Love & Lamentation
It must have been quite some years since I last heard music by Simon Wickham-Smith, but there was a time when I played it a lot, especially the various albums he recorded with Richard Youngs. But I guess that's how things go. Interest shifts I assume. To be honest, again, I have no idea when I left off, or why. But its good, as well as strange perhaps to see him back on Pogus Productions. On the cover I read that 'not satisfied with making music, he has also been a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan t…
Cauldron
Cauldron was Fifty Foot Hose's first and most famous recorded work, released on Limelight Records in 1968. Founded by Cork Marcheschi, the band played continuously around the Bay area of northern California throughout the mid-'60s. Marcheschi, who had developed a taste for R&B and the avant-garde music of composers such as Edgard Varèse, started out as the band's bass player, but his interest in experimental music prompted him to develop his own musical instrument, similar in function to the hy…
Gulf Between Us
Muslimgauze are easily the most prolific electronics outfit on the experimental underground scene. And while they release CDs in bunches, Muslimgauze's output never sinks below absolutely brilliant. The basic formula is relatively simple: lift some Arabic street music, sample it, loop it, attach a small explosive, and detonate. The result: an incredibly rich pastiche of wind-blown, dubbed-out trance music that is at once edgy but calm, aggressive but soothing. "Gulf" is a peaceful, laconic 20-mi…
Metal Machine Music
25th Anniversary reissue in clear jewel-case with 12-page booklet. Few records have alienated audiences like Lou Reed’s 1975 double album Metal Machine Music. Each side bore a single track lasting exactly 16 minutes and one second. There were no drums, no singing, and no songs. Instead, waves of shrieking guitar feedback created a brutal sonic assault which, thanks to the locked groove at the end of side four, was literally never–ending. Deleted by RCA after two weeks on sale, the album attract…
Keyboard Study 2 / Initiative (+Systèmes)
A split release between Terry Riley and French avant-garde composer Pierre Marietan that was recorded in Paris on September 30th and October 1st, 1969. Riley's piece is a 24-minute work for 2 pianos (Gérard Frémy and Martine Joste of the GERM ensemble - Groupe d'Etude et Réalisation Musicale). Marieten's piece is performed by the full GERM ensemble including Philippe Blachette (violin), Philippe Drogoz (double bass), Louis Roquin (trumpet), Chantal Lemaire (cello), Gérard Frémy (piano), Martine …
Chanting the Light of Foresight
a beautiful album, Riley composed the pieces on this album for the legendary ROVA Saxophone Quartet. The work is based on the Taín Bó Cuailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley"), an invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill. Long out of print
No Man\'s Land
this glistening, pulsating CD for No Man's Land soundtrack documents another stage in the flux of influence and invention that makes Riley's music. This album is much more closer to the 'real' minimalism, with Riley maily playing organ, but the tablas and sitar can be heard on almost every track, along with some voice and what sounds like electronically altered instruments. Few copies available, long out of print
La Nordica
Roedelius always surprises us with his imaginative, unusual, unexpected music. The four long electronic pieces that integrate this CD are each one a journey towards the unknown. All of them possess a decidedly mysterious, enigmatic character, like soundtracks for nocturnal walks in deserted cities. The music is mostly static, even though there also are passages with a slow percussive rhythm. The themes are a succession of whispers that come and go, sometimes intertwining. Other passages consist …
Feeding The Hungry Ghost
From the quietly atmospheric opening on 'nuncamais' to the percussive chaos of 'vostok', bq have assembled a shifting collage of electronic sounds that condenses five years worth of live performances throughout europe into a timeless stemless totality. masterfully assembled like a buroughs cut-up, the pieces have been skillfully juxtaposed with each other and within the album as an integrated whole. listening to it, we are wheeled between hi-tech and lo-tech, atmospheres and abbrassive rhythms- …
Emak Bakia
Emak Bakaia is the missn Muslimgauze album recorded between the extreme releases Intafaxa and United Sates of Islam Andrew Burton at Concrete Productions has remixed and remastered the album A Manchester, U K collective has been making records under the name Muslimgauze since the mid-80s As time has passed, those recordings have evolved into multi-leveled, hypnotic pastiches of Islamic percussion, melodies from the Maghreb to Teheran and modern digital technology.
Sevilla X
Electronic music composed for an ENEL and Infobyte's project for the EXPO in Sevilla.
Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (For Heike)
“It is very difficult for me to speak of this work, since it is getting very close to my goal of creating a kind of language free space. I thus prefer to let it go without further comment other than that I dedicate it to my companion Heike - each gesture is both speaking of her, and speaking to her, without words.” Bernhard Günter
Parallax
Computer music (2004-2007). With a text from Tim Zulauf (German and English) and drawings from Yves Netzhammer. Bernd Schurer is an artist who mainly focuses on the work with sound in a variety of contexts. He has realized compositions and audioworks for film, media- and soundinstallations, as well as for the stage and he has realized one opera score, all of which cover a broad spectrum of distinct aesthethics. His main interest lies in conceiving systems, that are autonomous, interactive or sel…
Dreamz / Blue Polz
Beautiful picture disc LP featuring two full-color reproductions of visual works by Rick Reed and two new side-long solo compositions. Reed's fascinating, highly evolved world is represented well by these two new pieces, each of which offers up the kind of droning intensity and unsettling beauty that this veteran noisemaker has come to be known for. Reed's work is very obviously that of an experienced craftsman - one whose sound is a reverent nod to early electronic music underscored by an endur…
This Ship in Trouble
This ship in trouble was first performed live at the EEI festival 2006 in Labin, Croatia. It was reworked into single tracks during fall, winter 2006-2007. The music was originally composed on Unije island, using a single guitar chord from the piece with the same name by the band And Also The Trees. The six pieces carry names of ships that have sunk Ð six musical narrations of the imaginary fate of these ships now lying wrecked on the bed of the Adriatic Sea. Marcus Maeder realized his first mus…
Homage to the Square Wave
RESTOCKED last copies, Eleh present their fourth vinyl-only full-length, Homage to the Square Wave. Featuring two sidelong tracks each clocking-in at over 20 minutes, Homage is dedicated to the highly influential artist Josef Albers. Eleh return with their battery of vintage modular analog gear to produce a recording of pure tone, pure sound, pure volume and pure analog. Side A features 'Black,' a slowly enveloping mass of intensely throbbing low end, activating the flight response. Time passes …
h-Menge
The latest in Asmus Tietchens ongoing Mengen series, this album maintains the bold adventurousness and strict minimalism of previous recordings whilst suggesting some sense of evolution along the way. The series was initiated as an exercise in composition based exclusively around spatial manipulations of white noise and sine tones, but this instalment seems to hint at a heightened level of sonic richness and diversity than that policy could ever reasonably hope to accommodate. Some of the pieces…
Untitled 1-3
This magnificent collaborative album from two of the key minimalist composers of their generation originally crept out in 2004 as one of the very earliest releases on the Spekk label. The album now sees a significant overhaul for its reissue, with an extra two pieces thrown into the bargain plus a remastering job courtesy of Taylor Deupree. Although the original Spekk edition of the album went out of print within two months of its release, a digital version has been in circulation more recently.…
Voice Coil
Pauline Oliveros (accordion with Expanded Instrument System); Peer Bode (live text with Bode vocoder); Andrew Deutsch (live mixing, archival recordings, samples, loops and electronics). Voice Coil was performed by the Carrier Band in the fall of 2003 at the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, New York. Pauline Oliveros performed on accordion and computer-based Expanded Instrument System, Peer Bode performed live text with his Bode Vocoder, and Andrew Deutsch performed live mixing, archival recordi…
Further Materials
A sequel to the Other Materials compilation (released via Richard Chartier's own 3 Particles label), this album draws together the various compilation tracks released by the artist between the years 2002 and 2005. Many of these pieces take the form of miniatures, meaning they're both shorter and more condensed than Chartier's conventional output, the most succinct of these being the two-minute sound sculpture 'Tracing (Sketch For)' lifted from Raster Noton's Frequencies [Hz]. You'll find more su…