New Arrivals
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 …
Les Soeurs Noires
Les Souers Noires LP by Timo van Luijk with Daniel Duchamp and Dominique Vermeesch. Released by Editions Delvoyeurs for the exhibition "Les Soeurs Noires" by Dominique Vermeesch. Side A contains a piece by Timo van Luijk and Daniel Duchamp. The B side has an etching by Dominique Vermeesch. Edition of 500 copies.
Drawn With Shadow Pen
Antwerp-based synthesist and sound-sculptor Yves de Mey presents Drawn with Shadow Pens, following previous outings on a slew of renowned labels such as Modal Analysis, Semantica, Opal Tapes, his own Archives Intérieures imprint with Sendai partner Peter van Hoesen, and the now-defunct Sandwell District. Drawn with Shadow Pens is a testament to the gifted musician's incredible engineering talents. "Prelament" sets the album off with a dense fog of acrobatic waveform maneuvers slowly shapesh…
Hare Rama Hare Krishna
** pre-order, delayed to Jan 20th ** Now we drift deep into the world of Bollywood. “Hare Rama, hare Krishna” is an Indian movie from 1971 which features an odd story about family problems, the flight of a young girl into the hippie lifestyle far from home and the quest of her brother to bring her back home. The musical framework of this movie has been created by Rahul Dev Burman (1939 – 1994), one of the most prolific soundtrack score composers from India. And the music alone plays a movie in y…
Paradia
Orifginally released on the legendary Cobra label (best-known for some legendary French electronic based acts: Heldon, Hydravion and Lard Free, Urban Sax and the Magma spin-offf Weidorje). Roland Bocquet who created this album has been the keyboard player for the French rock band Catharsis from the late 1960s to 1977. "Paradia" is his first solo album and there were more to come. “Paradia” is a mostly instrumental record with a very lightweight expression. Melodies and rhythms are quite ge…
Memorymetropolis
Walter Bachauer has been an active part of Berlin's but all in all Germany's electronic and progressive music scene as long as he lived with his greatest achievements being the Meta Music festivals in Berlin in 1974, 1976 and 1978 while he worked as a line producer at RiasBerlin, the city's biggest radio station. In the early to mid 80s he got back to compose and play music under the pseudonym Clara Mondshine and this is his second out of three albums from 1983 “Memorymetropolis”. So let …
Tides
"I had sent Neil an electronic ‘backing track’ to improvise on, with the idea to keep my part intact as the spine of this new piece. But once I received Neil’s recording, things turned out differently. While toying around with his saxophone improvisation, I noticed it was full of fantastic details, and wanted to emphasize these. I tried overlaying looped parts, with wonderful results. So the original idea went out the window, and I decided to solely work with Neil’s improvisation. I approached ‘…
Issue 6
Published January 2016. Format: 210 x 285 mm. 100 pages. Colour. Interviews with Skaset (Norway), Lucas Abela (Australia), Marcia Bassett (USA), Crys Cole (Canada), Joe McPhee (USA), Sodadosa (Indonesia), PBK (USA).Topics covered includes: meeting Sun Ra, starting to play the sax at 28, Forbidden Planet, The Nihilist Spasm Band, PO, poerty, Chicago, UFO sightings, science fiction, politics, stagnation, the scary middle class, hatred of reverb, changing guitar strings in 23 seconds, that Manowar …
Echoes as Messengers
This year 2015, Yannick Dauby and Wan-Shuen Tsai were part of a public art project at National Taiwan University. Yannick's work was a creation project related to the sound universe of bats and led to a series of public events, including soundwalks and exhibitions in the campus. The blog chiroptera documented the activities of field recording and creation, some in collaboration with students. Here is a new output of this project, released as a CD.Echoes as Messengers is a kind of domestic sound …
Septet
Guitarist Taku Sugimoto continues his long-term musical activities, with a focus on composing, and also collaborates closely with some of the composers in the Wandelweiser Group. This release is one of the summits of his recent work. Septet is a work of just under 40 minutes, performed by seven musicians on clarinet, flute, viola, contrabass, cello, electric guitar and sine-tones. Throughout, numerous diffuse sound reverberations emerge and overlap, then fade away. The sound progression is simpl…
Butterfly Effect
Shinichi Atobe has managed to stay off grid since he made an appearance on Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction imprint back in 2001. He delivered the second-to-last 12” on the label and then disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a solitary 12” that’s been selling for crazy money (theres a copy up on discogs at the moment for $600 - go figure) and a trail of speculation that has led some people to wonder whether the project was in fact the work of someone on the Basic Channel payroll. That kille…