New Arrivals
Sane Men Surround
Following up their warmly-received 2011 Alter debut, The Letter (ALT 005LP), Sane Men Surround is the second album to emerge from Southend-on-Sea's Liberez. Like their debut, the nine tracks here continue to savagely EQ percussion, guitar, violin and electronics into abstraction with tracks like "A Warning and My Madness Offends," bearing the industrial and almost ritualistic atmospherics of its predecessor, while "Nema Te" and "What's Mine Is Mine" introduce a new style of composition and songw…
A Crack-Up at the Race Riots
"'It's about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice. I wanted to write the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel.' -- Harmony Korine, addressing a national television audience, 10/17/97. Back in print from Harmony Korine, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots was originally published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998. Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in …
With helpful hands
In our ongoing quest for music from the home of Alain Neffe and Insane Music Contact, we are extremely proud to release this CD. For about thirty years now, we at Plinkity Plonk have been great fans of the music of Pseudo Code, a trio of Alain Neffe, Guy Hinant and Xavier S. Electronic, minimal, desperate, lonely, frightful, and simply beautiful. Music that can only be fully identifief as Potlatch Music. Over the past thirty years a number of releases have been available displaying their unique …
Voyeur
Husband-and-wife duo, Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, who self-released handmade items and created sound for installations and exhibits along with producing conventional releases. "A few years ago I was commissioned by a film company in California to create a musical score for a film inspired by the Hitchcock 1954 film Rear Window, but with a more surrealist, two-sided viewer plot. As filming hadn't begun, I was given the screenplay and timeline, and asked to make specific music that might f…
On air
Studio session recorded for BBC Radio 3 'Jazz on 3', May 2012. Gino Robair, energised surfaces & synth. John Edwards, bass. John Butcher, saxophones. "Built around extrasensory sonic perception their strategy advanced amoeba-like, continuously melding and breaking apart timbres in different configurations and with varied possibilities. Edwards' super-speedy wood and string smacking was sometimes appropriately violent; Butcher's output jumped from sonorous glissandi to staccato reed bites an…
Occlusions
… Occlusion is a loose framework for a multi-channel, freely improvised piece of LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC, performed without the aid or consent of pre-recorded or even pre-arranged materials of any kind. A given realization will last between 10 and 30 minutes ; time is elastic. Every effort has been made to avoid divisible rhythms (although mistakes are occasionally made) ... Still, I consider it a "kind" of Dance Music. These two realizations, recorded a week apart at festivals in France and…
A handful of automation
First solo audio only release by Melbourne based sound and laser artist Robin Fox and first solo release since the mind melting 'Backscatter' DVD on Synaesthesia (2005). Taking time out from his duo with Anthony Pateras, 'A Handful Of Automation showcases Fox's unique and highly individual take on the usually misunderstood Extreme Computer Music genre, and is a pleasurably disorientating ride. Alongside chaos trips such as 'Boundary Layer Skin Friction' and the stunning title track, sit b…
Open
"Following on from their two track LP release, Mindset (2011), Open sees legendary artists-in-resonance The Necks return to the territory they are best known for, a single piece running for over an hour. The piece emanates a calm, immersive stillness throughout. Already The Wire has said that Open "(displays The Necks') astute handling of pacing and momentum, finely honed collective sense of timing, (and) their shared ability to balance at length a group equilibrium". Here the band returns…
Lifespans
Lifespans is a mesmerizing and hallucinating piece of electronic music. Listen to it at a fairly loud volume, or with headphones, and you will hear myriads of voices and melodies, never repeating themselves
Antiquated Futurism
Latest release on Vatican Shadow's Bed of Nails label - initial copies on Translucent Orange Vinyl** Dominik Fernow's Bed Of Nails venture welcomes his longtime co-conspirator Kris Lapke with three tracks of haunting Gothic Techno produced as Bronze Age. Kris used to run the Hospital Productions studio when it was operating in Manhattan. It was there that he galvanized seminal records including Kevin Drumm's 'Imperial Distortion' and Prurient's 'Arrowhead' with his signature post-product…
The Background Noise
Under The Snow is a project by Stefano Gentile (guitar, objects, field-recordings) and Gianluca Favaron (microphones, field-recordings, processing). Stefano Gentile is well known for his work as owner of the Silentes and Amplexus labels; he is part of Maribor (along with Maurizio Bianchi, Nimh, Andrea Marutti and Gianluca Favaron) and in the past he has collaborated with Aube and Amir Baghiri. Beyond releasing under his own name, Gianluca Favaron collaborates with Ennio Mazzon on the Zbeen proje…
Tragedy & Geometry
On Tragedy & Geometry, Steve Hauschildt, one-third of Cleveland’s neo-kosmische revivalists Emeralds, crafts an hour’s worth of instrumental synthesizer vignettes. His pieces tend to evoke thoughts of bygone eras of technological pop culture — many of these tracks could be placed seamlessly into Blade Runner, or into some lost Playstation-era (you know, when Final Fantasy VII was cutting edge) videogame. Hauschildt doesn’t craft wholly formed songs so much as he works with detached, technologica…
Ripatti 02
Sasu Ripatti links with the legendary Max Loderbauer (NSI., Sun Electric, MvO Trio) as Heisenberg for two knotty, complex riddim trips on his \"studio diary\" imprint. Adopting the mantle of the eponymous fictional meth chef*, the duo conduct fevered but controlled experiments in frayed, often frantic grooves eaten up with dissonant, freeform electronics. A-side is a 125bpm techno tunnel groove with offset bass hits embedded in a swarm of combustible modular chain reactions that dissolve to a gu…
Spoken Music Concert At Paula Cooper Gallery
Originally issued on Dog W/A Bone in 2002. The S.E.M. Ensemble's Spoken Music Concert took place on Tuesday, February 6, 1990, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, then on Wooster Street in Soho. It was performed by members of the S.E.M. Ensemble: Petr Kotik (Director), Chris Nappi, Joseph Kubera, and Den Neill (sound mix); and four guests: John Cage, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and Anne Tardos. "Empty Words," written in 1973-1974, is arguably the most musical of John Cage's texts. M…
Active recovering music
Active Recovering Music (ARM) is a slide whistle ensemble led by sax player Masahiko Okura. All of the members play the slide whistle. Okura debuted ARM in concert with a five-member formation in 2008. He's since continued the group's activity (though their live performances are infrequent) with changing numbers of players. This is the recording of a performance by ARM--this time with eight members--which took place at Ftarri, Tokyo, in February 2013. Each of the three pieces was composed by Oku…
Calmont breakdown
New solo album by the highly prolific yet always captivating Richard Youngs, whose music can waver healthily between new forms of singer-songwriter material, lo-fi drones and all manner of avant-garde forms. Here, his music sways towards the difficult and embraces organ drones and swells, frazzled electronics, a voice that is at once unnerving and unnerved, and more besides. Anybody expecting a comfortable listen should be prepared.
Harding greens. Symphonie fur Kartonagen
World premiere with the Echtzeitmusikensemble, conducted by Titus Engel with: Alexandre Babel, Burkhard Beins, Tim Blue, Anthea Caddy, Johnny Chang, Gesine Conrad, Werner Dafeldecker, Chris Dahlgren, Agnieszka Dziubak, Helena Gough, Andreas Hirtler, Tisha Mukarji, Nathalie Hörhold-Ponneau, Berit Jung, Klaus Kürvers, Hannes Lingens, Morton Olsen, Michael Renkel, Derek Shirley, Gerhard Uebele, Christopher Williams, Andrea Sanz-Vela. Echtzeitmusiktage, 8.9.2010, Sophiensaele, Berlin. This is a DVDR…
Cry
Cry was recorded in a shed at Taieri Mouth between 1998 and 2000 and then released by Emperor Jones on CD in 2000. Alastair has always been one of the most admired yet paradoxically ignored musicians from the New Zealand underground since he first started out in The Rip on Flying Nun Records in the early 1980s. Having already worked with the incredibly talented New Zealander otherwise known as Michael Morley, it seemed natural for MIE’s next step to go on to work with Alastair on getting …
Blue Clouds
Some cream for your acid-folk tea - hitherto unreleased sides from the two and a half bards (well, two bards and a maiden - forsooth!) who self-released All On the First Day back in '72. These include studio recordings from later in the 70s, a couple live songs and an outtake from the legendary album itself! Well, the first legendary album anyway - for Blue Clouds is clearly another.
August Undone
Sweeping and rustically romantic neo-classical and drone flights seemingly dropped from the sky on the wonderful Students Of Decay label "From the very first seconds of “Within/Without,” listeners familiar with the output of Aquarelle, the nom-de-plume of Madison, WI-based sound artist Ryan Potts, will find themselves in territory that is at once familiar and new. This opening salvo explodes into being with the surging, analog fuzz blooms and preternatural sense of rhythm that endeared many to …