New Arrivals

The Necks in quiet mood recorded at a concert recording in Townsville, Thuringowa, Northern Queensland. Though many Necks' pieces open with - or eventually arrive at - some discernable groove, Townsville just floats in a state of suspension from beginning to end. It's like watching the ocean as wave follows wave follows wave: each the same; each different; assymetric. Bassist Lloyd Swanton who, on this occasion, provides the motif that set Townsville running says he had had no idea where it woul…

Awesome reissue! The world famous Impulse jazz catalogue is so cavernous you truly need a music-minded flashlight to uncover its deepest and darkest secrets. Thankfully Light In The Attic has recently acquired such luminescent technology and the first discovery is Hungarian guitarist GABOR SZABO’s 1967 Indo-fusion landmark, Jazz Raga. combines Szabo's distinctive 6-string touch & open-minded ideas. It brings together jazz, pop-rock & his native European influence, along with hypnotic sitar, st…

Recorded at the Roundhouse 1972, during the ICES Festival."For this show we rehearsed a week in a small village in the south of Holland. The repertoire of the first part was a kind of "frozen improvisation". We made some written plans about the form and structures and then rehearsed it for the whole week. So during these rehearsals things moved from improvisation into fixed form, just by remembering what we have played, and polishing it. This is a working concept that …

Constellazione Seconda is the follower of  the Lombardi 1978 "Costellazione" a piano sound exploration based upon a map of sky constellation, planned as the first step of a large work focused on the exposition and 'performance' of constellations maps, planetaria and maps of the heavens. This new work breaks up into 21 short piano movements, concentrating on incredibly short staccato notes that sting violently between fractured harmonics leaving plenty of momentum-puncturing silences to really he…

After a fourteen year absence, Michael Gira resurrects his legendary apocalyptic no-wave band for a fabulous new album on his own Young God imprint. Assembling a cast of musicians that includes familiar Swans and Angels Of Light conspirators, Gira also welcomes a few new members to the fold with guest stars including Devendra Banhart, Mercury Rev's Grasshopper, Bill Rieflin (of Ministry, REM and Robyn Hitchcock's band), Shearwater multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris and even Gira's three-and-a-hal…

Fancy: a 17th century term generally describing a composition in which form is of secondary importance. Fancies were usually contra-puntal and in several sections. (The Oxford Dictionary of Music)Fancies (2009) served to reconcile previously unsettled material, based upon a scheme that condones disparity between its constituent parts. In the period since its completion, and subsequent issue on cassette, Fancies has come to represent an antithesis to what I originally termed ‘a work in parenthesi…

Limited to 300 copies. All music by Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long. Recorded in 2005-2006 at home in Huntington Beach, California. Originally self-released as a limited, handmade edition. new master by m.a.tolosa, Madrid 2011.

another gem, a wonderful collection of obscure solo acoustic guitar tunes from the mid 60s up to the dawn of the 80s -- beautiful work from a slew of players we've never heard of -- but we'd put right up there with Fahey and Basho in the way they reach from the back porch to the cosmos with just their fingers and some strings! One thing we love about this set, and the Numero Group releases to date, is how deep they dig and what beauty they unearth, somehow with impeccable sound quality. S…

'CD digipak. CM von Hausswolff says: 'I was approached by my old friend and Radium 226.05 colleague Ulrich Hillebrand, now director of Angered Theatre in Göteborg. He informed me that there was a new play in the process of being written by author and theorist Michael Azar called 'Jag r en annan' (I is another) stemming form the famous letter written by Arthur Rimbaud in his youth. The play uses Rimbaud's life from being a young poet in Charleville ending with him being the trader in Harar,…

Billy Gomberg (b 1979, Chicago) is a musician and video artist living in Brooklyn, New York. His studio practice incorporates analog synthesis, digital treatments, acoustic recordings and custom programming that gives rise to electronic sound caught gazing at its own physicality, acoustics in love with their own abstraction. Billy's debut CD release displays abstract and complex dimensions of texture and tone that might make more sense at first on a subconscious level before it will on a conscio…

Recorded live on April 10th and 11th, 2010, Tasogare: Live in Tokyo documents the performances of five 12k artists at two temples in Tokyo, Japan. Komyoji Temple (April 10th) saw the first-ever performance in Japan by Australia’s Solo Andata, known for creating deep, textured music with found objects, homemade instruments and very little in the way of electronics or software tricks. The duo was joined by 12k veteran Sawako whose voice and delicate computer work were accompanied by guitarist Hofl…

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…

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…

The best 12k/LINE release in ages - dark, Lynchian eroded tape-loops and analogue menace. ESSENTIAL PURCHASE! (boomkat) "The Transparence dubplate, developed at O ' in Milan, Italy, works within the physical limitations of the vinyl medium, employing the object as sound source and also sound medium, to become an instrument in its own right. Using the non-linear acoustics of the gallery at O', the dubplate was recorded, and later cut to disc in Berlin, at very low volume. This ephemeral audi…

The Preservation label presents Nuojuva Halava, the debut album from Helsinki, Finland’s Ous Mal. Ous Mal is the recording project for 22-year old Olli Aarni. With previous CD-R releases for both Finland’s 267-Lattajjaa and the UK’s Under The Spire, Ous Mal has already gained fine notice for his expansive sound, further developed in widescreen ways on Nuojuva Halava, his first full-length. Finding common ground between the dusty tenor of old-school hip hop cassettes and the fog of deep ambience …

Here are two men whose musical natures are obviously rich and their backgrounds complex - back to Stinky Winkles in the pianist's case, back to Amalgam and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the saxophonist's - but who reduce, in the critic/analyst's shorthand, to tiling or fabric. Tessellations. Moiré. Does that convey all you need to know about Veryan Weston and Trevor Watts, secure in the understanding that these are self-chosen metaphors, not imposed from outside? Needless to say, no, …

Recorded live in concert at the Abrons Arts Center, NYC on October 15, 2009, Saturnian documents master saxophonist David S. Ware's triumphant return to performance following his kidney transplant in May 2009. This performance prompted features in The New York Times and on NBC Nightly News.Ware, in full peak of form, performed three extended pieces, each one on a different horn. "Methone" is on the saxello and "Pallene" features the stritch.  David has played these lesser-known members of the sa…

Fourth opus of musical art brut, faithful to our precepts, we search out self-taught musicians. That means people who make contemporary music outside the customary production and distribution channels and with the determination and creative gifts that stem from unmistakable artistic talent. Some of these musicians operate in mental or social isolation and make their music in special workshops while others can be classified with the spiritualist or visionary artists. This particular relationship …

2009 repress. First ever U.S. reissue of this album, with new liner notes by Peter Margasak. Released in 1971 while Gil was living in London, this is the third self-titled release from the bossa nova and tropicalia legend. Gil recorded this album while in political exile from his native Brazil and its somber, straightforward tone is a welcome change from the experimental, psychedelic assault of his 1969 long player. Featuring 8 originals and a brilliant cover Steve Winwood's 'Can't Find My Way H…

Deluxe 2LP version. More voraciously bestial soundwork coming from Daniel Menche -- this time, his chosen theme is the piano, in which he attacks, investigates and dissects with the precision of an autopsy surgeon, adding a whole new meaning to the concept of prepared piano, or should we say, unprepared piano, for an all-out assault. Guts lays out quite possibly some of the finest slabs of Menchian sonic mayhem to date. Slightly different track sequence over CD and vinyl formats due to ti…

Terrapin is Giovanni Lami & Shaun McAlpine. An improv duo based on real time processing field recordings, analog instruments and digital sounds, all played and processed live. This work comes from some recording sessions in Giovanni’s Studio. Later subtlety edited without any overdubs, just choosing the most suitable parts, noticing something evolve from the session, forming a solid arrangement. The fundamental idea behind the project is vivisection, holding an historical vivisectio…

Another double OLBM CD that testifies the remarkable work carried out within the New Wave phenomenon by Viridanse (from Alessandria, Piedmont) between 1983 and 1987. Despite its short existence, the group has left an important trace in a time when the world of music was already full of proposals. Influenced by the English Wave and the Florentine scene, Viridanse debut with a split-tape shared with The Art of Waiting. In 1984, Contempo Records produces their 12” EP "Benvenuto Cellini" and - the f…

In working with sound, video, and installation, Richard Garet has made an artform of interference. In previous work, he's employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film. He's flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. And here on AreaI, Garet continues his ongoing research with electromagnetic disturbanc…

Arnold Dreyblatt's Turntable History: Spin Ensemble was recorded March 12, 2011 by Ernst Karel at Boston's Goethe Institut. This performance version of the original piece (released on CD as IMPREC323) provides a different perspective on the original composition. From the original studio version of the piece: Arnold Dreyblatt (b.1953) is an American composer who has studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier. He is a member of the German Academy Of Art. He has released wo…

I spent two months in protected areas of Costa Rica making multichannel field recordings of the different forest ecosystems of Central America. Armed with a quadraphonic setup (IRT cross), a parabolic microphone, a hydrophone, and a scientist's passport, I went to nine main sites to record: the coastal evergreen forest, the tropical dry and deciduous forest, the mangroves, the wooded riverbanks and floodplains, and the forests altered in cultivated areas. The recordings were made at the S…

he zeitkratzer project Neue Volksmusik (new folk music) is more of a reflex to, rather than a reflection on folk music. This is because the ensemble does not play specific music with any sense of distance. On the contrary, zeitkratzer is taking possession of folk music in its essence. This means that they continue a tradition which folk musics all have in common: constant transformation. No form of authentic folk music can ever be about conservation as a fixed medium, destined for a museu…

To say that the last few years of Gareth Dickson’s life have been tumultuous would be an understatement. In 2007 he fell in love with a girl from South America, packed up a few essentials from his life in Scotland, and moved to the Argentinian countryside. It didn’t turn all fairy tale at that point, however. While there he was shot at, attacked by dogs, and was involved in a very close call when the passenger plane he took to a little town in the Andes was forced down after an engine cau…

In his interpretation of the music from Osvaldo Coluccino, Alfonso Alberti takes us by the hand to lead us part of the way through our innermost being.What we hear seems like fractured piano music, like notes and sounds scattered in space: in his “Stanze,” Osvaldo Coluccino uses the piano’s resonant body to generate resonances in the spaces within us. He removes the windows, eliminates all opulence, and confronts us with environments that lie within ourselves. The light and the dimensions keep c…

Likeness is the newest release from the duo of Tom and Christina Carter. Recorded over a period of several weeks during the Spring of 2006, the album is a return to the spontaneous composition of previous Charalambides records such as Houston and Union. With the exception of "The Good Life", which appeared in a primitive version on the Wholly Other CDR Home, all of the tracks on this release sprung forth after 'record' was pressed, and were fleshed out via overdubs, editing, and a malfu…

Japanese duo Tenniscoats have been running together for more than ten years. Running is the tempo you need to have to keep up with these guys: always touring, recording and working on new projects.Their music is all about catching the moment. Next time everything will sound different. They are true improvisors inside their own musical world. The music on this record adds a new facet to their universe. Deeper, more intense but with still visible signs of their trademark playfulness despite the fa…

    On their seventh studio album, Sightings don’t make any radical breaks from their past. Instead, Richard Hoffman, Jonathan Lockie and Mark Morgan continue the slow evolution of their vision, a sort of "industrialization" of rock. On 2007’s Through the Panama, the trio achieved their best amalgamation yet. City of Straw doesn’t really up the ante, but it stays right there. These 39 minutes run the gamut from chittering electronics to punk chaos. When saying "industrial" in reference to …

Whereas previous works by Mika Vainio have utilised guitar Life (… It Eats You Up) is the first to use the instrument as its primary sound source. A fascinating, sometimes disturbing and deeply personal work this new 10 track set bears all the hallmarks (exacting attention to detail of tone, rhythm and texture) of Vainio's previous works with some stunning surprises, such as his cover version of The Stooges' 'Open Up and Bleed'.Tracks such as ‘Mining’ hark bark to the banging beat exces…

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.

The title of Fern Knight’s 2006 release, Music for Witches and Alchemists, served simultaneously as a wonderfully apt description and an unambiguous product warning. If you prefer the mundane to the magical, move on: These are not the druids you’re looking for. Since then, the group has relocated to Arlington from Philadelphia, and while Fern Knight’s music evokes far-away times and places, it turns out the band fits in nicely with the D.C. area’s musical history—assuming you can stomach …

The Preservation label presents Home, the third album from Olan Mill from Hampshire in the United Kingdom. Olan Mill is the recording project of composer and producer Alex Smalley, who to-date has received rapturous acclaim for his work that holds a sublime measure between the realms of modern neo-classical composition and ambience. On Home, Smalley has mined his most expansive territory yet to create a thrillingly evocative and deeply felt body of work. The tender clusters of sound that ha…

More than seventy years since his death in 1937, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan retains his reputation as one of the greatest singers India ever produced. Possessed of an elastic, honied voice that poured out like mercury, he influenced generations of singers including Mohammed Rafi, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and Pandit Pran Nath. Born at the end of the 19th century to a family of musicians that extended back in time for centuries, his art was formed in the culture of the courts of the maharajas under Briti…

On his cd debut, UK sound artist Jodi Cave creates seven short compositions united by themes of singularity and natural randomness. One of the most immediate features of For Myria is its restrained sound palette. Like an instrumentalist who has laid a small collection of choice instruments out in front of him, Cave creates beautifully intimate collages, each touching on maybe only 2 or 3 sounds, woven together by computer processing which has been pushed into the background, utilized more as a c…

Awesome solo release by a former Amuleto band member (on the die schachtel Musica Improvvisa box)...Wanke continues to amaze us with his sensitive, detailed and spacious sound works. "to r.s." follows up his lauded debut "Caves" on Sedimental with another stunner. For “to r.s.”,  Wanke uses electric and acoustic guitars, acoustic piano, objects and natural sounds. The 53 minutes of this unique piece divided in four parts combine static compositions, drones and looped music. Structurally viewed a…

An inedite work by the great composer Luc Ferrari: 'chantal, ou le portrait d'une villageoise' 1977-1978. Stereo magnetic tape. Mastering: Jérôme Joy, Meriol Lehmann-Avatar.

Another uncommon sonic wringer from Portuguese label Creative Sources has been signed by a couple of Switzerland-based (as you could easily surmise from the geographical coordinate, which point to a place the district of Franches-Montagnes in the canton of Jura in Switzerland, they used to name this release) musicians, Lea Danzeisen and Christoph Schiller, who decided to squeeze the spinet, the little brother of harpsichord and piano, whose sound got totally transfigured by meticulous mod…