Guitar Improvisations
For the 36th installment of our Catalytic Artist Albums series, we are excited to present an exclusive collection of improvisations on nylon string guitar by the exceptional, Tashi Dorji. Recorded over the month of August, this record showcases Dorji's most recent work and explorations on the guitar. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
Tashi Dorji
Tip! Early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.
Pre-Existence
*2023 stock* Limted 2022 restock, last copies. Originally released in 2006. Tetuzi Akiyama has been a major player on the free music/improv scene in Tokyo for over 20 years. Pre-Existence first came out on CD as a part of the great Wooden Guitar series from Locust. Akiyama's playing here is one of a minimalist approach, discovering and investigating the empty spaces between each note. He does not follow the Takoma guitar school style of finger-picking, but instead invokes a far more warped primi…
Electric Solo
*2023 stock* "I started the “Electric Solo” project in 2008 – the same year I recorded my first pesonal album. A lot has happened since then; Concerts, personal albums, collaborative albums. Many tracks from these projects became part of the “Electric Solo” repertory and were performed live in an improvisational manner, reflecting the ambience of each night, the venues and my own mood. I chose to record tracks that were already part of my personal discography, along with some musical themes that…
Tabulatura (Volume 2)
Tabulatura is a 2008 indeterminate composition for sixteen pre-recorded guitar parts and computer with custom software. It is conceived as a system to generate different acoustic patterns. The Volume 2 documents eight pieces recorded live at Palazzo Castagna, Città Sant'Angelo, Italy, in November 2020. The album was recorded on two-track, directly on hard drive, without DSP and overdubs.
Neuter
Sofie Herner (Enhet För Fri Musik, Neutral) returns with Neuter, the first proper album since the Gitarrmusik III-X LP released on Förlag För Fri Musik back in 2017. Neuter was recorded between 2018 and 2021 and is the culmination of a very distinctive and unmistakable sound Sofie has developed and refined during close to 10 years now. The music of Leda is based on primitive guitar loops of various lenghts, loops that intervenes and creates peculiar rhythms and subtle harmonies. Slow-burning pro…
Fragments
Rachika Nayar’s fragments is a collection of sonic miniatures constructed from guitar loops and in the familiar comforts of her own bedroom. First released as a limited edition cassette by RVNG Intl’s Commend THERE imprint in 2021, fragments (expanded) adds an entire new side of previously unreleased music to the collection, which has been newly mastered by Rafael Anton Irrisari.
While growing up and developing a relationship with the instrument and her capabilities, using delay pedals to improv…
Grain Live
"It’s unfortunately rare for an improviser, especially in a solo context, to concentrate on one idea, a single angle of attack, and to work that idea deeply, to discover hidden jewels within a relatively “narrow” range and further, to surprise the listener with unexpected divergencies. Agnas, in the three selections from a live event presented here, does this beautifully. On ‘1992’, he places his guitar on his lap and approaches it as a kind of dulcimer, generating a strong and captivating rhyth…
The Prospect
*2023 stock* Giuseppe Ielasi is back following his 2020 release Five Wooden Frames. There he returned to the guitar exploring shifting and modulating loops and the interplay of tuning and drifting to create five stark yet ethereal pieces. On The Prospect, Ielasi sticks to solo guitar but this time in a much more pure form. Each of the two pieces consists of parallel electric guitar lines recorded simply through a tube amplifier free of studio tricks or heavy editing. Like much music written over…
Otomo Yoshihide Live in Shenzhen
Tip! *In process of stocking. 2022 stock* Over the years, Otomo’s music has spanned across Free Jazz, Noise, Free Improvisation, Sound Art, popular music, film scores, and compositions for large amateur ensembles. Carrying the lineage of the Japanese Free Jazz movement that developed in the 1960’s, Otomo has exploited the sonic possibilities of both the electric guitar and turntable. He is one of the key figures who defined a now internationally recognized genre of Japanoise. His band Ground Ze…
Outside
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Sturdily rooted in Michigan but at home anywhere she steps, Shelley Salant is a wearer of many hats. Anyone who's worked in even the outer reaches of underground music and D.I.Y. culture in the last ten years has probably run into Shelley, maybe when she booked their band a show, or had them by the radio show she's done tirelessly for almost a decade or possibly when she passed through town playing with Tyvek, Chain & The Gang, The Vitas, Swimsuit or one of the m…
On the salt of a seaside
*Limited edition of 100 copies. In process of stocking*
Pierre Gerard : guitar _ improvisation
recorded & performed 2019
mastering : Giuseppe Ielasi
Airs
*2022 repress. Limited edition of 600 copies.* Over the 23 years since Loren Connors’ Airs was first published, it has drawn a thick circle of fans. Gently recorded to cassette tape in 1999, (with wonderfully subtle multi-tracking), Airs is comprised of a series of brief electronic guitar poems. Intimately composed with the patience and purposeful hesitation we have reverently come to expect from Connors. Lyrical melodies recur in different forms throughout the LP, as shifting figures in a dream…
Bridge Variations
On Bridge Variations, the now Stockholm-based English guitarist Jon Collin changes his guitar for a keyed fiddle. Mostly recorded to tape under different bridges around Stockholm during 2021, partly for the sound but also because of their importance to the geographical make-up of the place, the album is like a modern take on traditional Swedish folk music made by an outsider looking in. The sound is pretty much a continuation of the palette explored on 'Dream Sequence, End Of Summer', Collin's c…
To Sail, To Sail
One of the most profound solo statements to date from a musical master who has been crossing musical borders for over three decades! Concentrating exclusively on the acoustic guitar, Fred Frith stretches himself and the instrument like never before, performing with the eloquence and grace of a master in peak form. With a prodigious technique and elegant sense of maturity he draws upon a lifetime of study and experience to bring together influences as diverse as classical, blues, folk, gypsy and …
Trasluz
Amidea Clotet's Trasluz is the result of research into the sound and textural possibilities of the electric guitar treated as a source of sound amplification. Clotet creates spontaneous, raw and vivid soundscapes, which call for the importance of the present moment, of knowing how to listen to what surrounds us and to ourselves.
Bonobo Beach: Some More Guitar Solos
*Limited edition of 500 copies.* Subtitled “some more guitar solos,” Bonobo Beach was German guitarist and instrument inventor Hans Reichel’s fourth and final record of solo guitar works. After this record, Reichel would turn much of his attention to the bowed wooden-tongued instrument he created called the daxophone. Reichel recorded the six tracks at his home in Wuppertal in April, 1981, and in the process made what might be his masterpiece. These are not just some more guitar solos. Concentra…
Solo Acoustic Guitar Improvisations II / III
*200 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* "These performances are all about the process, about exploration and they more than once reminded me of a quote by Derek Bailey about the creation process as a kind of jigsaw puzzle: “Emptied out of the box, there’s a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colors, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything— intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture o…
Dwa Dni
*In process of stocking* Amgen presents Rhodri Davies's Dwa Dni. Titles borrowed from the works of Lisa Jarnot, Ed Luker, Nathaniel Mackey, Redell Olsen, Sun Ra, Nisha Ramayya, Sarah Riggs and Leslie Scalapino. Telyn clun MOGIC / MOGIC lap harp.
Dead Cities Lie Buried / Lift Comrades, Lift Comrades
Marble, lasagne, lego, moon, liquorice, sap, weightlessness... These are all words and their associated sensations that come to mind when I think of the music of Société Etrange and more precisely to this brand new album mysteriously named "Chance". To tell the truth, it's lucky that this trip exists.The German groove of Can, the ghostly haze of Phew and the industrial elasticity of African Head Charge. All this and more. Société Etrange is an entity, it's a name and a sound. A compact and preci…