New Arrivals
Language Is The Skin
Tip! "Language is the Skin" is the fourth full length release by New Monuments, the quartet co-led by Don Dietrich (Borbetomagus) and Ben Hall (Graveyards/Bill Dixon). Hall and Dietrich continue applying pressure to the structure of the relationship between saxophone and percussion. "Language" branches out to include totally new forms, line-ups, and instrumentation. New to the band, replacing C. Spencer Yeh, are Don's 25 year-old shredder daughter Camille adding 'cello, big Stockhausian refriger…
Psychedelic Sounds In Japan
Welcomed re-issue of this sough after Japanese masterpiece, just released during the 1968 turmoil. The Mops are one of Japan's best known "group sounds" bands, particularly noted for their psychedelic period. The group was founded in 1966 by high school friends Mikiharu Suzuki (drums), Taro Miyuki (guitar), Masaru Hoshi (lead guitar) and Kaoru Murakami (bass), playing mostly instrumental rock. Their debut album is still considered a cornerstone of the so-called proto-garage revolution. Their flo…
Alphane Moods
Australia-based musician Mark Gomes presents the debut full length under his own name for Soda Gong. “Alphane Moods” finds Gomes employing strategies that will be familiar to listeners of his work as Blue Chemise– elegiac, loop-based modes of composition and a predilection for concise etude forms– that manifest here with a strikingly different scope and intent, shifting from expressive abstraction into more conceptual terrain. Over the course of fourteen widescreen tracks, he navigates the gap b…
Brazilian Classics
Dorival Caymmi was a Brazilian singer, songwriter, actor, and painter active for more than 70 years beginning in 1933. He contributed to the birth of Brazil's bossa nova movement, and several of his samba pieces, such as "Samba da Minha Terra", "Doralice" and "Saudade da Bahia", have become staples of música popular brasileira. Equally notable are his ballads celebrating the fishermen and women of Bahia, including "Promessa de Pescador", "O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?", and "Milagre". Caymmi compose…
Grafitti
A superb Jazz Flavoured Latin Funk Soul album recorded in 1977 by Grammy Award Winning Carlos Franzetti when he was a struggling musician trying to get his first breaks in a tough New York Jazz scene. With a Top Notch grouping including Percussionist Ray Mantilla, Victor Venegas on Bass and Dick Meza from the Tito Puente Orchestra. Carlos played all the Keyboards, wrote the numbers and was also responsible for all the arrangements. Released by Guiness Records (No relation to the Drink) and swift…
for four double basses
*In process of stocking.* Minimalism is the keyword for the release from Bryan Eubanks. He composed work for four double basses, and Jonathan Heilbron, Mike Majkowski, Andrew Lafkas and Koen Nutters are the performers here. The score/concept is explained on the cover here; this is an excerpt: "[..] .....Each bass bows natural harmonics on one of the strings (I, II, III, IV), holding each note for the chosen duration and allowing a pause equal to half of this duration between each note. ..... All…
The Logic of Chaos
Tip! Tip! Tip! *25 copies limited edition. In process of stocking, only a few available.* The Logic of Chaos is the latest release of Elisa Batti for the label One Instrument that gathers music composed over a period of 3 years. Fascinated by the idea of developing pieces with strict and limiting guidelines, the confined environment gave her the possibility to explore and expand the creativity and the freedom of composing. Each single piece has a specific story and is recorded with a different i…
Chasing the Phantom
Dewa Alit, Bali's master of contemporary Gamelan composition, returns to Black Truffle with Chasing the Phantom, presenting two recent works played by the composer's Gamelan Salukat, a large ensemble that performs on instruments specially built to his designs, using a unique tuning system that combines notes from two traditional Balinese Gamelan scales. Alit explains that the ensemble's name suggests "a place to fuse creative ideas to generate new, innovative works" and both compositions demonst…
Plastic Love
*40 copies limited edition. 2022 stock* Can noise be romantic? Is it true that high volume sound helps to meditate? Can noise music be highly emocional? Will density make us float? It is these and others questions that Peak Bleak propose to answer in “Plastic Love”. Created from electric emanations, from three transformers captured with an electromagnetic pickup, modulated and reworked in real time in Desterro’s basement. Roughness, feedbacks and hauntings from fragmented melodies. Ephemeral noi…
Atrocity Decay
*50 copies limited edition* 'Hailing from Bristol (UK) The Savage Morality introduce themselves as a ‘collective of Industrial anarchists born from the ashes of the cassette underground.’ They already have several works and are now back with this new album featuring ten tracks. The first part of the album is clearly driven by good-old Industrial elements getting the listener back to the 80s. The tracks are mainly carried by strong Industrial percussion mixed with dark sounds and noises. You’ll n…
Aldan
*2022 stock* These are images of a dark and cold Siberia engraved in the memory of a child. It is about a high mountain where the snow never melts, about empty streets, about an exploited mighty nature, abandoned with its guts spilling out. It is about a shattered nuclear plant, and black mornings when the freezing air stings the skin with its chilly needles. Landscapes that the child observes quietly, within a very slow motion of time, on which children hover.
Light Colours In Jyderup
*111 copies limited edition. 2022 stock* ‘Light Colours In Jyderup’ is a trademark Marta Forsberg composition – in a relatively short space of time, the Swedish composer is able to transform the simplest of sonic materials into the most magical, transcendent experience. Using only vocals and some effects, she makes a handful of students from a tiny Danish town sound both alien and medieval; the way the piece unfolds is graceful, its tone and feeling is sacred yet warm, like a Christmas carol fro…
Making Eye Contact With Solitude
*70 copies limited edition glitter gold cassette* Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spont…
Bečvou
Bečva is a river located in the Eastern part of Czech Republic. In September 2020, several chemical leaks into the river caused the poisoning and subsequent death of 40 tons of wildlife in the waterway – an unprecedented catastrophe. Growing up in Přerov, Bečva was an ever-present part of Tomáš Niesner’s youth and this environmental disaster affected him deeply. In an effort to understand the river better and inspired by Werner Herzog’s ‘Of Walking in Ice’, Niesner set out on a journey from the …
Pleasure Prison
*2022 Stock. In process of stocking.* Ivan Zoloto, a Karelian musician and artist based in Barcelona is releasing his new album “Pleasure Prison” on the freshly-minted label School of the Arts. Recommended if you like: dark drone and ambient, experimental electronics, raw minimalism, noise, and free-floating strings. Just like Zoloto’s previous release, “Ghosting” on the Russian CANT label, “Pleasure Prison” is deeply immersed in psychogeography: before relocating to Spain just before the pandem…
Alkisah
*2022 Stock. In process of stocking.* The new album by critically acclaimed Indonesian duo Senyawa is being co-released by 44 different labels worldwide, and School of the Arts presents a Russian version on cassette. It features the full album as well as two extended remixes: Moa Pillar’s 14-minute heavenly ambient and a 24-minute poisonous drone collage by Ivan Zoloto.
Senyawa’s music combines extended vocal techniques of Rully Shabara and homemade instruments built and played by Wukir Suryad…
Juxtaposition II (Blitz Opposition)
Tip! *2022 Stock. In process of stocking.* A turbulent quartet of Oslo-based improvisers brings the house down with two voices, bass, guitar, and drums ⏤ RIYL free voice, skronk, jazz negativity, dub effects, Naked City and Painkiller.
Vocalist Agnes Hvizdalek delivers a unique form of glossolalia (think Monk, Eye, and animal sounds) backed up by noise-rock-influenced axe-grinders from the band MoE: Guro Skumsnes Moe herself on electric bass and voice and Håvard Skaset on guitar. Utku Tavil punc…
Winter War
2022 Stock. In process of stocking. Petrozavodsk is a dub-metal trio based in Moscow and Barcelona. The sound of their debut combines venomous guitar chords, ultra-heavy bass frequencies, and mind-numbing primitive drums with dub effects on the snare and the hi-hat. Side A, “Winter” is slow-churning dubbed-out drone metal, with feedbacking jet-engine guitar lines that at times sound closer to Ellen Fullman than metal riffs. Caveman drums on side B, “War” possess a tribal feel, and are punctuated…
Live In Murmansk
2022 Stock. In process of stocking. Trombonist and violinist of Copenhagen’s Selvhenter make noise in Russia’s Far North. Maria Bertel and Maria Diekmann are founding members of the acclaimed Selvhenter band and Eget Værelse, a collective that unites various projects of its members ranging from free noise to electronic pop music. In the middle of winter of 2017, two Marias visited Murmansk, Russia, a fjord city 2° north of the Arctic Circle, to play a rather short but very inspired set of solo a…
Elegie
*2022 Stock. In process of stocking.* This cassette is the first installment in the label's Death Series, and it is, indeed, a eulogy. Italian artist and media anthropologist currently residing in Bergen, Norway. Gabriele de Seta (Naturalismo) has recorded three beautiful compositions for Zev Asher, Aube, and Zbigniew Karkowski respectively.
“I’ve worked on these pieces from around 6 years ago. Mostly as turning points, trying out new things & compositional approaches, and realized I was basical…