Issue 9
The 9th issue of Lasse Marhaug's fanzine Personal Best. 100 pages, full colour offset-printed with glued spine. Nearly three years on from the last issue, Marhaug conducts in-depth interviews with: Christian Blandhoel, Martìn Escalante, Russell Haswell, Campbell Kneale, Tine Surel Lange, Greg Pope, Joe Potts (and Los Angeles Free Music Society), Mariam Rezaei and Edward Sol.
Reshape
The cover of Joachim Spieth’s latest album, Reshape, depicts a stony landscape against a moody sky at dusk, silver clouds backlit with soft orange light. His 2021 album Ousia featured a similar sun, only foregrounded by waves. It’s as if some lost, drowned continent rose from the murky depths, dotted with strange fossils and petroglyphs. That contrast is an apt analogy for Reshape — an album of remixes and reworkings from some of the biggest names in ambient, techno and drone in honor of the Aff…
Terrain
With ‘Terrain,’ Joachim Spieth presents the fourth long player on his Affin imprint. The follow-up album to ‘Ousia’ (2021), ‘Terrain,’ reflects on the human relationship with nature. The album title is a reference to a musical language that layers Spieth’s music production practices and intimacy with nature.‘Terrain’ was forged in deep solitude.“ It’s an interplay of euphoric flashes and introspection” – says Spieth. The eight compositions take the listener into a captivating cascade of sonic te…
The Wave Ahead
Gorgeous, pearlescent cosmic ambient flights by London’s Jo Johnson - erstwhile member of ‘90s riot grrrl group Huggy Bear - now in pursuit of astral trajectories since returning to orbit over the past few years. “What is the sound of feeling? In physics, we conceive of sound as waves. Vibrations, undulations, physical manifestations: heard but not seen. Borne by the body, but interpreted in the brain.
Within ourselves, we perceive emotion as waves, too. Rolling in, rolling out: tidal, even. In …
Gyttjans Topografi
Edition of 500 copies w/ printed inner. Swedish drone alchemist Mats Erlandsson is sitting in a fictional room on ‘Gyttjans Topografi’, imagining a virtual chamber orchestra using zithers, tapes, double bass, harmonium, organ, and various synthesisers to draft a treatise on alternative tuning and non-normative harmonic structures. Transcendent material. The music on this recording is performed by a kind of fictitious chamber ensemble situated in an imaginary room outlined by textures that altern…
Helios/Hind
*Limited to 231 hand numbered copies* The Universal Veil is a duo comprised of Sam McLoughlin (Twisted Nerve/Pre-Cert Home Entertainment) and Folklore Tapes head honcho David Chatton Barker. Their improvised live performances with their own handmade "ritual instruments" are by turns meditative, trancelike, joyous and surreal. Helios/Hind is a fascinating sonic artifact which unearths lo-fi cassette recordings from several years of past performances and weaves them together into a new whole, usin…
Nine Death Stages
* Edition of 325 copies, silkscreened sleeve w/ obi (black or kraft), postcard * Kusōzu : Nine Death Stages is the second album by the Tokyo trio Archeus, which consists of Keiko Higuchi (voice, percussion, trombone, shamisen), Shizuo Uchida (bass strings), and Tomo (hurdy gurdy, voice). It follows their debut, self-titled and self-released CD and cassette from 2021 and is further proof – if any were needed – that these musicians, who’ve known each other for some time, but only started playing t…
Picture a Frame
"Picture a Frame" the debut album by the Belgian composer Elisabeth Klinck, was born out of strict isolation and is nonetheless a result of a collaborative process that saw her working closely with artist Oscar Claus. Enriching her compositions for violin with electronic soundscapes and field recordings from their surroundings, the two entered an artistic dialogue that took place inside its own idiosyncratic space outside of conventional time. It is an intimate record in which Klinck’s expressiv…
Gomberg III-V - Airplay
Big Tip! The alter ego, Gomberg, created by Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger is a tool for him to "overcome his own limitations". Gomberg serves as a foil on which a second personality comes to life and does what he wants. The recordings on Gomberg III-V were made between 2006 and 2018, recorded in Vienna and Brest. Some of the tracks are occasion-related compositions or commissioned works, e.g. a signature for an art space or short works for films, some are the results of collaborations for …
Monte Carlo Fallacy
In the lockdown of early 2020, Berlin fell silent. As reflects Nicholas Bussmann, “it felt like the early 90s in East Berlin”, the place where he grew up and experienced social change and uncertainty, and presumably a lot of empty, silent space. Here, on this duo with his long-term accomplice Werner Dafeldecker, we hear the sound of two instrumental practitioners as they explore the nature of their respective instruments with a paced and thoughtful guidance, with little intervention or overt de…
Discreet Music Mag #3
New issue! Interviews with Leda, Franciska, Troth and a feature on Incipientium. A5, 20 pages, written in English.
Chris Cutler in a Box
These 10 CDs (and DVD) collect together solo work, compositions and collaborations made between 1972 and 2022 by percussionist and lyricist Chris Cutler and include as well as three previously released solo CDs ('solo', 'twice around the earth' and 'there and back again'), more than five hours of unreleased materials, as well as a double CD collection of tracks culled from official recordings featuring Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, R…
The Necks Box
8CD Box. A career-spanning box set dedicated to the Australian music icon..." One of the greatest bands in the world, said the New York Times; A post-jazz, post-rock, post-everything sonic experience that has few parallels or rivals, according to The Guardian; Fifty years after Kind of Blue, the new music I would find it hardest to do without is that produced by The Necks, circumlocutes Richard Williams. No one has so far even attempted to copy them since, what they do is so unique, anyone ventu…
Bocca D'ombra
"We entered the shadowy mouth of a new space, descending into a realm that precedes the underworld, the arcane, far from our time. We met beasts that gave us lessons about their language, which we started learning without grammar."
Vórtex Submarino
Tip! *50 copies limited edition* Gibrana Cervantes is an acclaimed Mexican musician who has made a name for herself as a violinist, composer, and improviser. She is widely recognized for her innovative and experimental approach to music, which seamlessly blends classical and metal influences to create a truly distinctive style. Cervantes has a gift for combining melody and noise in her compositions, resulting in emotive and contemplative pieces. Beyond her work as a musician, Cervantes is also t…
Pèkisyon Funebri
Leaving behind their folk based trilogy, Mohammad return to their own original material. Heavy and concentrated, majestic and dark, ethereal and subtle, Pèkisyon Funebri marks a new era in Mohammad’s existence, unfolding earthly murmurs and ghostly chants over their distinctive seismic diapasons. An exhilarating procession through highly charged sonic plateaus, from the burning core to the silent skies.
Uncut Flowers
Hot on the heels of their third album Forget The Curse (Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox, 2023), Fördämning Arkiv presents a Troth anthology compiling early non-album material and other odds and ends from the Australian duo. A massive 15-track retrospective, Uncut Flowers consists of the tracks from the Our Opaque Wreath cassette (Moontown Records, 2019), The Optimist (Essential Minerals, 2019), the Garland And Gauze 7" (Altered States Tapes, 2020) as well as various compilation contributions. 74 minut…
L’Âge de l’Absolutisme
** Limited edition Compact Disc. Comes in A5 oversized digipack. ** Antifrost proudly presents a new release by ΜΜΜΔ featuring baroque keyboardist Alem. Entitled ‘’L’âge de l’absolutisme” this new album, ΜΜΜΔ’s 12th release to date, contains an idiosyncratic take on three landmark late baroque masterpieces: Alessandro Marcello’s Adagio from Oboe Concerto D minor, Georg Friedrich Händel’s Sarabande from Keyboard Suite in D minor (Suite de pièce Vol. 2 No. 4) and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air from A…
Cantor Park
75 copies, blue vinyl. Sometimes records just vibrate with a magical aura propagating endless energy and timeless positionment. Stefano Pilia & Valerio Tricoli have been maestros in their respective careers when it comes to dancing between modern concrete, unimagined landscapes and electroacoustic experiments slowly creating and almost hand-sculpting two of the most singular paths in the European avant garde scene.
After their long tenure in experimental collective 3/4HadBeenEliminated (Häpna, D…
Signal
*300 copies limited edition* Signal, Erik Enocksson and Kristofer Flensmarck's new collaborative work is an electroacoustic composition for voice and electronics – a contemporary echo of late twentieth-century avant-garde text-sound compositions – methodically burrowing its way deeper into a seemingly mundane existence, through alphabetical sequence, all the while revealing its inherent mystery:All förlust / all ilskaall meningslöshet / all skönhetAll natur / all rädslaall skit / all stillhet / …