New Arrivals

Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadóttir presents a new album, Leyfdu Ljósinu (trans. "Allow The Light"), recorded live at the Music Research Centre, University of York, in January 2012, by Tony Myatt, using a SoundField ST450 Ambisonic microphone and two Neumann U87 microphones (NB -- it was not played in a concert environment and there was no audience). To be faithful to time and space -- elements vital to the movement of sound -- this album was recorded entirely live, with no post-tampering …

"‘Golden Worry’ features new drummer Emmanuel Nicolaidis and is huge step forward from 2008’s ‘Terrible Two’. The band has kept busy touring with Beach House, Celebration, Dan Deacon, Zomes, Battles, Mi Ami, Jason Urick, and Future Islands. The CD version comes in a four panel mini-LP style gatefold package. "

"Mountain Ocean Sun is a project fronted by His Name Is Alive main man Warren Defever, who collaborates with three like-minded drone artists for an hour-long recording of shruti box, harmonium, bells, gongs and violin. The group's first performance was at a 500 year old Buddhist temple in Osaka, and that pretty much sets the tone for the quartet's quasi-mystical approach to soundscaping. Defever himself continues to mythologise, describing the recording as having been made "on a mountain, in the…

'Returnal' is the fourth album from Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never project, after 'Betrayed In The Octagon' (Deception Island, 2007), ÔZones Without People' (Arbor, 2009) and 'Russian Mind' (No Fun, 2009). All 3 albums being superbly compiled on the 'Rifts' double CD set (No Fun, 2009). It sees Lopatin fine tune his craft for creation of deep atmospheres and texture even further. Starting off with the mind blowing triptych of 'Nil Admiari'-'Describing Bodies'-'Stress Waves', which …

"The Koeln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through "the complete continuance of creative music," and on towards the next millennium. The "success of the future" is not a lost cause as long as there is music like this in the air."-Graham Lock"Although Anthony Braxton does not play on this double CD (whose contents were released for the first time in 1995), his presence is certainly felt. He conducts the band through a fairly free improvisation and five of his compositio…

In 1995 Steve Peters and Steve Roden toured as a trio with singer Anna Homler; sometimes they would vocalize behind her, and they liked the way their voices blended together. They then spent about 15 years saying that “someday” they should record a voice-based project together. Aside from the physical distance between them, the problem was always: What would we sing? Neither wanted to write or sing lyrics.Inspiration came in the form of a book of Japanese jisei – poems allegedly written by monks…

Seaworthy, a three piece collective based in Sydney, Australia that revolves around core member Cameron Webb as well as Sam Shinazzi and Greg Bird, was formed in early 2000 to explore melodic and experimental approaches to the construction of minimalist sound scapes from looped guitar, warm drones, piano, electronics and field recordings.Map In Hand often blurs the lines of conventional categorisation with elements traditionally considered part of “indie” or “post” rock blended with processed mu…

There’s probably not much to say about punk’s continued existence. Like jazz or sitcoms or party politics, it just carries on eating and breathing and shitting and propogating. It’s only interesting when someone comes along trying to advance the form. Like “Arrested Development” or Dennis Kucinich, they’re usually forgotten. This would all be relevant if Neptune were a punk band, which we’re not at all sure is the case. They create a sense of undermining the status quo, which is pretty pun…

Ap'strophe is the duo of Ferran Fages (acoustic guitar) and Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga (zither). Recorded by Christian Pallejà at Maik Maier studios in Barcelona, december 2008. Mixed and mastered by Ferran Conangla. With their music they investigate the perception of the distinctive timbre of the guitar and the zither alongside the differences and similarities of their string instruments.

It has been quiet for Flim, also known as Enrico Wuttke, since his last release 'Pola Music' and 'Ohne Titel, 1916' (the latter being his second release on Plinkity Plonk). However he still works as a designer, and creates music for dance companies and short films, as well as enjoying family life. His new release is a 28 minute EP with four pieces he created for a dance piece 'Refugium', based on the novel 'The Wall' by Marlen Haushofer. Originally published in German in 1962 and touted more rec…

The IMO is a very large improvisors ensemble, founded in september 2010, that  usually gather about 35 musicians per concert, from all switzerland and beyond. From the, expected, mess of the first concerts emerged a collective consciousness and involvement from the impressive number of musicians included in this ambitious projet. After a year - and 7 concerts - 40 of them met during 3 day during the 2011 summer, marking a sensitive step in the orchestra progression. Working deeply a certai…

Collaborating since 2004, Dispersal Patterns is Bach and Kannenberg's second joint project. Departing from their earlier emphasis on systems and graphic notation, they here rely on intuitive communication as they weave two improvised soundscapes from quiet field recordings, analogue instrumentation, digital synthesis, found sounds and minimal signal manipulations. Bach and Kannenberg have previously explored concepts of place, soundscape and transmission in their first collaboration, Two …

this CD is an amazing achievement. Kjos Sørensen is a brilliantly gifted performer, but clearly an imaginative and creative one too. A very special issue, continuing BIS’s tradition of opening our minds and our ears.

Peripheral Records is proud to announce it's thirteenth release with, 'Maurizio Bianchi's - Aeternum Aevum' CD. Two long beautifully understated tracks, that show a more pastoral side to the great Italian master of Industrial. Slow whirling pieces of Ambience dedicated to the late Konrad Schnitzler. The CD is limited to 250 copies within a DigiPak. The sleeve is adnorned inside and out with Abstract paintings by Hayat Saidi.

Xavier Charles : clarinet, Michel Doneda : saxophone, Jean Pallandre : microphones. Following the first meeting in 1997, they went back to the same places to record again an incredible meeting of soundscape !

Strøm are Gaudenz Badrutt, pianist and electronic musician (1972) and Christian Müller (1971), clarinettist and electronic musician. Under the name of strøm the two artists from Biel mix since 2001 various ingredients: free improvisation with conceptual music, contemporary music ideas with free jazz explosions, down to earth, drifty energy with spherical sound. The duo mixes electro-acoustic chamber music skillfully with allusions to contemporary pop-aesthetics. Both musicians studied at …

Features Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) on vocals, and is a fascinating, compelling collaboration that mixes the last three centuries into one beautifully haunting, cryptic flow of idea-sound. Presented in a quietly handsome paper folio package!

Compilation of music from classic Commodore 64 computer games. The 18 original pieces of music have been remastered for this release. When people talk about "Commodore 64 music," it's easy to forget they're not talking about a musical style: they're talking about a delivery mechanism. What that convenient phrase hides is the sheer amount of originality and creativity that went into creating the music for games on the Commodore 64. Included on this compilation is some of their most celebra…

Things get dislocated, gather themselves, spread across areas of varying intensities. More intimate or more complex song. closer to the sacred, left untouched by mediation, even slightly incomprehensible, though mostlyambivalent and reality-piercing. At times, the music seems to lead us to a meaning that is deeper than the textual level. or is it the depth of another possible song? That's when the music takes us to areas that seem perpetually urging, more than their simple addition of voi…

This album is a single forty-minute track exclusively made up from recordings of waterfalls within America's Pacific Northwest. The source material was cultivated and mixed over a two-year period and takes the form of a monstrously powerful, ferociously noisy concrète piece. Menche has always situated his work towards the extremes of electroacoustic music and Kataract is no exception, but for all the turbulence and extreme frequency manipulation here there's a level of detail on show th…

Monochromes Vol.1 is the new sound work by Italian multimedia duo TU M'. The Monochromes series is a collection of modular audio and video compositions for chamber ensemble. Fragile atmospheric colours made of sound, light, space."A poet always has too many words in his vocabulary, a painter too many colors on his palette, a musician too many notes on his keyboard.

Excellent first recordings by Mani and Luigi Archetti.Far away from Mani's space rock releases these are great improvisational postpunkish ethnic jazzy rock masterpieces "Integrating themselves into the sound of nature, or stretching out their feelers, reaching the chaotic realms of unheard soundwaves surrounding us, they may also become devouring monsters, eating up your guts, brain and ears like roaring chainsaws through inventions and delicate discoverings make it a pleasant journey in wonder…

The Preservation label presents Beeswax Ephemera from Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller. With one eye on the future and one on the past, his playing has considerable technical and abstract expanse, though retains a wonderful melodic sensibility upfront. Evan’s experimental leanings give Beeswax Ephemera an idiosyncratic quality that mark an inventive new talent in the world of artists taking guitar music into exciting new directions. These nominally earthy compositions take flight with the undenia…

Featuring Moebius (ex-Kluster, Cluster, Harmonia), Conny Plank and Mani Neumeier (Guru Guru). The original LP was released on Sky Records in 1983. Historical masterpiece!! Reissue with elaborate miniature paper sleeve of the original LP. Digitally remastered version, limited to 1,000 copies

Mindblowing!!! Simon Balestrazzi should need no introduction. He founded T.A.C. (Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata) in 1982 and has bee pioneering the italian industrial scene since then. His passion for sound synthesis and exploration brought him in recent years to develop a research in electro-acoustics, both in duos, trios and also in solo.

poSTepeno is inspired by a multi-part collage created circa 1890 by an anonymous schizophrenic patient (known only as Frau ST) at the Viennese Oberdöbling asylum. The compositions (for piano and sine tones) morph musicalthemes through continual microtonal modifications. Sine tones are unstable, but nevertheless they consistently keep their individual frequency direction (up or down). In the chordal sense, the distance between the tones is subject to alteration. In this way the harmonic indicatio…

'When dealing with female interpreters of the art of advanced vocalism, four personal favourites come to mind : Diamanda Galàs, Meredith Monk, Shelley Hirsch and - more recently - Non Credo's Kira Vollman. I'm afraid that I'll have to add a fifth chair at the table. I had already met Ute Wassermann in a great CD on Creative Sources, Kunststoff, a duo with trumpet player Birgit Ulher; yet, Birdtalking is one of those records that immediately raise all aerials, a top-rank effort in which a single …

Eri Yamamoto released two recording in 2008, each of which—in different ways—demanded attention. In a series of duos with friends such as William Parker and Hamid Drake (Duologue), Yamamoto was expansive and free, readily finding ways to play beyond conventional harmony without sacrificing “beautiful” pianism. With her trio (Redwoods), she was more in the pocket, mining vamps and grooves for what they could say about the blues, but always keeping things intelligently sweet. If you’d barely heard…

Film director Chris Teerink asked me to make the soundtrack for a documentary he would be making about American artist Sol LeWitt. This was in 2009. Chris and I agreed that the music and the images should both be equally important in his film. We didn't want the score to overpower the images, but neither did we want it to become solely background 'muzak'. I searched for a certain openness in the sound, while at the same time keeping a directness to it. Musical references for me were the piano pi…

Scelsi Edition volume 2: three rarely recorded orchestral works, Hymnos, Hurqualia and Konx-Om-Pax, played by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic under Juan Pablo Izquierdo, with selections from Canti del Capricorno sung by Pauline Vaillancourt and Douglas Ahlstedt.

The Preservation label presents From Here To There, the debut album from San Francisco’s Ben Swire. While From Here To There can sit snugly in the canon of electronica, it’s played out with expansive vision and immediate warmth. Woven together with a deft sense of minimalism and melody using double bass, interlocking guitars and crisp percussion, the use of live instrumentation against densely layered field recordings finds great balance between elasticity and deep ambient underpinnings. The acc…

'Japanese percussionist Seijiro Murayama has been working in France since 1999. His musical approach is based on extreme attention to the performance space, the energy of the audience and the quality of silence. He is interested in how continuous sounds and microscopic events can delicately revitalize the environment. Now established in Beirut (Lebanon), french saxophonist Stéphane Rives has spent over last ten years developing new sonic array of extended techniques on the soprano. On thi…

Joëlle Léandre (doublebass) and Jean-Luc Cappozzo (trumpet) recorded Live in concert by Jean-Marc Foussat at Instants Chavirés( Montreuil, France), 2009. Mastered by Joëlle Léandre and Jean-Marc Foussat.

Angharad Davies (violin) and duo Cremaster consisting of Alfredo Costa Monteiro (electro-acoustic devices, speakers, electric guitar) and Ferran Fages (feedback mixing board, electro-acoustic devices). Composed, recorded and assembled between september 2010 and july 2012 in Barcelona. Violin parts recorded by Kostis Kilymis on march 2012 in Oxford. Pluie fine is the result of several exchanges of recorded material shared between Cremaster and Angharad Davies, from 2010 to 2012. Each piec…

For his latest album, UK avant-folk maverick Richard Youngs seems to be converging on some of the most assured and firm-footed vocal work of his career to date, fashioning rock-solid songs from typically leftfield instrumental tactics. On 'Broke Up By Night', Youngs sounds like a gnarled old folkie of almost Ewan MacColl proportions, albeit accompanied by organ drone and wispy electronics. It's a rather magical, mantra-like cadence he elicits, and the album springboards nicely from this point. S…

Pierre-Yves Macé is a young French composer, he was born in 1980, but has already released four albums on respected labels including Tzadik and Sub Rosa. Miniatures - Song Recycle is his second album for the Parisian imprint Brocoli, following the acclaimed Passagenweg. Miniatures - Song Recycle, as the title suggests, alternates musique concrète studies and songs in the form of lieder, where the voice is made of recycled, chopped and transformed a cappella vocals from YouTube, accompanied…

Jonas Kocher, accordion with Hans Koch & Patricia Bosshard, Christian Wolfarth, Gaudenz Badrutt, Urs Leimgruber, Christoph Schiller, Christian Müller. Recorded during the year 2011. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Limited edition of 222 numerated copies. 

Comprised of pieces from the band's original score for F.W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans", My Education has discovered the perfect forum for which to flex their compositional muscles, achieving ever-transcendent musical heights in the process. This original score was perfected over the last two years through live scoring to the film, performed at sold out shows throughout the USA. Just as the music provides new context to the film as a live accompaniment…

"Ben Reynolds is one of the newer voices from the same UK scene that includes Ashtray Navigations and many of the VHF celebrities (Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Richard Youngs, etc.) It should be of little surprise then that Book of Beyond fits very nicely among the recordings of those other artists -- noise/junk drone. As in his previous recordings, this at times dissolves into more acoustic offerings, but the Fahey influence appears to be mostly gone, and what remains in the quie…

Within the four-tenth-hasty Suite February von Luigi Archetti the individual musical-acoustic events seem to have out-pulled in individual sound-pure from the being silent background. Looking for, a "Hinhoeren" and emphasizing hidden, electrifying sound particle. The attempt is to be given to the shade of the music a voice. Klangliche atmospheres through-cross feeling and conception. Fourteen ephemeren sound places, arranges for the listener a music, which reciprocates between imagination, expec…