New Arrivals
Navigating by Starlight
"Navigating by Starlight is the elegantly distended fourth LP by a New York band known for its fine taste in bourbon as well as its ability to explore strangely forested nooks of space. Composed of two side-long excursions of heavily bearded improv, this is what Bruce Dern should have been listening to throughout Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running. The first side is called 'Lovejoy Vapor Trail,' after the recently discovered comet said to be releasing enough alcohol to fill 500 bottles of G…
Saturday Night Fever
"Saturday Night Fever takes the concept of the movie of the same name and stretches the night a bit later, the fever a bit higher to the point where the party ends up blending into something much more sinister and wild. What starts out as a disco drumbeat with funky guitar swagger and melodic horns may slowly deteriorate into some sort of corroded ambient loop that eventually morphs into melodic horn samples. Basically every track is subverting its own gestures, carving out a narrative of …
Tiento de las Luz
The completely singular drone and ambient pioneer Thomas Köner is back on Denovali. Köner’s Tiento de la Luz is a unique release for the artist as it subtly blends classical instrumentation and live electronics in homage to a 15th century musical form. This deep and graceful drone album comes on heavyweight vinyl in a variety of colours and includes a download code and extra thick sleeve.
Thomas Köner's first encounter with this musical genre goes back to a commission from Frankfurter Gesel…
The Throne of Blood
Masaru Sato, who worked at Toho Studios under the legendary Fumio Hayasaka, composed this chilling score for Akira Kurosawa's 1957 masterpiece based heavily on traditional Japanese music, especially influenced by Noh dramas. Limited edition first press of 500 copies on white vinyl.
Almasty
Solo bass played and composed by Kasper T. Toeplitz. Layers of noise full of details like the voice of dead machines !“A purely formal présentation of Almasty would point that it is a composition for solo bass – electric bass, which implies a few electric/electronic machines around the string instrument, which change or modifiy its resonances somehow, but nothing more that what is seen those days around any electric instrument. And Almasty is also a solo composition, as it is recorded and presen…
Grand Tour
Tilbury left communist Poland in 1964 and his visits grew rare. He got involved with Cornelius Cardew’s Scrath Orchestra and the AMM; later he went on to become known for his performances of Morton Feldman’s compositions. Meanwhile Zygmunt Krauze, aside from his work in the Musical Workshop, grew to be his generation’s leading conceptual composer, mainly thanks to his reception of Wladyslaw Strzeminnski’s unism. The worlds of Krauze and Tilbury were separate, but adjacent.
The Musical Worksh…
plays Parallel Winter
Voice, guitar and zither by Richard Youngs. Composed, recorded, mixed and mastered by Richard Youngs.Motto of Populista Winter Triangle came about on 13th of December, 2014. It was a cold and windy day, a classic of pre-winter Warsaw, cold, wet, transparent yet at the same time grey, or perhaps mostly grey. It was also a day of the first Warsaw show of Richard Youngs in Komuna// Warszawa. Not fully by accident, there was a piano in the room, which made Richard propose performing 'ParallelWinter'…
Silent Night at the Crooked Forest
Ole-Henrik Moe, viola. Kari Ronnekleiv, violin. Sheriffs of Nothingness is a stringduo consisting of two of Norway's most distinguished artists in contemporary music: Ronnekleiv as a performer and Moe mostly as a composer. Moe and Ronnekleiv won the Norwegian Grammy for best contemporary album in 2007, and in 2011 Moe was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Award.Sheriffs of Nothingness interplay is remarkable. They move inside their music like one organism with all kinds of materials and pas…
Playing with a Dead Person
When you contacted me about the duos, I thought there is nothing more original than playing with a dead person […] which is curious because Derek Bailey is very much alive, especially when we hear his voice and I feel he's sort of sitting here, in the studio, and he's waiting for me and I'm waiting for him and we're not quite sure what's gonna happen. „Derek and I always wanted to do a duo recording together and we never quite managed that. Within the later years that we were trying to set somet…
Pianophonie
'Forte e piano' is one of Serocki's lesser known and acclaimed works, while 'Pianophonie' is considered his greatest masterpiece. However, it's worth remembering that 'Forte a piano' and 'Pianophonie' are interrelated. It's difficult to imagine the latter without the former. Serocki was born in Torun. He studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski and piano with Stanislaw Szpinalski at the State Higher School of Music in Lódz and graduated in 1946. He continued in Paris, studying composition w…
Melting into foreground
Henrik Munkeby Norstebo, trombone, half clarinet, electronics.Melting into foreground is the second solo album from trombone player Henrik Munkeby Norstebo, and his debut on the SOFA label. The first track is solo trombone. No effects. He is using the whole spectre of his instrument, from pure tones to noise and the barely audible, in an attempt to find the balance between the intuitive and the strictly constructed. About the second part, Henrik says that all the electronic sounds stems from one…
Torch of the Mystics
2016 repress! Limited edition LP version with insert. Torch of the Mystics, the most popular and revered Sun City Girls album, was recorded in the summer of 1988 and became the first LP released on the Majora label in January of 1990 in an edition of 1000 copies (the original CD version was released by Tupelo Recording Company in 1993 and is long out of print). Reissued here for the first time, this record has influenced and inspired a wide variety of musicians and artists and continues to…
Records By Artists: 1958-1990
Records by artists is a catalogue raisonné, a book of about 500 records. The artist uses the record/vinyl medium, as a total project (cover, packaging, sound project) liberated from the music.Since the 1960's, artists have increasingly experimented with recording sound as a means to investigate the possibilities of expression. Vigorously researched and documented, Records by Artists 1958-1990 is the catalogue to an exhibition curated by Giorgio Maffei at the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna in …
The Beat of the Earth
Two foundational documents of American private-press psychedelic rock emerge from decades-long shadows, deeply illuminated chapters authored by prototypical "terminally unique" Southern California artist/seeker Phil Pearlman and two of his early, briefly extant bands.From 1967, Phil Pearlman (The Electronic Hole (RAD 002LP) and the majestic Relatively Clean Rivers (ASH 3007CD)) leads a free assemblage of local Southern California acid-heads through loping Velvetica tribal incantations. The Bea…
The Electronic Hole
The Electronic Hole (1970) is a raw, noisy, droning, and completely mesmerizing album recorded by Phil Pearlman between the first Beat of the Earth album (RAD 001LP) and Relatively Clean Rivers (ASH 3007CD). Pearlman assembled The Electronic Hole in 1969. Recorded in local studios during off-hours, the album is entirely different from Beat of the Earth, as it abandons a free-form improvisational approach in favor of "compositions," including a wild cover of Frank Zappa's "Trouble Every Day." …
Hyperboreal
180-gram LP version. Includes printed inner sleeve and offset printed insert sheet with liner notes. Italian DJ and producer Manuel Fogliata hasn't released a lot of records since emerging in 2006, but the few he has put out have all been worth tracking down. Perhaps best known for his work alongside Donato Dozzy in creating the much sought-after Aquaplano records at the tail-end of the 2000s, Nuel has been just as consistent and impressive on his solo outings. Whether taking on metallic elec…
Decimus 7
How does one deal with the world's nightmarish montage of bad news -- the glut of information that incites feelings of futility and insanity? One way to cope is to plunge deeper into the madness, at least temporarily, for a dip into the healing pool of catharsis. Few people in music today provide a more immersive alternate reality on record to combat our own horrible one than Decimus (former No-Neck Blues Band guitarist and synth player Pat Murano). Musical categories dissolve in the mind …
Luxe Poesjes
One thing is for sure: those paintings are not going to make themselves!Shaking the hands of these four painting graduates is much easier since Fluwelen Koord came into being; these days, they’re as clean as my dad’s white car. They’ve buried their brushes and pencils ever since their debut CDR sold out (all 35 copies of it). In no time at all, with jackets firmly buttoned, they’ve forged ahead to dominate stages in Belgium and Holland with their combination of non-music, no wave art punk…
Opgenomen Verantwoordelijkheden
** sold out at source ** This album is the result of 10 years of preserved sounds, vocal blubber, field recordings and printed leftovers. These elements are collaged together into a travelogue of sorts, departing from Vom Grill’s (or Dennis Tyfus) bedroom towards the bar across the street — a short journey indeed! — where a destroyed piano is pushed by Jos Steen onto Bert Pels and DT, who crawl out from underneath clad only in kids’ accordions. “I’m going over to the over side” -- where Gre…
Light Flight / More And More
There are synthesizers, there are guitars, bass guitars, real drums and vocals in the first song. Components of rock and pop unite here in this lone 1977 effort and make way for elements of dark slow funk and soul that take you a couple of years back to the early seventies. The garment of swirling synthesizers keep it all together. The atmosphere can be soft and gentle like the touch of a lover’s hand but it can also become more and more mysterious and gloomy generating a feeling of paranoia as …