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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…
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 '…
Speak no more about the leaves
This cd contains 3 pieces inspired by Arnold Schönberg's 'The Book of the Hanging Gardens' and in particular the poems by Stefan George that Schönberg used as lyrics. Track one uses Steve Roden's voice reading/singing part of the text as the only sound material. Track two uses the vowel structure from the text as a score for striking five tones on a small chime. Track three uses samples from the Schönberg work as well as Roden's voice singing the same text as track one.
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.
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,…
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…
Deluge & Sunder
Edition of 350 numbered and signed copies packaged in deluxe gatefold sleeves. A CD edition of what every DANIEL MENCHE fan considers his finest work to date. Remastered and expanded with a bonus album Sunder, a follow up to Deluge. Deluge & Sunder is actually a surprising departure from previous explorations by Mr. Menche as the tones are generated by real live instruments (bass guitar, accordion, piano and melodica) as played by a real live Menche. The rumbly counterpoint that so well defines …
Klaviermusik
The sovereign and immediate approach Lachenmann takes in his Fünf Variationen über ein Thema von F. Schubert (1956) lends Schubert's slight Deutsche Tanz D 643a special and almost heroic flavor. But only five years later, Lachenmann had already travelled a considerable distance since those days as his Echo Andante of 1961 shows. Like Wiegenmusik (1963), the piece has been shaped by Lachenmann's studies with Luigi Nono whose influence and inspiration are clearly audible. A perfect example of the …
Foldings
At 7pm on a cold Tokyo evening in January 2002, Taku Sugimoto met Mark Wastell at the exit to Yoyogi underground station. Taku had with him his acoustic guitar and a cello that Mark was to use for that evenings concert. They walked the short distance to Offsite, more or less just around the corner. Once inside, Mark began to change the cello strings and Taku started to arrange the recording equipment. Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakumara arrived shortly after and busily set about install…
Ray Night 1991-1992 Live
First ever CD by this legendary and ultra-obscure Japanese psychedelic rock group. Kousokuya are from Tokyo, have donated some spectacular tracks to the first two volumes of the Tokyo Flashback compilation series on the PSF label, and self-released an extremely ltd. LP in 1991. The band has been around for quite some time; I originally was under the impression they formed around 1984, but was recently informed that an edition featuring Nanjo and Narita from High Rise existed going back to the l…
Aerial # 3
This release is the third and last in the three-part Aerial series. Tod Dockstader is one of the all-time great figures in the world of musique concréte composition, with his "organized sound" works from the 1960s being amongst the most radical ever conceived -- in league with Schaeffer, Henry, Stockhausen, and Varese. Aerial is a rare new work in the realm of shortwave radio, from one of America's most experimental composers. Volume 1 was released in March 2005 inside a slipcase. Volume …
Sun Awakens
Ben Chasny has busied himself releasing a solid run of outsider folk records for some time now; ‘The Sun Awakens’ is his eighth full-length outing and thankfully it shows no signs of Chasny letting his quality control wane. As he explored on his last Drag City release ‘School of the Flower’, Chasny has again employed a handful of collaborators to fill-out his unique sound with percussion and odd instruments – yet this doesn’t distil the fact that the record is totally his own. "The Sun Awakens" …
Zombie Fela Kuti And Afrika 70
Includes liner notes by Jacqueline Grandchamp-Thiam, Rikki Stein and Mabinuori Kayode Idowu. Digitally remastered by Pompon (Translab Paris, Paris, France). With the inclusion of Nigerian master musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti's incendiary 1977 single, "Zombie," "Mr. Follow Follow," a typical anti-authoritarian exhortation, and a couple of hitherto-unreleased live cuts from the 1978 Berlin Jazz festival, ZOMBIE finds the iconoclastic singer and bandleader at his electrifying best. The title track, …
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…
Untitled #188
Back in stock! 'Mutated, composed, recorded and mastered by Francisco López at Mobile Messor (Madrid, Bucharest, Montreal), spring-summer 2006. Original source environmental recordings done in Montreal: between 2000 and 2006 by Francisco López, and in April 2006 by Hélène Prévost, Steve Heimbecker, Louis Dufour, Tomas Phillips, Chantal Dumas, Aimé Dontigny and Mathieu Levesque, within the project 'Montreal Sound Matter'; conceived and directed by Francisco López; commissioned and organized…
Steve Reich: Tehillim The Desert Music
Two Reich masterpieces, definitively recorded, featuring a crystalline, high-energy Tehillim with the ONLY RECORDING of the newly revised version of The Desert Music. A must for Reich fans. For freshness and focus, the new recording of Tehillim surpasses the 1981 recording by Mr. Reich & his own ensemble.
3 Liederzyklen
In the three song cycles of this recording, Wolfgang Rihm stays faithful to the text and its meaning while paying close attention to melodic line. In choosing to do so, Rihm has a deep lineage in the great tradition of Romantic art song that stretches back to the distinguished names of Schönberg, Berg, Brahms and Schumann. Approaching the text both from the perspective of the singer and from that of the accompanying pianist, Rihm is able to reach tremendous heights of expression. While the eleve…
Electronic music
Iannis Xenakis is without a doubt one of the major figures in the development of music in the 20th century. In 1957, he joined Pierre Schaeffer and others at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and it was there that Xenakis composed his early works for electronic tape. Xenakis' distinct sound is already apparent in 'Diamorphoses' (1957) which incorporates sounds of distant earthquakes, car crashes, jet engines, and other 'noise-like' sounds, and 'Concret PH' (1958), based on the s…
Chamber Music
It is with great shrewdness that Uroš Rojko has almost maxed out the unusual juxtapositions of an accordion with a viola and a piano, respectively. His fondness for the accordion may have its roots in his folk music past. On the present recording, however, these roots are not in evidence. Even the Tangos speak a language of their own, which Rojko creates by juggling characteristic fragments of tango, thereby reducing them to their essence. Even the first bars of his pieces exhibit the correspond…
Untitled (3rd Album)
Reissued! Rising from the silence, shaking the muck of level-Z rock and roll detritus from their feet, Royal Trux returned to action in October of 1992 with an untitled album, their third. It had been two years since they'd vanished into the negative zone with Twin Infinitives, an ultimate left-turn that appeared to have no endgame. For Untitled, Royal Trux strung together eight pieces of varying vintage that clearly communicated their rock and roll desires with the most direct approach to playi…