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Isolated Agent / Stranding Behavior
**Full-color picture disc, released in an edition of 233 copies. 2021 Stock ** Much of Matt Shoemaker's recorded output prominently features the use of field recordings (see his "Tropical Amnesia One" CD), but in this case he has eschewed such grounded measures and has instead sculpted a two-part puzzle which seemingly exists on some other plane(t). Layer upon evolving layer of sonic phenomena is still the methodological trademark, but the content is almost entirely electronic, lending a great d…
The Way Things Go
** 515 copies ** Here, finally, is the gorgeous presentation that astronomy domine Rick Reed's music so richly deserves: Two black vinyl LPs, pressed on 180-gram virgin vinyl, with full-color labels, inside black poly-lined sleeves, housed in a matte-finish full-color gatefold jacket adorned with Reed's vibrant and fantastically evocative paintings. Included with each copy of this set is a full-color download card featuring access to high-quality MP3s of the complete contents of the vinyl record…
Wattle
** 270 copies ** Elevator Bath's series of picture disc LPs (each record being adorned with full-color artwork by the recording artist) comes to its conclusion with a top-notch new release from the great Masami Akita. Wattle is a new, two-part composition featuring Akita's traditional soup of unidentifiable metallic clanging, crushing feedback, jagged white noise, and various effects. It does not disappoint. There are no drums, no guitars, no vocals; just scorching electronic mayhem of the highe…
Milchreise
Transport rushes through all sorts of unholy rituals and improvised excesses – from Tanz um den Melkeimer to the Ekelzentrum and on to the Traumbaum. A Space Odyssey without rules or certainties, apart from the filthy power of an uproar of etheric synthesizer washes and motoric drum pulses. On their Milchreise, they boldly stimulate cosmic regions of your brain that no band has stimulated before (probably apart from Amon Düül, Ash Ra Tempel and Boredoms). Milchreise is their thundering, …
Neu! 86
Neu!'s notorious fourth and final album is finally given a full and official issue, to be known henceforth as 'Neu! '86'. Following the untimely death of estranged bandmate Dinger in 2008, Michael Rother relinquished his uncompromising stance on the album, and with the consent of the legendary drummer's heir, he returned to the original master tapes in 2009 in order to rework the elements of what was formerly known as 'Neu! 4', delivering a remastered, remixed and in part, brand new studio album…
Krishnanda
2012 reissue, long out of print. Krishnanda is an album in the truest sense of the word – a spiritual, experimental psychedelic Brazilian masterpiece from start to finish – Produced by the artist himself in the CBS studio with arrangements Joppa Lins (codenamed Pacheco Lins ) and the endorsement of Hélcio Milito (then in the position of Production Director of the label), Krishnanda is a pearl of MPB and features poetic lyrics mystical perspective under a different linguistic structure.The sound…
Augmented Studies
* 2021 Stock * "When I imagine, as I sometimes do, that evolution were possible, Complexity is not its goal, but perhaps the safety net for a possible Immediacy. This opens up the possibility to exercise sufficient safeguards in an ever finer woven net of abstractions ? if not to escape directly ? to at least be able to risk a glimpse through the netting: a glimpse unfiltered through abstraction, signs, predetermined patterns, a glimpse of unaltered reality." - Peter Ablinger
Sexo Puro
* 2021 stock * Nobody who attended the first performance of Sexo Puro is ever likely to forget it. On that October afternoon, the conciliatory power of this work, which Maria de Alvear sees as a “meditation on inner goodness”, came into sharp collision with the irreconcilable powers that sometimes gather at contemporary-music festivals.
It was probably not even the theme of sexuality that so profoundly disturbed a part of the audience at the 1998 Donaueschingen Festival, even though it is seldom…
Section
* 2021 stock * The structures of Chris Newman's music are apparently simple, like his music pictures: large, thick dots of notes, but a lot of space in between: "The raw and the cooked" (Roland Barthes). He himself likes to cook well and with pleasure. Just his lamb chops, for example. He only puts them in a hot pan with oil; there is also chard, just pulled out of the water, but also more complicated things: coq au vin or bœuf bourguignon.His music has a strong physical structure, is quasi carn…
Dedicatorias
* 2020 stock * Dedicatorias is a series of 60 sound works each lasting 1 minute which were largely accomplished between 2013 and 2015. The list of dedications is neither exhaustive nor can it be. It is subjective art which comprises very different techniques, influences and materials: sound remnants, illuminated in their confrontation, metamorphosis and combination which bring up to date and question the bearer and media. Radio is the paramount reference.
In these miniatures, there is a place fo…
De Puro Amor & En Amor Duro
*2021 stock* What is one to make of Maria de Alvear’s two long solos for piano, De puro amor (‘Of pure love’) and En amor duro (‘In hard love’), both composed in 1991. The scores themselves, if one decides to start from here, are completely perplexing. Pages and pages are marked with hastily scratched notes, sometimes repeating themselves dozens of times. Little priority seems to have been given to rhythm, dynamics or articulation; even less to the notational conventions such as barlines, spacin…
Angelus Novus
*2021 stock* Angelus novus is the third opera by Madrid composer Jorge Fernández Guerra. This time, he draws on a selection of texts by Walter Benjamin, which he uses to create a dialogue of sorts between a male character and a female character, who could be an alter ego or perhaps an angel.
The dialogue appears to transpire during the final moments of the character’s life, which may be reminiscent of Benjamin’s final moments at the Spanish border as he fled the Nazis.
Angelus novus premiered a…
ENIAC Girls
Seventy years ago, computers were as big as swimming pools and were programmed by country girls. ENIAC, the world’s first fully electronic, vacuum-tube-based universal computing machine, sported a weight of 27 tonnes and used 18,000 vacuum tubes for calculating. And, each day, at least two of those vacuum tubes gave out. When this machine was presented to the world public in 1946, six young women, most of them maths students from the rural Midwest of the USA, had spent three years inventing a me…
Flores
**2021 stock** Flores, like any other work of Maria de Alvear, deals with the ideal of inner freedom. This is not a mere claim, it is manifested in the shape of the piece itself. Written in the author's typical mixture of composition and notated improvisation, the text leaves a certain scope to the seven instrumentalists as to the elaboration of the rhythm and at times also the intonation. The score has almost no directives for the parts of the two singers: what and how the singing is performed …
Nine unfinished Symphonies
The Nine Unfinished Symphonies were conceived as one entity. They are written in my musical native tongue; the musical grammar and idioms with which I have become so familiar that I can converse in them spontaneously, without thinking, so that I can devote my full attention to what I actually want to do. It appears that we need narratives, such as the ‘sacred’ number nine with symphonies, or the concept of the Unfinished, which stands in sharp contrast to the fragmentary or the ‘uncapitalized’ u…
Live
Patty Waters is a visionary avant-garde vocalist and composer, best known for her groundbreaking 1960s recordings for the legendary free jazz label ESP-Disk. Captivated by the music of Billie Holiday, she sang with Bill Evans, Charlie Mingus, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock before coming to the attention of Albert Ayler, who introduced her to ESP-Disk's Bernard Stollman. The rest is history.Recorded with pianist Burton Greene, Waters' haunting 1966 debut Sings juxtaposes a side of hushed self-com…
Molochville
Br'laaB is the moniker for the studio works of Brecht Ameel (Razen), consisting on the one hand of themes from Ameel's songbook for the Acid Boogie Quartet, on the other hand of tape collage pieces based on recordings of found audio, ultra-fi sampling, degraded vhs, skipping cd's and sandpaper vinyls. Combining influences that range from Slint to Raymond Dijkstra and from Tape to Peer Raben, the pieces here were assembled and recorded after hours while working on commissions for contemporary da…
Pathological Curves
To sonically modify sound, not as a composerly or listenerly injunction but as a condition of its possibility: such is the task of Elizabeth Hoffman. Hers is not merely a music of the "verb" - that composers "do" something or "perform" something on the sonic. Hers is an "adverbial" music.
Above all, adverbial music modifies - sound, yes, but more fundamentally the space in which sound appears and the temporality that it solicits as it vanishes, always. Adverbial music, reticently and generously,…
Wave Piano Scenery Player
Wave Piano Scenery Player consists of several artifacts brought into a single structure: large black oil paintings on paper sheets dividing an automatic grand piano in two parts (sounding body, keyboard); tree pieces of music hamonically linking the 88 keys of the piano by combining them with mirotonally tuned sinewaves; a subwoofer/loudspeaker reproducing the elctronic tones; a pianist and a computer, both acting as performers.
The time-based form is deivides into threee parts, in which Sabat c…
Painted Cakes Are Real, Too
When you are listening to his pieces and are completely at ease, they offer the listener the beauty of pure sound: I believe this also applies to his likeminded friends. Even when and if they are of a continuous narrative type, they just create the right situation to listen to sounds. As the title reveals: Painted cakes are real, too. The beautiful sounds are repeated in order to remain purely sound. This repetition does not build up a narrative, it becomes more complicated and excited not in or…