A Shape Of Time / Strands III / Duo / Still Life
This 1983 collection on ALM compiles what is generally considered to be one of Jo Kondō's last linear pieces - "A Shape Of Time" - which he describes as a "duo" for piano and orchestra. The classification is appropriate since the overall concept is focused on basic dynamic arc applied to individual pitches or sound-blocks. In this way each of the individual 'linear' sound-events is started out by the group of orchestral instruments which play crescendo part of the dynamic shape - piano to mezzo …
Mr. Bloomfield, His Spacing = ブルームフィールド氏の間化
A masterpiece album released in 1976 by the Japanese contemporary musician Yuzuru Kondo, whose main contributions to the sombre labyrinths of post-1960s musical modernism is something that the composer conceptualised as 'linear music' (or line and shadow as "Sen no ongaku' is sometimes translated). Then there's beautiful piano solo puzzle "Sight Rhythmics" that's a bit like Messiaen's total serialist one-off “Mode de valeurs et d'intensités". Plus semi-concrète essay "Summer Days" where muffled…
Works Of Uncommitted Crimes
*300 copies limited edition* Works Of Uncommited Crimes is the debut solo album of Danish artist and composer Christian Skjødt. The album consists of two parts created and recorded live at Tonometer Studio January 2014. Both parts are long slow developments. Each of a certain hypnotic and metallic character, creating a multilayered labyrinthine world. Here a massive amount of tiny sonic details lead towards and into different landscapes of immersion. Defined by both textural sharpness and softne…
Dissolution & Suspension
*300 copies limited edition* The 4.1-channel composition 'Interdependencies I' (2018) by artist and composer Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm, derives its conceptual and sonic foundation from a meticulously crafted analog electronic 8-voice instrument, purposefully designed to probe the realms of electrical interdependence. In a paradigm akin to a zero-sum game, this microtonal device comprises eight oscillators engaged in an intricate struggle for the finite electrical resources within the intercon…
Fourteen-Seven-Ten-Three²
Extremely rare 2006 CD of monumental and radical John Cage late compositions by the Barton Workshop.
Space As An Instrument
** Gatefold sleeve, Obi ** One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one's internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment.…
Heartbeats
*300 copies limited edition* Arbitrary presents the second in a series of 10" vinyl remix collaboration releases by Danish musician Mads Emil Nielsen and Chromacolor. Side A features Heartbeats, a composition Nielsen originally made for a radio soundtrack. The track is derived from loops and granulations of sine waves and pulses from Nielsen’s modular synth, which he later combined with recordings of synthesized bass and layers of organ-like tones. On side B is a remix by German sound artist and…
Sound Strategies
*2024 stock* Ambient music according to Brian Eno, the non-musician who made it a genre of its own, before and better than so many boring epigones. As many as 15 tracks are on the CD, with some rarities and collaborations by Daniel Lanois, Jah Wobble and others.
Loré Ipsum
A piece for voice(s) an dead electronics with Loré Lixenberg (mezzo-soprano). Edition of 500 copies. Lore Lixenberg is an English mezzo-soprano that lives in London and Berlin. She has worked with contemporary composers such as Stockhausen, Aperghis, Ligeti, Earle Brown, Wishart, Acquaviva, Turnage, Phill Niblock or Pauline Oliveros, as well as poets or artists like Stelarc, ORLAN, Heidsieck, Lemaître, but also pop bands like Radiohead. She has released the first complete recording of John Cage…
Interdependencies I
*100 copies limited edition* The 4.1-channel composition 'Interdependencies I' (2018) by artist and composer Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm, derives its conceptual and sonic foundation from a meticulously crafted analog electronic 8-voice instrument, purposefully designed to probe the realms of electrical interdependence. In a paradigm akin to a zero-sum game, this microtonal device comprises eight oscillators engaged in an intricate struggle for the finite electrical resources within the intercon…
No Soy un Robot
For countertenor (Miguel Quiñones), parrots (Charro Cadena, Pistaccio Lopez), different voices & dead electronics (Kurzweil, Moog and smartphone apps performed by Frédéric Acquaviva).
Music for Diego Marcon’s works
Starting with the film Monelle (2017), music has been a fundamental part of almost every work by the artist Diego Marcon. Federico Chiari’s compositions emerge from his ongoing dialogue with the artist. The music and the imagery take shape together, riffing off one another as they are interwoven to define both the structure and the emotional temperature of the pieces. The collaboration between Marcon and Chiari revolves around the deconstruction of codified genres, such as the aria, popular jazz…
Fear Of The Object
Tip! These 4 CDs comprise a three-year time span of work between video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen and percussionist Chris Cogburn. The initial concept informing the project is to examine the differences between the resonant frequencies and wild harmonics of physical objects and the exactness of sine tones and just-intonation. An additional layer of video is produced live using audio signals as raw video voltages, thereby transforming sound into video in ways far beyond the classic parameters of vo…
Treatise on Musical Objects
*2023 stock* The Treatise on Musical Objects is regarded as Pierre Schaeffer’s most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer expands his earlier research in musique concrète to suggest a methodology of working with sounds based on his experiences in radio broadcasting and the recording studio. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also on philosophy and the relationship between subject and object, Schaeffer’s essay summarizes his theoretical and practi…
In Search of a Concrete Music (Book)
*2023 stock* Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music (À la recherche d’une musique concrète) has long been considered a classic text in electroacoustic music and sound recording. Now Schaeffer’s pioneering work—at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d’être of “concrete music”—is available for the first time in English translation. Schaeffer’s theories have had a profound influence on composers working with technology. However, they extend …
Music after the Fall - Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Book)
*2023 stock* Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to in…
Western Music and Its Others Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Book)
*2023 stock* This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant exampl…
Margrethe Fjorden
*100 copies limited edition, hand-numbered in printed box* Recital presents its first ever video edition of "Margrethe Fjorden". Produced in 1996 by Fluxus artist Eric Andersen, the citywide Intermedia event included performances from Alice Damas, Willem de Ridder, Larry Miller, and other artists from around the world. Inspired by the mysterious tale of Queen Margrethe the First (1353-1412), the multi-sensory event was comprised of three major themes: UNION, WOMAN, and FAITH.
Over 4 hours of vid…
Méandre(s) – Une expérience de fabrication collective spontanée (Book+CD+DVD)
A sound and music experience along the Dordogne, with the company Le Chant du Moineau and the Ensemble UN orchestra, accompanied by a group of invited researchers (with a composition by Lionel Marchetti, as well as extracts from conferences, on CD and a film by Camille Auburtin on DVD).
The Room Above
The Room Above was recorded in the church of the Helvetic Circle in Genoa, in the 2020 lockdown. I played the church's organ in the present moment, with no score, over four consecutive days, possibly inspired by long sonic walks in the surrounding mountains and along the Ligurian coast. The intrinsic architectural sonic spatial identity of the building entered the recordings. The cumulation of sonic spaces - those initially present, those of field recordings, those of future concert venues, and …