★Rvng Intl.
No era sólida
Lucrecia Dalt presents No era sólida, an introspective path to unworldly surroundings where self becomes sound, and a compass for the searchers of musical possession.
For her follow-up full-length to 2018’s Anticlines, Dalt relinquishes control of the corporeal to reach imagination’s outer realm. Where Anticlines framed the physical processes of matter changing state, No era sólida observes a transition in Dalt herself through the emergence of Lia: an apparition, or second self, of the artist as…
RVNG Intl. At 15: Selects / Dissects
There’s no real reason we decided to acknowledge RVNG’s fifteenth anniversary and not our fifth, or even our tenth. But here we are, a decade-and-a-half later and honestly, not so far removed from where we started. We’re still listening and learning, and we’re still loving every moment of the fabled label life.
In the spirit of our very first release, a mixtape from our old friend Julian S. Process (later of Pink Skull) complete with stenciled, spray-painted CD cover, we invited a new(er) frien…
FRKWYS Vol. 15: Serenitatem
"Visible Cloaks meet two of their influences, Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano, in a beautiful effort to expand and refine their ambient-environmental gestures with firmer architectural underpinnings, giving bitrh to the most sublime episode in RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational ‘FRKWYS’ series so far.Between them, Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano are part responsible for a lot of music that prompted Visible Cloaks to life. Yoshio Ojima is a composer of environmental and ambient music, with a bias towar…
Becoming Peter Ivers
Becoming Peter Ivers tells the story of the late Peter Ivers, a virtuosic songwriter and musician whose antics bridged not just 60s counterculture and New Wave music but also film, theater, and music television. Written and recorded in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late-1970s, Becoming Peter Ivers raises the curtain on this mischievous master of ceremonies, who, harmonica in hand, rarely missed a chance to light up an audience. Since his untimely death in 1983, Ivers' short but storied life has been…
Neighborhoods
Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score and documentary composed and directed by Hood to…
FRKWYS Vol. 11: Cantos De Lisboa
Sharing their vision over lengthy living room guitar sessions and evenings of cold wine in Fado taverns, Gunn and Mike Cooper created Cantos de Lisboa, an album with variable vernacular shades and musical forms from Portugal’s antiquity. Cantos means “corner” in Portuguese, as well as “chant” or “song” (this latter meaning evolved from the Latin antecedent referring to stanzas of verse in poetry). For two artists whose roots lie in the country blues and its subverted offshoots, the proverbial “c…
FRKWYS Vol. 14: Nue
Composer Tashi Wada has performed for years with his father Yoshi Wada—artist, composer, and early member of the Fluxus movement. However, they have rarely appeared together in studio settings. Nue, the fourteenth entry in RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, finally brings Tashi and Yoshi, along with an eclectic group of close friends and extended family, together on tape. Nue draws on aspects of Tashi’s background for his widest vision to date—among them the minimalist bagpipe music o…
Movement
Holly Herndon’s Movement is the debut offering of material by the young musician, modernist, and machinist. Restless for reckless cultural immersion, Herndon left her Johnson City, Tennessee home as a teenager for Berlin, Germany. For several years, Herndon lived and learned techno music as party dweller and performer, eventually returning wide-minded to the States to pursue a Masters in Electronic Music at Mills College. Under the guidance of network pioneer John Bischoff, Roscoe Mitchell, and …
Insides Vol.1
Insides suggests a need for now, not some heavy, heady accumulation of then. (though you can rest reassured this publication is assembled by heads, but not just for heads) In that accumulation, we lose track of our intimate effort and subtle progress. We’ve assembled several events (both past and present) from RVNG and surrounding enterprises to explore and experience beyond the catalogued accomplishment. A reexamination of RVNG with a myriad of mechanics under the hood. Inside the debut i…
Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1
**2017 small repress** Craig Leon-approved reissue of his two solo albums Nommos and Visiting as a 2LP set in gorgeous packaging with two essays by Leon and a download coupon* Issued respectively by John Fahey's Takoma label in 1980 and Leon's Arbitor private press in 1982, Nommos and Visiting were the twin brainchildren of studio wizard Craig Leon. Leon's production was pivotal in realising the debut recordings by Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and Suicide. While those albums broke ground in ne…
Eye Chant
Originally issued in 1986. You can see the sounds her voice makes. The literal depiction of this, a photograph of Michele Mercure with an eyeball in her mouth, is removed in the updated album art. The original graphic elements are left to suspend, speak, and sing across time. In the absence of the decade-specific portraits, the redesigned edition is dislocated from a particular or linear history. Our initial point of encounter is artifactual; a trace in place of a scar. Accordingly, Michele’…
Elite Excel
The first taster of Stellar Om Source’s upcoming LP for RVNG Intl., Joy One Mile, ‘Elite Excel’ comes backed with a fantastically brooding remix from Kassem Mosse. Christine Gualdi’s vision of electronic music has expanded since we last checked in; tantric analogue drone sequences have given way to more rugged future-city constructions inspired by her investigation of the roots of New York electro and Detroit techno. ‘Elite Excel’ begins in a nocturnal cruise mode reminiscent of early Carl Craig…
Joy One Mile
Eagerly anticipated full-length on RVNG Intl. from Christelle Gualdi's Stellar Om Source, marking a significant departure from the no-age synthcraft she's long been known for and has showcased on numerous self-released CDRs and sides for the likes of Olde English Spelling Bee and Big Love. Joy One Mile began life when Gualdi acquired a mint Roland TB-303 and began experimenting with it; over the course of a year's gigging, she perfected seven compositions which she then laid down live, without o…
Music Works for Industry
Marc Barreca’s Music Works for Industry is a layered assertion. An economic mantra for the mind to spin, like the many loops on this recording, or churn, as gears of some godhead machine. From the pool of playful compositions, a social subtext appears – a somewhat sardonic riposte to the commercial and cynical abuse of music and musicians. The work profits the listener over industry. Said another way, its motivations are more generative than lucrative.
No longer than four minutes, no shor…
Breadwoman & Other Tales
** CD edition** Sensational!!!! Breadwoman & Other Tales are the collected recordings of a language arising. It is the sound and document of Anna Homler divining speech, lyrical fragments, and melody for music composed, mixed, and engineered by Steve Moshier. It’s 1982 and Anna is driving an ocean blue classic Cadillac to meet renowned poet and playwright Deena Metzger in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles. Passing a non-descript desert patch where tall wheat and mustard flowers grow, Anna opens her mo…
Tumblers From The Vault (1970-1972)
Double CD edition. Syrinx’s path veered from the dominant modes of ‘70s subculture, their version of chamber pop hybridized with wild, whimsical electronic experimentation charting new territory in the under and overground. Formed by composer John Mills-Cockell after the dissolution of Intersystems, Syrinx’s two adventurous albums, Syrinx (Self-Titled) and Long Lost Relatives, endorsed the poetic potential of the avant-garde, subverting a turn of the ‘60s trend toward technological pageantry.…
FRKWYS Vol. 13: Sunergy
Sunergy brings together synthesists Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational collaboration series. For this edition, a panorama of the Pacific Coast provides the place and head space for a musical appreciation and consideration of a life-giving form vast and volatile with change.
Fortuitously (as is the freaky way), Smith and Ciani were discovered to be neighbors in the small coastal community of Bolinas, California. T…
Zelalem
Mikael Seifu’s Zelalem is an ode to – and a fearless break from – the storied lineage of Ethiopian music. The literal Amharic translation of Zelalem is “eternity,” and through Seifu’s conceptual frame it becomes a “vector of light.” Seifu shines this light on the music of his home country while guiding us through an uncharted “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” – a coinage Seifu uses to describe the music he and his peers are producing in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis-Ababa. Illuminating the rich sounds…
City Lake
Before Bing & Ruth’s halcyonic opus Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, there was City Lake. Initially pressed in an unusually limited edition five years ago, the ensemble’s stunning full-length debut is now released in simultaneously refined and expanded form. With bonus tracks and new, visceral mastering, the album gleams all the more and signals a spree of live performances this fall revisiting the material.
As the principal leader of Bing & Ruth, David Moore assembles his orchestral roster accordin…
We Are Not The First
For those who maintain the more mutable dance music is, the deeper its impact on human evolution, RVNG Intl. presents We Are Not The First, an Epic conducted and deconstructed by Chicago artist Hieroglyphic Being and the J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Bul. We Are Not The First combines the musical forces of Marshall Allen, Daniel Carter, Greg Fox, Shelley Hirsch, Shahzad Ismaily, Elliott Levin, Jamal Moss, Rafael Sanchez, and Ben Vida in deep dialogue with each other and humans’ hidden sonic history. Tracked…