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Tomorrow Is Too Late
Australian born, Sweden based artist John Chantler returns to Room40 with his fifth solo edition. Tomorrow Is Too Late was commissioned by INA GRM for their Présences Électronique festival in 2018 and sees Chantler significantly expand the horizons of his acoustic palette. Moving from subtle microtonal movements to passages of intense harmonic saturation, Tomorrow Is Too Late is his most dynamic work to date. A powerhouse of reductive intensity that bares witness to Chantler’s uncompromising son…
Works for Ensemble
Wolfram Schurig's musical career began with instrumental playing. After basic training on the recorder, his concert studies with Kees Boeke, one of the protagonists of historically informed performance practice, left their mark on him. This experience plays an important role in Schurig's working method as a composer: "You simply write music differently when you are on stage yourself. You owe it to the performer to deliver something that is playable, and in which he can find himself as a co-creat…
Collection 008
* Numbered edition of 200 copies in a folder cover. * Recorded and Mixed at Lowest Music & Arts, Telecom Studio 1981 - 1982. Percussion, Recorder, Effects, Artwork – Masami Akita (Merzbow) violin – Kiyoshi Mizutani. Remastered from Original Cassette Tape in Feb 2018 at Munemihouse, Tokyo. Originally Released on Cassette by Lowest Music & Arts in 1982.
Le Cuisinier
This album consists of improvisations between Masami Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani, who began his career working in Merzbow (when Merzbow wasn't just Masami Akita alone, but he began as the duo of Masami Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani, who met Akita in high school It was recorded on July 3, 1983 at Music Studio Kichijoji, Tokyo and mixed at Merz-Bau. It was released by Stratosphere Music in 1983 on a cassette, and at some point was reissued on cassette re-released in few copies by Lowest Music & Arts /…
Sonatas And Interludes For Prepared Piano
**2022 stock** Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, a cycle of 20 short pieces for prepared piano (a piano modified by inserting nuts and bolts and other objects between the piano strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects) by American composer John Cage. Created in 1946–48 after the composer had been introduced to Indian visual and performing arts, the cycle was intended to represent the so-called permanent emotions—the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the comi…
San Francisco Moog: 1968-72
San Francisco Moog documents for the first time a critical missing link in the history of electronic music. In 1968, a young singer named Doug McKechnie got hold of one the very first Moog Modular Series III synthesizers ever made—serial number 004—and began experimenting with it. Soon, he was hauling its many components around the Bay Area, performing improvised concerts for audiences whose minds had been opened by psychedelia but whose ears were often unfamiliar with electronic sounds. Working…
A smashing adventure
Welcome to an enchanted land where everything is strange and mysterious. The songs on this cassette are ancient incantations that make us travel back in time to our childhood, when music was a daydream and everyday life a strange adventure. There's something arcane and primal in the tinkling of notes here: in the lo-fi ohms of tracks like "Holy Smoke" and "Field," in the twilight pace of "Bell Tower" or in the epic broomstick space ride of "A castle at the heart of an asteroid field."
The music …
Drone Islands - Land Rising
**200 copies** Pitchfork Media and Allmusic journalist Mark Richardson defined drone music thus: "The vanishing-point music created by drone elders Phill Niblock and, especially, LaMonte Young is what happens when a fixation on held tones reaches a tipping point. Timbre is reduced to either a single clear instrument or a sine wave, silence disappears completely, and the base-level interaction between small clusters of "pure" tone becomes the music's content. This kind of work takes what typicall…
Witchcraft & Black Magic In the United Kingdom
**200 copies** "Witchcraft has had a fascinating and turbulent history in the UK. Through periods of persecution and prejudice, it has survived to the present day and many people still practise the tradition now. From the 7th Century onwards, attitudes towards the practise began to change. During the medieval period, fears over so-called ‘black magic’ began to emerge. This referred to the power of witchcraft to bring harm to others. An association was also drawn between witchcraft and the devil.…
Primordial Lift
Primordial Lift was originally released in 2000 and is a recording of a performance Oliveros made with David Grubbs on Harmonium and Tony Conrad on electric violin among others. Of course, the result is transcendent and throws your mind across the room – thick waves of sound and dense drones surround you as you listen and the instruments become one wall of pulsating sound. Some of you might know Oliveros from her minimalist work with the Deep Listening Band, which she founded – this material how…
Ethnic Minority Music of Southern China
The fifth Sublime Frequencies volume in Laurent Jeanneau's amazing documentation of vanishing indigenous music of the rural Asian frontiers, this CD focuses on ethnic minority groups of Southern China. Presented here are 17 tracks of supremely infectious vocals and folkloric instrumentals played on a wide variety of local traditional instruments. The centerpiece of this collection is the 13-minute "Do Djui Atsei" (track 5), an absolutely epic male and female group choral vocal piece which is imp…
Earthforce
In process of stocking. Ultra rare mid-70s UK acid folk rock recordings. Features sitar, moog, acoustic and electric guitars, assorted percussion instruments to create a Popul Vuh like soundscape. If you can imagine the perfect blend of Eastern trance/psych and English hippy acid folk rock, this would be it. Very cool and freaky. Earthforce were an offshoot of Ebling Mis and Oa Band formed by Steve Bayfield. Hailing from the UK, the band was influenced by a wide variety of music including Englis…
Ailleurs
Dominique Blanc-Francard’s “Ailleurs” is trippy and weird… and yet… the songs are catchy and the album rocks out. Fuzzy guitar, chunky drums, weird effects, a thick mix of layers of sound — all tasty ingredients. Pink Floyd meets T-Rex? It’s a terrific recipe, which surely must describe other albums? Even so, we can’t think of another album that sounds quite like “Ailleurs.”Without realizing it, you’ve probably already listened to Dominique Blanc-Francard’s work — as a sound engineer. DBF (as hi…
Key To Nowhere
Cosmic righteousness from Brother Ahh – aka Robert Northern – best known for his work with Sun Ra, but a force behind some wonderfully soulful records of his own! This album's one of Ahh's later works – self-released in 1983, with a conception that's fuller than his earlier works – almost in an Alice Coltrane spiritual mode, with tracks that emphasize consciousness, healing, well being, and awareness. Ahh plays flute and French horn on the album – and other instrumentation includes percussion by…
Eros In Arabia
This year has been an incredible period for avant-garde, Minimalist, New Age, ambient, and electronic reissues. One after another, many of the most coveted and rare LPs from these movements have emerged from the shadows. While each of these movements had a tendency to avoid easy categorization, the reissue market has largely veered toward those whose location can be easily understood, offering less attention to those members whose work fell into the spaces between. With their fourth release sinc…
Shub Niggurath
Available previously only as a private cassette release, this Shub Niggurath reissue features the bands very 1982 first recordings. While the influence of Magma, Art Zoyd and Univers Zero are strongly in evidence at various points along these five long tracks, Shub Niggurath took it all several steps further in every direction making them one of the most extreme and uncompromising bands of the mid-80s French avant-garde scene; and while this demo was never intended to be an official release, the…
Aphelion
This debut release by the regular working trio of Dave Rempis, Joshua Abrams, and Avreeayl Ra is a perfect example of what makes Chicago such a fertile breeding ground for improvised music; three musicians of widely varying ages, backgrounds, playing experiences, and musical interests join forces to deliver moments of both sublime beauty and volcanic energy, continually tempered by the seamless narrative momentum that they weave together in a seemingly effortless way. Although the trio has only …
Nocturnal Earthworm Stew
* 2021 Stock* Nocturnal Earthworm Stew is a glorious experiment in electronic music, capturing the vitality and early curiosity of the 1970s. An earlier press statement called it "Serious headphone music made under the influence of Stockhausen, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, Weather Report, Charles Ives and others." The influence of prog and space rock is pronounced, and contributions from Canadian prog legends Nash the Slash and Martin Deller (of FM) solidify Nocturnal's p…
Fragile
**2021 Stock** The rarest, and I would dare to say best, folk/psych album from Peter Howell and John Ferdinando, musical brainchildren behind Ithaca, Agincourt, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and Tomorrow Come Someday. This fifth Howell/Ferdinando album had just been completed in or around 1974 when the partnership came to an end. Howell had been working at the BBC as a studio manager since 1970 (he’d provided a stiff upper lip voiceover for John Peels Top Gear shows), but he was now offered a…
Nuestra Soledad / Vera
* 2021 Stock* It was—and is—almost impossible to categorize Vera Sienra’s musical style, but we’ll try: wistful songs with the world-weariness of Fado, and the pulsating sadness of the bossa nova. Her powerful and unique tone of voice, plus the softness of her guitar, have always been an unmistakable trademark. Listening to the songs of Vera’s debut album (from 1969), few people believed that those mature melodies were created by the beautiful and timid blonde who could be seen on their black & …