New Arrivals
Spellbound
Of Sudanese heritage, the bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1927-1993) was born Jonathan Timms in Brooklyn. After working with Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk, among others, Abdul-Malik studied music of other cultures. He was among the first to incorporate Middle Eastern and Indian influences into Jazz.A mindblowing mix of jazz and Middle Eastern influences— and a rare ‘60s treasure from Thelonious Monk’s former bassist! Ahmed Abdul-Malik blends together percussion, bass, and oud with some soulfu…
Free
Latin jazz percussionist Airto Moreira's third solo album, originally released in 1972. Featuring Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Stanley Clarke, Ron Carter, Nelson Ayres and others. Airto has played with the likes of Miles Davis, Donald Byrd and, most recently, on Arthur Verocai's Timeless project.
Split Cassette
Welcome back Hiroshi Hasegawa. This split cassette is the second release from Astro on Scrotum Records. Astro provide us with "Cruel Subconsciousness", a loud and layered 20 minute structured noise track, recorded live at the Akihabara Club in Tokyo, 2014. A masterpiece! On the flip side, Hiroshi Hasegawa presents his very old alter ego, Mortal Vision. "Music for Assassination", in 3 parts, is a massive guitar noise wall - highly recommended! Recorded in 2015, 13 years after the first brilliant …
RAW
Unsounds is proud to present Anne La Berge’s new piece: RAW. Originally from Stillwater, Minesota and based in Amsterdam, the avant-flutist, improviser and composer has written an open-ended work for ensemble and electronics made up of fragmented gestures and shards of skeletal speech. Ensemble MAZE, of which Anne is a founding member, is performing the piece which was recorded at live at Splendor, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.“Play noise. Do not play at all. Play melodically.”RAW embraces the …
Crows that have no eyes
Created from the non-standard use of electronics, hydrophone microphone and feedback, Crows that have no eyes is a patient and masterful 40-minute eai (electroacoustic improvisation) piece by two of Asia’s most exciting improvisers today. There is nothing close to a straightforward musical narrative here, only oblique strategies and a display of wits, curiosity and risk-taking; where the artists have opted for subtle but extreme frequencies that push against the limits of listening. This isn’t s…
Dark Matter
Derived from an audio library of cosmological activity collected between 1993 and 2003. It was gathered from various sources including NASA (Cape Canaveral, Ames, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Arecibo), The Very Large Array, The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and various educational institutions and private contributors throughout the USA.Lustmord writes: “The Universe we inhabit is a vast expanse far larger than we are able to comprehend. As we attempt to understand its underlying str…
Frogoroth
Dave Phillips, Yannick Dauby, Slavek Kwi & Sylvain van Iniitu. Black pools of swamp ambiance through foul forms of metal distortion in the anuran kingdoms. Edition of 250 numbered copies. The ensemble adheres to the rgyud-skad tradition of Tantric overtone chanting. The ritual Tibetan instruments as used by the ensemble include: dunchen, gyaling, silnyen, bub, damaru, kanling, nga, shang. P
A Family of Three (Band Photo)
Alessandro Bosetti, lyrics, voice. Kenta Nagai, fret-less electric guitar. Tony Buck, drums. “A Family of Three (Band Photo)” is the fruit of urgency and sediment – a vibrant story bringing together sounds, images and texts that have emerged over time in Alessandro Bosetti’s imagination, in his life experience and through live concerts. Tangents, ideas and themes revolve around cautiousness, desire, Italy, ways of doing, uncertainty and longing. Without definite focus on one subject, these all f…
Karoujite
Cristián Alvear, guitar, Seijiro Murayama, percussion. Recorded in Mishima (Japan), October 2016. In this recording entitled Karoujite (a japanese word meaning “scarcely”), Cristián Alvear and Seijiro Murayama are deeply involved in a minimalist and repetitive mode of playing. Each of them focuses on continuously playing same chords on the guitar, and rubbing the cymbal or hitting the snare drum. Listeners are invited to discover a kind of nonlinear and nearly static music. They can feel a sort …
Rapport à une Académie Kafka's Parachute
A “man” tells his fabulous past as an ape, from his capture to his adaptation to the world of men, to the members of an Academy of Sciences. This edition of A Report to an Academy, a short story by the great Kafka, is accompanied by a musical piece especially written by Nurse With Wound (here, Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron, Quentin Rollet, and It could be Worse).
Yawar Fiesta
A Spatialized Electroacoustic Opera.“Born in the Baroque period, the opera is making a strong comeback in this late-20th / early-21st century with the emergence of a new form of Baroque, the result of the globalization of information, racial and cultural melting pots, our historical knowledge of the arts, and the cohabitation of styles. This world-as-a-whole, as the synthesis of all other art forms, is a reflection of a society and an era, and it has to resemble our world through the use of mode…
Histoires d'histoire
“Music of Another Present Era” (2013-16), stereo tape. Music of Another Present Era plays freely with our ability to imagine another time and culture. At the same time, it recognizes that this historical imagining is necessarily conditioned by our own time and place. We do not know exactly what ancient music sounded like, as we are left with only inaudible details such as the microtonal scales that were used. This work appropriates a number of these ancient tuning systems to create a sense of th…
Compuriddim
Andreas Tilliander (Mokira, TM404) returns with a plunging set of skewed techno dubs for Joachim Nordwall's iDEAL, his first new release for the label since the Bias Line 7” in 2010, and the Hateless album released a decade ago. RIYL Peder Mannerfelt, Frak, Tapes, Pole, Basic Channel! Andreas Tilliander has gone some way to making his studio a bastion of dub music within his home city, Stockholm ever since emerging with the Cliphop album for Raster-Noton in 2000 and subsequently releasing a whol…
Stack Music
Having felt restrained by the limits of traditional instruments and the techniques tied to them, composer, music producer, and artist Konrad Sprenger (b. Joerg Hiller), spent years developing various algorithms and custom instruments to realize his work. His recent focus has been on rhythmic patterns based on the Euclidean algorithm, using a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar. The unique system can create complex rhythmical patterns whilst tuning the strings during performan…
Kreis Plon
LP version. Includes download code. Almost 20 years ago, Jürgen De Blonde debuted on Kraak with the nowadays unfindable and almost visionary album 1 (1998). It was the starting point for a vital and wondrous exploration that lead him over paths of glitch, idm, shoe gaze, hypnagogic pop, improvised music, straight forward synth music, field recordings, and kraut... In the middle of this ungraspable adventure through contemporary electronic music, Köhn stands as a genuine artist that stayed t…
Crawling Through Tory Slime
The debut LP of this collaborator with Rhodri Davies and Chris Watson, evoking the knockabout, visionary, English humour of Jeff Keen and Bruce Lacy, spiked here with massive, steaming dollops of contemporary political outrage and disgust. "'Sounds are slurpy, runny, fizzy, spongy, hard as rock,' says the label, 'recalling long improvisational sets, floor-sucking dubwise psychedelia, plunderphonics and tight GRM-era electronic sound design.' Released to coincide with BD's summer-long exhibition…
Sine Studies II
Sine Studies II is loscil’s continuation of the challenge set forth in Sine Studies 1- namely, to generate music derived from computer generated sine waves and no other sound source. Sine waves are perfectly pure units of synthesized sound, which alone contain no overtones and a somewhat unnatural sounding simplicity of spectral content. While their abstract purity in its rawest form can seem clinical, unnatural, synthetic and rather void of emotion, loscil takes it upon himself to morph, add, s…
Sine Studies I
The newest release from Vancouver’s Loscil, their first on the Jaz imprint, employs simple sine wave generators as the source for all sounds, transforming and processing some, while leaving others in their original form. Pure math and sonorous clarity on 45 RPM from one of Canada’s foremost ambient composers. Limited release of 300 copies featuring original artwork by Network Osaka.
In The Aura of The Other
Louise Landes Levi has translated & written books, published chap books, broadsides & cards, / played sarangi in concert halls, in radio stations in town squares & railroad stations for some decades & perhaps for some lives. Overland journeys to India produced several interpretive translations/ one of Rene Daumal ( the great Sanskrit autodidact & author of well known Mt. Analogue) RASA originally printed by New Directions (1982), now available through Shivastan, the other, of the legendary poet …
Blurred Genres
Ron Kuivila is a sound artist and composer. He creates instruments of his own design for performances as well as installations. Kuivila's work challenges what one can hear simultaneously. He samples sounds from many different situations, and he is influenced by nature as well as artifice.Prior to receiving his 2008 Grants to Artists award, Kuivila had shown his sound installation work at MASS MoCA (1999-2007); V2 Organization, Holland (2000); and Donaueschinger Musiktage, Germany (2000); WDR Spr…