New Arrivals
Bandits of Stature
LP edition, sold out at source: Darla is pleased to offer a new record of string quartets by Harold Budd. Bandits of Stature is a first as it comprises 14 compact Budd composed string quartets played by the Formalist Quartet. Harold Budd is a one-of-a-kind, modern neo-classical artist with a career spanning 40 years. Bandits of Stature has the characteristic Budd minimalism one may expect, yet in new, or classical, form. On Bandits of Stature, he has created 14 elegantly simple, av…
Elegy for Bangalore
The sound/video installation-project 'Eye Contact with the City' (recipient of an Honorary Mention at PRIX Ars Electronica 2011) was the outcome of an artists' residency in Bangalore in the autumn of 2010. The primary materials used in the installation were the field recordings made and video footage shot at various locations in Bangalore. Materials also included retrieved audio from old reel-to-reel tapes found at the city's flea markets. The extensive repository of field recordings and other a…
Do You Love Me?
Do You Love Me? is an extension of Lutz Bacher's videos of the same name, in which Bacher interviews curators, artists, friends, and family about Bacher the person and Bacher the artist. Though Lutz Bacher is the starting point, the interviews often reveal more about the people being interviewed than Bacher herself. The publication takes the form of transcripts interwoven with images of Bacher's artwork from the 70s to the present as well as photos, letters, and ephemera.
Awakening Messiah
Dominick "Vatican Shadow" Fernow presents veiled techno producer Violet Poison on his Bed Of Nails imprint with the spectral industrial gloom of 'Awakening Messiah'. To date Violet Poison is best known as the mysterious accomplice of Shaped Noise in their Violetshaped alias - but here he strikes solo, transmitting four cuts of steely, night-stalking cyberpunk driven by sputtering techno engines through intensely bleak synth interzones. Like Black Rain or Vatican Shadow, it's a chilling exercise …
Der Regt Mich Auf / A Controversy
Based around the married couple Paul and Limpe Fuchs, the group Anima, also known as Anima-Sound, was one of the most radically avant-garde and creative groups to emerge from the thriving Krautrock scene of Munich at the end of the 1960s. In fact, their improvised atonal sounds and unconventional instrumentation is much closer to the spirit of experimental free jazz than anything remotely close to rock music. The Fuchs began in the late '60s as part of the counterculture at the time. Adding to t…
Structures and Solitude
Tor Lundvall’s elegant soundtracks have been captured onto nine full length albums and collected within various compilations, raising his stature as one of the most abundant craftsman within the field of ambient music. Lundvall’s second box set for Dais features a 5 disc collection of more recent works including the albums Empty City and Last Light, as well as CD versions of the vinyl-only albums Sleeping & Hiding and The Shipyard. Additionally, the fifth disc in the collection entitled Night …
Under A Single Banner
It's been a busy couple of years for the producer behind the Shifted project. On top of an extremely well-received album for the Mote Evolver label, the producer has edged further out into the fringes of electronic music under a number of aliases, taking in noise/ambient variants as Covered In Sand, as well as more distorted, technofied productions under the Alexander Lewis moniker, a sound described by the Blackest Ever Black label as "S-M techno." His new album as Shifted, Under a Single Ba…
The Dusted Sessions
"Date Palms revolve around the core duo of Gregg Kowalsky (keyboards, electronics) and Marielle Jakobsons (violin, flute, electronics). They employ traditional rock instrumentation to create music informed by Indian classical music, country, minimalism, and spiritual jazz, arriving at a style that is wholly their own. On their third album, The Dusted Sessions, the duo expanded the line-up to include Ben Bracken on electric bass, Michael Elrod on tanpura, and Noah Philips on electric guitar…
Chimerizations
Chimerizations feature a radically new form of documentation of Florian Hecker’s sound works that dramatize the phenomenon of Auditory Chimaeras.
“Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other.” (Robin Mackay)
The publication presents the documentation of Hecker’s recent sound pieces (“Magnitude Estimation,” 2010; “Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera,” 20…
A Birthday Tribute - 75 Years
Five recordings, 2 from 1977 at Tempo Natural and 3 from 1993, where Tony Oxley leads various permutations of improvisers Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford, Pat Thomas, Matt Wand, Phillip Wachsmann, Ian Brighton. The first track from 1993 brings all musicians together for a 29 minute work of great dynamic and dialog. The following track present a quartet with Oxley, Bailey, Thomas and Wand from the same session, and the final 1993 track is the duo of Oxley and Rutherford. The first '77 tra…
Demiurge
Multiverse - the constellation of forward-thinking Bristol labels that also includes Tectonic, Kapsize and Caravan - reactivates its seminal Subtext imprint for a daring new LP from Emptyset. A collaboration between Mutiverse boss James 'Ginz' Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, Demiurge is the second album by Emptyset, and finds them reducing their production process down to a singular signal chain channelled into a modulated analogue hardware line (or so we're told). The results are somewhere between dr…
Veterans of disorder
Back in play just to celebrate 14 years, 2 months and 12 days since its original release is Royal Trux's penultimate album, Veterans of Disorder. Coming off the fan-favorite Accelerator LP, it was clearly time to build on expectations, right? Uh... listen, maybe this isn't the band for you. Neil and Jennifer were fans of rock n roll to the finish, sure -- but in that, Royal Trux was a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian enterprise, rebels to the core, and everything they endeavored to was viewed from th…
Piano Music
Two compositions exploring the decay of the piano from Wandelweiser composer Eva-Maria Houben. Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing.“Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing. And the awareness of fading sound may become the awareness of presence.” Halfway through Eva-Maria Houben’s abgemalt, the pianist unfurls a …
Litio Folk
Rob Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Om, 90 Day Men) swiftly proceeds his stunning 'Timon Irnok Manta' side for Type with a humbling, stripped down suite crafted almost entirely from his own vocals, subtly layered with some synth work. 'Lítió Fólk' feels at once vast and intimate: Lowe's vocals resonate deeply, instinctively - quavering notes and curling overtones centre the sound within the body - while the layered and sustained drone structure seems to draw the spirit ever outwards, drawing enchanting melodi…
Unfinished Studies
This LP is the first release from young Melbourne-based composer Robert McDougall, presenting four electroacoustic studies, the fruits of many hours of private sonic research and improvisation. Simple electronics, acoustic instruments, field recordings and textural manipulations are subtly processed, fragmented and iterated into patiently evolving forms. Eschewing the jump-cut dynamics of academic electroacoustics while making use of a large variety of source material, McDougall allows the eleme…
Nihtes niht
'The music supposed to be a soundtrack for lonely ice-soundscapes... when you stand there on lonely wide inhuman places and feel lost, but you still stand on ice...' - Baraka[H] The newest collaboration between masters of evocative noise/drone ambient is divided into four long tracks, four directions of nothing. The tracks are entitled in middle ageindo-german language, for north, east, south, west. And the album title means nothing from nothing - very weird notion, as it doesn't exist anymore i…
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…
Ecstasy & Refreshment
Further down the highway from last year's ace split with Roy Orb D.MT., Food Pyramid reach for lush neo Krautrock heights on 'Ecstasy & Refreshment'. They first break orbit with 'Dexedream''s stellar trajectory powered by twin-panned guitars and rocking rhythm machines to zones of swirling vocals, plateauing at the dreamy psych-house plains of 'Pacifier' and spinning dubwise with the corkscrewing, Ekoplekz-meets-Sun Araw-like scramble of Deep Fantasy'. Up there, the chiming African guitar chops …
Quanta Of Light
Limited, hand-stamped white label edition** Highly disciplined master of visceral intensity, Daniel Menche, presents a one-off album for Touch's great white label series. Daniel's work is gladly accepted by both noise and more "musical" spheres, releasing on a wealth of labels including Important Records, Editions Mego and Sub Rosa among many others. Taken as a whole, they capture and play with a timeless sense of drama and direct emotional rawness that's hard to ignore. For Touch, 'Quant…
Antworten
180 gram LP version with free download code. "Antworten (meaning: answer) is the third installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) (meaning: question) and Rufen (BB 075CD/LP) (meaning: call) studio albums. The fact that the music on Antworten was created before Rufen and Fragen were recorded is less of a paradox than it might at first appear. For the expansive piano fantasies of their 2007 recordings had already provided a clear answer to the two musicia…