New Arrivals
Celestial Ascent
If his 1969 debut album, Dawn, offered a magical ethnic sound from an 80-string guitar-zither, American multi-instrumentalist Don Robertson's 1980 follow-up, Celestial Ascent, uses the Austro-Germanic instrument as a viaticum for a timeless journey into the depths of the soul and psyche. The album was originally released as a cassette, and this is its first reissue since then. Traditionally designed to accompany the singing of psalms in religious communities, here the zither is the perfect …
What You Hear (Is What You Hear)
Thomas Brinkmann is renowned for audio works that hover among forms such as techno, minimalism, and ambient. Alongside such pioneering works as Klick (2000), Studio 1 - Variationen (1997), and 2012's duo with Oren Ambarchi, The Mortimer Trap (BT 006CD), with What You Hear (Is What You Hear) Brinkmann moves further to separate his art, not only from descriptive musical terms that oppress creative output, but also from the notion of an author in the act of creation. The 11 tracks on display form…
Drugstore
Tony Iglio, born in 1932, has been one of the most popular orchestral arrangers of RAI (Italian National Television) and has composed over 1500 songs. Son of art, over the years he has played with and for the most important figures of the last century in Italy. "Drugstore" was recorded in 1971 in a small theatre in Napoli by a combo of professional musicians and is rated the weirdest and most insane Italian library of the early 70’s mixing jazz, psychedelia, effects and purcussions. The f…
Malefactor, Ade
In 1989, ‘Malefactor, Ade’ was issued on the UK’s Glass Records, which had arranged several years earlier for the first actual release of Mayo Thompson’s 1970 solo LP, ‘Corky’s Debt To His Father’. This was the first Red Crayola record release in five years. The fearlessness with which genres are converted can be disarming, but stick to it - you’ll find listening an utter triumph. ‘Malefactor, Ade’ was reissued on CD by Drag City in the year 2000. Now it's on lovely vinyl.
Alternate Moon Cycles
The first half of the decade has seen cornet virtuoso and composer Rob Mazurek through significant achievements and personal losses, often linked inextricably through his creative processes. In and around the passing of his mentor and colleague, the trumpeter Bill Dixon in 2010 and his mother in 2013, Mazurek has found inspirations that are unique even for an innovator of his caliber. Mazurek and Dixon worked closely in achieving a deeper understanding of the pure tone of the trumpet (or cornet,…
Who Is The Sender?
Ask Bill Fay about his relationship with his instrument and he says something revealing, not ”Ever since I learnt to play the piano,” but “Ever since the piano taught me…” What the piano taught him was how to connect to one of the great joys of his life. “Music gives,” he says. And he is a grateful receiver. But, it makes him wonder, “Who is the sender?” Fay - who after more than five decades writing songs is finally being appreciated as one of our finest living practitioners of the art – assert…
Never Were The Ways She Was
Two of Constellation's acclaimed solo instrumental artists join forces on this tremendous new album of original compositions for horn and violin. Colin Stetson has developed a unique and renowned voice as a performer and composer, chiefly on bass and tenor saxophones, where he rallies an array of technical strengths and innovations (circular breathing, contact micing of his own body and the body of his instrument, vocalizations through the reed) to make some of the most captivatingly organic, da…
A Forum For The Arts / Studio
ARNE NORDHEIM Forum for the Arts (1969)Taken from the soundtrack to A Forum for the Arts – a promotional film about Henie Onstad Kunstsenter directed by Pål Bang-Hansen in 1970. Original material recorded in Studio Eksperymentlne Warsaw, 1969. Edited and reconstructed by Helge Sten at Audio Virus Lab, 2012. Licensed by Rannveig GetzDEATHPROD Studio (2010)Taken from the sound and light installation Studio commissioned for the John Cage – The Anarchy of Silence exhibition at Henie Onstad Kunstse…
CMRS/OPEA
Mindblowing double LP taken by a Maurizio Bianchi impossible-to-find early tape (from 1980!) "decomposed" in October 1980 using cacophonelectronics, and dedicated to the physical attraction to Sylvia Simonelli (September 1980/June 1981) “The genesis of this work is incredible. In the office where I worked, I had found a stamp with ‘’COMPRESA’’ (in English, included) written over it, and so I came to the starting point for a new experimental work. Erasing before the second, fourth, sixth and ei…
Il Sorriso Del Grande Tentatore
The first ever official LP reissue of a classic 1974 score! Spiritual cousin to the psyche-liturgy of The Electric Prunes' 1968 'Mass In F Minor' and William Sheller's 1972 masterwork 'Lux Aeterna', 'Il Sorriso Del Grande Tentatore' is a vital, beautiful, frightening and yet essentially forgotten chapter in the storied discography of lauded composer Ennio Morricone. This LP, with remastered sound, includes two previously unreleased tracks. Morricone's favourite Morricone! Included …
Stratosphere Sound
Hironari Iwata began his solo project Toukaseibunshi (Transparent Molecules) in 1985. In the same year he formed a second unit called Haiginsha, and began collaborating with Merzbow and Agencement. Iwata also ran the independent label Angakok, releasing several albums on cassette and curating a compilation that featured some the most radical musicians of the period including H.N.A.S., Asmus Tietchens, P16.D4, DDAA, etc. But in 1988 he suddenly ceased all musical activities. He returned to public…
Sintetizzatrice
Sintetizzatrice is the first recorded document of the collaboration between veteran DJ and producer Donato Dozzy and female vocalist Anna Caragnano. Through his solo work, and in his collaboration with Giuseppe Tilleci (Neel) asVoices from the Lake, Dozzy has achieved some of the most remarkable vistas contemporary electronic music has seen since the turn of this century. By removing himself from his areas of mastery to shift his focus on the voice, he has achieved a new peak with Sintetizzatric…
Sonnet
The sound of the fifth Benoit Pioulard full length is lush and verdant, a temperate rain forest of ear ecstasy that reflects the environment surrounding the artist. A mostly instrumental work, it is an adept melding of song and sound, melody and texture, the intangible and the palpable, that in an abstract sense recalls the more fractured and loose end of the 70's krautrock movement."The basis of the album was a series of field recordings of tones and unintentional harmonies that I made in the s…
Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo
Limited repress LP edition. Originally published in 1979 by the legendary Gianni Sassi's Cramps Records label, as part of a series curated by Franco Battiato, the long-awaited "Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo" has finally made available by Die Schachtel in a repackaged deluxe edition (both LP and CD), fully remastered (by Giuseppe Ielasi) from the original Cramps tapes, and complete with 3 extra tracks (in the CD edition) dug from Francesco Messina's archives.
Produced by Franco Battiato…
Small Leaves
Prolific chinese artist Torturing Nurse returns to vinyl format. 4 tracks of harsh and abundant noise but with psychedelic touch in vein of CCCC. 22 minutes long, black vinyls, printed labels and inner sleeve, one time limited pressing of 100 copies. Single sided LP.
Trance-Formations I Ancient Minimal Meditations
A forgotten classic! 2015 repress of the 2011 reissue of the original 1986 cassette. Pressing of 400 copies on 180-gram vinyl in full-color thick cardboard sleeve. Created between 1981 and 1985 by JD Emmanuel, a new age composer who has received a lot of praise from people like Lieven Martens and John Olsen. These recordings signify Emmanuel's praise to the course of the day. Starting off slowly with morning synth meanderings, walking through midday, running in the evening, and closing the …
Outer Planetary Church Music
A friend of Aguirre recalls meeting Tim Robertson by chance in a thrift store in Barcelona, while eyeing a dusty Hammond organ: "He was born in Honduras, but moved out of there at a young age to several other countries such as Perú, France, and Norway. His parents were devoted to some religious organization and they were spreading the word all around. The last place they were sent to was Barcelona, hence the reason he was there. He learned to play the keyboards as a kid and performed in c…
Empty Airport
The title of Empty Airport, Chra's second LP and her first on Editions Mego, may be read as a reference to Brian Eno's ambient classic, though this time we find ourselves in a territory of transit that sounds like a dystopian swan song on civilizatoric debris -- a heterotopia emptied of human remains, with only ghostly echoes behind. Chra aka comfortzone foundress Christina Nemec has traced out a post-anthropocene area in which acoustic entries of field recordings are stratified in layers …
Anonym
Amazing treatment of one of the best titles on Yuzuru Agi's mythical Vanity label, the debut by Vocalist & Synth player Junko Tange - the "tiny girl" in the phrase "dedicated to the quiet men from a tiny girl" after which the second Nurse With Wound album was named; it's the byline here - & Guitarist Masami Yoshikawa's Tolerance project, originally released in October of 1979."Yikes! This is not a record: it's a ticket pressed in 12" format to get the f- outta this modern era of derivative n…
Playing in the Dirt
Great back-story - reprinted below - on this LP, issuing the home-recorded experimental music of Bob "R.A." Cantius, an instrument builder/performer and Electronic Music Composer working out of my own former stomping grounds of Northern New Jersey in the mid-late 60s.Sonically, there's a commonality with kindred trawlers such as Charlie Nothing, Allan Bryant - specifically the latter's "Space Guitars" LP - and even Harry Partch's inimitable constructs, all wrapped in the same grand "Aleat…