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Jar'a
Jar’a is a surprising album in which the prepared Sardinian guitar, without any overdubs, achieves the tonal range and sonic pressure of a post-rock ensemble. The suite in six movements brings together avant-garde and ancient traditional singing rituals, evoking wide open spaces, combining underground worlds and the most ancestral Sardinia. Jar’a is a concept album, with three-dimensional sound, in which Paolo Angeli expresses an innovative contemporary language, inlaying it with fragile, emot…
A Place of Solace
Cinematically-scoped synth music with an intimate personality; the debut from Jachym Vandenbeele aka Aponogeton for Stroom. RIYL Heldon, Klaus Schulze, Eduard Artemiev scores for Tarkovsky. This album is the result of some musings on what drives us in life and how we come to terms with our place in the world. I wrote it around the time I was finishing my philosophy degree. I had also come to a point where I wanted to make music that was more personal, emotional and conceptual than before.We are …
Reihen
12k is very happy to welcome Uwe Zahn, aka Arovane, to the roster. Arovane, a well-respected artist in the field, hailing from within the German countryside, has been active since the early 2000s beginning with releases on City Centre Offices and DIN in the heyday of the IDM and microsound years. He has since gone on to release work with n5MD, Pure Magnetik, and A Strangely Isolated Place, among others. With Reihen he takes his characteristic pointillist synthetic structures and impeccable sound…
Elliptical Gamelan
Astasie-abasie is a project of Ian Andrews which evolved out of a long running performance collaboration with Garry Bradbury. The project focuses on the amplification of small sounds (following the approach of John Cage, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor) through the capture of sounds generated by small objects by way of contact microphones, home constructed cartridges, miniature piezo microphones and conventional microphones. Various devices are used as constraints in order to distance any performin…
Plasma Splice Trifle
Debut collaboration between these like-minded English underground titans, perfectly mixing the long-form pop eccentricities of Grumbling Fur with the free electric sound of Astral Social Club to produce four epic and memorable tracks. The music is dense and layered, with hidden hooks, haunting vocals, unidentifiable electronic shuddering, delicate ambience, etc. Challenging but completely accessible and beautiful stuff. After a brief vocal declaration of purpose, Back To the Egg rides a motorik …
Summer Mix
The Automatics Group's dance-pop deconstruction, 'Summer Mix' is one of the uncanniest computer music releases of this decade - first issued as a limited CD edition by Entr'acte in 2011. In the time since then it’s quietly become a bit of an iconic reflection for a post-rave generation, presenting a non-trivial nostalgia trip that somehow sounds like a digitally diffused, skeletal take on Gas, Basic Channel or Ross 154. It was created by applying a mathematical process known as a discrete …
Autre ne Veut
"Olde English Spelling Bee is one of those labels you can implicitly trust to provide you with the most brilliantly weird music. Their latest missive is a self titled shocker from Autre Ne Veut, a moocher from the same circles as Oneohtrix Point Never and all those weirdo Brooklyn types with an uncanny line in subtly skewed pop queerness. Seriously, this is one of the strangest, most jarringly unique records of the year, and we love it. At heart it's an incredible pop album with traces of Prince…
Profondo Rosa
Big or profound sensations from small gestures which are carefully arranged. Using a mixture of sacred and profane, or classical and prosaic sound sources, knitted into intricate, fleet-footed compositions that virtually spring into the ear. Profondo Rosa is composer Ailin Grad’s first vinyl album following years embedded and loved in the Argentinian experimental music scene, with past treats on labels Krut, Sun Ark, Orange Milk Records and her own label Abyss, devoted to ‘connecting Latin Juke …
Night Songs
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Night Songs is the latest record from Awakened Souls, the Los Angeles based husband and wife duo- James and Cynthia Bernard (Marine Eyes).
In the Spring of 2021, they found a good night’s rest was more important than ever to help them through pandemic days of schooling kids from home and balancing work and life. After going on an evening walk, James and Cynthia would write in their bedroom studio and test the evening's songs out for sleep.
Even prior to being tog…
Music from Organ
On his new EP ‘Music from Organ’, producer and live musician Giulio Aldinucci offers up four tracks of layered and meticulously-crafted ambience. In his own words: “The EP explores the interaction between the pipe organ and the sound environment, in terms of architectural space and soundscape. Every single sound of this work is created from pipe organ recordings using different techniques related to sound reflection, from granular processing to filters that “carve” the sound emulating the phonem…
Crystalline Tragedies / The Procession - Distant Motionless Shore
For this collective release, Martijn Comes and Giulio Aldinucci neither worked in the same studio together, nor did they share and exchange materials. The two pieces on this LP were composed privately and without any sonic input of the other. And yet, it is far more than just a 'split'. Both pieces were loosely based on a pair of opposites first proposed by Nietzsche: The moral codex of society, as represented by the Christian church. And the realisation that only by surrendering completely to e…
Kaivajaiset
*300 copies limited edition* Students of Decay presents "Kaivajaiset" by Finnish composer Niko-Matti Ahti. Best known for his work alongside his partner Marja as Ahti & Ahti, Niko-Matti has been an active participant in the Finnish underground since the late 1990s. "Kaivajaiset" is his first solo recording and was originally conceived of as an installation. Part horspiel, part musique concrete, it is a piece of music that draws comparisons to the work of pioneering avant-garde composers such as …
Lowlife
Eclectic selection running from midnight jazz moods to swinging house and dusted downbeats. As much as Los Angeles gleams in the global mind as a gateway to dream fulfillment and televised wealth / fame amalgams, it’s equally a desert of disappointments. Hence the dead-end yoga cults, under-the-bridge tar dealers, valley burnouts, Inland Empire night-stalkers and seas of destitute Eastside lowlifes. This vibe is central to Afterhours’s languid, nocturnal musical vision, which has evolved from sl…
Aestum
** Limited Purple Vinyl. Wide front-back artwork and inlay print by Emma Pryde ** Aestum’s self-titled debut album is an in-depth journey into supreme and tranceformative soundscapes. Oscillating around the apex of spacious power ambient and drone, the compositions recorded during 2020 combine monolithic electronica with decaying fantasies and slow-motion euphoria. The imagination for the album was inspired by the idea of panortosia (universal reform) as described in old scholar books devoted to…
Future Moons
*2023 stock* The trio of Kieran Adams (sampler, drum machine, drums), Matthew “Doc” Dunn (keyboards and electronics), and Andy Haas (reeds and electronics) is a subset of Toronto spiritual jazz practitioners The Cosmic Range. Where their parent-group tends to anchor itself with a firm pulse, the trio veers into various flavours of abstraction. Some pieces furnish nervy ambient waft, whereas others are more gestural—sometimes violently so. Meanwhile, on the title track, a synth bass ostinato lays…
Acolytes
Acolytes is the self-titled debut album by London-based enigma D. Shan. Following up a puzzling (yet well received) 7" on The Pheromoans' label Savoury Days, Acolytes sees Shan develop his sound into areas of greater fidelity, complexity, and a unique non-linear approach to songwriting. Reference points could be drawn towards Art Bears, the Cold Storage scene, The Residents, and the Ralph Records roster, but they would all fall short because ultimately Acolytes is a highly unclassifiable record …
Two Brothers
Ultra limited release on Camera Obscura's Camera Lucida spin off for small run, special projects. Contains the final recordings of Boston's folk meets space rock ensemble. 3 tracks are a rich brew touching folk, psych, Kraut & prog. Housed in black & white printed cover. Limited 300!
The New Today
*2LP Edition of 700 copies, includes a free download of the album dropped into your account* Dave Huismans (A Made Up Sound) returns under his 2562 codename with the oneiric ambient/concrète dancefloor states of 'The New Today', his 4th solo album in this guise. Where its predecessor, 'Air Jordan', also for his When In Doubt label, took inspiration from the arid landscapes of the Middle East, 'The New Today' draws upon ideas sketched out whilst 2562 was in New York, late summer 2013, and was lat…
Polar Force (CD + Book)
* Matte laminate sleeve, insert card and artist book featuring essays and photographs from the Polar Force project. * From Eugene Ughetti: as Philip Samartzis was preparing to leave for his second Australian Antarctic Division residency, he invited me to lunch to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a new work. He recounted his first experience on the ice, where the surrounding landscapes seemed to articulate avant-garde percussion works of an epic scale. On this visit, he wanted his fiel…
Golem
** Remastered edition, with new standard glossy jacket ** Originally released in 1974. German trio Sand's first album, Golem, is a legendary work of cosmic psychedelic genius. There is something magical and inexplicable in creation, and Sand absolutely manifest these mysterious phenomena. Storytellers, musicians, shamans, geniuses -- Sand were known, at the end of the '60s, as P.O.T. (Part of Time). Then Sand -- Ludwig Papenberg, his brother Ulrich Papenberg, and Johannes Vester -- developed a m…