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Bringing up baby
rare UK album from 1981. Musique Concret were an obscur London duo composed by Jim Friedman & Michael Mullen with a short lived musical history : their sole album 'bringing up baby' was originally released on Steven Stapleton's label United Dairies and there is also one short track on compilation. This is a great experimental power electronics works with the use of many delay and echo, tape recorder manipulations, collages, rhythms box, noise, and others studio trickery, naturally close to Nurse…
Arrowhead
Brooklyn noise herald and Hospital Productions label-head, Dominick Fernow presents his first release for the Editions Mego label. Fernow has been an active instigator in the power electronics and noise genre for well over a decade, with 100+ releases issued so far, usually limited and covering all known formats. Known in particular for his harrowing live performances where he uses his voice, amps, microphones, coins, tools, suitcases etc., to create a brain-bashing journey through mangled, nega…
Action Jazz
The Thing pretty much tore my living room to shreds on the release of their last album 'Garage' with its rock 'n roll take on free jazz. Their rendition of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's 'Art Star' especially defined their sound perfectly with a distinctly punk rock ethic applied to what to most sounds like truly out-there jazz. It's hardly surprising that the band is made up of Norwegians then, the country that has birthed some of the most continuously exciting free jazz to date and continues to with lab…
Homotopy To Marie
Though Homotopy To Marie is the fifth album by Nurse with Wound, Steve Stapleton has said that he considers it the band's true debut because it's the first one he created by himself. Slowly created over the course of a full year's worth of studio sessions (Stapleton having booked one six-hour block per week for 52 weeks), Homotopy To Marie is no less unnerving and experimental than Nurse with Wound's previous albums, but it's far less chaotic. Stapleton created the album's five songs (four on th…
Endokraniosis
This is probably one of the most clinical releases of Maurizio Bianchi's current discography. Together with Siegmar Fricke from Germany four very complex soundscapes have been produced that on the one hand show similarities and relations in sound to Maurizio’s early releases and on the other hand enter new territorities of clinical sound-excursions. The four long tracks contain metallurgic ambiences, painful postoperative distortions, quiet endoscopic sections and pulsating, radiant elect…
I Love My Organ
The bulk of the material on Tom Recchion's second album for Birdman was recorded just after the completion of Chaotica in the mid-'80s, and sounds like a natural continuation of that record (despite the absence of any Esquivel). Recchion is assisted on some tracks by noted musician, composer, author, journalist for The Wire, and music curator David Toop (himself a collaborator with Eno, Jon Hassell, John Zorn, Talvin Singh, Adrian Sherwood, and Scanner). Recchion labored on I Love My Organ for y…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
A conductor enjoys the privilege of being able to reconsider his attitude to musical works over and over again. The composer Boulez adheres to the same maxim: of his own compositions he regards only very few as being finished; most of them are, to him, "work in progress." The first two pieces on this collage CD were actually withdrawn by Boulez after their premiere as he wished to think them over again. Later on, Polyphonie X (1951) in view of its extremely strict serial procedure appeared to hi…
Opus 3.1
special price offer: Opus 3.1 consists of 20 tracks divided into five acts. Each cut--or scene--represents a different percussion instrument. Some are quiet, others cacophonous, but even the slow, stark resonance of a ringing gong maintains a sharp level of intensity. The sole drawback is inconsistency: After being soothed into a reflective trance state, the listener is occasionally jolted by the strident opening clang of the subsequent cut. Ghost Stories, a 1-track, 68-minute live recordi…
Un Peu De Neige Salie
Guenter's assiduous compositions favor extremely subtle variances in electro-acoustic crackle, subsonic rumble, and subliminal frequencies exploring the limits of the audible spectrum through invisible digital edits. The title of his landmark debut album, released in 1994 and reissued through Table of the Elements in 1996, translates as "a little dirty snow," an apt description for Guenter's naturally impressionistic minimalism. UN PEU DE NEIGE SALIE opens with "Untitled I/92," a degenerating ma…
Summons Of Shining Ruins
Summons of Shining Ruins is a project of Shinobu Nemoto, who works with electric guitar, tape delay, old rhythm machines, stompboxes and 4-track-recorders. No computer or software is used to record this work. And you can hear that in every tone.
Turning Dreams & Shifting Harbours
The Kidnapping Europe project was initialized by the artists Christina Clar (Paris, France) and Peter Jap Lim (Berlin, Germany) in 2001. Based on the "Europa Myth" (Zeus kidnapped the phoenician princess Europa and brought her to a continent which now has her name), the project aims to approach the topic of migration and the dreams, hopes and visions of migrants, in particular, from a contemporary perspective. In addition to their own work, which resulted in an installation that made its debut a…
Pre-zoic cellways
Jaap Blonk: voice, powerbook, effects. Cor Fuhler: EMS synthi-AKS, turntable. Nice meeting in the electronic series of Kontrans.
Musica Viva 06
"Musica Viva 06" is another excellent release from the German Col Legno label, which specializes in the avant-garde. This disc includes three live performances -- the original 1981 recording of "Ais," featuring the incredible baritone voice of Spyros Sakkas, a new recording of "Troorkh," a trombone concerto, from 2000, and (drumroll please...) the world premiere of "Anastenaria," also from 2000, with the inimitable Xenakis champion Charles Bornstein conducting. As it turns out, "Metastas…
The Disintegration Loops
First widely available release on Basinksi's own label (other releases on Raster, Idea, Durtro, Headz, etc), from early 2003. This series of 4 Disintegration Loops has become one of the true phenoms of post-9/11 experimental music -- totally legendary stuff at this point. "William Basinski is a musician, composer, auteur who has worked in experimental media for over twenty years in NYC, expanding the boundaries of the aural landscape. In 1978, inspired by minimalists such as Steve Reich…
Welcome Abroad
Vicki Bennett, under the People Like Us moniker, returns from several collaborations for her first solo album in several years. Stranded in the United States for an extended period after the Icelandic volcano eruption blocked her British homeland's airspace, Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing forelsewhere, from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. Volcanically marooned in Baltimore and NYC, Bennett utilized some of her "free" time to…
Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell\' op. 41 di Arnold Schoenb
"All my works always start out from a human incentive: an event, an experience, a text in our lives leads to my instinct and my conscience and wants me to bear witness, as a musician and as a man." This is how Nono, in 1960, described his motivation as a composer, the incentive inducing him to speak up through his music. His opus 1, the Canonic variations on the series of op. 41 by Arnold Schönberg, is based on the twelve-tone series used in Schönberg's composition; it actually takes effect in t…
Eclipse
Originally released in 1975 as an LP on Iskra Records (ISKRA-001). 'First session 1: Gradually Projection'. 'First session 2: Gradually Projection'. 'Second session: Mass Projection'. New Direction Unit are Masayuki Takayanagi: electric guitar. Kenji Mori: alto saxophone, flute, recorder. Nobuyoshi Ino: bass. Hiroshi Yamazaki: drums, percussion. Recorded by Mikio Aoki in Tokyo, March 14, 1975. Includes liner notes in English by Alan Cummings.
The Crackle Of My Soul
'Written and recorded by Gordon Sharp at Belmont Shore (ca), mid-levels (hk) & kobe (japan) 2001-2009. Mastered at Piethopraxis, july 2009. Dedicated to Matt Kinnison (1965-2008). Cindytalk have been active since 1982, which we won't go into here (a quick Google search will satisfy that need). During The 80s and 90s Their sound was defined by broken down rock structures and abstract piano ambience. A third side to Their coin emerged at The dawn Of The 21st Century with a turn towards obscure com…
Lift
'It was on a night when sleep simply would not come, not matter how long I sprawled on the grass or how many pages of my book I leafed through. The black shaggy 'thing' expelled all the breath in its body. Phu phu phuu. And as it did so, something glowed softly at the crown of its head. Ahh, what a beautiful light! I should put a hat over it to stop it flying away. The black shaggy thing took his favourite hat, the one he had hung from a tree branch, and popped it onto his head. Perfect. Hirotom…
Myrrh
this mindblowing album was originally released in 1972, when Robin Williamson was at the time still a member of the Incredible String Band, the ensemble he started with Mike Heron in 1966. These ten songs are all Williamson originals, with the exception of"Strings In The Earth And Air" by Ivan Pawle.Where his band's recordings were then getting increasingly electric, this is a return to a more acoustic bearing. This set includes some gorgeous, if overlooked, songs from the vast catalogue William…