Hallway Of Mirrors
VHF is releasing a bunch of solo guitar dudes over the next few weeks. Here's one of 'em! It's an album from New York's Alexander Turnquist called Hallway of Mirrors. It says that above so it's kinda pointless me saying that. Having said that the New York thing was a new bit of info so it's not all filler! I've not heard this chap before but I was rather taken with him on first listen. It's not a million miles away from the likes of James Blackshaw.... ie extreme 12 string fingerpluckery which i…
Freeze!
After 2 full-lengths mining vintage horror scores and Italo/Goblin-isms for inspiration, Kansas City riddler and composition whiz Umberto slow-pans his focus out of the graveyards and black widow cobwebs into the celluloid-stained artificial streets of Beverly Hills police beats and pop culture ghost-busting. Freeze! is an inscrutable but impressively legit reinvention of Jan Hammer-style 80’s soundtrack cheese: soaring keyboard lines, fast-tappin’ piano, locked-in bass grooves, goofy canned dru…
In Vogue Spirit
With their recent split with Naked on the Vague acting as a dip into pop's waters; Wet Hair's follow up, In Vogue Spirit is practically a jump into the pool. The band's most accessible batch of tunes to date boil with Krautrock rhythms, buzzing synths, and a new focus on vocals that has previously been mostly absent in the band's back catalog. It's not all motion and melody here though, the band still retains their experimental spirit, giving the record plenty of teeth to sink into any of …
Radian lines
Wet Hair heads Shawn Reed and Ryan Garbes have been jamming sideways strains of long-lensed electricity music for years now, but their trajectories as visual artists arc back even farther. So after a small infinity of J-cards and zines and LP sleeves designs, it’s a real pleasure to finally be able to present a preferential suite of some of their finest (and, till now, unseen) compositions in a glossy, full-color, pro-printed 22-panel art volume, bookended by a brand new black vinyl 33 RPM singl…
Night sessions
A collection of fascinating and obscure "nocturnal sessions” alternated with more "classic" electronic parts based on sequencers and synthesizers, more abstract and minimal sonic sketches, involving and tense deep drones musical mixtures, distorted and dilated electric guitars, deformed human voices, more static and fluctuating typical ambient movements, cold inserts of pulsating and "techno oriented" sounds, suggestive atmospheres built on bizarre loops, flat organ backgrounds and low guitar no…
Whinny Muir
A single, long, deeply moving, slow and expanded drone-track, built on everchanging sonic masses, low frequencies, strong electric/electronic sounds, field recordings, feedbacks, buzzes, hisses, rough distortions, sunken organ chords, subdued inserts of strings orchestral parts. Alternation of progressive crescendos, ambiental stasis, sudden, dramatic and catching dynamic shocks... An involving and extraordinary "trip" across an obscure sonic path, convincingly assembled in collaborative form by…
Privilegium Martyrii
Thick and spectral dark ambient, soaked with soft and flowing pads stratifications, wrapped in deep and penetrating low frequencies spires, enlightened by delicate and touching melodic inserts, profaned by echoes of reverberating metallic noises, clanging chains, circular mechanical movements, waves of indecipherable whispers, distant and suffering human voices... A great debut CD for Antikatechon, a project that showcases Davide Del Col's eclectic personality, already the unique mind of the Orn…
Delta
Extended sonic fluxes of synthetic nature mixed with delicate acoustic and electric guitars chords and riffs, crowd noises, indefinite and fading melodic "spots" of unknown origin, feedbacks, echoes, pulsations, vibrations, cracklings, rustling waves in continuous movement... But also sudden pauses, unpredictable and improbable inserts of folk blues radio transmissions, crystal clear water sounds, static, wrapping and dramatic electronic weaves, metallic tickings... An extraordinary range of sou…
Outdoor Spell
Rhys Chatham has trail-blazed a course through late 20th century music, equally aplomb in post-minimalist composition as he is in punk. Not since Roebling laid his span across the East River has there been an artist who builds bridges in both how we hear music and how we can appreciate art. His latest album, Outdoor Spell, is a further document in that direction. Here has has eschewed 100 guitars, or even himself playing a single guitar, for the trumpet and voice, both electrified and dry. It is…
Aika
Stunning ghostly new work from Timo Van Luijk, a collaborator with Andrew Chalk and member of In Camera with Christoph Heemann. Aika was originally issued in 2008 with different cover art and this upgraded edition should hopefully bring attention to one of the major European devotional drone recordings of the decade. Indeed, Aika explodes simple notions of ‘drone' with a more musical and instrument-based palette that crosses high Gothic form with a beautifully blurred sense of spatial dynamics -…
Untitled
New LP for this really great French trio with elecric bass, drums and hurdy-gurdy. 22 minutes on one side going always in the same direction with the same idea. Will of course satisfy all lovers of Tony Conrad or Henry Flynt's works. Recorded in 2006. Handmade covers. Limited to 500
Puech Gourdon Bremaud
Mindblowing totally acoustic drone record, musicians are Jacques Puech (cabrette), Yann Gourdon (hurdy-gurdy) and Basile Bremaud (violin). This totally acoustic set is a variation around two bourrées in triple time, both themes are taken out of the tradionnal Mont d'Auvergne repertoire. Hand made, spray painted cover
Dreamweapon I
Mostly unheard tape-recorded, Eastern-influenced drone material from MacLise, Tony Conrad and Jack Smith, as a sonic companion to the recent exhibition dedicated to MacLise "Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise (1938-1979)". Totally stoned out stuff! In a silkscreened sleeve. Second LP Edition of 500.
Eight Studies for Automatic Piano
Inspired by the work of James Tenney, György Ligeti, Charlemagne Palestine, and Conlon Nancarrow, Seth Horvitz’s Eight Studies for Automatic Piano makes use of simple, computer-aided compositional processes to test the limits of human perception and machine precision. It relies on a bare minimum of technical means to explore notions of temporal distortion, iterative process, and elegant complexity. Presented in an immersive concert setting without the presence of a human performer, Eight Studies…
Transparency (Performance)
In 2010, sound artist Richard Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History’s collection of 19th Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration. Chartier focused on the works of the German physicist Rudolf Koenig, including the Grand Tonometer (c. 1870-1875). This beautiful and precise set of 692 tuning forks expresses the frequency range 520 v.s (vibration simple)(260 hz) to 8192 v.s. (4096 hz). The p…
Objects of Memory
These works occupy a position between an expanded notion of composition and a gallery-based art practice. The content of the works presented on this disc produce a slow series of gestures that give the illusion of stillness amidst a texture of continually developing material. The central concern in all of these pieces (the three fully scored works, the installation documentation, and the live-performance) is the construction of a sound world that is able to be environmental rather than tempora…
Sostrah tinnitus - Stain
Warm, involving, deep and penetrating sounds... Flowing sounds patterns, vibrating drones permeated by a discreet sense of tension, evolving in dark, obscure, foggy, nocturnal atmospheres, violated by raven voices, mysterious noises and sounds of metal objects in motion... And then concrete noises, confused and elusive melodies, feeble light flashes, buried echoes of human voices, distantr whispers, sudden passages of rough sounds, undefined nuisances, subliminal and hypnotic sequences, just lik…
Rekviem MB-JMI
A "classic" minimal ambient album; just one long track, a bit obscure, of a static nature but unarrestable as a matter of fact and slowly developing, built with layers of soft and “round” sounds, heavily processed and effected, whose origin seems to be an organ... "Atypical" for sure, if confrontated with the huge and widely diversified productions of Maurizio Bianchi, this new album is probably one of the last and not to be missed releases signed by “M.B.”, since he has already announced his de…
Hibakusha
Cyclic loops agglomerates resting on static drones intertwined by flashes of electronic frequencies; algorithmic manipulations of undefined sound materials moved by bouncing delays and recurring panoramic space variations; a sequence of metallic waves in continuous tonal variation, heavy dissonances and sonic stratifications in progressive and pseudo-randomic composition/decomposition; desolate silences corrupted by resounding echoes of entangled electric rhythmic impulses... Longly awaited re-e…
Krungthep Archives
"After the post-industral / power-electronics 'diversions' of his recent collaboration with Pierpaolo Zoppo / Mauthausen Orchestra in From Unhealthy Places, and Forgotten Realm, the 'second chapter' of the Hall of Mirrors projects with Andrea Marutti / Amon in dark ambient 'territories', Nimh (Giuseppe Verticchio) returns as a 'solo' artist in his newest Krungthep Archives, rediscovering the sounds of his oriental ethnic instruments, collected in he Far-East, mainly in Thailand. The recordings o…