The Invention of the Human
"The Invention of The Human" is designed as a response to the question "what makes us human?" The question has become increasingly important in this period of history, in that many of the answers aren't good enough. "Civilisation" could be one answer; but what good is civilization where there is so much misery within it?
"Progress" could be another; but what good is progress without kindness and empathy to sustain it? Taking the thought of man's relationship with technology as a measure of human…
Infinity Suite
In common parlance the term Infinity Suite refers to a luxury hotel apartment comprised of several adjoining rooms. But my usage of the term here invokes the notion of infinite realities as resonating through dream and memory. An interconnected suite of spaces populated with vivid sounds and images spanning across periods of one’s life. My experience here focuses on the Indian city of Varanasi, but this sense of reality drifting I found there could’ve taken place anywhere. I focused on Varanasi …
Fielding
**Edition of 300, 2020 Vinyl Reissue.** Desastre and Worstward Recordings present the first vinyl issue of Hala Strana's second full-length album "Fielding". Originally released in 2003 on the Jewelled Antler label, "Fielding" is the sprawling, epic leap forward from Hala Strana’s self-titled debut full-length—a psychedelic collage of traditional music, field recordings, and sonic landscapes. Started in 2002, Hala Strana was the summation of Steven R. Smith's interest in the traditional folk mus…
Merzbild Schwet
**500 copies, blue vinyl. Very few copies available** The long awaited vinyl reissue of NWWs classic third album is finally available. Nurse With Wound began as a trio, but by Merzbild Schwet, its third album, Steve Stapleton's singular vision took over, with no compromises to other band members. As such it can be considered the first fully realized NWW. record and is a far more mature effort than its predecessors. Stapleton's editing techniques come to the fore, with abrupt transitions, quirky …
To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl
**500 copies, yellow vinyl. Very few copies available** The long awaited vinyl reissue of NWWs classic second album is finally available. Following on the footsteps of Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table, To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl was Nurse With Wound's second album and shows the group refining itself from the debut and adding a lot more dynamics. The record starts off with the very short Umbrella Link, really just some guitar riffing from engineer Nicky Rodgers as a concession for NWW.…
Solar Ipse X (Magazine)
Magazine, 64 pages A4 format (Italian Language), with overviews, artciles and interviews on Davide Rinella, Ahti&Ahti, Prana Crafter, Giovanni Di Domenico, Massimo Carozzi, Luca Collivasone, Gigi Masin, Masche… Approfondimenti su Boss Hog, Kaboom Karavan, 90 Day Men) Speciali (Riccardo Sinigaglia: ten favourites) and 128 records reviews
Where the Dusk Has No End
* Edition of 200 * After "September Winds", Giuseppe Verticchio/Nimh and Daniela Gherardi are back as Twist of Fate with their newest offering entitled "Where the Dusk has no End". Sounds and atmospheres constantly bordering shadows and light, in a sort of infinite twilight where thin rays of sun violate the looming darkness, drawing landscapes with fragile and indefinite contours, sound watercolours swaying through Ambient, Shoegaze and 'drumless Post Rock', alternating atmospheres - now darker…
Gruppo d'Improvvisazione "Nuova Consonanza"
**White vinyl LP** Re-issue of the incredibly rare Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza 1975's album, which comes in a fully remastered version with new sequence / structure as per recently discovered original tapes.When gazing over the expanse of 20th Century avant-garde music, few European projects can claim the seminal importance of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Formed in Rome in 1964 and considered to be the first experimental composers collective, its membership incl…
Ashioto
Black Truffle announce Ashioto, the first international solo release from Japanese drummer-percussionist-composer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. Active for over a decade, Yamamoto has performed and recorded extensively with artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, and Akira Sakata, as well as participating in innumerable improvised and ad hoc groups. Ashioto presents two wide-ranging pieces that combine Yamamoto's percussion work with piano, field recordings, electronics, and contributions from guest …
L'Herbe Qui Rend Amoureux
ince their debut concert at the legendary Grande Festo in 2018, a magic summer gathering and tennis tournament held on a honey & walnut farm deep in the Ardèche mountains, southern France, La Fureur De Vouivre boggle your mind with their medieval inspired rhythms and snake charmer style flute deliriums. This album is a trip, an adventure quest in search for the grass that makes you fall in love. The duo of Pauline Marx and Julien Groboz shake up their fizzling tunes and miniatures out of a barn …
Hipólito
Tulips is a percussionist and improviser from Cologne. Hipólito is a selection of recordings from 2019 and 2020.
Lamunan
** Edition of 90 copies** Forged alone in a cave on the island of Java, and recorded in a fortress in Poland, Antonina Nowacka’s “Lamunan” is an intimate exploration of a mysterious darkness and the earliest of musical forms. Nowacka has co-created raw electronics and audiovisuals as half of WIDT and the enigmatic Mentos Gulgendo, but her solo practice focuses solely on the voice’s inherent connection to mental states, its ability to speak wordlessly, and the apparatus of speech itself – leading…
BOW
Brussels-based string quintet BOW celebrates musical freedom. Juggling between their own written music and pure improvisation, the ensemble has worked since its creation on a personal and modern approach, digging into their instruments' capabilities and blending a large scope of influences.
Its debut eponym LP, due to be released on Sub Rosa, gathers five instantly-composed pieces that were recorded live by Christine Verschorren in the Echo Collective studio in Brussels. During the day, BOW repe…
Entry Points. Resonating Punk, Performance, and Art
*2020 stock. Edition of 200. 52 pages, Risograph printed artist book with CD* During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as members of the performance art group Exit, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher turned to creating outside of the gallery system and artistic conventions. Taking inspiration from Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism and Taoism, they searched for ways to push beyond the boundaries of Western art practices and rationalities.
This resonates with Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa’s 19…
Imagined Commonities: Live At La Cave 12, Genève
FEN is an improvised music quartet. Comprising Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore), Yan Jun (China) and Ryu Hankil (Korea), it was formed in 2008 in Marseille.
The initial intent of forming FEN was not based on a particular pursuit of any specific form of musical aesthetic, but rather to develop and deepen the improvised music networks of Asia. This desire was furthered by these 4 individuals, each with their individual endeavours to organise music-related activities and bridge co…
Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations
*2020 stock. Edition of 300, last copies. Comes with custom-made foil which transforms the special cover art by acclaimed artist Takashiro Kurashima into a kaleidoscopic trail of electric vibrations.* 1 continent, 2 bands, 42 musicians! Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations is a split LP that brings together two bands from Asia with outwardly contrasting dispositions, while sharing sympathetic resonances.
On Side A, hailing from Osaka, Japan, we have the ever exuberant postmodern psychrock legends, Ac…
Authority is Alive
Recorded live at the Playfreely Festival in Singapore, November 2019, Authority is Alive is a potent performance mixed from an intoxicating brew of poetry, philosophy and sonic alchemy. Bearing the theme “The Transparency of Turbulence”, the festival featured a strong line-up of East Asian and Southeast Asian artists and bore the ambition to be “an alternative to how we coalesce and navigate a region that is continuously torn apart by words, egos, greed and ideologies.”
“Everything... living... …
Hope
Bourbonese Qualk were an experimental music group from England who where active from 1979 until 2003. The group were always obsessively and uncompromisingly focused on controlling their work – they ran their own record label, recording studio, tour organisation and music venue (the legendary ‘Ambulance Station’) – they refused to integrate into the commercial music racket turning down publishing deals from major labels – stubbornly opting for total independence.
Bourbonese Qualk were also known …
Ice Exposure
Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the ‘70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theatre were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock ‘n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and un…
Summing
Oscar Jan Hoogland is the sound of Amsterdam in person. He plays in the Muziekgebouw (Amsterdams main hall for modern composed music) as well as in the Bimhuis (Holland’s main jazz venue) that is literally attached to it, as in its parking garage. He is an instant composer, pianist and inventor of his own instrument by putting a clavichord, a keyboard instrument from the 17th century, on 220 Volt electricity.
As the last student of the late pianist, composer and improvisor Misha Mengelberg he te…