Extented play
Janek Schaefer's illustrious career as a sound artist, turntablist and composer has seen various standout moments over the years, from his postal travelogue 7", Recorded Delivery, on the Hot Air imprint to his collaboration with Stephan Mathieu, Hidden Name. Extended Play ranks alongside Schaefer's very finest works, and one of his most overtly musical, in the traditional sense. Originally conceived as an installation, Extended Play consists of piano, violin and cello each playing a predetermine…
Constellations
Long out of print. Though it begins with a few minutes of depth-plumbing space music, Constellations soon evolves into a series of tuneless synthesizer squiggles tweaked to perfection by Schnitzler with help from his effects array (reverb, delay, echo, etc.). The assortment of electronics is reminiscent of '60s academia but loaded with emotion nevertheless.
Audioscope - New Electronic Music From Madrid
Two tracks each by Francisco Lopez, Luis Mesa, Juan P. Monreal, Antonio Garcia, Miguel Ruiz, 1 track each by El Sueno de Hyparco, Markus Breuss, Orfeon Gagarin.
Glossalalia
Slowly pulsating drones, chirping electronics, distant radio static. Ambient or minimal? To answer the question, it might help to go back a couple of millennia to the Epicurians. Today their name mostly evokes indulgence in fleshly pleasures but that only one form of their thinking; the other sought to deny the body excess experiences. Though the difference isn’t always audible, ambient tries to envelop a listener in pleasant fluffiness while minimalism wants to remove any nonessentials to focus…
Isabelle Eberhardt: The Oblivion Seeker
Another Schutze soundtrack, this is for a relatively big-budget, commercial film, and is consequently one of his most conventional recordings. However, it does showcase his talents as a composer and a manipulator of synthesized sound. Acting as a studio "one man band," Schutze has created a score which is lush and fully orchestral, with extensive use of string, horn and woodwind voicings, and some fine contrapuntal writing. Several sections even seem to follow traditional classical forms such as…
Clock Face
This release documents the second collaboration between Conrad Schnitzler and Jörg Thomasius (the first, “Tolling Toggle” came out on Fünfundfierzig). 15 tracks of their experimental collaborations. Recorded in 1991 and 1992, and released in 1992 in an edition of 500.
Continue
Lull is exactly what its name would seem to imply -- ambient noise with a surprisingly hypnotic effect. Consisting of a one-hour-long track that unfolds excruciatingly slowly, Continue could be the soundtrack for a '90s version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was equally unnerving for its vast expanses of nothingness. Where Scorn can be the horrific equivalent of a musical Freddy Krueger -- getting in your face to tell you how badly he's gonna mess you up -- Lull's approach is more subtle and se…
21 Situations
This is the long-anticipated encounter between Martin Tétreault and Otomo Yoshihide, recorded in the CBC studios in Montréal. Witness for yourself the clash of two masterful turntable manipulators, one from Japan, the other from Quebec: two universes, two attitudes and one electro-mechanical encounter around the record player. The result is a stunning collection of twenty-one improvised “situations” exploring themes such as science fiction, education, jungle, cartoons, and seventeen additional s…
A Bead to A Small Mouth
A beautifully packaged collection of specially recorded pieces (which could be most accurately described as "sound poems") from such left field luminaries as Nurse With Wound, Zoviet France and Graeme Revell (he of SPK and "Dead Calm" soundtrack fame).
All The Rage
"All the Rage" was developed from a recording I made of a riot in San Francisco in October 1991, which followed California Governor Pete Wilson's veto of a bill designed to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. Bob Ostertag's "All the Rage" turned the evening on its head with a devastating roar of gay anger. Of recent concert pieces having to do with AIDS, "All the Rage" seems by far the most powerful example. Mr. Ostertag's stern, purifying gaze has swept away the sentimentality and me…
The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid
Are there other earthling-conjured soundworks rivaling the majesty of Henry Flynt's minimalist hillbilly fiddle fantasias or the heavens-rending power of Messiaen's works for organ? Undoubtedly, else why bother listening. But the only thing speaking at us right now from these charmed regions are the celestial airs of these Stars of the Lid. Alternately lulling and wielding a potency that wholly escapes 'experimental' musics, SOTL bring big, whomping chunks of sonic firmament with a sustaining, l…
Avec Laudenum
Avec Laudenum was originally released on the Belgian Sub Rosa label in 2000. Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride recorded the album via mail and by the time it was released Wiltzie had moved from Austin, TX to Brussells. Avec Laudenum marked a decided expansion of the Stars of the Lid drone methodology. The duo's use of guitars and samplers was more compositionally directed, creating long, exquisitely stretched out melodies.
Le Temps Des Moissons
A long-lost classic of the Terry Rilesque (!) music and experimental world fusion. French saxophonist Ariel Kalma is one of the pioneers of early experimental electronic music; born and raised in Paris and studying recorder and saxophone from an early age, Kalma became interested in other musical traditions during his international travels in the early '70s, even going so far as to study circular breathing techniques from an Indian snake-charmer. His debut album, originally recorded in 1975 and …
Sea Changes & Coelacanths
Subtitled: A Young Person's Guide to John Fahey. This compiles Fahey's earlier releases for TOE: 1997's Womblife and the live followup Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts; plus the Hard Time Empty Bottle Blues 12" (all o/p as individual releases at this point). In the 43 years between his first recordings and his death in 2001, John Fahey stomped across the American soundscape, leaving behind footprints of influence so breathtakingly vast that entire genres now huddle within them. Fahey's mesmeric gu…
Echran
Echran is a duo: Davide Del Col playing synth - he also released several records with the name Ornament (music located in the territories of obscure ambient) - and Fabio Volpi (programming and voice) playing also in the musical-visual arts collective Otolab. Echran’s music is a form of post-industrial ambient mixed with analogical echoes of the 70’s and the 80’s, all combined with cold digital sequences and an obsessive metronomic minimalism. A lot of tension and hypno runs through the rhythms o…
Opera Decima
LAST COPIES...This album has been released on both a double CD and on a boxset of three LP's, and it's long out of print now; the music is a combination of ambient and industrial which can sometimes sound fit for a horror movie. Heartbeats, the chatter of children and ghostly voices swiftly floating around. Other times it's more spaced out, sad or just odd. A Hammond organ is present as a little link between his heavy metal/hard rock roots and this, and the whole work is pure drone masterpiece
Calcutta Gas Chamber
John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber has long been hailed as one of the minor masterpieces of post-industrial sound art, this is the very first edition on N D label. Back in 1990, this German born sound artist had traveled to Calcutta where he stumbled upon a gas chamber that had been closed down just a few years earlier. Watermann explains in the liner notes that the Indian government had numerous policies, both official and clandestine, aimed at population control; and the gas chamber was one…
Crop circles
a rare early work by Steve Roden, a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, known for his musical work under the name 'In Be Tween Noise'. Steve felt that this particular work, music for an installation he has done, was far enough from the music of 'In Be Tween Noise' to ask us to release it under his own name. It is a quiet soundscape, produced by using only a microphone and a speaker to create the sound material, and designed to fill the room at a moderate loudness to let the listener take a…
untitled # 90
The sonic vibrancy of tropical rainforests is highlighted on the one long (45 minutes) track of Untitled #90. But, of course, in the hands of Francisco López, the kinetic sounds are manipulated and shaped in most imaginative ways. Opening with the buzzing hum of life (insects? birds? animals?), the ambience of life within the moist, humid rainforest, envelopes the listener. Not just simple field recordings, the sounds are looped, subtly stretched and tweaked, in such a way as to really bring the…
Before The Law
Raz Mesinai is one of the most respected young musicians in New York’s burgeoning underground electronica scene. His unique approach utilizes samples of acoustic instruments performing his original compositions, electronics of his own design, computers and occasionally his dynamic percussion work. His latest project is inspired by the hermetic Jewish writer Franz Kafka whose influential work views the Jewish experience through a mystical, almost Kabbalistic lens. A complex and multifaceted CD of…