Swallow
2013 release. Scott Cazan's music is driven by a fascination in the fullness of sound as well as an interest in network and information theory. Like the writings of those who inspire him, such as Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Alexander Galloway, his work, for all its directness, has a dark and seductive aura. Swallow is an album that lingers at the borders between memory, ambience, and feedback.
Study For A Monument
Gothenburg-based artist Johan Zetterquist delivers his debut album for the excellent iDEAL label, unspooling three extended pieces shaped like sound sculptures. It's a profound drone metal variant recorded on a Gibson SG, amplifier and effects, live with no overdubs, slowly unfolding to reveal blistered shards of sound that recall everything from Stephen O’Malley to Maryanne Amacher's seminal Sound Characters. Zetterquist gets a huge amount of mileage out of the contrast between extremes produce…
Rotations
Hyper colourful and shiny modular synthesis and effected Clarinet ecstasies from the American contemporary avant garde...“As the duo Golden Retriever, Matt Carlson and Jonathan Sielaff have explored an ocean’s worth of sound. Primarily working with the intersection of modular synthesis and amplified/effected bass clarinet, the duo has done eight releases for labels like Thrill Jockey, Root Strata, and NNA Tapes. Their music combines an intense emotional immediacy and meditative focus with strong…
Smoke / An Ally
A hypnagogic narration that evolves in a dream-state, hazy atmosphere intrinsically embodies Dead Gum's thirteenth release. “Smoke / An Ally”, freely curated by the subconscious, evolves on sonic interpretations that emerge from a specific vocal pattern of indelible words. Variations of monad launch a descent to translucent memory fields. Numb listening, ceaselessly transformed inwards, unto the inner light of the night, nearing, until it dims down once again to blackness. Dead Gum is the solo p…
Concept Bongo
"Concept Bongo"'s completely minimal logic is not exhausted in the fact that it is an album that is only played with bongos. Because beyond this conception, the music we find in its thirty minutes is characterized by a mystagogic feeling which, through an abstracted and repetitive ambience, keeps you totally transfixed, marginally helpless to react to it. References to the musical culture of the percussion instruments are stimuli left to the listener's own discretion: you can understand "Concept…
London Taximi
Taximi is the improvisation during the performance of traditional musical pieces, using soloistic folk instruments. It has roots in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabic culture and can be commonly found in Greek music and specifically in rebetiko. Taximi is a free rhythm melody, an author's imagination, alternating between various emotional paths with a passion respective to each one who carries it. The main prerequisite in order to play a taximi is not to have excellent technical knowledge, but…
Whitehouse
Karlrecords presents the second collaboration between the critically acclaimed ensemble zeitkratzer and the legendary power electronics and afro noise pioneer William Bennett (Whitehouse, Cut Hands). Music with crystal clear, even neurosurgical precision -- pure acoustic power! The floor vibrates with deep bass frequencies, produced by the huge orchestral drum, the beaten bass strings of the piano, and sub-tones of the horns, while high piping sounds from amplified violin harmonics and bitt…
Live At Candy Bomber Studios, Vol.1
Curtains up for a new power trio: bass player Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Laniakea), drummer Alexandre Babel (Sudden Infant) and Caspar Brötzmann on guitar. As the title Live At The Candy Bomber Studios, Vol.1 indicates, this album is the first cut from an inspired recording meeting. Raw energy with full focus; three instrumentalists, at the peak of their skills, blend noise rock, drone, and improvisation into two relentless, epic pieces. The line-up consists of Massimo Pupillo, bass player in Zu, …
Oneirika
Reinhold Friedl's Zeitkratzer proves the perfect ensemble for Oneirika, avant-garde veteran Elliott Sharp's composition/soundscape inspired by Cageian tradition that premiered at Maerzmusik Festival 2014. Zeitkratzer worked with Elliott Sharp for the first time in 1997, and have since been releasing several cooperations, including two duo releases of Zeitkratzer mastermind Reinhold Friedl and Elliott Sharp. Over the last 40 years the avant-garde musician has created an immense oeuvre: he ha…
Bwoouunn: Fleeting Excitement
Alto sax player/improviser Masahide Tokunaga released his second solo album in 2015, and the highly original playing on that recording, comprised entirely of powerful long tones, received critical acclaim. Two years later, his third solo album shows that he has reached new heights. Proceeding in a comfortable way, his performances here consist mainly of long tones, but add subtle changes in timbre and volume with impressive technical skill, producing a highly creative sound space which could eve…
Schulevy Maker
Holotype Editions was founded as a means of bringing out music by some of the most unique and peculiar artists of the last decades. What could be more fitting for the imprint’s seventh release, than the duo of cult artist Ghédalia Tazartès and multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer Maya Dunietz. Recorded live at Cafe Oto, in December 2013, Schulevy Maker documents the duo’s first live appearance. An amalgam of bizarre samples, concrete sounds, live piano and bells, juxtaposed with the otherw…
L’homme approximatif
Jean-Marc Foussat, whose electronic universe owes a lot to Dada and Pataphysics, has decided to put Tristan Tzara's "L'Homme Approximatif" in music, with an astonishing LP, that features himself at Synthi AKS and voice, and Jamal Moss: flûtes, cordes, piano and Jean-François Pauvros vocals
Två porträtt
Två porträtt (Two portraits) is a record that includes two long sounding portraits of two, in different ways, significant figures from the 19th century Europe that in a first glance should not have much in common. But both Hanna Arendt and Friedrich Jürgenson chose in their thinking and in their practice a completely own way. Rainer Maria Rilke appears as a shadow in the wings, as a third for the record important character, whose words has given the two compositions their titles. In Martin Tegen…
Listen
"Recently, I have become interested in the idea of music blending with the environment the listener is in, rather than the music creating its own environment. In listen, I have recorded a balance of sounds that occur naturally throughout the day and others created intentionally in imitation of those sounds. the piece is comprised of four field recordings, collected in an area near my current home (Avon, CT) at different times of the day. I listened to each of the recordings and isolated sounds t…
Archive : Volumes I-V : 2005 to 2009
Five CD box set in DVD size metal tin with PVC jacket. Very limited edition, 100 copies only ! Five factory pressed CDs. Five postcard inserts. Individually numbered. Mark Wastell has been organising larger formations of musicians, collectively known as The Seen, for over 10 years, featuring John Butcher, Wolfgang Fuchs, Rhodri Davies, David Toop, Phil Durrant, Lee Gamble and many more. Using predominantly improvised material with occasional instructions or themes distributed to individual music…
Duft
On their 3rd LP for Poland’s Bocian Records, the Zeitkratzer Ensemble directed by Reinhold Friedl yield two knife-edge pieces recorded live at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, September 30th, 2015. A-side is a performance of Gilles Sivilotto’s Handmade 02, meaning a 15 minute transition from sleigh bells and arrhythmic string scrapes into structuring, creaking rhythms and banks of atonal clangour, developing into a serious caterwaul akin to a busy factory cosign to the end of its day. The …
Substantial
2017 repress of Hauschka's debut album Substantial, originally released in 2004. Piano music is highly personal music, which is the reason why piano solo albums occupy a particular place of importance in a musician's work -- not that Volker Bertelmann wants to hype his first foray to that extent, hence the pseudonym. Nevertheless Hauschka is personal music, simply because it has accompanied him for so long, because it has always been there in some shape or form, because it has always been import…
Bleak House
** Deluxe (and pricey) edition, remastered from the original tapes ** Recorded over three sessions in 1968, Bleak House marks Terje Rypdal departure from psychedelic group The Dream and off to explore further territories. He would later become one of the most recognisable instrumentalist in european jazz, with releases on the Ecm label filled to the brim with his searingly exciting future-tundra guitar sounds.By this time in 1968, he was already in an almost unique position in the Norwegian musi…
Contrapt
John Wall and Mark Durgan return after a lengthy absence with Contrapt. On Contrapt, they've created a fractured sound world woven together from improvisations that took place in the Utterpsalm Studio in London between 2012-15. The seven tracks on Contrapt are an attempt at imposing order, structure, and "expression" without meaning or intention, onto a huge amount of heavily edited sonic material.
Pop Art
Catherine Anahid Berberian (July 4, 1925 – March 6, 1983) was an American mezzo-soprano and composer based in Italy. She interpreted contemporary avant-garde music composed, among others, by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Silvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and Igor Stravinsky. She also interpreted works by Claudio Monteverdi, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Kurt Weill, Philipp Zu Eulenburg, arrangements of songs by The Beatles, and folk songs from several…