★Tal
The Well
The Well is the second album by the duo So Sner, composed of Susanna Gartmayer (bass clarinet) and Stefan Schneider (electronics). Recorded over nearly two years in various studios and spaces, the album reflects So Sner's extensive touring across Europe. The final mixing took place in Vienna at the studio of Martin Siewert, who served as both co-producer and mastering engineer. Known for his meticulous attention to sonic detail, Siewert brings his unique techniques and distinctive sound enhancem…
Permanent Parts
*300 copies limited edition* "Permanent Parts is the second album released by visual artist Katharina Grosse (synthesizer) and musician Stefan Schneider (synthesizer; So Sner, To Rococo Rot, Mapstation). Grosse and Schneider were joined at Galerie Max Hetzler on 29 April 2023, performing as part of the Spectrum without Traces exhibition, by three artists who all generally work within improvised music – Carina Khorkhordina (trumpet), Tintin Patrone (trombone and electronics), and Billy Roisz (noi…
Rain Without Rain
*300 copies limited edition* "Rain and experimental music have had an interesting connection for decades. Under the umbrella of American film music promotion, Hanns Eisler was already looking for "Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben” (fourteen ways to describe the rain) in 1941. A good 20 years later, The Cascades interpreted the periodicity of rain as a rhythm of mourning. For the Beatles ("If the rain falls, they run and hide their heads"), the precipitation inspired the band to use backw…
Threnody for the KhoiSan
Garth Erasmus is an artist and musician based in Cape Town, South Africa. 'Threnody for the KhoiSan' is his first album under his own name. Since 1985 his artistic interests have broadened to include music-making, designing and making his own instruments based on indigenous KhoiSan knowledge. From 1999 to 2012 he was a member of the South African First Nation activist group Khoi Khonnexion. In the past couple of years Garth Erasmus has also been a pivotal part of various international performanc…
Rice Field Silently Riping In the Night
*2023 much needed repress!* Reiko Kudo first appeared on the Tokyo underground music scene in 1980 with Noise, a duo which consisted of Tori Kudo on organ and herself (then under her maiden name Reiko Omura) on voice, guitar and trumpet. Their only album "Tenno" (1980 on Engel) is probably one of the most outstanding and uncompromising records of all time. Besides other pioneering female producers from Japan such as Non (of Non Band), Phew and Haco, who all had started their startling careers in…
Non Band
2022 limited edition of this Japanese no wave gem from 1982. With extended liner notes and interviews with band members about the recordings of the album, as well as unpublished photographs from 1981 by Jibiki Yuichi.
'The Japanese punk rock movement known as Tokyo Rockers began in the summer of 1978. It incubated an independent music culture as well as a host of fascinating, individualistic musicians. One of the more striking units was the male-female duo Maria 023. Non played bass for them, an…
Reime
*Limited to 300 copies* "How can one explain the lasting popularity of the bass clarinet in musical circles from Vienna to Brussels? Perhaps because its frequency range articulates an alternative to conventions of popular music, where "bass" is reserved primarily for rhythmic impulses and the very foundation of the music. Viennese bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer's playing can by no means be reduced to just this, rather, it scutinizes the entire sound universe: she can do rhythm and drone, not…
Accident In Heaven
Accident In Heaven was originally released in 1987 as a hand-made micro-edition of about 40 cassette tapes. It was only the third ever release on the short-lived now near legendary SDV label which had been established that same year by Konrad Kraft, Bernd Sevens and Dino Oon in Düsseldorf.Finally finding a more substantial and appreciative audience on vinyl over 30 years after its original limited release, Accident In Heaven is a strong testament to the explorative experiments of Detlef Funder a…
Eternal EP
Insistent rhythm trax from Kopy on Stefan Schneider’s TAL, reinforced with remixes by the boss’s Harmonious Thelonious, plus Elena Colombi, and Dynamo Dreesen with SJ Tequilla Like her half of a 2019 split with Tentenko, Kopy’s solo debut proper trades in a purely rhythmic language of tuned percussive hits deftly dubbed and harnessed in wonky syncopation. ‘Fujiko’ is the kinkier of the two, with nuff cowbell action and grubby bass jabs, whereas ‘Lok’ holds down more restless sort of dembow slos…
Neues Boot
** Edition of 200 ** TAL presents the first musical collaboration between Hamburg based Asmus Tietchens and Japanese artist Miki Yui, operating out of Düsseldorf for almost 20 years now. Highly respected and hugely influential artist Asmus Tietchens first made his mark on the electronic music scene in the late 1970s, whereas Miki Yui debuted her sonic settings in 1999. Their first joint album Neues Boot envelops the listener with a poetic sound sensibility and a conceptual clarity which was proc…
Drumira
**120 copies** It features four heavyweight tracks by Stefan Schneider, ghanaian drummer Nicholas Addo Nettey and percussionist Sven Kacirek (Hamburg). Nicholas Addo-Nettey was a former percussionist with Fela Kuti and his famous Africa 70 band during the most legendary years of his career. He has left band in 1979 in Berlin where he has been living ever since. His early solo album Pax Nicholas from 1971 has gained fame through a reissue in 2009. It is interesting to note that Drumira was firs…
Tastaturstuecke - Vol 1
Tastaturstuecke Vol 1 introduces 9 outstanding new compositions for church organ, harpsichord and self programmed software. The album comprises the first collaborational recordings of Brian Parks (Atlanta) and Phillip Schulze (Düsseldorf). The two musicians first met in the early 2000s at the famous Wesleyan University, Connecticut, where they regularly attended seminars of their teachers Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton.
Tiergarten
"Walter Benjamin begins his Berlin Childhood around 1900, a book in the form of a series of vignettes, with the following two sentences: "Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling". Entitled Tiergarten, after the eponymous park in central Berlin, this passage from Benjamin's memoir written in the 1930s which refers to the city as a sometimes alien piece of nature that you moonwalk through c…
Arctica
Pionneering production from the Düsseldorf mid 80s electronic underground world. Transferred for the first ever time from the original cassette to vinyl and CD. Konrad Kraft (Detlef Funder) is one of the still overlooked producers of Düsseldorfs fertile electronic music scene. Arctica was originally released on Cassette on Funder's imprint SDV Tonträger in 1987 in a handmade edition of about 50 copies only. Reduced to its essential musical elements, Arctica certainly contains some of the most un…
Musica De Venezuela 1972-81
LP version. Includes two full-sized inserts: Includes download code; Edition of 300. "After a concert of Kenyan singer Ogoya Nengo in Berlin in 2015 in a pleasant conversation Guillermo Lares told me about his father, Oswaldo Lares, a studied architect who, parallel with his professional activity, began to make field recordings of the traditional and indigenous Venezuelan music from the early 1960s onwards up until today. His search and fascination for finding the musical roots of his country le…
Hinosch EP
Electronic excursions from Düsseldorf/Osaka duo Hinosch (Koshiro Hino (YPY, Goat) and Stefan Schneider (To Rococo Rot, Schneider Kacirek). Four unruly studio tracks following the pair's collaborative live sets in Japan and Europe, pushing unsynced electronic instruments into knotted spaces of tape treatments. "Talent" offers swelling arpeggios that wobble over distant drums before playfully proceeding into the hiss and bliss of a pitched-down vocal drone, setting the tone for the EP to unf…
On Mande
Ever since her childhood Ogoya Nengo, baptized Anastasia Oluoch in about 1940, would excite listeners around her village with her singing abilities. Very soon she had received her stage name "Ogoya Nengo" which in Dholuo (language) means: the most precious and expensive singer in the region. Her debut album "Rang'ala" (Honest Jon's/London) came out in 2014 and was recorded and produced by Sven Kacirek and Stefan Schneider at various spots around Rang'ala Village, Siaya County, Kenya. Now "OGOYA …