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Blue Monday
Reading Group is very happy to announce the release of Blue Monday, a new LP from Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. The LP is the result of the first live collaboration between the poet/artist Miller and the cellist/improvisor Kanngießer, recorded at London’s Cafe Oto in January of 2023. Kanngießer’s searching, intensive cello lays an amorphous terrain beneath passing fragments of Miller’s poetry (from her 2022 book of the same name from Joan Publishing), billboards dotting the interior freew…
Personal Problems OST
**250 copies** Reading Group is proud to present the first-ever issue of Carman Moore’s beautiful soundtrack to the “meta-soap opera” Personal Problems (1980). Starring Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (writer, culinary anthropologist, and one-time member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra), Personal Problems was the result of a collaboration between Ishmael Reed, Bill Gunn, and Steve Cannon. Side A of this LP presents Moore’s original score as it was recorded in New York City in 1980. Side B contains improvisations …
Stegla
Originally presented as a sound installation at the Buskerud Kunstsenter in Drammen, Norway, Joakim Blattmann’s Stegla is based on sound recordings of small movements in trees and of the insects living inside them. In the installation, these recordings were controlled in real time by bioelectrical signals from the trees themselves and then amplified through the trees via surface transducers. For this release, the recordings have been processed with electronics and tape machines to bring out the …
Tone Science Module No. 7 (Cause And Effect)
Tone Science sub-label, from DiN records, continues to explore the world of modular synth music. Following the success and critical acclaim of the first six Tone Science compilation albums,
DiN label boss Ian Boddy has collated another nine tracks from musicians of varying backgrounds working in the realms of modular synthesis. One of the things that is so delightful about artists working with modular synthesisers is the sheer variety of styles on show. These instruments more than any other can…
The Last Moments Of 1923
Konstruktivists was formed by Glenn Michael Wallis in 1982 out of the ashes of Heute, a kraut rock influenced trio using electronics as well as conventional guitars and bass. Around this time -- in the late 70's/early 80's Glenn Michael Wallis was heavily involved with Throbbing Gristle, the U.K. pioneers of 'Industrial'. The first Konstruktivists vinyl album A Dissembly was issued in 1983. This was quickly followed by their seminal LP Psykho Genetika after signing to the newly-formed Third Mind…
South from Here
Winter Family is a duo made up of Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine. They met in Jaffa, Israel in 2004. Their self-titled debut (Sub Rosa, 2007) offered minimal music played by Xavier on pipe organ, harmoniums and piano backing strict spoken-word texts chanted by Ruth. Their second album, Red Sugar (Sub Rosa, 2011) was highly praised by critics (The Village Voice, Liberation, Haaretz, Pitchfork). Winter Family then composed soundtracks for dance shows, films and advertising (Chanel, EU). They col…
Signaling
**2020 stock** Cellist / composer Tomeka Reid and saxophonist / composer Nick Mazzarella have become valuable contributors to the Chicago music scene(s) for over a decade. This collection of duets demonstrates equally their instrumental skills and innate musicality. The saxophone / cello combination goes back to, at least, the '50s with the Chico Hamilton Quintet and recordings by Eric Dolphy and Ron Carter in the '60s. Most relevant here though is the pairing of Julius Hemphill and Abdul Wadud …
Six Ateliers - Concerts Jacques Lejeune
Late 80's original copies of the Ateliers de Musique Êlectroacoustique (Studios for Electroacoustic Music) program, designed by Jacques Lejeune himself, and ealized in conjunction with Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). 24-page book, large size, with original texts in French, many pictures, list of works and so on
Folklore
*2022 stock.* The celebrated improvising vocal group Trondheim Voices and two of Norway’s most important composer/producers, Helge Sten and Stale Storlokken, explore the boundaries of sound in a series of thirteen other-worldly pieces that act on the ears of the listener like magical invocations to a secret ceremony.
Led by Sissel Vera Pettersen, the nine female singers combine in rich and varied ensemble effects, from choral polyphony to extended-vocal techniques that recall Cathy Berberian int…
La Cantata Rossa Per Tall El Zaatar
2024 restock. Demetrio Stratos from Area teamed up with jazz musicians Gaetano Liguori anf Giulio Stocchi for this special album released back in 1976, after the Tall El Zaatar massacre in Palestine. Stratos delivers the sung words (and the guttural excursions) together with Concetta Busacca while bassist Roberto Del Piano and drummer Pasquale Liguori are heads of the jazzy rhythm section. G. Ligouri's piano playing is minimalistic and nice in a contemporary classical way. Sometimes the album ev…
The Zapple Diaries: The Rise and Fall of the Last Beatles Label (Book)
This is the first full-length look at Zapple—the Beatles’ label for experimental music and spoken word recordings and the most ambitious expression of the group’s determination to be leading members of the counterculture movement in the late 1960s. Barry Miles, the acclaimed author, was the Zapple label manager and has written an engaging and slightly gossipy you-arethere review of this fascinating period in Beatles history. The book provides insight into the lives and working methods of leading…
Requiem / Aventures / Nouvelles Aventures
*2022 stock* György Ligeti's "Requiem" for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two mixed choirs and orchestra is one of his most impressive compositions - especially, when directed by Michael Gielen - and at the same time "the" requiem of the 20th century: Sound which is chromatically layered moves gradually from the lower registers to the higher, thus changing from mourning sounds into the promise of the eternal light. In the Kyrie the polyphonic net which was previously static begins to move gently. It wa…
Les geometries souterraines
France fights Greece. Greece fights France. Fusiller side : France, electronic passion, electronic romance, lowered fist. Balinese Beast side : Greece, electric wires, cartoon saxophone, feedback loops, dead mixtable, secret rhythms. One color metalic offset printing + insert.
Curved Air In The 1970s (Book)
Propelled into stardom at an exhilarating speed due to clever marketing and the virtuosity of their musicianship, particularly violinist Darryl Way, the story of Curved Air in the 1970s is of a band that burned brightly before collapsing well ahead of their time. Fronted by the exotic Sonja Kristina, they supported Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and B.B. King in huge stadiums, while several famous names passed through their ranks (including Stewart Copeland and Eddie Jobson). This book documents eve…
Volume ! n° 16-2 / 17-1 - La Voix Pop (Magazine)
2024 stock. This issue explores the crossroads, contacts and contrasts between two fields of musical knowledge: ethnomusicology and popular music studies.When ethnomusicology tackles music that is produced in recording studios in both the North and the South, when queer performances venture into Asturian folklore, when bureaucracies produce world music, when raggadub and punk from Marseille are observed from the radios, restaurants and streets they have stemmed from, when Mandingo music is analy…
Bridle Path
**232 copies** John Truscinski has made a solo recording called ‘Bridle Path’, and it’s document of a journey, a singular meditation, a universal landscape soundtrack. Reflections and refractions of sound swim around in their own subtlety. A conversation gets out of its own way, using an unknown language of letting go. A focused void. Drone slabs and microtones bend and waver, slipping beneath the surface of sound. Using a a mini brute and Korg synthesizer, John carved out time to occasionally s…
And Then
* 2021 Stock * Released in 2000, shortly after ICR had returned as an operating label, this was the first solo album since the 90s from Colin Potter, perhaps best known as a collaborator with and engineer for Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Ora, Monos, Kiln and many others. Over 62 minutes a wide range of sounds pass—languid sway, relentless rhythms and rolling drones—sounds that were never meant to be—steam engines lost in space, galleons passing in electric fog, static in the flowers. 'This isn'…
Orbits
This sequence of pieces, composed in the main by Jackson Mouldycliff, with additional interventions & modifications from Colin Potter & Phil Mouldycliff, was started back in 2019 but because of the Covid pandemic it was only recently completed. The work centres on loops, repetitions & recurrent elements of sound assembled by MPM to accompany a series of mixed-media drawings by Phil, which in turn, takes as its starting point, star charts, celestial globes, planetaria, orreries, armillary spheres…
Fragile Pitches
* 2021 Stock * Fragile Pitches was originally commissioned by Unique Promotions to be performed in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of the city’s formal New Year Fire & Light celebrations. The event was very sucessful & saw somewhere in the region of 1200 people experience the performance. The juxtaposition of a formal, yet familiar space(thecathedral)with the less familiar musical aspects of electronic sound beds,drones, samples, effects and treated instrumentation created a com…
