Ame Debout
First-time vinyl reissue of two extraordinary documents from Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes. Born from the tumult of the '68 riots in France, Ribeiro + Alpes defined a uniquely Gallic take on the progressive psychedelia of the time. This is ecstatic music fusing European medieval traditions with the contemporary free jazz of the era. Ribeiro, with her confrontational and surrealistic poetry, along with Patrice Moullet's invented instruments, defined a genre unto themselves and created some of the mos…
Debris In Lower Earth Orbit
Twinkle3 have teamed up with Sidsel Endresen, Norwegian singer, avant garde pioneer and Ecm recording artist. The result is Debris In Lower Earth Orbit, a graceful, yet precarious dance through the weightless slipstream of orbital flotsam and jetsam.The core trio of Richard Scott (analogue synthesizer and electronics), David Ross (Drosscillator, kantele, mbira) and Clive Bell (shakuhachi and other woodwind) conjured 7 distinct sonic landscapes through an intuitive and delicate interplay first ho…
Cold Waters
2012 release. Cold Waters is the result of a very short yet intense meeting between Jean-Herve Peron (Faust) and Amaury Cambuzat (Ulan Bator). The duo met in the French countryside -- two days, two mics, two friends, and a dog... from hilarious to heart-striking, these "Songs from the Mill" flowed through them. Cold Waters, far from being an anecdotal side-note to their ongoing collaborative efforts in the legendary "krautrock" band Faust, reaffirms the duo's successful explorations as leading f…
Damned Piano
"This epic and at times over the top work fully delivers on its forthright title, which suggests the instrument in question at best deserves expletives and at worst warrants an exorcism. There’s no melodic ivory tinkling to be found here – Bellerue positions various objects on the body of the piano and its soundboard to draw out their resonant properties, then amplifies the results to cacophonous volumes. Over its four-part 64 minute duration, Damned Piano segues from looming, opaque, abraded dr…
Plugged Inclinations
“I work since 1993 to an experimental approach of the church organ (Pentes, Tirets) : 1) we control a machine 2) the organ is halfway between vehicle and artificial intelligence : it is a public transport : a ship, a barque, a boat, a building within a building 3) passing the machinery to the filter of listening, gesture and architecture 4) bringing the blast into the space : ventilate 5) make this organ sound not like this other one 6) express the organ as one says about lemon.The blast is endl…
Trinity
The amorphous unit that is AMM has been refining—and indeed redefining—a sound for as long as it's been in existence, and there's no reason to believe that the process this implies is likely to ever stop evolving. This does of course render John Butcher's presence here as perhaps anomalous, but there are no musical reasons to believe that this was the case in reality. The resulting trio—indeed the Trinity—of Butcher on tenor and soprano saxophones, pianist John Tilbury and percussionist
Eddie P…
Stockholm Connection
A unique 3CD-box from Umlaut Records putting in attention the musical collaborations between two of Sweden’s most headstrong musicians: the pioneers Bengt “Frippe” Nordström and Sven-Åke Johansson. The previously non-released music was recorded in Stockholm 1970, 1977 and 1982 and portrait the musicians both in format of a trio, including legendary pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and in a large orchestra led by Johansson including, at the time, young groundbreaking jazz musicians from Swede…
Dreamboat
Dreamboat is the collaboration between dream-folk singer / guitarist Ilyas Ahmed and the lunar-inclined analog synthesizer/processed bass clarinet duo Golden Retriever (Matt Carlson / Jonathan Sielaff ). The collaboration between these long time friends began with a shared admiration for each others' work as well as a commonality in approach to making music, which one day begged the question, "What if our individual sound worlds intersected?". The result yielded a unifying love of exploded modal…
Dimensions
Very nice late 80s early 90s recordings from the man behind Futuro Antico "In this record I have sought to integrate those element that together formed my musical identity, and which at times I have lived with some difficulty, as they derived from different, and conflicting cultures. That is the reason why some parts of the record have been written out note, and other parts were improvised. There is a continuous mix of languages, from electronic music and avant-garde to minimalism, jazz, Arabic …
Orchester 33 1/3
Recorded live at 'Music Unlimited' Festival in Wels (Austria) November 1996. Contains an additional movie about the orchestra directed by Peter Hormanseder (1998) on extra DVD. Plus previously unreleased bonustracks recorded 1998 (Graz) & 2001 (Vienna). Packaged in special bound old recordsleeves, with silver-grey screen prints on front and backside. The legendary Austrian ensemble lead by Christof Kurzmann and Christian Fennesz in the late 90s, is finally re-releasing their debut with bonus-tra…
Fluid To The Influence
LP version. Chris Abrahams returns with Fluid To The Influence. Building upon the foundation of his previous three editions for Room40, Abrahams charts out a divergent course through lilting piano flows, distended organ passages, thunderous electronic eruptions, and focused concrète explorations. Fluid To The Influence spans a huge spectrum of sound, each movement calling forward to the next in a flowing motion that demonstrates Abrahams's commitment to and interest in the album as an artistic f…
Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany
“Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany, though both consisting mostly of quite short musical items, have as a whole different origins and different shapes. Keyboard Miscellany is an ongoing collection, a place to deposit occasional pieces which seem to have no place else to go. The earliest is “Variation on Morton Feldman’s Piano Piece 1952” (1988). The piece came about when I was asked to contribute an analysis of a Feldman piece to a collection of essays on Feldman’s music. To do this I tri…
Le depassement de soi
'Linaia-Agon' (1972) for trombone, French horn & tuba. 2 performances, studio & live, with Benny Sluchin, Jens McManama, Jérémie Dufourt and Arnaud Boukhitine. 'Zythos' (1996) for trombone & 6 marimbas. Benny Sluchin, with red fish blue fish conducted by Steven Schick. First video & surround release. The documents on this DVD present a musical journey through a wide range of topics focused on Iannis Xenakis and his work Linaia Agon. Conceived by the great new music trombonist Benny Sluchin, it i…
Piano Sonatas & String Quartets 1
The first volume in a projected series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets — there are six of each — on Mode performed by the superb JACK Quartet and Stephen Clarke (piano). In the 1970s, Horatiu Radulescu (1942 - 2008) began exploring and composing begun composing what he called “plasmatic music,” in which sound was conceived as an “endless ocean of vibrations,” as opposed to the traditional way in which music treats sound as a fabric of discrete scale steps. His mu…
Soweto Stomp
Malcolm Goldstein, violin & direction. The Ratchet Orchestra. Composer/performer Malcolm Goldstein (b.1936) has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s. He received an M.A. in music composition from Columbia University in 1960, having studied with Otto Luening. In the 1960s in New York City, he was a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble. His 'Soundings' improvisations have received international acclaim for having reinvent…
Wucherungen
Hans Koch: Bassclarinet, Soprano Sax. Thomas Peter: Amplified Objects, Live Electronics. Recorded March 2014 in Biel / Bienne, Switzerland. “Music by bass clarinet and soprano saxophone player Hans Koch has been reviewed before and I particularly enjoyed his solo release Erfolg (see Vital Weekly 964). For Thomas Peter it has been a long time ago since I reviewed Medir (Vital Weekly 682). That one was entirely made with digital means, but on the disc he recorded with Koch he plays 'amplified obje…
Cheval ouvert
'After sharing the bill with fellow musicians like Knut, Isis, Jesu, Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, Zu, Asva, Todd, Shit & Shine, Marduk or Tony Conrad on the occasion of the 150+ concerts given over the last years, drummer Marc Fantini, bassist Derek Shirley, electronic musician & vocalist Gilles Aubry and electrified tenor sax maestro Antoine Chessex felt the need to come back to studio work. Results a powerful though dark and introspective piece of pure sonic radicalism. 'Cheval ouvert' immerse…
Gather & Release
Gather & Release is the result of years worth of composer Sarah Hennies' exploration of the vibraphone in synthesis with her experiences of identity, obsession, anxiety, tension, grief, and loss. Over the course of an hour, Hennies entangles highly focused percussion playing with field recordings, sine waves, signifiers from her personal & family history (including a 20+ year old recording of her grandfather reciting poetry), and bilateral stimulation, a tool for anxiety release and a major comp…
The Hum
Anne La Berge, flutes and voice. Joe Williamson, double bass and voice. Flutist-composer Anne La Berge, an American living in Amsterdam, and bassist Joe Williamson, a Canadian based in Stockholm, have formed a new duo. Both artists are known for their eccentric approach to text, either in song writing, or music compositions. With two intriguing text/music pieces that sound like odd radio plays, they introduce the listener to the ambiguities of their unrestricted fantasy. A pleasurable, sometimes…
Lunch music
Lunch Music by composer Yannis Kyriakides is a set of pieces for voices, percussion and live electronics, inspired by the 1959 book Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. On this recording the virtuosity of percussionists Slagwerk Den Haag (recently heard on the recording of Michael Gordon's Timber) and contemporary vocal specialists of Silbersee are embedded in a rich sonic environment of electronics, modulated voices, grinding pulses and hallucinatory noises.The concept of the music revolves aro…