New Arrivals
Sunrise
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…
Unisono
Eight musicians play the same virtual synthesizer programmed by myself with Max/MSP following a precise score. They start with the same sound but while slowly modifying each parameter they transform it from within, grinding up its entrails. The listener is positioned at the center of a sound at once unique and multiple. The version on this CD is a live recording made at Les Voûtes in Paris in June 2008 by the CLSI (Circle for the Liberation of Sounds and Images) directed by Paul Méfano. Th…
Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night
Reissue of debut release by the collaborative duo of Chicago-based percussionist STEVEN HESS (HAPTIC, PAN AMERICAN) & French composer/producer SYLVAIN CHAUVEAU. Produced by Helge Sten (Deathprod), whose characteristic smudged ambience is evident as he submerges Chauveau & Hess' compositions beneath a swamp of cavernous reverb & synthesized smoke.
Play robot dream
Trumpet virtuoso Marco Blaauw, known for his pioneering performances of contemporary classical music has been working with composer and sound improviser Yannis Kyriakides in numerous projects including a multi-media perfomance 'co-inc', and several projects for the ensemble musikFabrik in Cologne. 'Play Robot Dream' is a set of improvisations for trumpet(s) and computer. At times playful, at times meditative, they fuse a haunting melodic tendency with a provocative mix of drum machines an…
Class Insecta
One of the pioneers of laptop electronics, Ikue Mori has been breaking new ground on the musical frontier for three decades. From her early days in the landmark no wave band DNA, to her years as a regular in the downtown improvisation community and more recently as one of the epicenters of the international laptop electronic scene, Ikue has become an underground hero -- yet her work is still sorely underappreciated. This newest solo CD features Ikue's idiosyncratic take on contemporary dance rhy…
Maria Minerva's Cabaret Cixous
Over the course of a 12", cassette, and a stream of ace youtube vids, Maria Minerva has emerged as one of the most interesting artistes to come into leftfield-pop focus over the last 12 months. 'Cabaret Cixous' is her debut album, a coruscating water-bed of mottled '90s dance-pop memes writhing under blankets of slyly sexy new age synths while her dreamy vocals whisper and croon seductively suggestive lyrics. It's not quite aural soft porn, but there's an inescapably lascivious element to …
A Small Turn Of Human Kindness
Athens weirdcore trio Harvey Milk is a blessedly difficult band to “know.” They frustrate category, aesthetic response, and heavy music scene politics in estimable, admirable ways. On the heels of their feedback-saturated return to recording – first the somewhat tentative Special Wishes and then 2008’s Life . . . the Best Game in Town – they return with A Small Turn of Human Kindness, an album named after the very first track on their 1996 debut. A seven-part dirge, this album continues …
Installation for 300 Speakers, Pianola and Vacuum Cleaner
John Wynne's untitled installation for 300 speakers, pianola and vacuum cleaner is at once monumental, minimal and immersive. It uses sound and sculptural assemblage to explore and define architectural space and to investigate the borders between sound and music. There are three interwoven sonic elements: the ambient sound of the space in which it is installed, the notes played by the piano, and a computer-controlled soundtrack of synthetic sounds and gently manipulated notes from the piano itse…
Five American Portraits
“Ridges and creases / high on the middle forehead / The right temple near the eyebrow / A small ridge under the right eye / The right side of the tip of the nose / The opening of the right nostril / The middle lower lip / The inner ear of the right ear.” Can you tell who it is yet? It’s George W. Bush, of course, or at least part of his head, as seen (or rather heard) in the second of five “American portraits” in words and music by legendary experimental rock outfit the Red Krayola, in collabora…
Lost wisdom
The music of Mount Eerie has taken many forms (see: The Microphones) but it is always made by Phil Elverum. Lost Wisdom is an album that finds Elverum in a more collaborative mode than usual, working with two legends of music and kindred spirits, Julie Doiron and Fred Squire. Elverum and Doiron share vocal duties almost equally on the record, making it an album comprised of dark pop duets.This time the songs were recorded quickly and quietly during a surprise visit by Julie Doiron, keeper of t…
Luminous Night
CD edition: Luminous Night is the first set of new Six Organs Of Admittance material to leap forth from Ben Chasnys' cerebral cortex in 18 months, and what a joy it is. With the release of odds-and-sods collection RTZ earlier in the year there to bridge the gap between 2007s Shelter From The Ash it doesn't seem like he's been away for long per se but for serious Chasny-heads a new album is something to get pretty excited about and with his other musical outlet Comets On Fire either on extended h…
Postepeno
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…
5
Back in stock. Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, sat through over 30 hours of live material to compile this 70 minute collection - widely regarded as Supersilent's most subdued work. Often compared to the fusion aesthetic favoured by Miles Davis in the early 70's and the post-modern compositional structure of Stockhausen, the result here is once again surprising and breahtaking, new sounds unearthed around every corner, you get the feeling that the ground beneath you is about to collapse with the sheer…
Destroying The Night Sky
A very special release with an unusual mix of sound: Using Cadaverous Condition's "To The Night Sky" album as source material for their tracks, all the aforementioned bands have created a unique new style of music. Call it metal ambient, drone metal or electronics metal, the result is something previously unknown and exciting. Hear Nurse With Wound doing one of their darkest tracks ever - listen to Controlled Bleeding's totally insane restructuring of a rock track, or be surprised by Nocturnal E…
D minor / Bb major
Composed by Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto. Performed by Casey Anderson: computer, Matt Barbier: trombone, Eric KM Clark: violin, Devin Disanto: clarinet, Paul Fraser: trumpet, Kristin Haraldsdottir: viola, Stefan Kac: tuba, Ingrid Lee: piano, Daniel Letourneau: guitar, Heather Lockie: viola, Sepand Shahab: keyboards, Cassia Streb: viola, Christine Tavolacci: flute, Chaz Underriner: guitar, Michael Pisaro: guitar, Taku Sugimoto: guitar. Recorded by Michael Pisaro at the Wulf, Los Angeles…
Kippschwingungen
In 2007, Frank Bretschneider was invited to compose music for the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument developed during the 1960’s at the RFZ, the technical center for radio and television of the East German postal service. Built in a limited edition of eight machines total, only three Subharcords (in Vienna, Trondheim and Berlin) are believed to survive to this day. The Subharchord is, broadly defined, a subharmonic sound generator, comparable soundwise to the Mixturtrautonium. It’s sugg…
Stop Playing
Wolfgang Mitterer is playing the organ and leaves no tone unturned. The composer beams the traditional instrument straight into the 21st century – feel free to follow suit!The organ is a machine, and Wolfgang Mitterer certainly knows how to operate machines. Quite early on his passion for this complex instrument got hooked up to the manifold possibilities available in a digital studio setting; so, meanwhile the Austrian composer has become both: a much admired contemporary organist with a pencha…
Home
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…
All Is Falling
The ultra savant of 12-string mantra cycles expands further into cinematic, orchestral glory - an orgy of organic, deeply felt & exquisitely played pathways to the sublime. His 1st foray into the realm of the electric 12-string guitar. Comprised of one slowly evolving, shifting piece of music in eight parts, replete w/ swirling string cycles & wind instruments augmenting his extended pointillist flurries w/ clouds of sound, sometimes adding delicate counter-melodies but just as often feed…
Liminoid / Lifeforms
Liminoid is a composition for large ensemble exploring sonic immersion in drones and textures, rhythms and pulsations. Incorporating composed and improvised segments, the piece uses elongation of sound and layered polyphony in an attempt to create a liminal and/or numinous state. This recording of Liminoid is from its premier at The Music Gallery’s X-Avant Festival in Toronto, October 25, 2008. The piece features a powerful vocal performance with every member sharing the vocal duties. The lyrics…