when Pinhas was beginning to go on stage with his group Heldon. With Heldon and, afterwards, solo, Pinhas became the pioneer and accelerator of electronic music in France, and a fundamental reference throughout the world. Comelade’s electronic period was much shorter, from 1974 to 1981. From 1983 on, he developed his policy of instrumental, strictly acoustic music.In 1975, Pinhas recorded the introduction to Comelade’s…
Of The Air
* Edition of 100 * Of the air was recorded in April of 2015 in Charleston, SC on an 1890 tracker organ. Linkages between stops and the slider chests that open the ranks of pipes to control timbre are mechanical. As a result, pulling out a stop slowly brings in not only a new timbral layer, but does so in way that causes the new sound to slide into the correct pitch. This allows for a microtonal pitch world. During the recording process I was stuck by the way holding down a diatonic cluster while…