New Arrivals
Transparent Waves
*2022 stock.* When does our experience of sound become "music"? In the tradition of John Cage and Morton Feldman, in which sounds – and silences – can just be themselves, Thomas DeLio plays with the spaces between your ears as much as the sounds he puts there. In short, be advised this album is replete with clicks, silences, and brief sound events. Stripped bare, it plays with time and space and the minimum conditions for music. It gives the term ‘experimental music’ meaning. DeLio’s approach to…
Apophany
If you were to connect seemingly unrelated things – Heavy Metal and the symphony orchestra, for example – you might be guilty of apophenia. That friction between opposites has never been a problem for Nick Vasallo, though – his music is equally at home in both worlds. Melding Xenakis, Varese, Extreme Metal, and Dark Ambient with gothic charm, Vasallo conjures up a muscular sonic battle that leads you on an inexorable musical journey to a conclusion where surrender is your best option. Catharsis …
In Her Words
*Includes 4-page wallet with a 8-page booklet.* This album is a breakthrough for celebrated composer Stefania de Kenessey: it is all electronic, and it is all dance music. In recent years, de Kenessey has turned increasingly to electronic music composition as a rich source of experimentation, of new sonorities – and of total control. Or something like that. The result is an eclectic combination of vernacular and classical influences that refers, in equal parts, to the Bulgarian and Hungarian fol…
Orchard
*2022 Stock.* “I was born and raised in Kentucky, and for many generations my direct ancestors and extended family have been farmers. So, creating music that is ‘about’ soil, plant life, and the natural world, is my way of honoring that legacy.” Composer Tyler Kline’s tools, though, are not the plow – and vegetables are not the crop – in this collection of brief piano pieces commissioned by and for over a dozen pianists. Instead, Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific…
Transmutation of Things
There is a venerable history of popular songs used as the starting point for elaborate classical compositions, but 500 years ago Josquin and Dufay never imagined using a gargantuan digital orchestra with up to 300 layered tracks pushing architectural proportion and human perception to the max. And yet, that is exactly what composer, MC Maguire, does in his Toronto studio. It’s daunting, it’s overwhelming, and it has to be heard (preferably loud) to be believed. Dubbed “the most irritating and sp…
Signals
Lawson & Merrill are not financial advisors. But if electroacoustic bliss is what you seek, you would do well to make an appointment with them. They – David Margolin Lawson and David Merrill – met a number of years ago while engineering sessions at the revered CityVox Studios in New York City. They discovered they both had a love for “mid century” electronic music and composers like Morton Subotnick, Eliane Radigue, Edgard Varèse, Ilhan Mimaroğlu, and Steve Reich. It wasn’t until recently, thoug…
ElectroResonance
*2022 stock.* Hearing the bell, I am able to let go of all my afflictions My heart is calm, my sorrows ended I am no longer bound to anything I learn to listen to my suffering, and the suffering of the other person When understanding is born in me, compassion is also born- Stepping into Freedom, Thich Nhat Hanh Resonance... How do we find or create opportunities for connection, collaboration and shared human and sonic space? How do we listen deeply to one another and respond in ways that create …
Intervals 2
*In process of stocking.* “Well, isn’t it always now?” Joel Futterman’s audible smile, in response to my simple query about the time during a phone conversation, bespeaks and accentuates the deeper truths embodied in his creativity. Grounded, sometimes adrift, forced to live in the world of duality, we capitulate too willingly to the whims and whiles of intervals, to their capricious grip on our intersecting realities, to their encapsulation of alternating mood and ebb-and-flow vitality. Doors o…
Widoki
*In process of stocking.* Three very young men in their CD debut. The leader is Artur Małecki 20-year-old drummer and composer who creat music with his musical friends: Michał Aftyka on double bass and bass guitar and Przemysław Chmiel on soprano and tenor saxophones. On Widoki you have a chance to listen to the most promising and youngest generation of the Polish jazz scene.
Sonic Animism: The Emergence
"Sonic Animism" is a site-determined body and sound performance that investigates the state of the sentient-being on the non-human agency brought by technological sonic happenings.
The framework of the performance is an artificial environmental cycle system where each element incorporates with each other in a dynamic process. It permits micro level of properties evolve to novel integrated wholes
With this performance, Yang aims to blur the binary separation between the "objective existence" an…
Impermanence
Neti-Neti is the lo-fi ritual music duo of Matt Evans (drums/electronics) and Amirtha Kidambi (vocals/electronics) that formed amidst their mutual experiences surrounding grief after the death of loved ones. The duo shapes a vessel for processing this loss using hazy rhythmic interplay, dredging piles of noise, and serene moments of ethereal melodic counterpoint. Neti-Neti, translated as "It is not this, it is not that" from Sanskrit, is a contemplation on the nature of reality, life, death, bir…
With Grace In Mind
*In process of stocking.* The second album of all-stars trio feat. Marilyn Crispell on piano, Joe Fonda on bass, and Harvey Sorgen on drums!"Through many years of touring and recording, Marilyn Crispell, Joe Fonda, and Harvey Sorgen have left indelible marks on the history of jazz and improvised music, having performed and created work with a veritable who’s who of the national and international contemporary improvised music scenes since 1978. Paul Motion, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Barr…
A New Score For Koyaanisqatsi
** White vinyl ** Dark-folk songwriter Chantal Acda and beyond drums-percussion musician extraordinaire Eric Thielemans propose a new score for Koyaanisqatsi, re-actualizing the incredibly beautiful, raw, rhythmic, and touching images of this '80s cinematographic masterpiece. Slow deep electric waves, lonely synths in sonic desert landscapes, rhythmic pulses, transporting drums and bells, and deeply longing sounds and voices make up the audible fundamentals of this imagined, neo shamanic, ritual…
Tape Shadow
The Tape Shadow opens up to Rows, a series of slow chords and gestures, doomed and endless, colored right between major and minor, vibes and guitar, rotating around each other like planets, resonating in an enormous space. Tape delay creating shadows and environments to swim around in. Titles evocative of tunings, playing styles, and improvisational strategies. Matter of fact collaboration between two searching musicians. Sounds fading out.
The thump of a bass drum makes things rattle along in t…
Galaxy Heart
Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montréal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020. As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, "few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them." Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous …
Bridge Variations
On Bridge Variations, the now Stockholm-based English guitarist Jon Collin changes his guitar for a keyed fiddle. Mostly recorded to tape under different bridges around Stockholm during 2021, partly for the sound but also because of their importance to the geographical make-up of the place, the album is like a modern take on traditional Swedish folk music made by an outsider looking in. The sound is pretty much a continuation of the palette explored on 'Dream Sequence, End Of Summer', Collin's c…
Itsame
On his sophomore album “Itsame” on FILM, Brainwaltzera navigates the turbulent waters of personal crossroads with cautious optimism for an uncertain future. Drawing comparisons with his debut full-length "Poly-Ana", an equally introspective album that explores broader conceptual themes, the artist hesitantly describes the new record as a very personal affair. Acting as a kind of “journal” of the last four years of his life, each of the 17 tracks directly relate to events and experiences that tra…
Poly-Ana
*2022 stock.* Brainwaltzeras debut LP Poly-ana follows quickly on the heels of the producers Aescoba EP also released this year via FILM. Across thirteen tracks of both previously released material and fresh excursions into the artists world, Brainwaltzera explores sounds ranging from luscious, downtempo grooves and expertly reduced braindance cuts with nods to early 90's experimental IDM to harder, more caustic outings all bound together by a recurring theme of otherworldly ambience. Taking its…
Waiters On The Dance
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Another unsung hero of the long lost british prog history, Julian Jay Savarin is a keyboard player and composer, poet and science fiction author, hence the association with the most epic and romantic tendencies of the genre. He was born in Dominica (an island between Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean) and moved to the UK in 1962. He debuted in 1970 with Julian's Treatment, a short-lived progressive rock band which his sole album – …
Wayward Mystic
About a year ago I handed Tony a CD of Saint Hildegard von Bingen's spiritual songs to listen to, and the next thing I know he has played an entire hour long drum track alongside the recording, in one sitting- and that it was so right. The sounds of his rolling-thunder-in-the-distance drumming and the ethereal monophonic vocal lines perfectly complimented, and my inspiration to try singing some, then add violin/viola layers with pedals and improvise, was ignited. In learning some of these beauti…