Dark Ballads
* Edition of 300 * Dark Ballads is the obvious title of this LP, as if this music pre-existed the duo that, without any other choice, was formed around it. Since then, Giotis Damianidis and Audrey Lauro have continued to advance along this straight line that runs through their inner landscapes.
Their music creates a "stretched" emotional space, which evolves in slow motion and captures the fragility of the tone, the tension of the path. Each stage of the record is a mineral evocation of the inti…
As Vgei Kapou Ayto
* Vinyl edition, limited to 200 hand-stamped copies * Twelve years since 2008, year zero in the documentation of Angelos Kyriou’s works, 2020 saw the long-awaited release of an expansive compilation of his music from the Agios Anthropos label (KLIMA). Rekem in its turn presents the edition at hand, a more current offering of where Angelos’ music sits today. A warm evening live in front of friends, a healthy 11min dose from the last few days of 2019, offers us the occasion for this rough gem.
Pan…
Soundscapes from Philoti, Naxos
Rekem Records presents an album of field recordings from the village of Philoti, Naxos, in the Cyclades. These recordings by anthropologists Panos Panopoulos and Yorgos Samantas offer us a tangible and pleasurable sonic image of highland Naxos, focusing on a range of acoustic stimuli that touches on the multiple aspects of everyday life, as well as those of ritual space and time, and the dynamic interplay between voices, natural sounds and music.
The material compiled sketches an acoustic profil…
Mex 2020
Mex is a non-profit-organization for intermedia and experimental music projects, located in Dortmund, Germany. Since 1992 more than 650 musicians and media artists from around the world presented their subtle, noisy, improvised or conceptual works. mex’s traditional venue for those projects of concerts in combination with performance, video and intermedia, is the mexKeller at the Künstlerhaus with it’s special acoustic and atmosphere. Jens Brand began inviting artists and later Maija Julius went…
Ludwig Wittbrodt
* Cassette in a plastic case with a cardboard insert, printed on the devices of the Museum of Photocopy in Mulheim, Germany. Dubbed in high quality at Ana Ott * The Duo Ludwig Wittbrodt, that‘s Emily Wittbrodt on cello and Edis Ludwig on laptop and drums. The two develop a thicket of sounds and melodies that absorbs us in a completely unpretentious way and fills us with associations and warmth. Sometimes in the jungle, sometimes under water in the desert, we are reminded of the achievements of b…
Anna-Lisa & Rosanne
* Each cassette is handmade and unique. The cases have been made in gravure printing. More precisely: They are line etchings with oil paint on handmade paper. The process also uses a titanium-zinc plate and a paint made of diluted tar. And finally, to match the music, the whole thing wanders through an acid bath * In the heat of summer, Nasssau staggered in a stuffy bus through parts of Europe. They pant in Dusseldorf, they splashed in Hamburg, they rejoiced in Brussels and they mumbled in Antwe…
SSSS
Alicja presents SSSS by Szymon Wildstein.Imagine a theatre run by pigs, the play that comes out of it, will it ruin your life?orYou piggy could start everything, and bring it all to an end.orHyperbole's draft never quite finished, as if there were more extensions to be experienced.Future has already arrived, why don't you change your life?
Throat Mask
The self-titled debut from Throat Mask collects four improvisations from the duo that are built around random processes and hover constantly between collapse and coalescence. The recording sees Nathan Gray attempt to guide his unruly stack of sputtering and chiming digital automations while T. Kowalski responds with fm, digital and analog synthesis and sparsely gestural midi drums.Side A keeps returning to Gray’s voice, occasionally it’s recognisable but more often it’s faltering or shredded by …
Eliksir
* Pro-dubbed clear tape in smokey brown case, cover image printed on transparency film, insert card with a stamp * Alicja founder, painter DJ and problem child Tomasz Kowalski presents his first collection of confounding audio objects: Eliksir. The title track, centrepiece and key to the work as a whole, Eliksir is an augmented radio play that is loosely based around Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room. But instead of an intense focus on auditory phenomena, distraction and interruption divert t…
Wwdruja nuk Nieuzywaja / They wander, don't use the feet
* Edition of 80 * Wędrowiec is a relatively recent project from Poland, channeling forward thinking sonic experimentation through the lens of minimalism and traditional ritual folk music from central Poland. Featuring members of Ksiezyc, Bractwo Ubogich, Kapela Domu Tanca, Kolowrót and Pies Szczeka (Agata Harz, Emili Herda, Piotr Herda, and Remek Hanaj), Wędrują nuk Nieuzywają / They Wander, Don't Use the Feet delves deep into a mysterious world, is built from a sonic pallet of haunting vocals, …
Shakuhachi for Latin Lovers
* Edition of 70 * Clive Bell’s roots in British experimental music run deep. Many will know him for his frequent contributions as a writer for The Wire magazine, while others will know him for his sonic explorations that date back into the 1970s, both solo as well as in collaboration with New Jazz Syndicate, Peter Cusack, Jac Berrocal, Steve Beresford, Jah Wobble, David Ross, David Toop, Mike Cooper, and countless others.Bell is an accomplished player of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), khene (T…
Quattro
Tanz Mein Herz’s latest, Quattro, out via Standard In-Fi, encounters the French collective pushing at the boundaries of folk tinged experimentalism, psych, and drone. Sprawling across two LPs, it’s an absolute burner of throbbing, hypnotic sound and stunning creative interplay, and easily one of the best records we’ve heard in the early months of 2021.
Taiwan Years
A stunning journey into the archives of one of the most fascinating composers / percussionists working today, Michael Ranta’s Taiwan Years, issued by Metaphon, is nothing short of a revelation, seamlessly binding acoustic interventions with a subtle pallet of electronic and electroacoustic ambiance in a landscape threaded by East-Asian esotericism, psychedelia, minimalism, and outright experimental avant-gardism.
Best that You Do This for Me
With Best that you do this for me, Jim O’Rourke delivers a composition that redefines the boundaries of chamber music with disarming directness and subtle complexity. Commissioned by Apartment House, the piece features violin, viola, and cello - played by Mira Benjamin, Bridget Carey, and Anton Lukoszevieze- whose voices, whistles, and hums artfully entwine with bowed harmonics. The suite is built on a flexible graphic score, affording the performers significant interpretative agency, and coaxin…
Muto Infinitas
In Muto Infinitas, Catherine Lamb extends her distinctive approach to microtonality and just intonation, crafting a forty-minute dialogue for quartertone bass flute and double bass performed by Rebecca Lane and Jon Heilbron. The recording, realized without electronic alteration, invites deep listening, unspooling at an unhurried pace in a luminous acoustic field. Lamb’s music here is uncompromising in its patience: the two musicians linger in the borderlands of pitch and timbre, carving out a sp…
Sculthorpe Studies
Sculthorpe Studies marks a thoughtful and searching entry from Josten Myburgh, situating contemporary ensemble practice within a deep engagement with Australia’s sonic environment and historical legacy. Drawing direct inspiration from the harmonic language of Peter Sculthorpe, himself known for invoking landscape and indigeneity in his music, Myburgh constructs a work for sextet and field recordings that is at once interrogation and homage. The piece unfolds in a sequence of episodes, each pairi…
Single Track
On Single Track, Michael Winter delivers an exercise in continuous transformation, realized by Liminar with a deftness that makes process audible without diminishing expressive intimacy. The work opens in a blur of kinetic string textures, mapping a single gestural arc that narrows and distills over the course of forty-six minutes. Through the canon form, what begins as a flurry of interconnected voices decelerates stepwise, granting each timbral shift and harmonic overtone maximum clarity. As …
Hlaholika
With Hlaholika, Adrian Democ offers a collection of chamber pieces unified by a focus on stillness and the unhurried unfolding of sound. Rather than chasing after overt drama, Democ’s writing reveals itself through the subtle layering of sonorities and stark, melodic lines, letting each instrument’s character shine. Apartment House brings sensitivity and patience to these recordings, allowing the music’s quiet radiance to emerge organically, rather than by force.
The album opens with “Ma fin est…
Motore Immobile
To quote Pitchfork, this is 'one of the most sumptuous, spiritual ambient albums of any era or provenance.
A New Instability
In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability, a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in Paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to the founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive s…