Beaming
Further on from a few phone conversations last week (graciously enabled in the first instance by the ever-generous Alan Skidmore) and the swift dispatch from Germany of the demo disc, I'm very excited to announce that Tony Oxley, one of the great forefathers of European improvised music, will be releasing a disc on Confront Recordings. I've played the demo about fifteen times in the last three days and it's absolutely incredible. Tony is 81 years old and as evidenced here, is still making except…
Skins n Slime
Oliver Coates’ skins n slime is a caliginous anatomy concealed by a drone-metal membrane, feeding upon mechanized strand distortions and thriving amidst its harmonic waste.
In his follow-up album to 2018’s Shelley’s on Zenn-La, the British cellist and producer leads an impassioned performance of string through viscous, synthetic modulation, triggering a darker side of his compositional sensibilities. Shelley’s experimental dance hybrids are substituted here for scorching color palettes and bruta…
No era sólida
Lucrecia Dalt presents No era sólida, an introspective path to unworldly surroundings where self becomes sound, and a compass for the searchers of musical possession.
For her follow-up full-length to 2018’s Anticlines, Dalt relinquishes control of the corporeal to reach imagination’s outer realm. Where Anticlines framed the physical processes of matter changing state, No era sólida observes a transition in Dalt herself through the emergence of Lia: an apparition, or second self, of the artist as…
Casts
Originally released in November 2014 when we had just started out, we're incredibly pleased to reissue one of our very first releases and one that we truly believe deserves more attention. Composed, Performed, and Recorded by Sarah Hennies in Austin, TX & Ithaca, NY 2012-2014.
The Reinvention of Romance
“The Reinvention of Romance,” a new work for percussion and cello that examines the care and empathy that emerge when two lives share space. Over the course of 90 minutes, a series of repeating patterns creates a peculiar kind of harmony in which two musicians are rarely “playing together” but are nonetheless intimately bonded. The Knoxville-based duo Two-Way Street (Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion) commissioned Hennies to compose “a very long piece;” for this recording they step into its two intertw…
The Acid Lands
The Acid Lands, created by the Prague-based Opening Performance Orchestra, was first heard in public in 2014 at the Movement-Sound-Space festival in Ostrava, to mark the centenary of William S. Burroughs's birth. The piece was performed live by Opening Performance Orchestra and their guests, the theremin player Martina Potucková, and the poet, musician and performer Pavel Z as the narrator.
The studio version of The Acid Lands was made in late 2019/early 2020 in collaboration with Bill Laswell a…
Universo - Selected Works 1982-1988
* Edition of 300 * Mannequin Records presents a double-LP compilation of the Dutch industrial-experimental heroes Doxa Sinistra. Preciously selected by the expert ears of Frank Brinkhuis, head of Trumpett, "Universo" is spanning from 1982 to 1988 through their entire discography.
Doxa Sinistra was formed in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, early 1982. On the strength of live performances at Paradiso and Ultra venue Oktopus, the two piece band was invited by Trumpett to record an album in the Freakowi…
A C of M
* Edition of 100 * “The first two weeks of lockdown I was sitting in my kitchen paralyzed just like everyone else, following the news anxiously. When boredom and anxiety set in and to keep myself sane I started to record audio off my Twitter feed; people playing their instruments at home (in *their* kitchens), anti-vaxxer car demos, people shouting & swearing at each other in streets & supermarkets. I made little sketches, loops and songs from these samples combined with some of my own home and …
Ajaeng Ajaeng
To be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls “the third ear”. The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study.
The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights…
Sasanami
"Sasanami" is the result of a dialog between the Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao and the Japanese musician Uchida Akira (with
Miu Sakamoto at the voice) initiated by IIKKI, between October 2019 and August 2020.
After to have worked as a saxophonist for several years, Akira Uchida, in 2007 learned piano tuning under Mr. Satoshi Yoshida. Planning and holding "Sound workshop" which is to introduce how to interact with various sounds from the viewpoint of sound turning. In 2015 while he was le…
Classical Mechanics
Observing visual and auditory patterns of slowly moving objects, induces a comforting sense. Whether random or organised, complex or simple, intentional or incidental, seen, felt or listened to, most physical movements carry a reassuring message; the receiver is alive, earth is in orbit exerting a gravitational force upon all matter and time has a constant flow which can be measured through the periodic succession of physical phenomena.
It was upon these fundamental principles that visual artist…
Concentration Patterns
* Hand-numbered limited run of 300 copies * C.R. Gillespie is a Canadian musician and sound artist. Born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, coastal living on Vancouver Island influenced his textural overlapping of “waves”; focused layering of soothing tones that tremulate and merge in a vast and expansive synthetic ocean. This aesthetic is at the forefront of his new release, Concentration Patterns, a sprawling 75-minute ambient suite which envelops the listener in a vibrating collage of drifting tex…
Parallel Voices
* Edition of 200 * Chicagoan Brian Case is returning to Hands in the Dark with his fourth release under his own name, Parallel Voices.
In a sense, the album is elliptical: Whilst, musically speaking, the American artist comes back to the start of his solo work by producing a fully instrumental album, he also delivers a story which informs the landscape Case lives in now, and always imbibes it with a sense of tension and dark undercurrents. You might think at first that the voice he uses is abstr…
Dreaming
With a 50 year plus music career, Michael Rother is one of modern German music’s great trailblazers. A founder member of NEU! with Klaus Dinger, Rother helped to pioneer Kosmische Musik. There was also the Harmonia project with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster which led to him becoming the original first choice of David Bowie to play guitar on ‘Heroes’, although that promising partnership never became reality. When NEU! split after three albums in 1975, Rother embarked on an…
Live At I-And-E Festival
Long anticipated vinyl re-issue of a concert that took place at the I-and-E Festival at Trinity College, Dublin in 2006 by Keith Rowe (legendary AMM guitarist and one of the founding fathers of European improvised music) and Mark Wastell (pivotal London based experimentalist). The duo had formed the previous year for a show at ErstQuake Festival in New York and this was to be their second, and only, other performance together. "Keith Rowe and Mark Wastell - This last performance balanced the eve…
Pléistocène Supérieur
**Limited edition of 50 cassette tapes with extractable paper crochet holy image on white matte rough paper. Includes digital download**Created to non-exist in the depths of East Rome and now relocated to France, John Poubelle defines her music as "punk fragile de sous-sol" (fragile punk of the subsoil), raw and spontaneous yet intimate and vulnerable. "Pléistocène supérieur" gifts us with acid synthetic "psalms" steeped in haunting reverbed vocals reminding of Nico's piercing plaint."SSS" is hi…
Sss
**Limited edition of 50 cassette tapes with extractable paper crochet holy image on white matte rough paper. Includes digital download**David aka Christophe Clébard, enfant terrible of synth punk scene, plays a crappy synth and a drum-machine to painfully celebrate love, loss and pain. Live, he hooks the audience with a naked performance that reminds of a panic attack you will never forget. If love is a lost battle, why not fight the pain using distorted melodies and intoxicating rhythms? "SSS"…
Mother
**Limited edition of 50 cassette tapes with extractable paper crochet holy image on white matte rough paper. Includes digital download**A long time agitator of the Turin music scene, Mother (solo project of Tommaso Bonfilio of SabaSaba) uses a mixture of tape cut-ups, crooked percussions, stretched voice and some random languishing instruments to convey an album filled with deep sweet and sour darkness in form of perverted songs as if in a collaboration between William Burroughs and Martin Rev.
Come When The Raven Calls
* Edition of 300 * Come When The Raven Calls is the second album by Suzanne Langille and Neel Murgai after more than two decades performing together. Langille fuses the rawness of American spiritual blues with Murgai’s trance-like percussion and multi-note vocal overtones. The duo are unmatched in their timeless approach to song, a structure they summon from a tinder of melody or thundering charge of the Persian daf. A lyricist as well as vocalist, Langille is devoted to the spoken word. She pul…
A Year Closer
It makes less sense to say that Maths Balance Volumes formed in 2002 than to say that, since that year, they have been collapsing into something, again and again. Just as the three members fell together with no plan or allegiance to any style or genre, each track falls together as the broken pieces of songs and sounds meet to make a temporary and frightening whole. Things make their way into a Maths Balance Volumes song when they don’t or won’t work anymore, when they have escaped their owner, o…