Heights in Depths
An incredible exploration of true minimalism with a capital M in the vein of Eliane Radigue, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier or Pauline Oliveros. Composer, improviser, pianist and accordionist, Leo Svirsky is based in the Hague, Netherlands. As a composer, his work explores how the instability of listening itself transforms the perception of musical semantics and affect. Disorientations of memory and spatial awareness are nevertheless bounded by a rootedness in song and story.
With his new wor…
Phonography
The first time I heard R. Stevie Moore was when The Residents played me goodbye piano - which would have been sometime in early 1978. Soon after that, I got in touch with him to import some copies for Recommended - followed over the years by many of his other releases. Phonography was Stevie's first, and a masterpiece. Terminally idiosyncratic but with all the compositional qualities of great pop. R Stevie Moore is a gifted songwriter and marches to his own drum - as this strange and compelling …
Future(s)
This CD of songs, grittily arranged and produced is noticeably more straight-ahead than ReR’s usual releases though it sits comfortably within the broad range of Steve’s tirelessly experimental output. This is a project with a long history: Steve and his main collaborator Todd Dadaleares have been writing, recording and performing together for longer than MeRCy’s 20+ year existence and David Fields (drums) and Tim Inman (keyboards) are also long servers. New, for this phase of recordings …
Still Life in Concrete
After a fruitful think-tank session (during which a selection of the european faction of the C.P. cognoscenti met in one of Berlin’s seedier bars to brainstorm new “candidates” for inclusion in the series, now in its 8th year) a couple of great titles were unearthed, the first of which is this fine outing, originally issued by the Columbia, MO -based Garuda label in the mid-80s consisting of a selection of “Imaginary Electroacoustics” by the composer Ed Herrmann, primarily composed utilizing the…
Three Pieces Suite
Studio recordings seven years in the honing. Plus music for a film by Jacques Leduc, with guest Tom Cora.Plus part of a live performance at Sound Symposium, Newfoundland.
Neu Konservatiw
The official release of the semi-official, legendary 1000 only vinyl from 1985, now a highly sought-after collectors piece. This album finds LAIBACH at their most powerful, orchestral and anthemic! Cold Spring released the CD version (2003, repressed 2006) and are now proud to release this gem on a stunning picture disc with new artwork, based on the traditional German ehrenscheibe style.
Ltd x 1000 copies on full colour picture disc.
Unusual Sounds: Reflections, The Brain
Augustyn Bloch was a Polish Organist & Composer largely known in these circles for his extended tenure chairing the "Warszawska Jesień," or "Warsaw Autumn" International Festival of Contemporary Music - you've likely come across one of the myriad "Yearly" Polskie Nagrania Muza compilations bearing the names of the Polish late 20th Century Avant Garde's elite - Włodzimierz Kotoński, Bohdan Mazurek, Andrzej Dobrowolski, Zygmunt Krauze, Bogusław Schaeffer, etc.Working comfortably across different d…
Last, Fragments & Live '74
When the band Agitation Free came together in 1967 as a result of the merging of two Berlin rock groups, one of the most interesting groups in a dawning independent German music scene was created. With their improvisations between rock, jazz and new music, Agitation Free - soon relegated to the not so flattering category of 'Krautrock' - made musical forays into areas that few of their fellow German musicians had ever penetrated. At a time when most in Germany were still orienting themsel…
Melpomene
Dan Melchior has become an unlikely 21st century experimental music icon. As the forms, signifiers and 'experiments' of the last several decades have become increasingly codified, one naturally begins to ask the question what the term in a contemporary setting means to the listener. If the performer and the audience both know what to expect before, during and after a record or performance, can it be considered an experiment? At the start of the century, Melchior was known in NYC as being a…
Fill My Body With Flowers and Rice
Alice Kemp creates a cryptic yet coherent body of work through drawing, painting, objects, sound, audio composition, performance, and beyond. She has performed in Japan, USA, UK & Europe, and her more recent musical output has been released by labels such as Fragment Factory and Harbinger Sound. «Fill My Body With Flowers And Rice» is Kemp‘s first full-length release to vinyl - a compelling work of more than 40 minutes, including two collaborations with Rudolf Eb.er (Schimpfluch, Runzelstirn & G…
Rags/The Golddiggers
Consists of the whole of the LP previously issued as Re/arc and most of "The Golddiggers". Featuring Lindsay Cooper, Sally Potter, Phil Minton, Georgie Born, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Marilyn Mazur, Kate Westbrook, Collette Lafont, Eleanor Sloan, Lol Coxhill and Dave Holland. Explores the song form as so many of the early post Henry Cow records by ex alumni did. With a full book of texts and pictures (74+ minutes).
CMCD (Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic And Electronic Works 1970-1990)
This essential piece of history at last reissued, redesigned and repackaged. Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium. It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition of 1917; Georg Katzer's monumental 'Aide Memoire' ('7 nig…
The Shunned Country
A collection of 52 very short songs on uncanny themes, illustrated in the exquisite 24p full-colour booklet with a set of 20 commissioned paintings by Ray O'Bannon. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob Drake plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable tempo synchrony, packing more ideas and material into 50 seconds than many manage on an ent…
Bob's Drive-In
A set of twisty, forty-ideas-a-minute, niftily arranged, irredeemably eccentric, but strangely brilliant songs that skip blithely across genre borders - from Nashville through the Miskatonic by way of the Beach Boys… even the production values range across the history of recording, sometimes switching inside a single song; so it’s a high-information ride - but still engagingly listenable. So far so good: another crafted, dense, idiosyncratic studio album. Now comes the twist. Finished with his …
13 Songs and a Thing
The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob Drake undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable musical logic.
The Skull Mailbox (and other Horrors)
The strangest so far. Mostly songs; a lot of acoustic instruments, a lot of unidentifiable sounds, a lot of fragments borne on a wind from somewhere else; bizarre picking interludes, humour (maybe) and snatches of incandescent playing. You can't pin this one down; it's full of twists and turns and a geometry that doesn't quite add up. Seemingly casual, there's not an ounce of fat on it, and the production - or anti-production - is, on repeated listening, quite extraordinary. Impressive.
Little Black Train
Thinking Plague, Hail, EC Nudes, 5UU's bassist and mixmaster with his second solo CD. Fast and furious country picking meets weird fragmentation and fast cut compositions. Guitars, Bass, Drums, Violin and odd unidentifiable noises all flawlessly performed, recorded and mixed into a single organism of musical strangeness. One of a kind.
Itsunomanika
Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…
S'Û
An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…
Vertigo
The Necks 18th album Vertigo is an eventful, kaleidoscopic tone poem set against a darkly shimmering background. Slowly but inexorably moving forward, it crosses many frontiers yet remains true to the mission and mood established in the opening stanzas of this cinematic 44 minute journey. A work able to be viewed either as a whole, or two symmetrical halves, Vertigo sees The Necks once again offer an excursion in sound that reflects both the light and darkness of some preternatural world.
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