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Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned
** ltd 700 copies on black vinyl housed in reverseboard printed sleave with printed inner sleave. Comes with lyric booklet, poster and postcard inserts ** Formed in 1968, The Plastic People Of The Universe – named after a Mothers of Invention song and heavily influenced by Frank Zappa and The Velvet Underground – were iconic figureheads of the Prague Underground, a loose collective of Czech poets, philosophers and artists considered a threat by the Communist government. Banned and jailed under …
Noise in My Head: The Actionistic Music and Art of Joke Lanz
Joke Lanz was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1965. In 1989 he created the noise music - performance, art - installation project Sudden Infant in connection with the Schimpfluch-Gruppe art collective. For more than 20 years Lanz has been one of the most prolific and profound artists working in the border zones between performance/body art and improvisation/noise. Noise In My Head documents Lanz's myriad activities and features: photos from installations, performances and actions; visual wor…
Quality Control
A giant of Scandinavian experimental music, Lasse Marhaug has been active in sound creation since his teenage years. His interests have spanned a wide range of styles: from improv jams to film sound, from humorous collages to crushing harsh noise works. This non-stop activity has resulted in a massive body of recorded work and numerous live performances all over Tellus. Besides his solo work he has collaborated with a multitude of fellow sound artists on stage and in the studio. In the everflowi…
Balls The Size Of Texas, Liver The Size Of Brazil
Opener "God Damn This Ugly Sound" is less an exercise in composition and more in locating, as it is a six-minute excerpt from a medical record documenting the sounds of various diseases. The rest isn't as obtuse, as it segues nicely into the looping guitar feedback and shrill squeal of "Blues for Sterling Hayden," which could easily be an exercise in sheer noise blast, but is instead a carefully controlled track that demonstrates just how subtle the duo can be, even under such 'extreme' conditi…
Distort Orgasm
Sometimes there is this sensation: "I knew this was going to happen." It clicked right away when Dan mentioned they had initiated a collaboration with Lasse. I have a deep respect and decent knowledge of their past works, but I could not imagine what to expect (besidesit being a first class job). Lasse is a chameleon-like collaboratorand Dan has been firmly straying from the scorched domains of harshnoise. After a long and anxious wait, playing "Distort Orgasm" reveals a work where both artists’…
The Quiet North
Back in 2006, Lasse Marhaug released an album with Joachim Nordwall from the Skull Defekts and Johannes Helden called When The Ice Is Leaving, Scandinavia Is Burning. With a title like that, the album should have been all fire and brimstone of Nordic noise: abusive, throttling, and demonic. It was not. Instead, that was the album you would expect from an album called The Quiet North; and The Quiet North is certainly not quiet. Pure brutalist noise is what Marhaug has in store for us. This wall o…
Dans Le Salon Du Nous
Since 2004, Laurent Gérard alias Èlg (Opéra Mort, Orgue Agnès) has never ceased to draw the sonic equivalent of concentric spirals and labyrinths made of cedars, brambles and guts. By constantly renewing his instrumentarium over the years, he has built improbable bridges between musique concrète and songwriting (Vu du Dôme, Mauve Zone), diagonal spoken word and wormhole (Amiral Prose), electronic incantations in crypt and blob choirs (Mil Pluton, La Chimie). The language is sometimes francophone…
The Great Silence
Recorded by Jørgen Træen at Duper in Bergen, Norway, September 15th 2003. Performed by Lasse Marhaug Produced by The Golden Serenades. Cover photo by Gunnar Marhaug. Originally released on CD by PacRec in 2007.
Virginia plane
Pressed in an edition of 300 copies. A new collaboration between these two heavy-weights, and the first in what will hopefully be an ongoing project. Composed remotely across oceans and hemispheres over the last five years, the album draws on the languages of musique concréte, dub, power electronics, free noise and at times even early Italian avant-garde composition (believe it or not). This entire work highlights the startling power of their individual approaches and the true potential o…
Fifty-Sixty
**Edition of 300 copies pressed to yellow vinyl with light green marble, in high gloss sleeve and black disco bag. ** Tip! The long-lost psychedelic album from the Incapacitants of the North! On Friday November the 13th, 2009, Lasse Marhaug and Tommi Keränen had an extremely productive day at a real-deal high-end studio in Helsinki, recording a 7” (Het Potati - released on A Dear Girl Called Wendy), a CD (Python In The Bowl - released on Freak Animal) and an LP (Fifty-Sixty - this one). An unnam…
Electro-Acoustic Works 1974-75
Composer, sound designer and curator/researcher Harold (Hal) Clark moved to Norway from San Francisco in the early 1970s to carry on his musical studies and career. In 1972 he was hired as a producer and tonmeister at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter at Høvikodden, Norway. Here he co-founded the Norwegian Studio for Electronic Music (NSEM) together with the late composer Arne Nordheim (1931-2010). Meeting with young Norwegian composers in regular salon-workshops and bringing with him the influences …
Arne Nordheim: Selected Works for Television 1967-1974
Arne Nordheim (1931-2010) is widely regarded as Norway’s best-known composer after Edvard Grieg. But did you know that he was a multidisciplinary artist and that his work inspired several of the country’s greatest visual artists? Arne Nordheim’s art extends way beyond the confines of music. Throughout his life, he also worked closely with other art forms, such as theatre, fine arts, ballet, film, literature, architecture and installation art. In 1955, a journalist asked the young, up-and-coming …
Electronic Works 1970-1973
*2023 stock* Kåre Kolberg (b.1936) is one of Norway’s foremost contemporary composers and is regarded as one of the pioneers of early electronic music and multi-disciplinarity art in Scandinavia. He has composed music for film, theatre and chamber orchestras to jazz acts such as Svein Finnerud Trio and Jan Garbarek.
Kolberg’s Omgivelser (Surroundings) was a commissioned piece made for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) in 1970. It was made as a soundtrack for a short TV-film of the sam…
Explosion Course
Otomo Yoshihide, guitar. Paal Nilssen-Love, drums. Lasse Marhaug, turntable and electronics. Recorded at Gok Sound Tokyo by Yoshiaki Kondo, 2011. Mixed by James Plotkin. Coproduced by Pica et PNL. Gatefold cover. 500 copies. Intense energy, progressive and sustained
The Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine is the March edition of Jazkamers 2010 monthly abum series. This CD is a 30 minute track with full on noise rock free jazz improv beat hysteria. Performers are the regular four piece of Gross, Hegre, Marhaug and Drønen. Beautiful artwork by José De Diego.
First
Following numerous small run releases and years of private development First is the debut CD release by Benjamin Nelson. Recorded and mixed in the summer and fall of 2015 in Oslo First represents the culmination of Nelson's live and studio practice since 2008 focused on long form, reductionistic, and near-static electronic music. First explores the perception of time, interference patterns, room reflection and hearing fatigue as primary compositional elements. Favoring textural over tonal …
Dietrichs
Simultaneously with the reissue of the "Dietrich " solo album, Pica Disk is proud to release a contemporary recording of Don Dietrich – which is also the debut of the duo with his daughter Camille Dietrich. Having grown up exposed to her father's playing since birth Camille Dietrich has been in a unique position as a musician, being subjected to a method of free playing that takes most artists years of exploration to locate. Yet as a cellist Camille has not grown up a copy of her father, and whi…
Don Dietrich
For four decades Don Dietrich has been one of the three musicians that makes Borbetomagus, a band that somewhere in the crossing point between loud rock, free improvisation and electronic noise music carved their own unique place in the musical landscape. Often overlooked and underappreciated Borbetomagus kept going like a steam train, slowly building a cult following that appreciates them for their uncompromising vision. Few bands can look back at a career with as much integrity as Borbetomagus…
Kama
A monumental 41 minute colossal single-track of an album recorded in the period from summer 2006 to february 2007 during dark nights in her studio in Oslo. Kama is mostly made from the sound of her french-horn; although if you didn't know it you probably wouldn't have guessed. Layers upon layers of distorted, processed and mangled pieces of sound form a consistent stream of sonic bliss. Within this massive sound-construction slowly shapes build into an epic climax. The title Kama hits at few int…
Polar Nights Live
Although Hijokaidan's status as noise superstars they rarely perform outside Japan. The pleasure was then ever greater for the All Ears festival in Oslo Norway to present Hijokaidan at their festival in january 2006. Polar Nights Live documents these historical and astonishing performances. Jojo and Junko performed as a Hijokaidan two-piece on the opening night of the festival, a rarely heard line-up. Their performance got such a tremendous response that they came back for an encore (Otomo Yoshi…