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Red Morocco
Someday someone will write a history of modern music that will free us of the false dichotomies such as high vs. low, improviser vs. composer, classical vs. everything else… …The written materials Joe passed out to the musicians for Red Morocco was minimal, sometimes more visual than musical, but always modest. Everyone was seated in the same room, in a circle. The music heard on this recording occurred late in the day, when Joe felt a certain clarity was occurring……The results are an elegant,…
THIS PLACE IS DREAMING
An attempt to convert Brussels' sonic reality into music. Mutated environmental sound materials gathered in Brussels, remixes of interviews with inhabitants and extracts of installations are flanked with atmospheric compositions made with sounds from other cities and countries.
Garage
Smalltown Supersound's "Superjazz" offshoot delivers this much-discussed darkcore jazz fusion album led by sometime sonic youth collaborator Mats Gustafsson, here rummaging through improvs and cover versions like a garage band picking up trumpets, double bass and drums for their heavily skewed but massively charming workouts. Sticking a hairy a tongue out at the polished slickness of the Bad Plus, The Thing offer up cover versions of tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and Peter Bro…
Fluxus
Collected here are three radioplays from three Fluxus affiliates, Philip Corner, Alison Knowles, and George Brecht. Each piece is built from a simple element and features a text recited by the author and sometimes others. Corner's piece is an homage to Erik Satie, built from a sparce two chord piano figure and a recitation that teeters along the stereo field. Knowles' piece, which she delivers along with Brecht, Hanna Higgins, and Jessica Higgins, is built from a long list of bean names on top o…
Quatervois
Finally the overdue and long awaited re-release of IOVAE’s Quatervois which came originally as a limited CD-R release on Drone Disco. IOVAE, native of Cincinnati is a true alchemist, working out lo-fi tape collages and simple four track assemblages. He uses unusual sound sources and layers these into rather dense and industrial etudes of found sound. Iovae (Ron Orovitz) has been playing with sound in the culturally insular confines of Cincinnati Ohio since circa 1988. Initially, tape & turntable…
Musical Paintings Vol 1
"A unique collaboration between a musician and a painter: Sean O'Hagan/The High Llamas and Jean Pierre Muller. The Musical Painting can be described as a large picture composed of wooden shapes that fit into one another. It produces its own soundtrack but with a distinctive novelty - it is the viewer who, by playing with the moveable parts of the painting, is in fact the conductor of the piece. This unique fusion between vision and sound is the fruit of the collaboration between Sean O'Hagan's '…
Silmät Sulkaset
On the second full-length release by Kiila, the band gently conjures up mildly otherworldly tunes with a peaceful air and feathered eyes. What was once free-pop played by two is now free-folk played by seven. The language of the songs has reverted back to Finnish, and the human voices rest on a warm texture of sounds from an array of acoustic and electronic instruments. Carefully-arranged songs alternate with those improvised on the spot, all bearing the mark of a handcrafted article.
American Landscapes 2
American Landscapes 2 ramps up the intensity slowly and with the clear objective to display power and a thorough sense of control. The first 13 minutes come at you sounding like a forest fire churning with stored energy. Underneath this unfurling force are composed parts that are revealed through close inspection. Once the energy breaks a trombone/saxophone duo stops the presses and summons a simple chamber horn interlude with other brass walking in. The piece wanders a bit into more open free p…
Monotonprodukt 07 27y ++
Considered to be Becker's masterpiece, the second album (1982) is the more subterranean, moodier one, and it's also the one that I personally prefer. Not to stress the Suicide connection, but at times the tracks really have a gentle Suicide feel softened with a Kraut expansiveness (slowly ever-shifting) that doesn't completely erase the angst underneath. "Water" has an undulating bass synth melody that is later connected to a higher pitched, repeating chirp and some distant, dubbed-out, spoken, …
Oboe Concertos
The oboe more than suited Maderna's partiality for clear structures and sensual-concrete sounds. It was not without good reason that at a time when the supply of music dedicated to the oboe was anything but plenty, Maderna wrote, not one, not two, but three concertos (besides several other works for oboe) for this "nasal" sounding member of the woodwind family. The first oboe concerto (1963) seems almost classical in its character, in the interplay of oboe and orchestra, or involving other instr…
Action Music
Giacinto Scelsi’s relationship with the piano is interesting and contradictory. For no other instrument has the Italian composer and poet composed so many pieces; to no other instrument does he seem so closely attached, both personally and biographically; and no other instrument disappeared so abruptly and finally from his scores as the piano, the European showcase instrument. With the piano, we can follow the break lines and develop-ments in the musical thinking and works of Giacinto Scelsi, wh…
Gran Torso / Salut für Caudwell
In 1988 the first issue of these recordings of Gran Torso and Salut für Caudwell was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics' Award); and neither compositions nor recordings have lost any of their value up to today. In Gran Torso, Lachenmann tried to explore the “mechanic and energetic conditions of sound production”. This resulted in singular, unusual sounds which simultaneously exploded the barriers of audibility, playing technique and sound as such. The guit…
Jugendlieder - Songs From The Youth
Berg's early lieder owe their existence largely to the young composer's great interest in literature; nevertheless it was his friend Hermann Watznauer, who actually inspired him to embark on composing his first lieder around 1900/01. And Berg enjoyed himself so much that he continued along the same lines until 1903, completing another 30 lieder; even Arnold Schönberg was essentially fascinated by them: "Berg's earliest compositions, however clumsy they may have been, already reveal two qualities…
Live At Blå
First live document and fourth album overall from a band that mixes free jazz ecstasy with garage rock intensity. Even with no electricity, they make a hell of a noise and the album is an explosion of energy. Recorded at the Bla in Oslo.
Musica Viva 11
Today, the piano concertos by Béla Bartók are regarded as works of classic modernism and are considered suitable even for conservative audiences. Musica Viva, the concert series for contemporary music in Munich, included the piano concertos in their program back in 1957, a time when it was by no means a matter of course to hear this music in established concert halls. The man at the piano was one of the greatest of his trade: Géza Anda, a fervent and uncompromising advocate of Bartók's oeuvre, w…
Aether
RESTOCKED! Another remarkable performance from a group that has no peer and belongs to no genre or movement. Minimal in an essential and structural sense, they succeed where more formal attempts founder, in re-forming subjective time in a way that is genuinely gripping and as far from theoretical as great interpreters can get. Applying extraordinary technique in a remarkably discrete way, they here transfigure a single chord over a long duration, imperceptibly arriving far from their st…
Songs About Fucking Steve Albini
A collection of psychedelic love songs paying tribute to all things analog. Similar to older Kid606 releases like PS I Love You, GQ on the EQ, The Soccergirl EP and Why I Love Life. This album was carefully constructed to be the soundtrack for the peak 72 minutes of your next trip. The songs all linger on too long but just long enough, you hear voices you can't understand, but you will know what they're saying. Every track has its distinct identity and direction to completely throw you from…
Electrostatic Deflection
"Electrostatic Deflection" is a new industrial-music masterwork, created through collaboration with Maurizio Bianchi, and Israeli musician Maor Appelbaum. It's represents Bianchi's more extreme direction... a sample of whats comming in the future from the historic Italian composer. Amazing impact, immense slabs of industrial sound in motion. Sweeping vistas of intense static energy, storm-fronts moving across the stereo field, an acoustic tidal wave approaching landfall, breathtaking deep and da…
Hearing Metal 1
Performer: Greg Stuart (tam-tam). 'The 60-inch (Mikrophonie) tam-tam is a large piece of metal, a proto-sculpture. Brancusi might have altered it: rounding and tapering the edges, making an oval instead of a circle, polishing the surface into smooth gold. The tam-tam is also a vast sound landscape-an instrument that makes noise at the slightest provocation. A resonance is created just in the act of walking past the instrument or breathing on it ... that is, if your ear (or a microphone) is close…