New Arrivals
Use your illusions
After a 12” for the Souterrain Transmissions label and a split LP with Ducktails on No Fun Productions, Dracula Lewis delivers his long-awaited debut full length "U$e Your Illu$ion$"; a title which evokes an imaginary deviant glamour which is synonymous with the teasing nature and sense of mystery which is a part of Dracula Lewis’ world. Working with an abundance of pop based ideas with an abstract mentality, the record brings to mind, in manner and tone, hallucinatory avant strategies that were…
Era
"Era is the fourth annual report from Chicago powerhouse quartet Disappears. It was formed during the gloom of the Chicago winter at Electrical Audio by now regular foil John Congleton. Insular and dark, the album sees the band further refining their love of dub, minimalism and repetition into their most original and stark set yet. It harks back to the early 80's post punk period, when almost anything seemed possible with the classic two guitar, bass and drums lineup, and exploration and…
Message Bag
We come burdened with the glorious purpose of having readied the latest recordings by Messages, a double LP set called Message Bag. It's a set of pieces that imparts a vibe rife with history, and yet clearly focused on the future. You buy these 2 LPs, poster and insert in a bag, but in all of its formats and strategies Message Bag operates as a return to an unresolved system, as an alternative to the rest of yr choices, and bestows something that can't be bought. We call it Wisdom.
Parallel / Grayscale
Parallel/Grayscale is the first collaborative work between Italian guitarist and composer Giuseppe Ielasi and French-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician Kassel Jaeger. It is comprised of two different improvisation sessions. The first one took place in Paris, in October of 2011. The second happened in Oreno, in June of 2012, after the first concert Ielasi and Jaeger performed together. The first session was a pure analog device improvisation, whereas the second one was more laptop-o…
Peripheral
*nice Price * Peripheral is the fresh new effort by Airchamber3 and marks a step forward from their debut. The improvisational element is still central in their compositional method, but Peripheral (recorded in a period of four years) shows how the trio, occasionally augmented by some additional musicians - Vincenzo Vasi (Patton/Capossela), Dominic Cramp (Carla Bozulich), Barbara De Dominicis, Luminance Ratio - has been able to integrate elements of different genres maintaining an experimental e…
Corporate Laughter
Debut CD from one of Chicago's finest modular synth manipulators, Neil Jendon. One of the first things that struck me about Neil's work, when I saw him live, was his pacing. Neil would subtly build levels and layers of various oscillations, frequencies, and tones so deftly that by the time he was sending a hailstorm of electronic chaos out of the PA like buckshot, you almost had no recollection of how he got there without you being aware of it. 'Corporate laughter' reflects many of Jendon's fant…
weltraumruckfuhrungsubereinkommen
Third vinyl release by the mysterious Von Himmel commune. Some of these guys go back a long way into Sloow’s history and their classic ‘Space Communion’ tape from way back received the vinyl treatment by Humito. ‘weltraumrückführungsübereinkommen’ has more of those awesome serious zoned and mind melting fractals spider webbed into shining diamond stars mirroring inner and outer space. There’s the obvious nods to the kraut gods but Von Himmel seem to exist in their private spacetime continuum of …
Format
In Format, Sarah Crowner's first widely distributed artist book, the artist creates a roving collage of source material culled from a diverse range of previously distributed print material: magazines, books, posters, newspapers, postcards, etc. This publication provides a rare insight into the artist's working practice, demonstrating Crowner's concerns with visual formulations hinged on historical investigations, particularly in the overlap of art, writing, fashion, and design. Crowner's gracefu…
Good luck mr. Gorsky
Good Luck mr. Gorsky is a Trio formed in 2004 in Thessaloniki, Greece, by Savvas Metaxas, Spiros Emmanouilidis and Thanasis Papadopoulos. They are experimenting with a variety of instruments and musical genres to build their own sound. Their music focuses on electronic compositions, using both physical and electronic sound sources. Field recordings, analog synthesizers, prepared piano and trumpet are currently used for creating their compositions.
In this album the trio took a series of improvi…
Open Space
I've been composing graphical scores since 2004. Each score has been done for a particular group, and not just for a certain set of instruments but also for specific persons, each with their own personal sound and their own distinct approach to improvisation. The scores hover in the gray region between composition and improvisation. They create a situation where the players are free up to a point to improvise but in which they could also find themselves in juxtapositions with other player…
Crushed Interior
Jim Donadio's debut Psychedelic Black album as Prostitutes came out in 2012 and ended up on many year-end lists, fitting in somewhere between the post-noise abrasive techno of Pete Swanson, Container, Nate Young, etc., the roughened post-punk hues of Powell and the more precision-built constructions of the Raster-Noton label. Donadio's follow-up, Crushed Interior, arrives via Digitalis and picks up where he last left us, taking us through to the next, blackened layer of re-formulated techno te…
@
Screeches, Scratches, Knocks, Bangs, Explosions and Howls in the Night! “@” is a fabulous studio recording of two Downtown masters. Both long-time supporters of extreme music and proponents of free improvisation, John and Thurston share a deep musical connection and come together here to create their first work together. A varied and powerful program of duo improvisations, “@” presents the community of NY’s Downtown scene at its collaborative best.
Spilt
Nate Young airs two of his alter egos on this great split LP: Demons, featuring Steve Kenney (oh you know, Steve Kenney - he's in those well-known beat combos The Pterodactyls and Isis & Werewolves.... No?) and Hatred, which combines Young once again with Kenney, but this time with the added presence of Spence Bryant. The Hatred side sounds like the motor on your turntable is continually breaking down, as if some perpetual Technics power-down effect was causing all manner of primitive pitch-slid…
Centralia
Mountains’ music is defined by slow builds, and subtle transformations, textures and melodic lines that evolve in a variety of ways to create grand soundscapes and acutely detailed compositions. For Centralia, the duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg wrote and recorded in a way that mirrors the pace of their music. While the current trend in experimental music is towards hyper-prolificity, Mountains have taken their time on Centralia, resulting in an album that is as precise as it is boundl…
Compositions For Geomungo and Gayageum
Sub Rosa reissues Belgian composer/violinist Baudouin de Jaer's Gayageum Sanjo (SR 347CD), with a complete new design and an additional CD of new compositions for another ancient Korean instrument: the geomungo ("black zither"). "Baudouin de Jaer chose a highly delicate musical instrument, the geomungo, and has drawn from it a marvelous creation; I can only congratulate him with all my heart for such an accomplishment, and for the release of this beautiful CD. I hope he will continue to make gre…
Mauricio Kagel Ludwig van
Mauricio Kagel’s 1970s film Ludwig Van, a rather critical piece of avant-garde cinema, asked pointed questions about the ways in which later audiences appropriate and interprete Beethoven’s music. Pianist F. Blondy and turntablist DJ LENAR reclaim and reinterpret the soundtrack in this post-modern mashup that includes source material such as Herzog soundtracks, a lecture by Alfred Cortot, samples of string playing and percussion from contemporary improvisation records, and numerous other …
Wake Up Awesome
The second chapter of SStudios (Software Studio Series). SStudios is a new venture in the Software Recording Co.'s expanding catalog that invites artists in the field of electronic music to create collaborative works of quality and vision. Inspired by the historical intersections of live performance and studio post-production, Wake Up Awesome is a modern kind of fusion in technique as well as genre. At its core are three artists highly experienced with both instant and labored composition.…
Enharmonic intervals (For Paschen organ)
Forget what you know about the Seattle-area sound-art project Mamiffer and the Finnish hypno-rock institution Circle. Enharmonic Intervals (for Paschen Organ), the first in a proposed series of joint efforts involving these parties, contains few of the musical hallmarks you might associate with either performer. The comforts of austere piano sketches and solemn nocturnes are largely absent; the wallop of repetitive rhythms and metallic kitsch is nowhere to be found. It’s as if an unseen h…
Stromboli
Field recordings of a volcano by Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere. Stromboli is an active volcano off the north coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean. The volcano has erupted many times, and is constantly active with minor eruptions, often visible from many points on the island and from the surrounding sea, giving rise to the island's nickname Lighthouse of the Mediterranean. The last major eruption was on April 13, 2009. Recorded at Stromboli's crater edge (924 m) on July 19th 2012…
Il Conte Dracula / Le Viol du Vampire
Finders Kreepers continue their 7″ series of vintage macabre film music with a volume dedicated to European vampire cinema with the two most notorious exponents of the horrotica genre at the helm. Although often put on the same platform the films of these two self-sufficient European filmmakers are in fact very different from each others celebrated efforts, having collaborated on just one occasion with Rollin directing a short dream sequence for Franco’s film Virgin Amongst The Living Dead (comp…