Early Works / Things Popping Up From The Past
Michel Banabila, born 1961, is a sound artist, composer, and producer. Banabila releases music since 1983 and has produced musical scores for numerous films, documentaries, theatre plays and choreographies. This album collects 11 songs from his early years, released on tape, vinyl EPs or limited CD editions: beautiful minimal loop-based electronica, neo-classical pieces and ambient drone music. A true discovery!
Numerous threads run through the music of Michel Banabila, whose contemporary work …
Last Afternoon
** Edition of 200 ** The second release on Constructive is ‘Last Afternoon’ by Japanese composer Takuma Watanabe. Having studied at Berklee College in the USA he is currently living in Japan where he composes for film using a string ensemble founded by himself. This is Watanabe’s first full length artist album. ‘Last Afternoon’ features collaborations with American vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara known for her recorded works with John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley and composer and so…
Red Sugar
** CD / 4 Pages Digipack + Poster Booklet ** Second long awaited album by Winter Family, the duo composed of Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine, actually based in Brooklyn. A rare and unique audio worldview expressed by the singular approach of Ruth Rosenthal (voice) and Xavier Klaine (harmonium, organ etc..). From the first bares of Searching Donkeys this new album creates a glowering and intense atmospheric...part nightmare, part uplifting dreamscape. It permeates and builds into a compelling wh…
South from Here
Winter Family is a duo made up of Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine. They met in Jaffa, Israel in 2004. Their self-titled debut (Sub Rosa, 2007) offered minimal music played by Xavier on pipe organ, harmoniums and piano backing strict spoken-word texts chanted by Ruth. Their second album, Red Sugar (Sub Rosa, 2011) was highly praised by critics (The Village Voice, Liberation, Haaretz, Pitchfork). Winter Family then composed soundtracks for dance shows, films and advertising (Chanel, EU). They col…
Angel's Flight
Angel’s Flight is the new album from highly-acclaimed producer and composer Biosphere. Ever since he debuted on Origo/Apollo with the groundbreaking ’Microgravity’, now thirty years ago, Geir Jenssen has been a major force in ambient techno, steadily building a catalogue that’s rivalled only by few. After three wonderful albums on Biophon (2018’s ’The Hilvarenbeek Recordings’, that has Jenssen samplng a broad palette of Dutch farm sounds is a total store favorite) the Norwegian maestro has now l…
Neues Boot
** Edition of 200 ** TAL presents the first musical collaboration between Hamburg based Asmus Tietchens and Japanese artist Miki Yui, operating out of Düsseldorf for almost 20 years now. Highly respected and hugely influential artist Asmus Tietchens first made his mark on the electronic music scene in the late 1970s, whereas Miki Yui debuted her sonic settings in 1999. Their first joint album Neues Boot envelops the listener with a poetic sound sensibility and a conceptual clarity which was proc…
You Can See Your Own Way Out
** Edition of 500, Clear Vinyl, Gloss Laminate Sleeve ** You Can See Your Own Way Out is the first collaborative record between Ilyas Ahmed and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Long-time friends and satellites orbiting the same communities and scenes, You Can See's inception was never really a question of if, but when. Combining Ahmed's explorative guitar/synth-work and Cantu-Ledesma's field recording, sound processing and electronics, the result presents as a book of short stories or vignettes highlighting…
Chevaliers
Winter Family is a duo made up of Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine. They met in Jaffa in 2004. Their dark, saturated and dense music is described as "death swing", "weird wave", or "funeral pop". They recorded new parts of this new album in St Martin church of Maxéville, France. Includes insert.
Xavier: "I recorded the pipe organ there, inspired by the Alsatian philanthropist organist Albert Schweitzer whose slow, bombastic performances, limited by faulty technique have always touched me deeply.…
Mutual Aid Music
* Limited edition double CD + 12-Page Booklet. Six panel gatefold CD package beautifully designed by Lasse Marhaug and featuring an exclusive essay on the social and artistic philosophy behind Mutual Aid Music by the composer (including notated examples) * A Double-CD of of Eight Ensemble Concertos by Wooley Performed by Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, Violinist Joshua Modney, Cellist Mariel Roberts, Pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, Percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and N…
Dissection Lente d’un Piano Rouillé
Rubbed/tickled strings, drone-based undercurrents, leviathanic apparitions, squeals of insects, molluscs & intriguing shells, underwater singing moans, the work of the Belgian musician and performer Anaïs Tuerlinckx plunges entangles us into a captivating constellation
Gyropedie
“Gyropedie,” Anne Guthrie’s third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into her hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie’s own words, “Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching …
FRKWYS Vol. 16: In a Word
**CD edition** In a Word, the sixteenth installment of the intergenerational collaboration series FRKWYS, brings together postminimalist composer Daniel Lentz with vocalist and sound artist Ian William Craig for an album that embraces erosion and the fertility of the loam left behind. A document of shared transformation, Lentz’s elegant piano figures and Craig’s trembling tenor are wilted, warbled, and looped through manipulated tape machines in a real time composition that evokes a strange warm…
Oh Temple!
*300 copies limited edtion* University Challenged are Ajay Saggar ("Bhajan Bhoy"), Oli Heffernan ("Ivan The Tolerable"), and Kohhei Matsuda ("Bo Ningen"). The trio began in 2019, playing shows in Holland, where they gained a reputation for delivering highly dynamic sense-rattling shows, ranging from gentle melodic orchestral spinouts to epic power jams, all backed by beautiful self-made films in the background. The plan had always been to record an album, and get the collective musical force and…
Upstream
German pianist and composer Hauschka returns to Sonic Pieces with music for the experimental film Upstream. Together with filmmaker Rob Petit and acclaimed writer Robert Macfarlane he has created a slow-moving dream-flight into wildness and winter through an eerie, hypnotic soundtrack of the Scottish highlands.
The film, which is shot entirely from the air, follows the course of the River Dee in Scotland all the way to its source in the Cairngorm mountains, the highest of any river in Britain. T…
Love Is A Stream
**Edition of 300. 10 year anniversary edition. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu. Design by Farbod Kokabi.** From the original press release: As a member of San Francisco legends Tarentel and Type’s premier astral travellers The Alps, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is hardly a new addition to the label, so it’s hard to believe that ‘Love Is A Stream’ is his first Type solo album. Previously releasing on Arbor, Spekk and his own Root Strata imprint, this latest album marks his journey into the beautifully cacop…
Best that You Do This for Me
With Best that you do this for me, Jim O’Rourke delivers a composition that redefines the boundaries of chamber music with disarming directness and subtle complexity. Commissioned by Apartment House, the piece features violin, viola, and cello - played by Mira Benjamin, Bridget Carey, and Anton Lukoszevieze- whose voices, whistles, and hums artfully entwine with bowed harmonics. The suite is built on a flexible graphic score, affording the performers significant interpretative agency, and coaxin…
Muto Infinitas
In Muto Infinitas, Catherine Lamb extends her distinctive approach to microtonality and just intonation, crafting a forty-minute dialogue for quartertone bass flute and double bass performed by Rebecca Lane and Jon Heilbron. The recording, realized without electronic alteration, invites deep listening, unspooling at an unhurried pace in a luminous acoustic field. Lamb’s music here is uncompromising in its patience: the two musicians linger in the borderlands of pitch and timbre, carving out a sp…
Sculthorpe Studies
Sculthorpe Studies marks a thoughtful and searching entry from Josten Myburgh, situating contemporary ensemble practice within a deep engagement with Australia’s sonic environment and historical legacy. Drawing direct inspiration from the harmonic language of Peter Sculthorpe, himself known for invoking landscape and indigeneity in his music, Myburgh constructs a work for sextet and field recordings that is at once interrogation and homage. The piece unfolds in a sequence of episodes, each pairi…
Single Track
On Single Track, Michael Winter delivers an exercise in continuous transformation, realized by Liminar with a deftness that makes process audible without diminishing expressive intimacy. The work opens in a blur of kinetic string textures, mapping a single gestural arc that narrows and distills over the course of forty-six minutes. Through the canon form, what begins as a flurry of interconnected voices decelerates stepwise, granting each timbral shift and harmonic overtone maximum clarity. As …
Hlaholika
With Hlaholika, Adrian Democ offers a collection of chamber pieces unified by a focus on stillness and the unhurried unfolding of sound. Rather than chasing after overt drama, Democ’s writing reveals itself through the subtle layering of sonorities and stark, melodic lines, letting each instrument’s character shine. Apartment House brings sensitivity and patience to these recordings, allowing the music’s quiet radiance to emerge organically, rather than by force.
The album opens with “Ma fin est…