Back in stock
Issue #17
Canadian cartoonist and Bananafish #17 cover artist talks with Robert Dayton about his hallucinatory style and techniques, and the effect on his work of education, interior decoration, comics, Fluxus and other abstruse art movements, and mental illness. On the CD: All-Star Schnauzer Band "No Onkyo"
Summer Salt & Subway Sun
The expanded / re-issued version of "Summer Salt & Subway Sun" Ltd. edition of 400 in beautiful box with bonus-album "Wildcat Fights." The first 400 copies are packaged in a deluxe full color book bound box, 16 page lyric booklet , full color book bound cd cases and the bonus album "Wildcat Fights". Eyeless are an earful. Messrs Bates et Becker have miraculously come trembling through the decades musically unscathed. And yay though it is within the office of many bands to have precedents in…
Metal box
Incredible 3 CD set spanning the years from Text of Light's first gig in 1999 through to 2005. This is the project of Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, William Hooker, Christian Marclay, Tim Barnes, Ulrich Kreiger and DJ Olive. They perform live to a backdrop of Stan Brakhage films, and no set is ever the same. The first 1000 copies of this lavish set will be issued in a special Metal Box with the 'ToL' logo embossed on the lid, as both a tribute to, and a pastiche of PiL. The first 1000 copies will also…
Oscillator
Mindblowing reissue! Another hot date with the history of Italian new wave: Neon, in the Year of Our Lord 1979, with Marcello Michelotti on vocals, accompanied by Stefano Fuochi. At the mixer: Maurizio Fasolo and Massimo Michelotti, soon to be known as Pankow. Halfway between hard goth and elegant neo-Futurism, with the determination needed to metabolize and mould into something new, the influences of Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. Oscillator is the missing link bet…
Experimentalstudio Freiburg 25 Jahre
This Three-CD box set celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the world’s most renowned studio for electronic music. Who didn’t experiment there and “make the seemingly solid boundaries of the doable tremble”? Stockhausen, Nono, Ferneyhough, Minciacchi, Andre Richard, and Nunes did – to name only a very few. The reissue of this box set is dedicated in gratitude to Andre Richard: he will be leaving the institute after this year.
Meets the Clear People with Mystery Gypped...
Last copies from a dead stock, out of print... Technically the full title is No Neck Blues Band Meets The Clear People with Mystery Gypped Live At Ken’s Electric Lake, but that seems unnecessarily long to me. In short, it’s NNCK with members of Sunburned Hand Of The Man. Over the course of the two discs the few inevitable moments of dullness are obscured by glorious passages of spiraling rhythm, spaced hypnotics and trance grooves. Woods evoke a primal sense of refuge and sanctuary which the ba…
Split Sides
Merce Cunningham's Split Sides (2003) captures the iconic modernist choreographer's most radical use of chance procedures. As the title implies, the piece is divided into two parts. Each 20-minute part features one of two options for the different creative elements of the piece: set design, costumes, lighting, music, and choreography. The order in which each element appears during a given performance is determined by an onstage dice roll before the performance, captured on full screen for the li…
Inversions
Latest from Albany guitar duo whose six string damaging has often shred the guitar beyond recognition. For this outing, however, Century Plants plug in, and allow their guitars to be guitars. Psych raga, melting icebergs of roaring drone, metallic strum and clang, oceanic melody and even a helping of pastoral song melody separate this from previous smash ups. Hardiman and Hare create these hypnotic states from the ground up, building their sound out of pure improvisation. Oh yeah, the guitars do…
Stormcock
Without question this is Roy Harper's best studio effort. Sure I can think of some excellent compilations and collaborative output from this legendary folk/prog/rock artist to be reviewed at another time but even the general critics have to agree in Stormcock being right up there in the vintage category. Four lengthy quality tracks make up Stormcock. Released in 1971 at the same time as Led Zeppelin IV and Pink Floyd Meddle, the quality of material compares favourably and comes very close in man…
Odd Clouds
Picture disk, with artwork by Chris Pottinger & Jamie Easter. Recorded between 2004-2007 in Detroit, Ferndale, and Hamtramck, Michigan. Performers: Chris Pottinger, Jamie Easter, Heath Moerland, Glen Morren, Chris Sprague, Matt Smith, Noah Eikhoff & Free Wade. Their 1st LP that came out a couple of years ago, was among the best things I had heard and seen in the last few years. So I didn't hesitate to get in touch with them. They kindly brought some odd clouds at the Qbico U-nite I did in 2007, …
Variations For Piano & Tape
Comprised of one 44 minute track, Variation #9 'Pantelleria,' this archival release is one of my all-time favorites of the piano and tape variations from the early eighties. Using a lilting piano melody on a small loop, the requisite magic happened in the recording process when this particular loop would randomly slip along the play head revealing an extraordinary counterpoint (in reverse) on the other side of the tape. To me, this piece evokes a lazy Arcandian summer idyll, and will alwa…
Phantom Broadcast
Following the records made in collaboration with Francisco López and the instrumental ensemble Zeitkratzer, John Duncan returns to solo work and to exploring further the sound source he's always preferred, shortwave. We know nothing about the actual radio transmission that Duncan picked up on 18 April 2002 in the course of a single recording that gave life to this work. Only shadows remain, taking on the aspect of bells, resonating into infinity, together with reverberations and apparent choruse…
Aerae
**last copies** Kassel Jaeger lives and works in Paris. He’s a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) and his album is a weave of improvisations executed on various instruments (koto, rebab, positive organ, Coupigny modular synthesizer), captured and then treated as if they were field recordings. It’s about reducing the instrumental gesture to simple expressive material, shaping it while loosing control over it, letting it grow until there is no more readability in terms of ways of p…
Scalpel
Aidan Baker has tried his hand in many different areas of music and it’s always amazing to here the outcome, as more often than not the results are excellent. There have been records that dabble more in psych, kraut, ambient, drone, and so on. However here on Scalpel, Baker has combined a familiar ambiance within his body of work with folk music for something that is loosely being dubbed as his “folk/drone” album. I really didn’t know what to make of that at first. I suppose a descri…
Repercussions
This is Robert Hampson’s 2nd solo album under his own name. Released as a special Stereo CD and 5.1 Surround DVD. Répercussions : An Acousmatic multi channel piece commissioned by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris for a performance the Akousma festival, diffused on the Acousmonium speaker system in 2011. Recordings of percussive intruments of all kinds - Piano, Drum skins, Gamelan, Metal grates etc are treated and manipulated to form a dense nonlinear or non rhythmical narr…
Perpetuum Mobile
estocked, reduced price: Perpetuum Mobile is the result of a uniquely schizophrenic 'open source' compositional process: the UK's finest collage composers (collage-posers?) Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) uploaded files to a shared server, downloaded and processed each other's work, and flung the resulting fragments back at each other. The result is an interpenetrating audio-collage so intricate that neither party can recall who did what to whom. So far, so avant-garde; but w…
Point of Convergence
Trapped on an ocean of disparate languages, sound gravitates towards meaning, escaping the obsolescence of mother tongues by denying the slow decay of time. In the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, God punishes the tower builders by scattering them across the earth, unintelligible to each other. As they departed their blissful prison of same-think, they became drunk with new songs, washing down their newfound 'auditory cheesecake' with sectarian babble. In as much as their speech had be…
Zweifarbige Gesten
Beautiful debut full-length album for Jennifer Veillerobe, a french-german musician, co-curator of senufo editions and one half of ‘eselsohr ’. The CD is centered around a minimal sequence of sonic events, alternating between modular synthesizer patterns / textures and simple acoustic gestures captured with a portable digital recorder. realised without any processing or overdubbing; the cd is an attempt to define a narrative using nothing but sharp edits and careful sequencing of non-homogeneous…
CULTURES ÉLECTRONIQUES 18
Bourges 2005 , Concours international de Musiques et d'Art sonore Electroacoustique
Devil's Music
2 CD edition of Nicolas Collins 1986 warped electronic work, with bonus material from a 1987 cassette-only release, plus a video and PC & Mac software to create your own Devil Music! "Devil's Music" and more! We presents the vinyl and CD reissue of Nicolas Collins' live radio sampling masterpiece, originally released on vinyl in 1986, served up in all its stuttering glory, a time capsule of the mid-80s New York City airwaves, acclaimed by Philip Sherburne as "an …