Bitter Earth
Bitter Earth is the much anticipated, long-in-the-making new album from John Duncan joined by a broad cast of adroit collaborators; Oren Ambarchi, Jim O’Rourke, Smegma, Chris Abrahams, Joe Talia, CM Von Hausswolff, Eiko Ishibashi, France Jobin - all written in dedication to Mika Vainio (who, for avoidance of doubt, is not dead!). It's a remarkable suite of cover versions - from The Gun Club to Nina Simone and Iggy Pop - and original material by an arch experimenter who continues to explore unfa…
Future Perfect
Serge Baghdassarians, mixing desk, delays, electric guitar. Boris Baltschun, computer, sampler. Burkhard Beins, percussion, zither. The three gentlemen formed a live performing electroacoustic work unit throughout the first decade of this century, exploring hybrid musical areas shaped by digitized samples, analogue circuits and acoustically produced sounds stemming from a diverse range of materials and objects. This first phase has been documented on the 'Labor' compilation (Charhizma, 2003) and…
Rubble Master
The cassette showcases two contrasting explorations of the microtonal tuba. On side A, Rubble Master explores noise production, with the lips and tongue acting as noise generators which are filtered using half-valve techniques. On side B, Underground Music uses live-electronics to simulate the movement of two related tunings moving in opposite directions, like trains through the abandoned underground station in which the piece was premiered.
Stop Time
Robin Hayward plays microtonal tuba in Catherine Christer Hennix's ensemble and Stop Time is his first composition to be released on Important Records. Stop Time was commissioned for a festival of the same name taking place in Leuven in 2013. It is the first piece to use a subset of the three-dimensional physical version of the Hayward Tuning Vine, invented in 2012, as a musical score. The harmonic space implied within the four cubes contained within the subset, based on prime numbers two (octav…
New Songs Of The Humpback Whale
Packaged in a deluxe, heavy duty 6 panel digipak and insert containing an essay from David Rothenberg and Michael Deal designed whale song visualizations. What record album was so important that ten million copies of it needed to be pressed at once? You guessed it. Songs of the Humpback Whale. In 1979 National Geographic Magazine inserted a flexible "sound page" inside the back cover of all of its editions in twenty-five languages, and that is supposedly how many they printed. No human pop star …
Arrebato
On Arrebato, Asheville's Ahleuchatistas embellish their trademark intensity with a more pensive and existential amble. These six pieces channel recollections of a natural kinship the band struck up with a number of communities they played to on an Iberian tour in early 2014. The resulting story threads together a suite of lyrical instrumentals showing a deepening meticulousness for structure—elastic and labyrinthine.
Spanish for "passionate outburst," Arrebato aptly evokes a rapturous rising fro…
See Heat
Mornings at the Case family breakfast table in summer-to-fall 2013 passed to the score of Justin Walter’s Lullabies & Nightmares, a solo record debuted for Chicago’s stalwart Kranky label that spring. A willfully reflective amendment to the AM ritual, Brian Case found a stirring soulful resonance in Walter’s cooing geographies. After decades under the alt rock context with 90 Day Men, The Ponys and Disappears, in recent years, Case’s interests have turned to more textural and alinear musical end…
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…