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Hirotomo Hasegawa : ichiriki, voice, loops. Shizuo Uchida : bass, ichigen, loops. Debut album by a new improvisation group consisting of Hirotomo Hasegawa and Shizuo Uchida. Both have a leather-bound folder full of underground back-story. Hasegawa was the lead singer of seminal early eighties Japanese punk hardcore group Aburadako (Greasy Octopus), while Uchida was a long-term member of Haino's Nijiumu medieval dream-drone unit. The group's instrumentation is highly unorthodox, placing Uchida's …
The ins and outs
This is a studio recording, and thus somewhat different in approach and tone to the group's continuous live sets; an example can be heard on a compilation from the 2003 Freedom of the City festival. Here the emphasis is more on developing specific ideas with a consistent logic than on modulating between passages of tension and climax. On the longest track, the 13-minute Absolute Xero, the logic is sure and compelling; Skzypce is more playful, with Wilkinson vocalising through his reed and Noble,…
Suitable For Framing
Reissue of this obscure Canadian album from 1975, originally issued on the A.R.C. Record label, with extended mixes and bonus material from the same period. Performed by David Rosenboom and J. B. Floyd (pianos, one in each channel) & Trichy Sankaran on South Indian percussion (mrdangam and kanjira). On April 19th, 1975, at Northern Illinois University, three musicians met in a milestone event from which emerged a unique, improvising trio with two pianos and South Indian percussion. Fortunately, …
Being A Firefighter Isn\'t Just About Squirting Water
Ever since the days of Leonin and Perotin, people have been trying to pin down that special something that makes music so unique, with Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio more ardent than most in his perusal. The lavishly packaged 5th instalment in this highly limited edition series of EP's, 'Being a Firefighter Isn't Just About Squirting Water' comprises a single 20 minute composition that is a dictionary definition of delicacy. Building upwards from spectral entities, …
3 Compositions Of New Jazz
The mid-'60s formation of Chicago's musician collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), proved a watershed event for jazz, providing a springboard for some of the next few decades' most influential performers, including the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Anthony Braxton. In many ways, Braxton's Three Compositions of New Jazz is that movement's manifesto. Seeking a new degree of abstraction and purity, Braxton opted to eschew drums or bass on…
Girls Beware!
JanuarY 2004. Two years after the highly acclaimed album “Rose-garden", the portables come up with their second full length. “Girls Beware!" starts where their previous album ended. De Portables developed a cult reputation during the years, mainly because of their many intense and always different performances. Against all recent trends, standards and expectations they do their thing; they play because they like playing. The quartet twists themselves during 11 songs a way between pop, post-rock …
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra / Sixty-Eight
For each of his compositions for prepared piano Cage created a specific piano preparation chart, setting out in meticulous detail the strings to be prepared, and the materials and manipulations to be used for preparing them. For the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), 53 tones of the keyboard must be prepared; and in this case Cage himself was astonished at the complexity of these preparations. The range of sounds is further expanded by an extra bridge installed in the pian…
Piano Works 1
Composer and neurologist Diego Minciacchi is as likely to publish a paper on motor skills as he is to compose music that mixes scientific and poetic ideas; yet this fact should not intimidate listeners new to his work, who might worry that the compositions on this 2005 release from Col Legno are too cerebral or complicated to appreciate. What they should know upfront, however, is that Minciacchi is a product of the generation of composers who absorbed the lessons of the 1960s and '70s avant-gard…
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black was an installation at LA Municipal Art Gallery as part of the COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship exhibition from 2004. The installation consisted of 2000 posters: 1000 Gold and 1000 Black. Two separate rooms were covered with these posters that were covered solid in their color with the name of the color printed rather large in dead center. At the bottom of each poster was listed the instrumentation for each particular soundtrack to the color. The GO…
The Brain Of The Dog In Section
Peaked-out duo recordings from one of the founders of the form and his ever adventurous, cello-torque-ing protégé. Recorded live in November 2007 at Chicago's famed Hideout destination, Brö and brother FLH combine for the first time ever in this penultimately intimate configuration. Although 'Braindog' (as we affectionately refer to these hypnotic tones around here) was recorded in an ultra-industrial urban warehouse district, the resulting music is über-organic, almost onomotopaeic at points. C…
Casse-tete
Composed in 1979 and edited on LP in 1984 by Amaryllis. Reissue on cd by Oral, 2008. Contrary to an electronic music delighting itself in soaring above reality in self abstraction, the concrete music of Bernard Bonnier has a down on earth hearing, and a dancing too, altough now and then out of beat. Bernard Bonnier has defined chameleon-music as: '...a mime* trying to beat its parth through the puzzle (casse-tête: literally 'head-breaker') of soliciting madness, sundowns, violence, science, love…
Das atmende Klarsein
Researching into the fringe ranges of hearing, and actually going to the limits: electronics – live or prerecorded – was one of the tools employed by Luigi Nono in pursuance of this object. In his work Das atmende Klarsein he moreover endeavored to expand the ability of listening: "Waking up the ear, the eyes, human understanding, intelligence, is what is essential today," the composer, also a politically aware man, observed in the early 1980s. Das atmende Klarsein "is a key work of Nono's final…
Bad Boy\'s Piano Music
George Antheil was not only always ahead of his time; he was also an alert contemporary and ready to take in all artistic trends of the first half of the 20th century. There was hardly a kind of music he wasn't aware of, hardly a madness he didn't take part in, and hardly a scandal he missed, or missed to cause. All his personal entanglements are certainly reflected in his compositions – and we wouldn't expect any less from him; but his continuing reputation as a genuinely unique character is ne…
Night Studies
Somewhere between Alex- ander Rodchenko, Jackson Pollock and Charles Ives: Marino Formenti's piano studies based on an instal- lation by Florian Pumhösl as a listening experience! The brilliant Italian pianist has placed compositions by Charles Ives (»Thoreau« from the Concord Sonata, the song »Tom Sails Away«, and »Study 11«) under his magnifying glass and studied them, has taken them apart, searched them for resonances, assonances and silences, and confronted the results with Ives’ own methods…
Three days of silence. The mountain of the stigmata
restocked ""three days of silence" is conceived as complete phenomenological experience of listening. i have been three days within the sanctuary of la verna on the top of a mountain called "the mountain of the stigmata" in tuscany. i've lived together with the monks recording and attending the ceremonies and the sounds of the place trying to penetrate in a dimension of pure contemplation. la verna, in latin alvernia and geographically known as monte penna, is a locality on mount penna, an…
(Old school) Karlheinz Stockhausen
This is the fourth release in the series [old school]. The first three CDs, dedicated to the music of John Cage [zkr0009], James Tenney [zkr0010] and Alvin Lucier [zkr0011] have been highly acclaimed. London's Wire Magazine wrote: 'The rigour and discipline they collectively bring to this compositions make both discs utterly enthralling, from start to finish.' The new release is dedicated to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.' 'I do not want a spiritualistic session. I want music.' Karlheinz St…
Maros at Ems (1970-1979)
Analog and computer-generated electroacoustic music and mixed pieces for voice, instruments and live-electronics, realized at EMS - the Stockholm Electronic Music Studio. (now the Stockholm Institute of Electroacoustic Music) 1970-1979. Miklós Maros was a composition teacher at the Stockholm secondary school of music in Stockholm, (1971-1973), teacher at the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm (EMS) (1971-1978), and lecturer in electronic music at the College of Music in Stockholm (1976-1980…
Sinfonía n° 1 \'Canarias\' / Tocata vieja en tono nuevo / Los e
The Sinfonia n° 1 "Canarias" is dedicated to the composer's father, an old Canary Islander aged 94 at the time it was written. He was the reason why Cruz de Castro decided to focus the composition's middle movement wholly on the Canarian Folía. This special, important form of Canarian folk music appears both in its original form and in variations: "That's the way it should be: from the simple to the complex, from the melody line to the concentration: a harmonious whole." (Cruz de Castro) The Toc…
Sugar tip
Last winter, when BLOODYMINDED was preparing to go on tour in the U.K., I was put in contact with Lee Stokoe, who was touring at the same time as us, under the name Inseminoid, with George Proctor of Mutant Ape. Not only was Lee beyond accommodating about letting us piggyback on the Inseminoid/Fecalove tour, but he was kind enough to also drive us around the U.K. for several days. I returned to the States with a thick stack of Culver CDs, which took some time to get through. I was most pleased t…
Whitehouse
There's not much in the way of commentary or anything about that, though, so either call it a wry Kiwi joke at the Yanks' expense or just something that looked nice enough to use. Consisting of six tracks of unsurprisingly varying length - fairly short or totally long - in ways The White House is Dead C as per usual and in others a bit of a diversion from the usual form. Notably, there's evidence of relatively more production - while it's hardly hard-disk billion-track digital sound or the like,…