Experimental / Musique Concrète

Huge Tip! Further Explorations follows on from Gentle Fire’s 3CD retrospective box set Explorations, released in 2020. These new archive recordings came to light in the process of unearthing the tapes for the 4CD box set by their fellow Stockhausen collaborators Intermodulation. The pieces used on this CD are taken from two sessions recorded for German radio in 1973 and 74, one for Sender Freies Berlin and the other for Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt. These beautifully recorded and preserved p…

Often credited as the father of multi-media theatre, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) took complete creative control over his productions - including cutting-edge approaches to lighting and costume that transformed human bodies into shifting sculptural shapes, while also composing wildly innovative electronic music as accompaniment. After initially experimenting with musique concrète and tape manipulation (as demonstrated on the 1959 LP Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais) Nik…

1999 re-issue on Blue Chopsticks of the EMI LP with two landmark instrumental compositions respectively from 1967 and 1970.

A rare collaboration, Visitation unites French turntablist eRikm and electroacoustic pioneer Luc Ferrari for a masterclass in musique concrète and sonic collage, echoing the legacy of Pierre Schaeffer.

*300 copies limited edition* More than twenty years of friendship haunt Vrhältnis, the new album by Antoine Chessex and Dave Phillips, out now on Coherent States and Krim Kram. Its source material reaches back twenty years, originating from live performances during a 2005 joint tour in Lausanne and Basel and a studio session recorded the same year at the Dynamo/Popkredit Studio in Zürich. Both sessions were then filed away, the recordings disappearing into the archive, untouched for nearly two d…

No time to waste: nine months after Tim Vanhamel released 'Dubs Pour Oh La La', his debut album under the moniker Comité Hypnotisé, the Millionaire frontman presents already the second album 'Hiking The Trails Of Mount Muzak'. Hardly leaving any traces of the dubbed out vibe which marked the first record, Tim expands his Comité Hypnotisé universe to a surprising next level on this second album: exploring a place where James Last, Wu-Tang Clan and Dj Shadow are cooking up a Thai meal in a Peruvia…

“A vinyl-based 'plane of consistency' able to fold, deform, and compress time and space so deftly that one has the impression of hearing echoes of distant worlds and times – 'everything everywhere all at once.'”

*300 copies limited edition* Drawing from field recordings collected during a trip to Japan, boring tables saturates sonic vignettes in sentimental key, replaying familiar traces of lived experience into something more abstract. The seven tracks on mathematical model 0010, Luca Quartarone's debut album, trail through evolving tonal expanses that envelop the environment in a perpetually expanding haze of serenity. Though sonic fragments hail from the everyday, the compositions themselves inevitab…

With centuries of history, traditional instruments carry physical vibrations shaped by human breath and touch. In contrast, electronic music generates vibrations through inorganic principles such as electrical signals and circuits. When the subtle tremors of traditional instruments resonate with the intricate tones of electronic sounds in an improvised dialogue, performers from distinct realms expand each other’s languages, creating a new sensory experience. The project album Ancient Moment mar…

This is my ode to corn in 3 parts, all featuring corn as corn himself. There are 6 pieces composed for 7 handmade instruments, made entirely out of different parts of corn, with some thread and wood glue as well. There is a cornfield recording, taken on a day they were harvesting just under a mile or so away. And there is a musique concrete type of piece featuring field recordings and the instruments. This album was made during my residency at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, surrounded by infin…

Textures of belonging, relentlessly woven into the epigenetics, layer upon layer, building palimpsests of human existence that are both fragile and resilient, with nothing but a wobbly strand of DNA. The way our grandparents' experiences spill across our systems, the way their grandparents’ experiences formed them in the first place, like a busy cityscape humming in the background, keeping the flow, making things operate, and despite their physical peril, hearts still flicker and divulge poetry …

Recorded during a residency in Tenerife powered by Keroxen Festival and Discrepant back in 2020 - amidst the pandemic, no less -, the duo of Carlos Godinho and Mestre André return after their 'Mãe D'Água' debut on Sucata Tapes and an entry on Keroxen's Aquapelago Series through a split with tropical druids Lagoss. Mostly captured in performance through a quadraphonic system placed inside a huge disused fuel tank, with a few tracks recorded out in the open throughout the island, 'Lava Love' evoke…

The Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory (K.E.R.L.) announces the release of the third and final volume of its acclaimed anthology, a richly layered exploration of experimental sound, artistic collaboration, and the cultural phenomena orbiting the enigmatic Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom. Bringing the series to a compelling close, this volume bridges archival research, oral history, and critical reflection, tracing the roots and reverberations of a uniquely Irish avant-garde movement. The b…

*200 copies limited edition* "Our first album we made together, "The Days After", was initially released on Three Poplars in 2003. Then, afterwards in 2007 it was re-issued with a new version of the second track, "Flaxen", on Faraway Press.  After having found the earliest version of 'The Days After' in my archives last autumn, there was an excitement that grows with the beginning of something in the creative process and the sparkle of an idea that can never be recreated. Furthermore, there was …

Erstwhile presents The Actress, Vanessa Rossetto's solo album. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, designed by Matthew Revert. Double CD, six-panel digipak.

"Wovenland became a band. But we never do live shows. Our band activities are mainly editing in a studio. Our goal is to focus on acoustic experiments. No more and no less. We have been active for a total of about 10 days, including meetings, in 7 years. We are now disbanding." - Toshiya Tsunoda & Taku Unami

On Displaces, sound artist Francesco Fabris fashions a high‑dimensional cartography of memory, hyperobjects and matter, where langspil, biophonies and geophonies are folded into phased time‑space, drifting between suffocation and release in an eerily tactile sonic ecosystem.

Erstwhile presents Pictures Of The Warm South, Vanessa Rossetto's the seventh Erstwhile release, her second ErstSolo. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, designed by Matthew Revert. Double CD, six-panel digipak. Primarily focused on composing works that draw on a diverse pallet of chamber instrumentation, field recordings, electronics and a wide array of different objects, with a practice that explores each through a combination of extended and traditional techniques, Vanessa Rossetto has been working …

Aaron Dilloway returns to Dais Records with 'No Skill Comedy Mind Reading', his first full-length album since 2017, a collection of characteristically jarring, absurdist material. Marked by his signature distortions and contortions — feedback-shrouded found sounds, field recordings, and vocal improvisations — 'No Skill' collects nearly a decade of select solo work and feels distinctly in the present, a scattered product of volatility, both harsh and humorous. Few contemporary experimental artist…

Tip! Just continue as usual.   Recorded June to September '22 for a 16 channel diffusion at Bellevaux Lausanne 23 September '22 Revamped for stereo '23 All recorded and decomposed by Dave Phillips Thank you Francisco Meirino, Gwen Grossfeld, Guillermo Pizarro

Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a we…

"Ken Jacobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschac…

2009 release ** A broad survey of 14 recent pieces curated by Eric la Casa and Philip Samartzis for Project Space in Melbourne. High definition, highly processed sounds, mostly of environmental origin but made highly abstract and hyperreal. A useful snapshot. Featuring: Thomas Tilly, Tarab, Marc Baron , Anthea Caddy & Thembi Soddell, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Lizzie Pogson, Cédric Peyronnet, Philip Samartzis, Loïc Blairon, Camilla Hannan, Eric La Casa, Geoff Robinson.

1994 release ** Serbian composer born 1932 in Belgrade, Serbia, now living in Croatia, Arsenije Jovanović has been active as a theatre director and stage director for Belgrade and ex-Yougoslavia theaters since the 1970s. He additionaly composes music for theater, film and radio. His works for radio earned him many international prizes. Spanning his entire carreer as a sound composer, this CD offers nonetheless an impressive style and quality consistency. He creates his music from organic sounds …

*Front cover is always a unique print/passpartout* "A new duo from Berlin. By and featuring Hanno Leichtmann and Nils Ostendorf. Both are seasoned musicians with eventful careers who operate within very different artistic spheres. One of them, Hanno Leichtmann, is a veteran—and remains to this day a pioneer—of the electronic music scene that has developed in Germany’s capital since the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, thanks to projects such as Static, the Trio Groupshow, and countle…

You Can Can is an echoed affirmation, an album which traces song forms around silence, field recordings, and degraded analog memories. This is folk music transmogrified and mutated, as if recorded and reconstructed in Pierre Schaffer’s GRM studio.

With this new project, their fourth full-length work, Tupperwear completely departs from the "stylish" electronics and trends to delve into a profound exploration of the fundamentals of music. It involves a quest or even a game through the extrapolation of geometry into various musical parameters, encompassing classical aspects like pitch, timbre, rhythm, intensity, etc., as well as noise, textures, or the implicit mathematics in natural or irrational elements. Pentagonono delves into cosmology …

*200 copies limited edition* In 2022, Gillies Adamson Semple made a pilgrimage to the Valère Basilica in the Swiss Alps to play the oldest functioning pipe organ in the world. Built in 1435, this unique instrument is the centrepiece of this sensitive and stirring 6-track release, tracing the elemental themes of spirituality, anatomy, ecological collapse, and the nature of listening in its glacial minimalist drones. Drawing inspiration from the long-form compositions of Sarah Davachi and Kali Mal…

Tip!  The Focus Group is the recording alias for Ghost Box co-founder and well respected graphic designer and film maker Julian House. This debut album was first release in 2005 on a burn to order CD-R. Now packaged in a 4 panel digipack with the original sleeve art by Julian House that established the rules for the primary Ghost Box artwork layout.  It’s a design grid that the label has continuously revisited and tinkered with ever since. “...it often sounds like hip hop if it had been invented…

Ancient Future is a stop on an ongoing quest of sample creation, manipulation, recombination, and morphological transformation through the modular synthesizer. Densely interconnected sound matter moves between islands of respite in a sea of incomprehensibility, grasping but not yet arriving. The ancient future is a place. It is the meeting point between the light piercing through the dark, fragmented state of our present reality. This album is an attempt to materialize this place in sonic form.

Tip! Pieced together with musty samples from children’s exercise records, vintage drama, clunky British jazz and library records, this is an archaeology of emotion, an exploration of the power of not only childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Julian House’s own The Focus Group; oddly assembled sampledelic collages, stitched together from fragments of library cues and forgotten soundtracks. A beautiful, unhinged stream of consciousness that seems to prod at buried memories."Julia…

As a member of British experimental group Morphogenesis, Adam Bohman was no stranger to wayward sound experiments when recording this solo CD. Favoring acoustic sounds over electronic he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments. The standout on this Paradigm CD is a cassette piece which the artist made of candid recordings of mundane experiences and conversations, using the stop-start technique to construct a collage of text and environmental sound…

*300 copies limited edition* Penultimate Press is proud to unveil a global collaboration that harnesses earth with combined members and atmospheres of Santiago, Chile, Salsipuedes, Argentina, Melbourne, Australia and Berlin, Germany. El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics) was written and recorded by Alvaro Daguer (Glorias Navales/A Full Cosmic Sound/ETCS Records), Pablo Picco (Bardo Todol/Bolinga Everest Records), Tomás Salvatierra (Glorias Navales) and Mark Harwood (Penultimat…

"Two longer live works of the now-patented blend of sound collage, crude tape mangling and music concrete sound events executed in a somewhat slapstick manner, where everything is balanced so thin that it can fall apart at any point. First piece recorded in Vilnius, Lithuania, literally days before the world shut down. For quite some time, I thought this might be my last live show ever. I felt sad over this but at the same time the piece has a clear sound where buzzing concrete sound events evol…

"The creative process, a means by which creative work finds its way into realization, has consistently reconfigured its basic principles as the content of art has evolved. The choices we make, the decisions that make sense to us, reveal our nature and our passion to assemble the things we wish to share with others as an experience. We are offered a number, as a title for this recording, which we have seen before and we'll see once more, as Christian Wolfarth releases this second of three chapter…

Tip! "Whether we experience music as abstract or concrete depends largely on our sensitivity to the richness of perception. Common opinion – often reductive – draws a sharp distinction: music is abstract when it does not “speak,” when it seems diffuse, branching into multiple, elusive directions. It is concrete when it “tells” a story, when its sounds and structures feel familiar, graspable. Yet this distinction quickly dissolves. From a scientific or cognitive perspective, structure itself is i…

'Physique is Neil Quigley (Kilkenny, IRL) and Sam Scranton (Chicago, IL). Together they make music by any and all means. Truly, no sound or technique is off limits as they assemble compositions that combine rich, warm sonic atmospheres with musical objects of objectively bad taste. Curve Totem, for release on 4/2/2021, is their debut album as a duo. Their magpie approach to composition builds novel musical landscapes from homemade instruments, Text-To-Speech and AI voices, lap steel guitar, Able…

*230 copies limited edition* Ahti & Ahti is the duo of Finnish sound artists Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti. Operating on the fringes of the musique concrète tradition, their work combines recordings of spaces and events, beings and objects, carefully aligned in an associative way. Nokivesi (soot-water) embraces sound montage and cut up conversations alongside instrumental and electronic sound, combining the complexity of the field-recorded sounds and compositional sensitivity. Originally create…

Kepla debuts on Liverpool label Sink with new compilation “Outside Time”. Following recent collaborations with Steven Warwick (PAN) and Dialect (RVNG Intl), “Outside Time” brings productions and experiments spanning ten years together for the first time. Early forays draw inspiration from musique concrete, dub and industrial, using granular synthesis resampling from drum packs, repitched melodies and phone recordings, resulting in a collection of tracks both lo-fi and highly detailed. ‘Part Exhu…

Born April 1966, in Marseille, Jérôme Noetinger discovered experimental music under the influence of the Déficit Des Années Antérieures in Caen. He is a composer/improviser/sound artist working with electroacoustic devices. Composing sometimes musique concrete in the studio, and performing improvised music using electroacoustic devices such as: the reel to reel tape recorder Revox B77 and magnetic tape, analogue synthesizers, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, various electronic household obje…