★Sub Rosa
Broken Re/Broken
Milan Knizak and Opening Performance Orchestra revisit Knizak's 1979 Broken Music (SR 400LP) in Berlin, 2014. "In 2008-9 we transferred the original recording from vinyl records into digital form. As we did so, we weren't interested in the precise, clean fidelity offered by the digital world, which fundamentally causes the fine structure of natural sound to be lost. Instead we were seeking the opposite: the world of errors and distortion, which remains hidden when digital audio is manipulated to…
What Lies in the Sea
What Lies in the Sea is the fruit of a ten-year collaboration between singer Lynn Cassiers and keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin, and is the first release for their duo Lilly Joel. Both musicians are free spirits and lauded innovators in their respective fields. File under: a mix between Obscure Records and the Birmingham sound. Belgian singer Lynn Cassiers is as much a sound-sculptor as a singer, using her voice, microphone, and electronics to create soundscapes. Belgian pianist Jozef Dumoulin redefin…
Moondog
French band Cabaret Contemporain pay tribute to the composer Moondog -- New York's Viking -- with singing by two Scandinavian sirens, Swedish singers Linda Oláh and Isabel Sörling. The seven musicians focus on Moondog in particular in an effort to offer the public a new way to appreciate this too little-known music. Cabaret Contemporain is a Paris-based quintet who play electro music with prepared acoustic instruments (piano, electric guitar, drums, two double bassses). T…
Fieldtone
The sounds found in nature can have a very slow groove. A groove embedded by silence, so slow it can almost only be felt while spending a few hours at sea, on a forest trip, in open fields... It is this groove and the "silence" of nature that inspired the Fieldtone compositions. The music is performed by an ensemble of string instruments (kanklės, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, double bass) supplemented with drums. Book of Air's series of bundled compositions exploring the parameters of sound…
La Selva
Finally available, in full-lenght original audio piece (71 minutes) on 24-bit / 48kHz digital USB flat memory-card with non-audio blank etched vinyl. Limited 500 pieces edition, numbered and signed by Francisco Lopez. La Selva' is an immersion into the sound environments of a tropical rain forest in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. An astonishing natural sonic web created by a multitude of sounds from rain, waterfalls, insects, frogs, birds, mammals and even plants, through a day cycle d…
Generation Sans Futur
Génération Sans Futur (Generation Without a Future), Art Zoyd's third LP originally released in 1980 through Atem Records, returns to the sound (and lineup, plus Daniel Denis (Univers Zero)) of the group's first album, Symphonie Pour le Jour où Brûleront les Cités (SR 330CD/LP). The 17-minute "La Ville" is a powerful epic, featuring Thierry Zaboïtzeff's prehistoric grunts, complex time shifts, and a tribal/ritualistic feel once again close to the spirit of Magma. But unlike "Musique pour l'Odys…
Utopiya?
Ütopiya? not only continues Oiseaux-Tempête's first album (SR 381CD/LP); it also extends it. The travels move this time to Istanbul and Sicily, providing the food for its urgent energy and indomitable drive. While the structures still hint at moments of post-rock, they go further now, almost into the area of free-jazz yet without losing a directness rooted in punk (highlighted perhaps by the presence of G.W. Sok from The Ex). In addition, the bass clarinet of Gareth Davis references both t…
Complete Analog and Digital Electronic Works 1978-2000
Released in 10-panel Digipak. Includes a booklet affixed to the sleeve. The Complete Analog and Digital Electronic Music 1978-2000 recorded between 1978 and 1980 by a key composer of Belgian electronic music André Stordeur. His musical career started in 1973 with a tape composition for the soundtrack to Gordon Matta-Clark's film Office Baroque. Later in the 1970s, he participated in avant-garde music ensemble Studio voor Experimentele Muziek, founded in Antwerp, Flanders, by Joris de Laet. Since…
Sounds from There
Swiss electro-acoustic artist Israel Quellet's fourth opus on Sub Rosa: a complex and mysterious work for symphonic bass drum, symphonic tympani, organ, Tibetan horn, homemade horn, triangle, tubular bells, shocks inside the church, anvil metal tank, and church bells. A challenging listen, but so rewarding.- "Music of expectation and experience, controlled recklessness. In his obsession with the possibilities of sound, Israel Quellet takes us to exciting places." --PopMatters - "Quellet's …
Live at Cafe Oto
Double CD edition: hard to imagine a more powerful or intriguing, improvising power trio than these 3: Charles Hayward on drums (This Heat and Massacre), Kawabata Makoto (Acid Mothers Temple) and Guy Segers (Univers Zero) caught in wild act at Cafe OTO, London, on May 24, 2013.
- "...[Kawabata is] a genuine Guitar God..." --Pitchfork - "Hayward's interest in all manner of world rhythms and percussion... lent the music an otherworldly quality..." --Pitchfork - "Darker and more bleakly melodra…
Youuu + Mee = Weee
Sub Rosa presents Youuu + Mee = Weee (First), a vinyl edition of the first disc of the three CD set Youuu + Mee = Weee (SR 367CD, 2014). Youuu + Mee = Weee is the first recorded collaboration between Charlemagne Palestine and Rhys Chatham. And it's precious. Following the musical meetings with Z'ev (Rubhitbangklanghear Rubhitbangklangear, SR340CD/LP), and with Tony Conrad, these new Sub Rosa sessions create a sort of trilogy. Rhys Chatham began his musical career as a piano tuner for avant-gar…
Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream
A milestone!! Sub Rosa presents another installment in its Early Electronic series, a silver vinyl reissue of Trevor Wishart's Red Bird: A Political Prisoner's Dream, composed between 1973 and 1977 using the studio of the University of York, and originally released in 1978 by York Electronic Studios. Wishart's compositional interests deal mainly with the interpolation by technological means between the human voice and natural sounds. He has been very active since the early 1970s in the area…
Youuu+Mee=Weeee
Youuu + Mee = Weee is the first recorded collaboration between Charlemagne Palestine and Rhys Chatham. And it's precious. Following the musical meetings with Z'ev (Rubhitbangklanghear Rubhitbangklangear, SR340CD/LP), and with Tony Conrad, these new Sub Rosa sessions create a sort of trilogy. Rhys Chatham began his musical career as a piano tuner for avant-garde pioneer La Monte Young, also working as a harpsichord tuner for Gustav Leonhardt, Rosalyn Tureck, and Glenn Gould. He soon studied und…
Early Nights
Early Nights can be seen as a music box of musical and nocturnal atmospheres. Belgian musician Jean D.L. guides us on this album through a collection of fragments and pieces of recollection collected over a period of seven years. The music, both recorded live and at home, meanders between improvisation, experiment, drone and ambient guitar, exploring the places where it originated. Jean D.L. develops a universe at once intimate and noisy, made of hazy soundscapes. Jean D.L. has worked sol…
Relaps/Archives 1984-1986
First limited edition: solid blue, black and clear mixed vinyl. Gatefold sleeve. Founding members of the original "Rock In Opposition" (R.I.O.) movement and the inventors of "chamber rock," mythic Belgian band Univers Zero have continued to change and grow and develop over their entire career, while still keeping an ensemble sound and spirit that is easily recognizable. These recordings were previously unavailable in an LP format. Longstanding dark-hued Belgian chamber rockers and avant-pro…
The SalMar Construction
The SalMar Construction is an amazing large music synthesis engine conceived and constructed in the early 1970's by a composer for use by a composer. These unreleased recordings were made at IRCAM in Paris in 1983. It illustrates the power that an electronic composition can achieve when the composer arrives at a true synergy with his synthesizer.
This LP represents a significant performance by Salvatore Martirano (1927-1995) on his unique instrument, the SalMar Construction. Under developm…
Everything Is Shit. Punk In Brussels 1977-79
An incredible energy took over Brussels at the onset of the Eighties. It is a strange and rare feeling when you tell yourself that something is happening. And it always happens through an accumulation of very small facts. Then, suddenly, it is there. This collection basically attempts to capture this emerging will. But before that, there was punk rock. In Brussels, it was a handful of venues, improvised concerts, a few dozens of people recognizing each other, and a festival that gathers everyone…
Pianist: Pieces
As a body of repertoire, these works are remarkable for their freshness of musical thought and energy (John Cage considered Wolff to be the most 'musical' of the experimental composers). Christian Wolff uniquely blends experimental concerns with classical tendencies. In these pieces not only are older composers referenced (Ives, Schumann) but Wolff's love of clarity of line and transparency of texture betrays an empathy with Webern, Haydn and Bach. This aesthetic is, however, combined with a ten…
New York Electronic, 1965
Sub Rosa presents another release as a part of their early electronic series. Drone-based experiments from Angus MacLise (notably with Tony Conrad extremely present on the album, and John Cale), and purely electronic compositions -- a path (almost) nobody knew MacLise had explored. Miraculously salvaged by Gerard Malanga, these archives provided a new perspective on the artist's whole body of work and considerably expanded his artistic palette. And so Sub Rosa is able to present a whole recor…
An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music - Vol 1
Subtitled: First A-Chronology 1921-2001. At last, the Sub Rosa label re-issues the highly-acclaimed Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music collection. Containing early and contemporary classics as well as pieces that had never been heard before. Volume 1 begins in the 1920s with the Russolo brothers, and examines each decade in turn -- Varèse, Cage, Schaeffer, Xenakis, the great pioneers crafting the first traces of a music that was markedly revolutionary: electronic music, created from no…