The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form
* Triple gatefold package with full color collages, and 60 x 90 cm poster * Matmos’ practice of creative constraint has made them one of the most consistently exciting acts in electronic music. The duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel are well known for their long-standing practice of sampling unusual sound sources and experimenting with conceptual restrictions. As a couple in life and music for more than 25 years, Schmidt and Daniel have a particularly democratic approach to music making, each t…
Arkhaios
Jeremie Mathes is a French field recording artist (known for some excellent CDs on Unfathomless) living in Cambodia since some years. For "Arkhaios" he combined cavernous object drones (recorded at an abandoned factory site) with various instrumental sounds from ancient Khmer instruments (Tro u, Khim), all highly processed. You get the impression as being under the earth in a place populated by metallic amoeba or other smallest creatures, inside sewerage ducts or an deserted mine, exposed to the…
The Healing Begins Now
Rain Drinkers' inaugural release, originally on 99 cassettes via Earjerk Records "Five cinematic, moody pieces for a grey day. Rain Drinkers are Joe Taylor, Zavier Krall and The Creative Spirit. Track one, 'You Are Now Starting the Awakening Process' calms the soul with a nice organ and piano melody that you can drift on. 'The Next Phase' gets a little scarier as the demons stir in dark places not wanting to be disturbed. "Let us sleep." they moan. But that can not be... for The Healing Begins…
VII
A new timley studio album from the duo of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley. Recorded and mixed during an unexpected extended stay in Berlin when the borders of the world suddenly closed. The claustrophobic urgency of this scenario is seared into the colossal vibrations set into this vinyl release.
Unlike many of their releases this is a studio record made unto itself as opposed to the many soundtracks they have made for theatre works and the like. It also stands as one of their most fully real…
Sub
**Limited edition of 500 copies** The most enigmatic of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Marc Zeier is the man behind G*Park; and here, he presents his first major album since the acclaimed 2008 album of cryptic electro-acoustics entitled Reuters. Many years in the making, Sub is a sprawling masterpiece of modern day musique concrete, reflecting the early pioneers' use of razor cut tape with a grandiose revelation of an existential horror. Zeier describes this album as the manifestation of amorphous cond…
Works For Cassette
Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb -- also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tap…
So Long
A journey through time, perhaps, for a daydreamer floating in a small boat amidst the radiant hues of a midnight sun. that daydreamer in this instance is the icelandic artist Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, best known for his electro-surrealism in stilluppsteypa. he has long been an artist of extremes and absurdities -- mania fueled performances, wildly scribbled drawings, and haflerian audio shock-therapy, on one side; and on the other, a profound meditation on austere shape, form, and mood cast th…
Chanteuse
Since the early 1970s, Jacqueline Humbert has collaborated as performer, visual artist, and designer with leading innovative artists, filmmakers, choreographers and composers worldwide. Her approach to vocal performance has influenced many composers, and the works in Chanteuse represent a new and exciting extension and reinterpretation of the "song" genre. Humbert on the release: "Chanteuse is a collection of new or previously unreleased songs, many of which were written for me by a broad range …
Nigths and Profecy
**Edition of 200** Zombies lurk throughout the post-industrial abstractions and radiantly murky collages of Nigths and Profecy - an 80 minute split release from Fossil Aerosol Mining Project and 400 Lonely Things.
Fossil Aerosol has a long history with zombies. Or perhaps more specifically, with the contexts that fostered zombies during the 1970s and 1980s. Of particular interest was the imagined, and then realized, ruins of contemporary society - often populated with artificial corpses. One of …
Acoustic Shadows
SA Recordings present a new LP from the acclaimed New York composer, performer and sound designer Lea Bertucci. A work of three interlinked incarnations, ‘Acoustic Shadows’ began as an event, which then became an album and has inspired a sample library for other musicians.
The Event (recalled by Lea Bertucci)
“Acoustic Shadows I-III was a series of site-specific musical performances and a sound installation that took place in the enclosed hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany, 2018.…
Luz Azul
**350 copies** "Luz Azul is a group started by LA-based vocal and performance artist Anna Homler (aka Breadwoman) together with musicians Marcos Fernandes and Robert Montoya in 2007. On this record they compose their own mesmerising cosmic universe where the hypnotic speaking in tongue voice of Anna Homler blends mesmerisingly together with the sound of her found toys, intensified by the shamanistic percussion of Marcos and the pulsating electronics of Montoya. As fellow percussionists and sound…
A Sunset for Walter
Penultimate Press present A Sunset for Walter, the first duo release from long-time collaborators Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras. "Having worked together in a number of different collaborative contexts over the years, the pair used Pateras' 2018 residency at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart as an opportunity to develop a major durational work for Steinway piano and multiple Revox tape machines. Presenting four excerpts from a three-hour concert, the LP's opening moments immediately establish …
Circle Line
A very peculiar journey... Circle Line initially started life as a graphic score created by Phil Mouldycliff as a piece to be played by Keith Rowe in 1989. Over a period of twelve years this open form composition developed to the point where by 2002 an opportunity arose to make a recording of the work at IC Studio in Preston, using ambient recordings taken from Circle Line Tube stations made specifically for the project by Phil and Colin Potter. Keith effectively solos over the assemble tape col…
The Difference of Similarity / The Similarity of Difference (LP
**300 copies** Astral Colonels are Anthony Pateras and Valerio Tricoli and this is their second album. On Side A ("The Difference of Similarity") the formidable use of a sound arsenal based primarly on prepared piano and tapes and a bright use of echo and repetition create winding tensions grafted into harmonics, irregular spiral-shaped non-progressions intertwining costantly on the ridge between the familiar and the unknown, a recurring alternation of stasis and fibrillation that delivers liste…
Nature Denatured and Found Again
5 CD Box. The five discs come in an oversized box with cover art by Marcus Kaiser and Yuko Zama. The box set also includes a 24-page full-color booklet containing additional photos by Joachim Eckl, Marcus Kaiser, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, and Michael Pisaro, and liner notes by Michael Pisaro and Joachim Eckl. This beguiling epic was born of composer Michael Pisaro’s desire to organize a series of sound walks along the Grosse Mühl River in Austria, a practice borrowed from the visual artist Joachim …
Homotopy To Marie
**Silver & black and silver & white vinyl edition of 300** 'Homotopy To Marie' is the fifth album by Nurse With Wound, originally released on United Dairies in 1982. The album is a step on from the Dadaist rock of 'Merzbild Schwet', with much use of tape manipulation and classical avant-garde techniques, using keywords including unsettling, volatile, eerie and nocturnal to describe the feel of the album which combined tape edits with resonating gong tones and disembodied children's voices to cre…
Jacques Bekaert (LP)
Continuing in the Igloo appreciation thread, here is a replication of IGL 008; Jacques Bekaert's 1981 eponymous LP - following 1979's "Summer Music" for Lovely - containing three tape pieces composed between 1969 & 1978, featuring contributions by a who's who of 60s & 70s Avant Garde & Fluxus figures - Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, David Behrman, David Rosenboom, Maggi Payne, George Lewis, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Ryo Koike, amongst many others. The extended "Late Lunch" - at 28 minutes barely fi…
Silances
Continuing in the Creel Pone "6" Igloo program, here's a picture-perfect reproduction of one of the more obscure & bewitching entrants into the label's early discography, Henry Krutzen's 1981 "Silances" LP; IGL 006. Nestled somewhere between Ghédalia Tazartès' mutant Sound Poetry, Anton Bruhin's acoustic / Alphorn drones & the more "Private" sensibilities of Badouin Oosterlynck, Paul A.R. Timmermans, or latter-day channelers like Raymond Dijkstra, the largely quiet, humble multi-track constructs…
Musiques Vertes
Creel Pone replication of this fascinating, un-Google-able LP offering a largely acoustic take on historically electronically-assembled Musique Concrète, performed by the Collectif Musique Verte in 1982. An associate of Knud Viktor - who took the album's cover photo - and, by proxy, L'Oiseau Musicien boss Jean-Claude Roché, French "Composer and musicologist" Jean-Yves Bosseur was a member of the ensemble GERM - "Groupe d'Etude et Réalisation Musicale" - the same that realized that version of Ter…
CMCD (Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic And Electronic Works 1970-1990)
This essential piece of history at last reissued, redesigned and repackaged. Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium. It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition of 1917; Georg Katzer's monumental 'Aide Memoire' ('7 nig…