A Thousand Breathing Forms
Over the last thirty years, Steve Roden has risen as a singular voice, attacking and advancing the highest challenges of the avant-garde - blurring the lines between nearly every creative field, moving outwardly toward the boundary with every day life. A visual and sound artist, his work spans the fields of painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. Following their brilliant box set of rare recordings by the artist from the period between 1988 and 2003, Sonori…
Howl And Other Poems
This is arguably the best-known recording to feature any beat-era poet originally issued in 1959. Although “Howl” is the centerpiece, the peripheral works, especially the mantra-like “Footnote to Howl”, are given empowering presentations that magnify the greatness that’s inextricably inherent in both art and artist. Indeed, the genesis of Allen Ginsberg’s brilliance as both poet and performer has rarely been equalled. The modern listener remains entranced by his vaudevillian sense of prov…
MP3 Deviations #8
"The MP3 Deviation album contains pieces that are results of the collaborative research by a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) and myself, led by Tony Myatt at Music Research Center at the University of York in UK in 2009. My idea was to develop new software based on the disruption of the MP3. Primarily I thought the MP3 as a reproducing device could have created a very new sound by intervention between its main elements, the compression encoder and decoder. It turned ou…
In Performance
Lucky restock! After studying with composers John Cage and Earle Brown, Joe Jones became a prominent figure in Fluxus, contributing to the movement’s first “yearbox” alongside La Monte Young, György Ligeti and Nam June Paik. Beginning in late 1961, Jones began constructing his own music machines – drawing inspiration from the calliopes, automata and orchestrions of the 19th and early 20th century to create self-playing ensembles of stringed instruments, percussion and woodwinds – “played” throug…
Headcrash
Headcrash is the final result of a series of live performances called “Quad Core”, brought to audiences all around Europe and further, and finally recorded at Les Ateliers Claus (Brussels) in the summer of 2016. This project interacts with computer data storage devices as a raw material to produce unpredictable instruments. Four hard-drives are used as turntables, hacked in many different ways and picked up with several magnetic sensors. Technically, the computer is controlling the hard-drives v…
Tote rennen - Lieder
Fifth part in the Selten Gehörte Musik reissue series. Recorded by Dieter Roth and Oswald Wiener at Mosfellssveit, Iceland, May 28 - 30, 1976. Packaged in fullcolour LP cover (reproduction of the original), with printed innersleeve featuring a new text about “Tote Rennen Lieder” by Michel Roth (with the English translation as an insert), as well as a rare drawing / “liner notes” by Dieter Roth. Edition of 500 copies. “The tense relationship between Wiener and Roth, borne by great mutual admirati…
Sprachmusik
New electro-acoustic text-sound composition by Berlin based fine artist Stefan Roigk. The radio play like combination of poetic lectures, vocals treatments, concrete sounds and deep vocal drones is based on several live recordings an performances made between 2012 and 2015.
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Few copies back in stock, sold-out at source Die Tödliche Doris was born out of West Berlin’s lively post-punk community in the early ‘80s. Along with Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Sprung Aus Den Wolken and Frieder Butzmann, Die Tödliche Doris ranks amongst the Geniale Dilletanten – which roughly translates as “ingenious dilettantes” – who sought to democratize cultural productions beyond the grip of both Western capitalism and GDR socialism. The Geniale Dilletanten became synonymous with a f…
Solo 1975-1980
Sidestepping all normal expectations on this album, Ju Suk Reet Meate (founding member of Smegma) directly goes about casting musical spells, utilizing primitive "inner mind" techniques on hammered dulcimer, tape loops, thrift store records, a homemade synthesizer, electric guitar, saxophone, mouth sounds, and manipulated christian radio broadcasts. Recorded in Portland, Oregon, these previously unreleased recordings reflect a similar "inner-mind over limited technique matter" aesthetic as the a…
Look'n for Ya (1973-75)
In 1973, when Smegma (the band) was born they had only one rule: No Musicians! That way they could re-invent the musical wheel with a new primitive, suburban, anti-hippie approach. 44 years later perhaps the world is ready for the first full LP of this original, uncompromising sound. At the time, it seemed they thought they were on a solitary journey, but shortly after these recordings, it was discovered that there was another local group, The Los Angeles Free Music Society, that they shortly be…
Solo 1975-1980 (art edition)
Edition of 50 copie, in handmade sleeves. Sidestepping all normal expectations on this album, Ju Suk Reet Meate (founding member of Smegma) directly goes about casting musical spells, utilizing primitive "inner mind" techniques on hammered dulcimer, tape loops, thrift store records, a homemade synthesizer, electric guitar, saxophone, mouth sounds, and manipulated christian radio broadcasts. Recorded in Portland, Oregon, these previously unreleased recordings reflect a similar "inner-mind o…
Audible Design
In the past, the quality or nature of sounds used in music was set by the technology of instrument design, and conventions about performance and musical 'expression'. In the 19th century, european composers became increasingly concerned with 'sonority', through development of new orchestration techniques, and new instruments. However, a systematic approach to sound itself had to wait for the invention of sound recording and the accurate computer analysis of sounds. Studios, and then computers, a…
Let Me Hang You
“Twenty years ago, William S. Burroughs was asked to record an audio version of his favorite parts of Naked Lunch. Longtime associates and producers Hal Willner and James Grauerholz produced several sessions, and they recruited a team of world class musicians to help. Famed for their Naked City involvement, Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz contributed their genius, as well as Eyvind Kang, just to name a few. The recordings were then abandoned and collecting dust on a musty shelf, as forgotten as a…
Raster-Noton Source Book 1
Epic archival document from Raster Noton; the beginning of a comprehensive and authorized review of the past 20 years of the label. Comes with an exclusive CD featuring material from Kangding Ray, Emptyset, Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, Senking, Byetone, Atom Heart, Robert Lippok and more. A short introductory preface by Olaf Bender is followed by a keynote interview conducted by berlin publicist Max Dax that provides an insight into the identity and philosophy of the label heads. The main par…
Art Record Covers
Since the dawn of modernism, visual and music production have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1925 double-sided discs Rotoreliefs, the 20th century saw ever more fertile exchange between sounds and shapes, marks and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance. In Francesco Spampinato’s unique anthology of artists’ record covers, we discover the rhythm of this particul…
A Farewell Performance
Extracts from the Farewell performance at Kings College, London 1978. Jgjgjgjg formed at the London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976. Reissue of tape on Balsam Flex. 200 copiesIn those days a number of British poets were producing works influenced by radical international currents in sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance art. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s an…
Password / Chamber Music
Password is a short radio-play about the art world. Chamber Music is the trio performing Tibetan throat singing, inspired by a recent internet image: the hipster chart of esoteric music. Edition of 80
Antibarbarus
A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s. This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this ope…
The Book Of J's
Original copies, very few available. José Luis Castillejo's The Book of J's was the first book issued by Alga Marghen. It was also the first art book produced by Castillejo in about 20 years; one line of 'J' letters in the center of the page, a continuous frieze running along 400 pages. No essays, no introduction, no two pages the same. A 400 pages hardbound top quality art book (cover cm.24x16) in an edition of 200 copies. Also included in the edition is a free LP, recorded by the author and co…
Tlalaatala
Art edition, LP edition limited to 80 copies in cardboard box with stamp, also including the original 400-page-creative-book with the same title. A killer reading of José Luis Castillejo's TLALAATALA book by Fernando Millan, recorded in Madrid in 2001. Modern or advanced writing is a direct and independent medium, i.e. it realizes and gives presence to a set of relationships without the need of further dependence (as it happened till now in literature) on other media. Words, syllables, stories, …