Material
*2023 stock* "On their second album Material, originally released on Sky Records in 1981, Moebius & Plank ventured far, far away from the double coordinates of the Harmonia world and pop music cosmos. Amazingly, they did not find themselves floating in space, but made an exemplary landing, avoiding getting caught between a rock and a hard place. Material saw them generate a form of genre-busting electronic music, more radical than anything one might have expected to come out of Germany, not even…
To Live
American indie label File 13 Records released what was already Martin Rev's sixth solo album in the autumn of 2003. The previous year, Rev and his musical partner Alan Vega had struck out in a new direction on their "American Supreme" album and Rev's solo works continued in a similar vein. If "Strangeworld" from the year 2000 actually felt more like a timeless abstract of Martin Rev's entire spectrum of musical influences, "To Live", three years later, introduces more contemporary elements, incl…
Dinosaur and Gems
Atsuko Hatano plays viola, violin and cello; she also uses electronics. She has released numerous albums and attracted a great deal of attention both inside and outside Japan. Hatano also creates music for movies, TV dramas and commercials. She frequently collaborates with other musicians and artists, including Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi. Ryotaro Miyasaka, a percussionist active in genres ranging from pop to experimental music, has been extremely busy of late. In 2022, he released the CD "O…
The Best Concert Ever by Chiho Oka and Aoi Tagami
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited release* Chiho Oka is a computer music player and sound artist. Aoi Tagami specializes in improvised voice performance and is also a singer-songwriter, performing songs with her own lyrics and music. A solo CD by each of these artists, produced as part of the "Ftarri Fukubukuro CD 2021" series, was presented to those who attended concerts at Ftarri in the 2020/2021 New Year period. Released for sale to the public in February 2021, the CDs are Chiho Oka's "Manipula…
Were Some Sound Days, One Separately Be Placed
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* The recordings were made during January 16th to February 27th, 2022. Recording gear included a cassette tape recorder, a cardioid dynamic microphone and a cassette tape. After some operations, the recorder’s eraser function was temporarily removed so that the sound could be recorded overlapping again and again.
During these days, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo did recordings every day. Every time they chose a random place on tape and recorded a very short length…
Gauche
*2023 stock* Alto sax/clarinet player Akira Sakata is a legend of Japan’s free jazz scene. Ken Ikeda is a musician who resided for many years in New York and London, and has been based in Tokyo since his return to Japan from the UK in 2020. In 2021, Ikeda released "Signal and Signaless," a duo CD with Rie Nakajima, on the Ftarri label. This album, "Gauche," is Sakata’s first release from Ftarri. On May 21, 2022, Akira Sakata and Ken Ikeda gave a duo concert at Ftarri, Tokyo. This CD consists of …
Allelopathy
*2023 stock* Ayami Suzuki, a musician based in the Tokyo area, performs a unique kind of ambient drone using electronics and voice. Since 2020 she has been performing at Ftarri in Tokyo, both as a soloist and with other musicians. Acclaimed guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama is active on the international improvised music scene. In 2021 Akiyama gave many outstanding performances at Ftarri; recordings of a number of these concerts were subsequently released as CDs. "Allelopathy" is one of these recordings.…
Rooms And Shadows (1 And 3)
*200 copies limited edition* Born in 2000, Sun Yizhou is an up-and-coming improviser/composer based in Beijing. In 2022 he released the CD "Responses" (on the Japanese label zappak), a collaboration with fellow Beijing resident Zhu Wenbo. Kevin Corcoran is a San Francisco-based percussionist who also uses field recordings and electronics in his musical projects. He has carried out tours in Europe as well as Japan and other East Asian countries.
The four pieces on this CD (each about 13 minutes l…
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*100 copies limited edition* Pentiments takes its first leap into CD-primary territory with a selection of audio and visual works by newly relocated Los Angeles artist and good friend Connor Camburn. Contained on the disc are seven formidable studies of a kind with some of the more barbed and uncompromising voices that occupy the noisier margins of academic electroacoustic music (the voluminous generative palettes of Kent Tankred, the charred sonic dysfunctions of Benjamin Thigpen and the alien …
Sailboat Galiola Nuria’s Unfinished Logbook
Tip! *100 copies limited edition* Pentiments gladly welcomes the preeminent Serbian sound artist, writer and director Arsenije Jovanović back to its proceedings with the premiere of a powerful new work produced in his 90th year. Being preceded by a body of now classic radio productions as well as involvements with the films of directors like Terrence Malick, Sailboat Galiola Nuria’s Unfinished Logbook is apropos in taking on the dense and confluent form of a partial recollection of the voices o…
Closed Circuit
Peter Jefferies, a living legend of New Zealand underground music, from his seminal bands Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, to his collaborative efforts in bands such as Plagal Grind and Two Foot Flame, is perhaps best known for his solo work on masterpieces such as “The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World” (1990) and “Electricity” (1994), as well as “Elevator Madness” (1996). All of these albums came out on vinyl but one of the best was the singular “Closed Circuit” (2001) whi…
Live Recordings
*Edition of 100.* "Live Recordings" presents MAW—the trio of Frank Meadows (bass), Jessica Ackerley (guitar), and Eli Wallace (piano/synth)—fully testing the possibilities of their creative dialogue in front of a live audience for the first time. Two concerts in Brooklyn and Saugerties, both staged in October 2021, display the performance of an acute democratic understanding, acquired across formative years of private sessions and conversation, including the late 2020 recording session that prod…
01.30.22
Tip! *Edition of 100.* Stella Silbert and Nat Baldwin’s "01.30.22" starts with a disorienting and curt mixture of vinyl static, chopped and skewed mysterious acoustic guitar strings, and a loud, acoustic “thud”. It’s an introduction to a strange piece of music from a strange album by two fascinating players in the current improvised and contemporary music landscape. This first piece, “5”, warbles and wobbles its way though oddly lyrical passages, framed in sporadic collaged format by the rapidly…
Dig Up Roots
*100 copies limited edition* "Dig Up Roots" is a document of a live performance at Tokyo Arts and Space on July 1, 2022. Ryosuke Kiyasu plays snare drum and table, presenting an extreme and cathartic relationship with physical surfaces and their characteristic tolerances, as exploited with wood, hands, and body. Notably the distinctive acoustics of the space can be felt deeply throughout the performance, not to mention the overblown recording. The space’s container is audible, fluctuating, and s…
Räkna evighet som intet
*300 copies limited edition* “Räkna evighet som intet” is an electroacoustic composition in two movements and as much an incantation as it is a process of mourning embodied in an aesthetic structure. Throughout the piece Enocksson weaves taut strings, tense static and veils of feedback with fragmented voices, all the while extracting verses from acclaimed Swedish poet Lotta Lotass into emotional chorales on the impermanence of life. Merging the geist of Enocksson’s prior work – the industrial do…
Modular Organ System
Begun in 2017 and developed and refined over the six years since, the Berlin based artists, Phillip Sollmann and Konrad Sprenger, deliver their first LP, via Choose Records, documenting their remarkable Modular Organ System. Comprising a single, long form composition divided into two parts, “Modular Organ System” is a sublime and masterful work of drone, imbued with immediacy and emotion, that culminates as one of our favourite experimental organ records to appear in recent years.
Sept duos pour guitare acoustique & piano préparé
Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments…
Alone On Penguin Island
Originally released on Dome (Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis's seminal label), this is an often overlooked milestone in freefrom and artistic post-punk. A siginficant piece of the UK musical puzzle when a lot of artists were shrugging off the previous decade and embracing the DIY attitude of the 1980s.
Kaleiding (music for a performance by Lily&Janick)
Kaleiding is the debut show of the contemporary circus company Lily&Janick. It's a play between light, reflections and new perspectives onto partner acrobatics. With a long mirror that lays on the floor, images are getting created that hypnotize – like watching an everyday life situation through a kaleidoscope. This distorted reality invites into a decelerated world where up is down and down is up. Kaleiding is a movement based show working on the border between dance, circus and visual arts.
Águas
On 31st January 2022, Hydra Ensemble performed at De Pletterij in Haarlem (NL). It was a good one. Luckily our bass player Gonçalo decided to release the (newly mixed and mastered) recording on his label Cylinder Recordings. I'd say this is my favorite Hydra recording thusfar...