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Safe as Milk - 50th Anniversary Edition
Captain Beefheart's debut album, originally released in 1967, is the most accessible and pop-inflected from his entire catalogue. Still, "Safe as Milk" is a very strong and heavily blues-influenced work but it also hints on many of the features that would later become the trademarks of Captain Beefheart.
First Utterance
Official 180g reissue, from the original master tapes no less, of one of the most insane (and influential) experimental folk records of all time. This was Comus. Super dark themes and nightmarish visions abound in this total one-off of a record. First Utterance was, and still is, “difficult”. Fortunately today an appreciative audience exists for “difficult” stuff like this.Kent-based art students Roger Wootton and Glenn Goring had played acoustic covers of Velvet Underground numbers in London fo…
Twelve signals
New CD from German sound artist Christina Kubisch on Semishigure, a similar exploration of sound & silence as the first one, Diapason (SEMI 002). On Twelve Signals Kubisch used original miner bells from a German mine to produce an hour long piece of bell tones. Several electrical bells were hit with small hammers each giving forth a sequence of clear bell tones that hover in the air. This live recording was made in the St. Matthaeus-Kirche in Berlin: halfway through the recording the original ri…
Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise
Fly or Die II. Bird Dogs of Paradise is the much-anticipated follow-up to composer, trumpeter, and (now) singer Jaimie Branch's debut Fly or Die, which was dubbed one of the “Best Albums of 2017” by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NPR Music, WIRE, Stereogum, Aquarium Drunkard, and more. Written (mostly) while on her first European tour with Fly or Die in November 2018; and recorded (mostly) in studio at Total Refreshment Centre and live at Café OTO in London UK at the end of that tour, Bi…
Requiem for Jazz
Composer, clarinetist, singer and educator Angel Bat Dawid announces the release of a new work, Requiem For Jazz. A 12-movement suite composed, arranged, and inspired in part by dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s 1959 film The Cry of Jazz, the album is a wide-ranging treatise on the African American story from one of its most astute narrators.
Itself an incisive critique of racial politics in the USA, The Cry of Jazz draws formal comparisons between the structure of jazz music and the African Ameri…
Stalker / The Mirror
Back in print ! Edward Artemiev's re-recording of his scores to Andrei Tarkovsky's classic films Зеркало (Mirror) (1975) and Сталкер (Stalker) (1979), reissued on 180-gram vinyl. When Artemiev recorded these scores in Moscow in 1989 and '90, there were no legitimately available releases of the original soundtracks. Artemiev chose to fill that void himself with these recordings, released on Torso Kino in the Netherlands as part of a 1990 double-LP set also containing re-recordings of Artemiev's s…
Spiritual Noise ___ Rinascimento
Huge Tip! *15 CD-R Box Set + 100-page Artist’s Book. Edition of 199 copies* “Spiritual Noise___Rinascimento” (renaissance) took an entire year of self-isolation in My Cat is An Alien's secret HQ called Alien Zone up in the Western Alps to be conceived and created -- between 2021 and 2022, in the midst of a reality still plagued by pandemic, we spent our lives discovering new existential meanings projected into the deepest core of still-unknown space-time dimensions -- flowing through the spiral…
Kolokoksta
Last copies** Edition of 200 ** Born in 1989, Johana Beaussart’s background lays in the contexts of fine art, initially film and animation before being drawn toward the creative potential and complex meanings carried by the human voice. For much of her career, the Paris based artist’s output has remained within a practice more closely aligned with performative action and sound art, focusing on orality, the structures of discourses that feed a collective memory and a history of speech, illusion, …
Brazil 84
Brazil 84 is from Phil Niblock’s series “The Movement of People Working.” 16mm, unedited long shots, carefully framed to compress single movements, shot in rural and urban settings, capturing people in their working environments, men and women using their hands and body to an eternal working choreography that seems tuned to the microtonal universe of Niblock’s music. All these images are timeless, they could have been shot today, in the ‘60s or even earlier in the century. All these images…
Les Grandes Répétitions
Two films, part of a series made for French television in the mid 1960s, of concert rehearsals. In the earlier film it’s Stockhausen’s Momente that’s being rehearsed (with long sections of performance) interspersed with KS speaking about himself and his work and the thinking behind his work. Just buy it. It’s completely exceptional, in every way. Stockhausen himself is both eloquent and profound, and speaks as he composes, with thought behind every word. His intensity at work, which is gripping,…
The Weather Pieces
The set of The Weather Pieces are reflections on the perception of meteorological phenomena. The listener is immersed in a hybrid sound world, as the line between the live performer and the computer generated propositions becomes blurred. The musician follows a score that leaves room for interaction with the computer’s ever-changing proposals. The works also use the performer’s voice, using spoken texts to convey inner thoughts and feelings. Les si doux redoux for basset horn grew out of an…
6 Pieces for Gamelan Slendro
For this recording project, the fearless French musical collective ensemble 0 (pronounced “zero”) began a new kind of collaboration with the Swiss percussion ensemble Eklekto and Gamelan Oksitan — this last the traditional Javanese ensemble of gongs and metallo- phones based in France. Their transcultural bridge has foundations that go back to Claude Debussy’s fascination with the radiant tones of gamelan music that he heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Yet neither Debussy nor many other sympat…
Stries
Bernard Parmegiani (1927–2013), the grand old man of French electroacoustic music, did not write much music for tape with live performers. Among them is “Stries” for the unusual combi- nation of three live synthesizer players and tape. Until recently, “Stries” had not been played live for some 30 years. This is the first complete recording, only part of it had been previously released on LP on the INA/GRM label. “Stries” was written for the three synthesizer players of the Paris- based electro…
The Complete Cello Works
"This album collects for the first time four of the most important works from Horatiu Radulescu’s later period, all composed for cello, and all performed by his widow Catherine Marie Tunnell. Radulescu and Tunnell began working together almost immediately upon meeting in 1995. By the time they were married in 1997, Radulescu had already composed for her two of the pieces on this disc (the solo Lux Animae and the cello sonata L’Exil Intérieur), and revised and rededicated her a third, older work …
Negoum
The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Frances-Marie Uitti and Ayman Fanous spent ten minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. eastern, improvised vs. through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says: “Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphase…
Complete Piano Works
This release brings all of Morton Subotnick’s piano music together on one album for the first time, along with four first recordings, all supervised by the composer.Liquid Strata is an important work in Subotnick’s oeuvre. Here the electronic component is what he calls “ghost electronics,” and this is the first of 11 Ghost Pieces. In these works, Subotnick sought to address technology in a way that highlights rather than compromises the inherent features and strengths of acoustical instruments. …
Dispersion
"Working with forces unknown to me has always been an exciting challenge,” says Elliott Sharp, “especially when those forces are in the form of younger musicians, highly skilled and enthusiastic.” For his work with the musicians of the Veni Academy, he chose three previously composed works that would be easily adaptable to a large ensemble whose instrumentation was not the result of prior design plus one newly composed for the occasion. The chosen pieces were based on well-defined processes that…
Kurzwellen
"The performers in Kurzwellen react to the completely unforeseeable events which they receive on short-wave radios while performing on their instruments. But this is not improvisation. Stockhausen’s score instructs them how to transform what they hear: how they imitate and modulate it, make it longer or shorter, how to rhythmically articulate it, higher or lower, louder or softer, darker or more playful. Whether they should play and as solo, duo, trio or quartet, etc.Though not so familiar now, …
The Early Immersive Music of Joan La Barbara
**Milestone recordings. Joan La Barbara's controlled experiments into the limits of the human voice took her beyond music** Joan La Barbara is one of great figures in the history of the American musical avant-garde – holding equal standing as an innovator, composer, and performer. She has defined the field of extended vocal technique for the better part of half a century, pushing our understanding of the sonic possibility of the human voice – drawing on its primal root, and thrusting it into the…
Broken Line
Alvin Lucier (b.1931) is the great American poet of acoustic phenomena. He has a keen sensitivity to the way objects vibrate, the way sound waves travel to our ears, and to the way our brain processes those vibrations. Trio Nexus is a Berlin based ensemble specializing in New Music. Carbon Copies seeks the recreation on musical instruments of sounds recorded in the environment. Here, the musicians prepare the piece by making their own 15-minute recordings 'of any indoor or outdoor environment.'…