Eleven Live Collaborations
Live collaboration between Japanoise legend Merzbow and german artist Achim Wollscheid. Recorded at Spiral Hall, Tokyo.
Live in Geneva
As can be gleaned from the title, this is a recording of Merzbow live in Switzerland. Abrasive noise, big rhythms and (to be expected) and onslaught of noise. Recorded at Cave 12 on 10th March 2005, there is apparently no editing involved on this release.
Merzbear
Author, activist, painter, and sound artist Masami Akita has been at the foreground of experimental music for over twenty-five years. Inspired by psychedelic rock, free jazz, and early electronic composition as well the physical arts (especially Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau), Masami Akita has created a musical language all his own. Merzbear, the sixth Merzbow release in his utterly essential Merz series for Important Records, pulses and pounds with distorted droning guitar feedback, pulsing noise b…
Alexipharmaca
Alexipharmaca, Mem1’s second full-length album, is a collection of improvised works that capture the allure of the forbidden and dangerous, and the modern fascination with things ancient and shrouded in mystery. The album’s title is taken from a set of poems written by Nicander of Colophon, a Greek pharmacologist (fl. 197-130 B.C.E.), whose text deals with plant and animal poisons and their antidotes. Mem1’s music intoxicates with its rich textures and lavish soundscapes, but — like a beautifu…
Studio one
Michael Bullock (contrabass & feedback), Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet) and Vic Rawlings (cello & surface electronics). "One strike isn't enough. This album struck me like a big wave, a wave that makes you lose your consciousness and equilibrium for several minutes, leaving you wondering what just happened to you during this elusive lapse of time. Probably this is exactly the purpose of this trio, where as their music draws rust from your very skin, suburban rust, from those big suburbs where the indivi…
Fever
Each composition of this CD is dedicated to a person, or to the work of a person: Malcolm Goldstein, Amadeu Antonio Kiowa, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elvis Presley and Yoko Tawada. Throughout these five sound portraits, Kaul displays a fertile imagination and a penchant für exotic instrumentation, which includes a hurdy-gurdy, Korean gongs Japanese and Tibetan temple bells, kalimba, Tanzanian lute, bowed gopichand from India, glass harp, kanjira, tabla and frame drum, and Western percussion instruments.…
Open
Mark Wastell and Matt Davis met and first played together in a workshop led by Eddie Prévost in London during the spring of 1996. Soon after, Wastell was invited to join Chris Burn's Ensemble, in which he played with Phil Durrant for the first time. Subsequently, Phil and Mark worked together in the quartets Assumed Possibilities and Quatuor Accorde, documented on Rossbin and Emanem CDs, respectively.
The debut trio concert by Davis/Durrant/Wastell took longer to organise than any of the partici…
Catapult
Gustafsson, for all his brash screeching, is a particularly accomplished player with an amazing ability to create snaps, crackles and pops on his baritone. He has lung power to spare but also can tone down the wildness and use understatement to great effect. On Catapult, Gustafsson confounds those listeners who know him as this generation’s Brötzmann. His solo playing (this may be one of only two solo baritone records ever recorded?) is actually gentle and intellectual. Nine themes make up the r…
Mondes inconnus
Mapping (1995-97). Aerial (2002). Deepfield (2000). Still Time (2001) for flûte and electronics. Melt (1994). Symbiont (2002). Silk to Steel (2005). Cortex (2004-05). DVD-Audio with several versions: Surround 5.1, Stéréo and Stéréo (Dolby Digital). 'Composition is, for me, like a giant puzzle in which the overall shape is fixed but the pieces and the picture itself change and undergo subtle transformations as one is constructing it. The computer tools that I use, enable me to fix the edges - the…
Complete "La Grima"
"La Grima (Tears) was performed on August 14, 1971, at the Genyasai festival in Sanrizuka, Japan. The first six minutes or so of this performance can be heard on the omnibus LP Genya (released on CD in 2004). This CD presents the complete, unedited version of the performance.As if to slash through the audience's scornful, jeering reaction to Takayanagi's opening remarks, the group launched into a fiercely convulsive performance. Despite having a variety of objects thrown at them, Takayanagi and …
The dark spot
Kosokuya are one of Japan's more mysterious psychedelic inner-space rock groups with an obscure history dating back to the late seventies. Great sensitive + heavy playing, lovely vocal action from Kaneko, and Urabe's unique atmospherics.
Kilter
"Kilter is significant as a title because it displays Mary Ellen's habit of insisting we remember what, if left to ourselves, we'd be quite happy to forget. She's moved on, compelled like the rest of us to negotiate a strange, often lovely land, in an oddly menacing time. What she writes are signposts in that land, or lanterns which led the way home one night." - Bill Morelock, NPR
"In Parterre transformation works as an almost psychedelic fantasy. Childs juggles a kaleidoscopic assortment of …
Too beautiful to burn
Martin Siewert and Martin Brandlmayr are two of the most active musicians in the ever-evolving Viennese music scene, in both improvised and composed settings. They have been performing together in various groupings since the summer of 2000, but Too Beautiful to Burn marks their initial meetings as a duo. Siewert has been quite prolific recently, in projects such as Efzeg (Grob, Durian), SSSD (Grob), and the seminal all-star collaborative orange CD on Charhizma, along with Werner Dafeldecke…
Drop, Hop, Drone, Scratch, Slide & A For Anything
Performed live at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York City, 26 April, 2001.
Variety
"the piano's harmonic figures meet with computer sounds unexpectedly within a slowly changing acoustic environment. piano pixies sing and dance serenely in a virtual space while the noises from the instrument insitage dialogues with the computer. the music is tranquil, never aggressive and is at almost every moment polyphonic in the good old sense of the word. pretty often, the two musicians play on two different planes so that in spite of the slowness of the whole thing, the resulting complex r…
Erratum musical
the principle of musical erratum is simple: you choose a keyboard - any keyboard - you draw each note at random - no note can be struck twice, but all are struck - the resulting whole is played without any particular modulation, "a uniformity de rhythm, anaccentuation" says Duchamp.tThe premises of minimal and aleatory art are thus expressed in "the green box", published in 1934 (although the writings date back to 1912-15). to do this, we chose to use a piano (a bösendorfer)7 VARIATIONS ON A DRA…
The seasons: Vermont
1998 release ** The Seasons: Vermont is a soundscape of Vermont as charted through the changes of its yearly soundings. It is a composition in four parts (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring) for magnetic tape collage with an unspecified live instrumental/vocal ensemble. Though the actual composing of the music was completed between 1980 and 1982, it is the realization of a ten-year composition project. Goldstein listened closely and became attuned to what was the particular sound quality of each sea…
Adventura Anatomica
** longtime sold out at source, few copies restocked ** A fairy tale world comes to life in sublime fashion on Maja Ratkje’s latest collaboration Adventura Anatomica, a musical work for theatre she created with choreographer/danser Odd Johan Fritzøe and stage designer in November 2005. This is a world of bittersweet fairytales, of wolves and innocent maidens losing their way in a dark wood, a world of fear and despair and joyful ecstasy. In any case, emotions such as these coexist closely in Rat…
Stalker
Renowned international composer Maja Ratkje is a founding member in two of Norway's most respected improvisational units -- Spunk & Fe-Mail. Like much of Ratkje's work Stalker flawlessly contrasts these two distinct emotional and audio extremes. While Stalker is influenced by the hardest Japanese noise it is also a quiet emotional drift based around Bertolt Brecht's story of a girl who has drowned and is floating down a river while her body slowly dissolves leaving only her hair to remain. With …
The Sleeping Moustache
This curious quintet makes sounds that recall the glory days of Nurse With Wound: long, shapeshifting collages of psychedelic murk interrupted by random outbursts of industrial clatter, nightmarish drones, deeply bizarre audio mutations and tangible masses of sticky audio goop of impossibly vague origin. The Sleeping Moustache consists of five ten-minute tracks interspersed with five brief interstitial tracks. Everything blends together well because nothing blends together well; forced juxtaposi…