In the Woods
On Rimarimba’s 1985 album In The Woods, Robert Cox has made his music kit, an odd assortment of new and old technologies, lately fixated on the digital delay, and programming technologies, sing his own song at its most articulate clip. The songs seem more developed, fluent, like mini-suites in some sense. By his third album, it’s clear Cox has recognised just how liberating technology can be – “All these intricate layers of things that I was trying to play, and didn’t have the musical ability to…
Les Archives
Les Archives is composed, arranged, and produced by the elusive Japanese artist June Chikuma. While Freedom To Spend’s reinvented edition bares little visual evidence of its origins in the composer’s name, title, or sleeve design, the album, a whooping gonzo of synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and a mysterious string quartet, remains as vibrant now as it did when released on Toru Hatano’s Picture Label as Divertimento in 1986. In fact, the music of Les Archives now glows with a different p…
On Dry Land
For Rimarimba’s 1984 album On Dry Land, Robert Cox advances along the terrain explored on Below The Horizon. It’s an enchanting album, one which, at times, seems to comment on its own practice; a picture of everyday life in the hobbyist’s, or part-time musician’s, recording studio. Some moments point towards the tourist-explorer aesthetic that would eventually coalesce under the banner of Fourth World music. Other moments where Cox seems to be channelling an otherness, a kind of hauntological re…
Snow Crash
Voodoo noise and poetry : what is sound, what is poetry? What is this reality and how are we perceiving it? This LP brings together two extreme and loud vocal performers digging and channeling invisible realities through electronically expanded proto languages. No occult bullshit, this is an experimental non-dual approach to reality: clashes and crashes into extatic trances. Joachim Montessuis develops an experimental contextual practice mainly around voice, drone, noise and resonance since the …
Le vray remède d'amour
**300 copies** Le vray remède d'amour is a collection of seven tracks recorded between 2012 and 2019 with a 'Boîte à Bourdons/Drone Box' constructed by Léo Maurel, a mechanical electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy with four strings and sliders to play an adjustable chord in sustained twisted tones, drones and complex overtones + one duet with Gaspar Claus on cello. Recorded and composed in Paris at Sophia & Baphomet studios, mastered and cut at DK Mastering by Thomas Gonet and Hervé de Keroullas. 2D cove…
Thinking of Eternity
**300 copies** In late 1998, using the same techniques by which he had composed the psychedelically inspired music of the year before, PBK spontaneously began working on a quartet of pieces as a tribute to the Cluster album (by Moebius & Roedelius) he had become obsessed with. “All of my synthesizers and samplers would be set up and running via two synched midi-sequencers, everything mixed live while manipulating the sounds by hand to achieve these incremental timbral changes, the slow effect of…
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…
The Innocents
Marsfield is a collaborative project that involves British musicians Andrew Chalk (Ora, Mirror, Isolde...), Robin Barnes and Vikki Jackman along with Australian Ambient practitioner Brendan Walls. Following Three Sunset Over Marsfield and The Towering Sky - both released on Faraway Press in 2010, The Innocents is the group's third full-lenght release and includes two long mesmerizing compositions.
The Bridge of Dreams
Circaea, the latest collaborative project involving prolific British musician Andrew Chalk (Ora, Mirror, Isolde...) debuts with The Bridge of Dreams. Alongside Chalk in this new adventure we find young cellist Ecka Rose Mordecai and classically trained guitarist Tom James Scott, also founder of the Skire label. The twelve delicate miniatures that make up this album find protection in the caring arms of Faraway Press - Chalk's own label - and are a work of pure beauty.
Sounding / Way
Pauline Oliveros and Guy Klucevsek's Sounding / Way was originally released on cassette in 1986 and has been out of print ever since. This LP was cut by John Golden and pressed at RTI in order to achieve a quiet, dynamic pressing. The Sounding / Way concept was simple: each artist would write a piece for two accordions and then they would perform them together. Thus, side A contains Guy Klucevsek's Tremolo No. 6 performed by Guy Klucevsek and Pauline Oliveros. Side B contains Pauline's compositi…
Drift
**100 copies** Drift is a free fall album consisting of three compositions invoking a sense of hovering expansion. Deeply spacious yet tightly compacted sound movements create holding patterns that slowly shift and evolve. Cycles fall in and out of sync while atmospheres envelope time, appearing on the periphery before being subsumed back into space. The compositions utilize modified alto saxophone with spring reverb attachment, synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and electronic processin…
Neu Konservatiw
**100 copies 2018 repress** Originally released to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien back in 2015, Neu Konservatiw comes in a beautifully designed slevve with insert and postcards. The album features two unreleased Asmus Tietchens tracks plus other exclusive contributions by Werkbund, Column One, Evapori, Hyph, Pierce Warnecke, Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg and Margitt Holzt.
Tanz und Andacht
**500 copies** This is a total find - Tanz und Andacht (Dance and Devotion) is a mouth-wateringly rare and otherworldly missive from Hamburg’s cult, highly enigmatic label / band Werkbund, a bizarre, crazily ahead-of-its time project that finds the sweet spot between Coil and Torsten Pröfrock's work as Dynamo / Various Artists, now reissued on vinyl with two bonus tracks to the pleasure of weirdos across the world, more than twenty years after the long sold-out original 2x7” release. Since 1987,…
Climatery
Miguel A. Ruiz is a veteran experimental/electronic musician from Madrid, Spainthat has worked under numerous monikers since early eighties as TécnicaMaterial, Orfeón Gargarín, Codachrom, Dekatron II, Michel Des Airlines, Funeral Souvenir, etc. Some of these projects still active today. Entering the world of Ruiz is a wonder to the mind and ears, each project yields authentic masterpieces of experimental electronic music. "Climatery" was originally recorded in the summer of 1986 and was publish…
'Châsse’ Recordings 1982-87
**Edition of 400 copies** :Zoviet*France: is an idiosyncratic group of anonymous music makers, gatherers of sound, and fabricators of unknown music. For nearly 40 years, they have explored and reported back from the liminal areas of music and composition, walking the margins where little is easily located and consensus reality melds with the hypnagogic and half-heard. Having wilfully obscured themselves in Newcastle upon Tyne since their inception in 1980, :zoviet*france: has developed a radica…
Horology 2 / The Future and Radiophonic Dvations
This 5 LP box release, pre dates Horology 1 and is a companion collection of experimental recordings made in late 1977 / 1978 period by Adi Newton prior to and during the formative period of development of Clockdva. The box includes the original The Future recordings made by the trio of Adi Newton, Martyn Ware & Ian Craig Marsh before The Future developed into The Human League and Clockdva. The Future pioneered a totally electronic synthesised sound that later became Synth Pop that dominated the…
Nasca
Most of the October nights in 1987 you could find Gerry Vergult (Aroma Di Amore, Fred A., Adult Fantasies) and Gerrit Valckenaers (Adult Fantasies, The Colorist Orchestra) in a desolated top studio in Ghent. At that time and place they sneakily crafted and shaped this Nasca record while they were supposed to finish a new Fred A. record. They created an abstract universe where minimal post-punk basslines blend together with radio sounds in "Nothing Toulouse", tropical tribal vibes oscillates betw…
Death And Spring
We live in a musical era defined by historical reappraisal - a noble moment which has rescued a near countless number of incredible albums from lingering neglect and loss. As wonderful and exciting as this is, it has come with an unexpected, but increasingly acknowledged consequence. With so many eyes on what was, we risk allowing history to repeat, subjecting today’s artists to the same forms neglect which plagued the past. It’s becoming increasingly rare to encounter record labels which entire…
Results, Not Answers
Bureau B present a reissue of Young Scientist's debut album Results, Not Answers,
originally released in 1979. When you think of the music to have
emerged from Seattle, grunge and Sub Pop are probably the first things
that come to mind. But Seattle was already home to a vibrant alternative
music scene back in the 1970s. One of the most prominent synthesizer
acts of the period was the trio Young Scientist. Influenced by the likes
of Cluster, Harmonia, and Tangerine Dream, they released thei…
Cheyenne
Bureau B present a reissue of Martin Rev's Cheyenne,
originally released in 1991. The sphere of Martin Rev's influence and
the relevance of his music may well be related to the fact that he was
one of the first artists who succeeded in grasping the abstraction of
electronic music, infusing it with a sense of immediacy built on raw
energy. Whilst the likes of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Kraftwerk
were busy digging in the electronic music garden, Martin Rev fo…