Trübhand
Trübhand was summoned in February of 2016. My wife and I were living in north Germany in exile at the time as a result of untenable UK visa policy. As someone who always has a strong reliance on landscape in my work, the absolute flatness of the area was further adding to my homesickness and feelings of isolation. At night, in the alien darkness, I would close my eyes and rend the landscape. I would summon great mountains, pulling up grassy slopes that gave way to jagged cliffs, dragging down th…
Koura
Track 1: Multitrack recording of sustained tones using a ‘Jubel Töne’ zither and additional live electronic effect processing. Track 2: Multitrack recording of sustained tones using a ‘Hohner Organetta’ chord organ and additional live electronic effect processing. Both tracks are part of a composition series based on sustained, multilayered recordings of solo acoustic instruments. The instruments have been performed with extended techniques and additional live electronic “extensions” (looping fe…
Biotische Verwitterung
A disquieting record to accompany the nightmare of now. Baldruin documents this darkness, finding some hope in the helplessness. Buried within these grooves, lies a dizzying array of crepuscular sonics. Barely alive, it drips with dread. Rachitic loops return to us, like traumas. A sticky submission. My goodness, these earworms are infectious.
Rosary Bleeds
Rosary Bleeds takes the road hinted at with those 90s synth chords and follows it all the way down. While the other two releases feel like very communal creations with no single voice dominating, Rosary Bleeds is centred on Alison O'Donnell's dramatic vocals. The backdrop is almost entirely synthetic; clicking drum machines, burbling, proto-melodic leads, deep bass. Clean electric guitar sometimes adds to the texture with simple, single strums. There is almost nothing to suggest that the…
Music from Saharan Cellphones Vol.2
2017 repress. "Contemporary pop music from the Sahara desert, where songs are stored on cellphones. Collected in Northern Mali in 2010 (since taken over by extremists who've banned music on cellphones) the second volume expands into new sonic territory - from dreamy Niger guitar ballads, Bamako club juke, and hi energy Moroccan child Raï - with a focus on the Autotuned DIY creations circulating the desert." Includes insert with liner notes.
Grey Mornings
Two years after the release of the critically acclaimed, Pondfire, Paul Beauchamp returns with his second solo album, Grey Mornings. Once again tapping into geographical influence for inspiration, the nine tracks of ambient drones reflect the feelings and emotions experienced during the early hours of grey, foggy mornings in both the Piedmont region of Beauchamp’s birthplace in North Carolina and the Piemonte region of Northern Italy where he now resides. Beauchamp continues his research into ex…
One Single Sound
Bored of working for years on microsounds, crick & crocks, drones and field recordings, Matteo Uggeri launches a new project based on field recordings, drones, crick and crocks, microsounds and ignorant beats. Each of these four tracks is then built using only 1 drone, 1 field recording, 1 sampled drumbeat. Then a lot of effects. Inspired by the letters of Charles Robert Darwin to William Darwin Fox. "I am at work on the second vol. of the Cirripedia, of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I…
Space Text Sound
Space Text Sound documents text material used in three of my recent installations: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Hong Kong (After Perec) (2016), Drifting (2016) and Other Ghosts (2015). All three of these works investigate the nexus points between the production of space through sound and how text can be used to reflect on this process. I’m interested in how words can convey the sense of place sounds can and, beyond this, how these words impart a feeling for inner spaces, often more common…
Spoiche
United Bible Studies is an experimental and improvisational folk band from Ireland, with members in the UK. There are a few core members such as David Colohan as well as a host of incidental contributors on both the live performances and studio albums. Pastoral psychedelia and traditional song have remained the cornerstones of the band's style, alongside collective improvisation that can take the form of extended drone-works or explosive outbursts of ecstatic noise. The lineup currently in…
Sinergia Elettronica
Sinergia Elettronica, the conjunction between Jooklo and Metabolismus orbiting around the museum of weirdness of Degenfeld (Germany), had always been characterized by instant and unpredictable music, therefore their releases being put out as flashes of the moment, as sparkling and quick. Not the case of this one, the first recording appearing on vinyl, which has been sitting under an old piano for a few years before actually seeing the light of day. Three long pieces of prog-delic angular abstra…
The Music Of Gurdjieff / De Hartmann
** Restocked, reduced price **The music of Gurdjieff / de Hartmann is the result of an extraordinary collaboration between the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher, G. I. Gurdjieff and Russian composer, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff traveled for twenty years in the Middle East and Central Asia to discover and develop the teaching which now bears his name. Meditative and mindful, Gurdjieff’s music stems from Eastern melodies and music he heard in remote monasteries. From 1923 to 1929, Thomas de Hartm…
Dalstrøka Bortafor
Bjørn Hatterud and André Hardang Borgen have been staples of the Norwegian experimental music underground for 20+ years. Individually they have been active with numerous projects – spanning from post-ironic queernoise and decontructed folk plunderphonics to cloudy guitar psychedelia and hard hitting avant boogie – both musicians have wandereed the kind of adventurous artistic paths that starts to make sense when viewed in hindsight, revealting continuous multidisciplinary lines of ideas. …
The Complete Syllables Music
The Complete Syllables Music is the first collected edition of trumpet experimentalist Nate Wooley’s groundbreaking solo compositions. His attempt to sidestep a positive/negative value based musical aesthetic and to expand his own preconceptions of what the trumpet tone should be led him to the construction of a new compositional language, based on adjusting the physical parameters of how one makes sound. This new way of thinking was based on the shape and positioning of the oral cavity necessar…
Key
One of the great overlooked artifacts of the New York avant-garde, Meredith Monk’s debut album - Key, is a revelation - leaping over the decades with a vision as radical as the day it was made. Originally privately issued in 1971 - now emerging in the hands of Tompkins Square, across its sides, the human voice unfurls as its rarely been heard - the origins of Monk’s seminal body of work, and a near perfect lens into the awe inspiring nature of the era from which it sprang.Within avant-garde prac…
Live At The Dreamland +1
Sold out at source. Guitarist and free improviser Tashi Dorji grew up in Bhutan and has developed a playing style unbound by tradition, yet with a direct line to intuitive artistry. His recordings feature improvisations that spasmodically grow along tangential, surprising paths. For this Ultraviolet Light release Dorji improvises on electric guitar. Tracks 1, 2, 3 Recorded Live at the Dreamland, Louisville KY by Connor Bell, May 30th 2014. Track 4 recorded by Patrick Kukucka at The Mission for T…
Coat
Wasting little time, The Pin Group released Coat in November 1981, merely two months after their first single. On the title track, Humphries' distant vocals call out as tense rhythms gradually push listeners over the edge. B-side track "Jim" could easily have been recorded in Manchester circa 1979, but remains a master class in NZ post-punk atmospherics, menacing from start to finish.
Ambivalence 7
Ambivalence was not only The Pin Group's hypnotic debut, but also the very first release on Flying Nun. While guitarist Roy Montgomery, bassist Ross Humphries and drummer Peter Stapleton build off each other's jittery riffs, Montgomery's uncanny baritone pierces the torrential clangor. Conjuring both Wire's Chairs Missing and VU's White Light/White Heat, the band captures a truly unique sound – evocative, yet austere.
New Age Sewage
The Brown brothers emerge from the depths of California with a new collection of oozing drone centred on ‘heavy visions of negative west coast mythology.’Darkness is never far away from a Robedoor session, and their first album in four years finds Alex and Britt Brown dealing with ‘multiple seismic life events.’ Naturally this results in quite a powerful listen, Robedoor’s sludge even denser and mired in more pain and crepuscular mysticism. The brothers craftily let the gloom seep in slowly over…
Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki
The weirdest exploito-pop attempting to fuse western popular music with folkloristic elements of different origins came from the '60s and early-to-mid-'70s. Among tons of more or less entertaining releases a few diamonds could be found and Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki (1971), the brainchild of French composers Jean Kluger and Daniel Vangarde, is definitely a stand-out production in this field. "Yamasuki" is a fictional Japanese person about whom Kluger and Vangarde created a musical concept st…
The White Album
"In this double album named after the famous Beatles' album but having little or no artistic relationship to the same, we have decided to throw aside all preconceived notions of what music has been and recreate the wheel in a rocking fashion, utilizing a myriad of miscellaneous and sometimes famous musicians to put together a concoction of je ne sais quoi. There is a giant spider picking away at and eating your face one piece of flesh at a time, Larry. I like slow songs, and I like fast songs. I…