New Arrivals
Reception
The Sons of God: 32 amplified iron plates. Mats Gustafsson: live electronics. Recorded by Olof Madsen on the 5th of March 2006 at Frgfabriken, Stockholm, Sweden. Reception was a sound installation at Frgfabriken (February 18 - March 5, 2006). by the Sons of God and Emanuel Swedenborg and a part of the festival Place and Space, Stockholm New Music. The festival was curated by Magnus Haglund and Magnus Andersson. During the installation period, the following guest-artists were invited for performa…
9 symphonies
Sultan Hagavik is first Polish band (and probably the second one in the world) which performs music using tape decks. It was founded in July 2011 in Wroclaw, in circumstances hard to specify. The band utilizes recordings found on old cassettes, as well as their own material recorded with analogue dictaphone. Using tape decks as musical instruments allows duo members to create completely new sonic quality. In their sur-conventional compositions they refer to many musical genres; from pop to punct…
Thing
This powerful 1972 performance by Arni Cheatham's group provides a unique glimpse of the jazz scene in Boston. The group borrowed the most innovative characteristics of jazz and rock, but never sounded derivative. This is early seventies "jazz fusion" of the highest order, before the term evolved to mean a light, commercially acceptable genre. As with many innovative jazz forms, the recording was made at one of the many local universities, Harvard. The resulting album was pressed in scant…
Five American Portraits
“Ridges and creases / high on the middle forehead / The right temple near the eyebrow / A small ridge under the right eye / The right side of the tip of the nose / The opening of the right nostril / The middle lower lip / The inner ear of the right ear.” Can you tell who it is yet? It’s George W. Bush, of course, or at least part of his head, as seen (or rather heard) in the second of five “American portraits” in words and music by legendary experimental rock outfit the Red Krayola, in collabora…
Soundtracks for bride of sevenless
A survey of Asian sound activity: 1997 - 1998 1 Koji Tano Field Recording Intro (1:16) 2 Government Alpha Acoustic Type (0:48) 3 Chris C. Lin Bathyal (2:55) 4 Ching Shen Ching* V-Zone (7:25) 5 Magmax Gracie Jugend (5:33) 6 S.Isabella Phosphorescence (4:36) 7 Z.S.L.O. 422189 (4:36) 8 R.H.Y. Yau Dog (1:13) 9 MSBR Fragment #1 (5:10) 10 Kazumoto Endo Night Falls On IKEBUKURO (4:17) 11 PNF My Favorite Scratch (7:58) 12 Yukiko Toyama Park 3AM (5:55)
News from the \'70s
This rare collection of recordings from the 1970s features Anthony Braxton at the height of his power and makes an indispensable contribution to his discography. Personally selected by esteemed Italian musicologist Francesco Martinelli from long forgotten cassettes stored in the saxophonist's home, these six tracks were not released commercially until 1999. While the sound quality is mixed, the music is some of Braxton's best. There are two solo performances ("Composition 8G" and "Composition 8C…
Dead Space
Blip is a duo collaboration between Jim Denley and Mike Majkowski: two of Australia's most prominent improvising musicians. They began playing together in 2002, as members of The Splinter Orchestra, and formed Blip in 2009. They have been developing their own approach to the woodwinds/strings duo arrangement, deconstructing and reconstructing this format. Blip music focuses on duration, the subtleties of sound, the pitch within timbre and texture, as well as pulse. Wi
Teeming
'Magda MAYAS and Christine ABDELNOUR SEHNAOUI both play acoustic music that is diametral, a space they conquered by changing the traditional ways of their instruments: modern alchemy. Together they express a strong physical experience. MAYAS is a master of sparse fragments of motion and SEHNAOUI works in a flux of changing sounds. The multiple layers of their performance create a shivering moment of existence, which reminds me of the words of the Danish artist Malene Bach: 'Art finds its own re…
Unit
A journey to the Chinese Qinghai province (Tibetan culture region of Amdo) was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut China. Its purpose was to experience the province and to produce art works to be presented at The Third Guangzhou Triennial, subtitled 'Farewell to Post-Colonialism' in the same year. The sound installation Unit and a series of photographs called Cutting Qinghai resulted from this journey, during which I took photographs and made audio recordings. The installation was presente…
Rozenhall
A re-mastering and repackaging of two previously released LP’s (2001 & 2003), this CD is a collection of 5 quite different pieces. All are mixed-moving-surrounding sounds and natural and manipulated noise - some can be considered as drone though they aren’t at all. No name for Rozenhall’s style. Very intense. As the CD liner notes say, “Play loud!”. Trk 1: “A Plumage…” - Early 60’s satellite type mixed sounds going round and round the Earth, then they come at you. Grabs your ears with claws. Sho…
Keynote dialogues
voice + electronics. Making music out of words, making words out of music.
Unknown skies
...Every trio without a piano, or without a drums, or as in this case without a double bass, gains in incline what it loses in “balance”. It only takes a little sometimes. Everyone plays at ease across. Everyone can split themselves. There are no more solos as solos but phases, circles of influence and predominance which do not last. The duos bind and unbind more clearly, the contrasts stand out better. The theme is no longer material to develop but, as in Unknown Skies, a lyrical and volatile s…
Eyes! China Doll
Each CD will have a coupon to receive a bonus CD of new material once all the solo albums of Edward have been reissued. Includes two unreleased tracks. Edward's second solo full length first appeared as the world was still rubbing ITS eyes from new wave fall-out. Synth pop had, by now, been fully co-opted by the populace at large with Wham, Madonna and Chaka Khan topping the US charts and Dead Or Alive and Paul Hardcastle making a splash across the pond. With Eyes Edward proved a couple t…
Vellus
Incorporating wildly coloured orchestrations and unusual performance actions, set against intense monochromes of noises and whispers, Vellus is a collection of chamber works that obsessively deals with the privacy of ritual, memory and the self. Diverse takes on instrumental concrète by this young Australian composer. 'Lucas Stumbles' (2007) for percussion (Eugene Ughettti, Greg Sully, Mathias Schack-Arnott, Anna Webb) and electronics (James Rushford). 'Respite in the Woodland' (2007) with Aviva…
Ceremony
Phoenix Records reissues a digitally remastered edition of People's sole album, the legendary Ceremony -- Buddha Meet Rock, originally released in 1971 in Japan. Nobody's sure if the musicians on this recording ever performed as a group or whether Ceremony was simply a studio super-project. Certainly, guitarist Kimio Mizutani had already enjoyed a certain amount of critical exposure following stints with Love Live Life + One and Masahiko Satoh's Sound Brakers, and it is Satoh's jazzy fuzz guita…
Caves
Riccardo Dillon Wanke’s Caves was composed and recorded in 2006 in Alfama (historical district of Lisbon, Portugal) using acoustic and electric guitars, saxophones and natural sound elements starting from pure radical improvisation evolving into the investigation of drones and static and looped music related to minimalism. At the center of these works are the binaural beats in musical composition, the results lying between classical composition, minimalistic improvisation and a "folk" sensitivit…
Gayageum Sanjo
Sub Rosa presents a release by composer/violinist Baudouin de Jaer. Gayageum Sanjo: compositions for 12-string gayagrum, Prelude, 5 sanjo and 10 studies. According to legend and to recent archeological digs, the gayageum is a millennial zither-like instrument featured in all Korean traditional repertoires. "Sanjo" is usually translated as "scattered melodies." This style of music was informed by southwestern shamanic music (Sinawi) and the great epic songs (Pansori) from the same regi…
GYU
CD version. Tujiko Noriko returns to Editions Mego after a period of relative silence, this time in collaboration with Tyme. (aka Tatsuya Yamada, member of MAS). This album was developed from songs that the duo made once a year at the end and beginning of the new year, for a period of six years. These were sent to friends and people who asked. After six years, there were six tracks and they added five more tracks based on the illustrations of Kimura Toshiko to complete the album. A gaudy ta…
Grand Electronic Suite
Recorded at the Roundhouse 1972, during the ICES Festival."For this show we rehearsed a week in a small village in the south of Holland. The repertoire of the first part was a kind of "frozen improvisation". We made some written plans about the form and structures and then rehearsed it for the whole week. So during these rehearsals things moved from improvisation into fixed form, just by remembering what we have played, and polishing it. This is a working concept that …
Crossing Into The Electric Magnetic
This is an exceptional collection of pieces by one of the pioneers of electronic and tape music. Halim El-Dabh began experimenting with wire recorders in Egypt even before Pierre Schaeffer inaugurated the practice of Musique Concrete in France - one piece here dates from that period ('Wire Recorder Piece', 1944) and is thus of great historical importance. Most of the other works were recorded in 1959 and evidence a remarkable body of work and experimentation. El-Dabh does not sound like his fell…