★Mappa
Pin Down the Dust
*Limited edition tape* “Pin Down The Dust'' is the first meeting of Nighte - Christina Carter (Charalambides) and Mari Maurice (more eaze) - and it feels both automatic and natural. The collaboration stems from a spontaneous decision by the duo to start playing together weekly. “That's how this music was made,” explains Carter, “with gut feeling as the guiding principle. Mari understands the music I've made on such a deep level that playing with her feels so natural.”
By its very nature, intui…
Electric Rust
To decay is also to transform. Rusting metal is the visible traces of passing time, as the oxidation process accumulates dampness in our atmosphere and imprints it as unpredictable patterns onto hard iron and steel. Working in construction for a year now, Kensho Nakamura sees rust all the time, clambering up ageing chunks of material. Normally discarded as waste, Nakamura began discerning beauty in the phenomenon, organically spiralling around and consuming some of the very hardest of manufactur…
Back To The Body
The journey from trauma to healing and understanding inspired Andrew Oda’s beautiful new album: "Back To The Body". More delicate and plaintive than his previous work, but no less adventurous in its broad palette of synthetic and acoustic sounds, this music is the topography of a descent into the wisdom of the body, “as frightening and unsafe as it may feel” as the composer puts it. A sweet piano, a gently plucked guitar, and a mournful cello sit alongside garbled synth melodies, rustling field …
Kleine Freuden
Johannes Schebler's musical output is all about establishing a dreamlike territory where sonic settlements can spread at ease. While Grykë Pyje (Johannes Schebler's duo with Jani Hirvonen) presents musical landscapes as open and clear spaces, Baldruin's miniature pieces tend to narrow them down, zooming into domestic sceneries that shift like malleable rooms inside a magic building. These are the quarters where the inhabitants of Schebler's musical world are configured. Rendered in a tender mann…
A Veil, the Sea
Tip! waves...I’m not sure if the ocean is our sequestered delirium; feverishly complex, almighty and delicate, irreconcilably teeming with life that we physically cannot co-exist with, or colonise. Effortlessly overpowering to our multicellular selves, yet an accommodating host for even the single-celled amongst us. Ancestral, integral but largely peripheral, a container for consumerist miscellanea and other sinister debris and, most urgently, it is something that needs to be dealt with… later. …
Phantom Rooms
A house is something that is so deeply temporary, yet it can hold so much energy. How do we carry or leave behind those energies while transitioning into new spaces? How does each space we occupy for some time shape us and how do we tear ourselves away from it and its influence once it’s time to go? These are some of the core questions behind CC Sorensen’s new album for Mappa, ‘Phantom Rooms’ – it’s a record about movement, change, transformation, family, juxtapositions… but most of all, home.CC…
Newfoundout
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* 'Over the last decade, Toronto-based composer Nick Storring has become well known for his unique, painstaking compositional style of layering performances on a plethora of objects and musical/electro-mechanical instruments to deeply moving effect. ‘Newfoundout’, his seventh album, follows last year’s lush and nocturnal ‘My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell’ (Orange Milk Records) with more rhythmical material and an almost theatrical, phantasmal sensibility. …
Him, Fast Sleeping, Soon He Found in Labyrinth of Many a Round, Self-rolled (Tape)
'It is to the detriment of our understanding of musicality that we mostly measure it by the capacity to produce, and much less by the capacity to receive some sort of acoustic information or event. The virtuosity of listening, of understanding the sonic situation and its potential, is, however, that which defines one's capacity to interact – with other musicians, with the audience, and with the environment. This could also be taken to mean that an ethical act is implied in the situation of liste…
Squirlich Stroll
Following the release of Collision and Coalescence, Slovakian label Mappa commits to the duo Grykë Pyje, releasing their third LP "Squirlich Stroll". Maintaining the fabled tone of their debut on the label, Jani Hirvonen (Uton) and Johannes Schebler (Baldruin) dig deeper into the sonic vein of myth and fabric of yonder. The music in "Squirlich Stroll" unravels as a yarn brought back from a wild voyage.On uncharted areas of medieval maps where potential dangers were thought to exist, the inscript…
Open And Closed Circles
Mappa invited me to make a work for cassette release. At the time I was putting finishing touches to a work for CD that was the result of 3 years of collection, distillation, presentation and consideration. I had made a conscious decision to stop composing in favour of making work for installation and performance.
However, the idea struck me to make a ‚format-specific‘ piece. For many reasons the cassette didn’t excite me in the same way as vinyl or CD. But then I considered the compact cassette…
Dilo
** Gatefold sleeve, incl. extensive 8 pages booklet (photos, notes, lyrics) ** I first discovered khroniky – Ukranian folk songs – in the Highlands of Scotland. I was watching a screening of Bajka, a mesmerising documentary made by the filmmaker Lucia Nimcová and sound artist Sholto Dobie. I knew nothing about these ballads beforehand, but I was fascinated by these odd, beautiful songs, especially the easy way in which they mixed misery and levity, where gentle melodies blend with tales of dark …
Schism
** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…
Stand Closer When You Have Something to Say
Stand closer when you have something to say documents two separate elaborations upon a single physical space: a studio in Los Angeles, California with concrete floors and large, wooden firehouse-style doors that face a moderately busy street. Tasting Menu—a trio of multi-instrumentalists Tim Feeney, Cody Putman, and Cassia Streb—give attention to the room by rubbing its surfaces; opening and closing its portals; allowing its natural resonances; and moving about it spatially, left to right and fr…
Face First in the Entangled
‘Face first in the entangled’ is Infant’s illustration of the “organic internet” between different lifeforms built by mushrooms. These mycological structures see wild fungi coordinating and operating in a decentralized yet organized fashion, leading to dramatic ‘social changes’ without the need for leaders. The music follows a similar path, with Detroit-based Patrick Miller working over a year-and-a-half to forge a mimic of such systems, eschewing lead elements in favor of co-mingling patches of…
Apex
**Risograph printed j-card** As a project, Line Gate has been undergoing a slow, steady transformation, much like the longform drone works that have come to characterise it. What began as a band in 2010 and most recently surfaced as a solitary hurdy-gurdy resonance on 'Den' in 2017 has now flourished into ‘Apex’, Michal Vaľko’s latest album. 'Apex', simultaneously an album about perceiving the beauty around us, about sacredness, and a meditation on a state of timelessness and seeming non-action,…
Sotto
‘Sotto’ is Andrew Oda’s attempt at world building in sound. Meshing method, mind, metaphysical and mundane into massive murals, its triptych of vivid compositions seem to wield electronic sound like a magic paintbrush. Inspired by the paintings of Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Ljubomir Popović, and Nicole Duennebier, ‘Sotto’’s three parts inhabit environments bursting with explosive internal ecologies of synthesized pulsations, yawning drones, tinkling imaginary chimes, and abstract noisy rumblings…
Bow Down Thine Ear, I Bring You Glad Tidings
* Limited Edition * Among the musicians whose work closely reflects the reduced forms in experimental music, perhaps the most interesting is Cristián Alvear, a Chilean guitarist performing formally radical post-Cagean music, as well as Laurent Peter aka D'incise, a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer, one of the key figures of the eclectic scene in Geneva. The numerous projects in which they participate prove their strictly defined artistic vision and active involvement in networking th…
Creepy Crawly
Somewhere between the buzzing Cyborg bugs and the whistling of extinct birds. Welcome to the hybrid zoo built on the ruins of the biotic crisis. You can explore the chirping, singing and trilling of birds and insects, which you know from pictures of cryptozoological encyclopedias or go straight to synthetic ornithology, where you can listen to mutated biorhythms. Everyone knows Mockingjay call, but who heard the voice of the Double-headed emu or the rustle of invisible community living in the cr…
Natursymphony No.1 - Spring Music
The overlap between the organic and the synthetic is Vlad Dobrovolski’s stomping ground. Digitally organised sounds melt into squalling melodies that grow and stretch over and under each other like the fractal leaves of a fern, spiraling inwards and outwards into a tesseract of connective tissue. “The more carefully you listen, the more you hear,” explains the Russian-born sound artist. “No two moments are exactly alike in nature. The song is always changing. I find myself listening in ways I ne…
Televize
"The joyful, tender, almost too tender, but at times extremely intense album entitled Televize was made by the inflamed, wholly focused, at times completely scattered, dissipated and organically chaotic ensemble called the Roman Radkovič Collective. It throws at the listener a threshold music and a poetic experience of the world. If one record can mediate otherness, a music which can never be imagined without first-hand experience, it is the LP with the magical title Televize.It sounds like a ga…