New Arrivals
Homemade Gloomy Pop
Finally available as a double CD, this collection is dedicated to Endless Nostalgia, one of the cult-band par excellence of the Italian electronic New Wave of the Eighties. Better known for the single "Me & My Alter Ego" released in 1984, this electro-pop duo from Verona, Northern Italy, produced a large number of cassette releases that have become very sought-after items nowadays. This generous and well-structured collection is a testament to the quality of the formation that was centered on Lu…
Music for a distance
Music for a Distance is the second release in the small music series. The title of the work in relation to the cover images (abstract photographs of Julius’ wife resembling landscapes merging into a distant horizon) suggests a work of uncommon poetic perception and inspiration. With the opening track "Music for a Distance," Julius achieves a sensitive balance of unpredictability and deliberate design, at times resembling a symphony of insects, complete with crickets and cicadas and rustling leav…
Catch-Wave
Takehisa Kosugi is an inter-media artist and performer who started his career back in the '60s in Tokyo. With his first band Group Ongaku (free anarchist-conceptual improvisations) he was introduced to the Fluxus avant-garde movement. During the '70s, he was a member of the mystical, psychedelic, droning rock band Taj Mahal Travellers. He co-founded the band in 1969. Since the end of the '70s until now, he has released several solo albums and commissioned works for events and sound installations…
Under foot
Rusalka is a female noise artist based in Vancouver with past works on What We Do is Secret, Ruido Horrible and Dead Audio Tapes.Under Foot is worship. The worship of women and sound. It is sacred filth. Based on the novel ‘Venus In Furs’ about sexual cruelty, servitude and female dominance, Under Foot strips away illusions. It is a complete submersion into disharmony. The disharmony of desire for degradation. The disharmony of a woman wielding the whip. The desire to be sonically and spirituall…
Parallel World
Originally released in 1976 by Nippon Columbia, this is the final album by legendary Japanese space/psych-rockers Far East Family Band. Droney and far-out electronica influenced by German producer/electronic music composer Klaus Schulze is more pronounced, merging prog rock with electronic music to create something rather weird and wonderful. Although Schulze oversaw the production of the album rather than playing on it (which he definitely didn't!), the synth star here is Masanori Takahas…
If You Want To Fuck The Sky, Teach Your Cock To Fly
Andy Bolus (Evil Moisture) armé d'électroniques maison et autres oscillateurs, Korg 800DV ou Revox (!) est accompagné de la voix de BB soit Brigitte Bordelle, qui crie quand on la chatouille et qui crie aussi quand on la cogne. If you want to fuck the sky, teach your cock to fly Ñou si tu veux un frère, dis à ton père de baiser ta mère Ñ ou quand les cons voleront, tu seras chef d'escadrille Ñ est un excellent disque de bruits divers et variés avec moults rebondissements dynamiques, cut-u…
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…
Grass Openings
After numerous CDs, CDRs, cassettes and LPs, Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood have established themselves as one of the many lights in modern improvised outsider music. Their latest offering, ‘Grass Openings’ sees them continue down this winding path of intoxicated trance derangement. Drawing heavily from psychedelic, jazz and weirdo traditions to create a unique form of mutant sound.
Vital
In March 2006, Idea Fire Company made their first appearances in Europe. Core members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust linked up with Frans de Waard and hit selected hot spots in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Adding de Waard (Beequeen, Shifts, Kapotte Muziek, Freiband, etc) was a brave gamble that paid off handsomely. Armed with only a tiny digital keyboard (Borecky), a radio/cassette boombox and small echo unit (Foust), and a sawed off MS 20 (de Waard), the trio captivated audiences large…
Natsu No Sebone
Alto saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe and percussionist Toshi Ishizuka recorded this extended improvisation at Tokyo's Apia Club, quietly ferocious music with a unique physicality. "Thrilling, blood-shaking, soul-scraping and defiantly non-sexless improv set from two Japanese titans. Recorded live at the Apia club in Tokyo in December last year, this set showcases Urabe's uniquely physical approach to improvisation -- ferociously concentrated, contorted, sweating and eruptive with physical power. Hi…
Moonish
The tempered tonalities of Abraham's piano mesh with the atonalities of Brown's prepared guitar and utensils. Through concentrated listening and the implementation of conventional and extended instrumental techniques the resultant tones and textures pull at and morph into each other creating a mysterious sonic world, half here, half there. With combined extensive histories in jazz, improvisation, pop and rock music Chris Abrahams and David Brown together are: 'culture of un'.
I Wish I Didn't Dream
Wish I Didn’t Dream, the new album of duets by guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Langille, was cut in just a few hours of studio time. But the pieces started falling into place 15 years earlier on the 10th floor of a nondescript building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was there, at the old location of the Brecht Forum, that Connors got to know writer and WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk, who was curating a concert series there. On occasion Tom Abbs (now President of Northern Sp…
Vessel
'when I was young, at night, if the wind was blowing in the direction of our house I could hear the slow beating of the ships' engines.' Vessel was conceived for and presented as a site-specific, multi-channel sound installation in Diapason Gallery, Brooklyn, in October 2008. The composition consists of recordings of cargo ships on the river Waal in the vicinity of Zaltbommel, a small town in the heart of The Netherlands. For my parents. Thanks to Jan Tiggelman (boatsman) and Michael J. …
A Church Is Only Sacred To Believers
Nicholas Christian - Matt Milton - Dddie Prevost - Bechir Saade, recorded on sunday 17th of june 2007 at Atomic Studio London. “Spontaneity is not mere impulse… It does not imply undeliberated behaviour or feeling. Spontaneity is behaviour, feeling and thought that is free of external constraint, of imposed restriction. It is not an an uncontrolled effluvium of passion and action. Insofar as the individual removes the fetters of domination that have stifled her or his self-activity, she or he is…
The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock
Michael Chapman, one of the finest acoustic guitar innovators borne of the late '70s UK folk scene, was in Philadelphia early 2010, paying tribute to his good friend, the late Jack Rose, a mighty six-string alchemist in his own right, and a youngster wholly inspired by Chapman's critical recordings. While sharing in the good light of friendship backstage, we asked Michael if he'd ever recorded an LP of purely improvised guitar music. It seemed feasible, as the current state of acou…
Temporary Perspectives
Limited to 300 copies. Field recordings, sine waves, computer data, lloopp, electric guitar, tremolo pedal, condenser microphone, contact microphone, mixing board. Recorded and mixed: 2006-2009. Mastered by Valerio Tricoli. Photography by Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga. Package design by Pafsanias Ioannidis.' label info
42 Vexations
16 page booklet including Cage's Place In the Reception of Satie by Matthew Shlomowitz. Erik Satie's 1893 Vexations is musique d'ameublement - literally, "furniture music", the phrase coined by Satie in 1917, where he identifies sound as drapes, tiling, wallpaper - items belonging to the environment and changing it simply by being in it, by actually becoming elements of the space. This recording is the second instalment in a series of furniture music (after Marcel Duchamp's Musical Erratum), and…
Un Coeur Simple
Stephan Mathieu's latest work transforms music made for Gustav Flaubert's titular play. First published as part of the book Trois Contes (Three Tales) in 1877 and translating to 'A Simple Heart', the text, a modern rereading of an old tale, makes for a neat analog to Mathieu's sonic practice - augmenting recordings of obsolete formats - wax cylinders, 78s - and early instruments by computer processes. Using pieces written by early renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474) and performed in…
C+-
The Phonos ek Mechanes trio was founded in 2007 by three composers and electro-acoustic performers from Wroc aw: Cezary Duchnowski, Pawe Hendrich and S awomir Kupczak. The name of the group comes from Greek and means 'the sound of the machine' which reflects specific methods of artistic creation applied by the three musicians. They play typical instruments such as the piano, electric guitar or electric violin, often prepared and tuned for microtonal music. Sounds that are created this way do not…
Selected passages / Set.grey
Selected passages : During the winter of 2008, I stayed on the campus of a small college in Vermont where I had previously recorded the material for a piece titled 'intervals'. When I first arrived I made recordings of a small radio which was in my room, I would listen to that radio throughout my stay and captured many different sounds from it. I also spent quite a bit of time both indoors and out recording the environments, and made recordings playing some of the pianos which are in vari…