Best of 2019
Ethnoelectronics
**Edition of 300** Ethnoelectronics, issued on cassette by Sound Reporters in 1986, exists beyond the realm of easy definition. Very little information about the album exists, other than the fact that it involved the contributions of a remarkable group of sonic explorers - Walter Maioli, Nirodh Fortini, Fred Gales, Raffaele Serra, John Zandijk and the sculptor Edward Luyken, and was conceptualised as the soundtrack for an obscure science-fiction saga. Or was it?The title makes clear allusion to …
Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps
James Tenney, for almost the entirety of his career, was one of the great, unsung giants of the American musical avant-garde - an artist’s artist, whose towering contribution and influence was everywhere - equal to Feldman and Cage, but who, like Nancarrow and Partch before him, was a maverick - radical to the core, refusing to play by the rules, and thus suffered at that fate’s all too predictable hand. Since his death in 2006, his legacy in devoted hands, recognition has slowly begun to grow, …
Phonopoetics
Edition of 300. Introduction by Henri Chopin. Serbian-Hungarian poet, actress, and visual artist Katalin Ladik has to be considered as one of the most pioneering artists alive. Educated in the former Yugoslavia, Katalin Ladik (Novi Sad, Serbia, 1942) began her career with interventions on Radio Novi Sad (1963–77) and as an actress with the avant-garde theatre group Bosch+Bosch in the city of Subotica (1977–92). Her work is bound to feminist matters in Eastern Europe and reflects the personal, so…
Three Nails Left
Cien Fuegos present a reissue of Schlippenbach Quartet's Three Nails Left, a classic mid-1970s originally released on FMP in 1975 and showing Schlippenbach is in sublime form. It features a stellar line-up, with Evan Parker - soprano and tenor saxophone; Peter Kowald - double bass and Paul Lovens - percussion. Side A was recorded live at 3rd Jazz Festival Moers June 2nd, 1974 by Michael Krause. Side B was recorded live at the Quartier Latin Berlin, February 2nd, 1975 by Jost Gebers with the FMP…
Time
Multi-reedist Tony Coe was born in 1934, four years after guitarist Derek Bailey. He cut his teeth as a career jazzman with Humphrey Lyttleton, before an extended stint with the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band. On this rare 1979 duo outing, he sticks to clarinet. And though that instrument has an illustrious jazz pedigree, Coe’s playing here is something else. It’s worth noting that the clarinettist has also played under the baton of arch-modernist Pierre Boulez, the kind of composer Derek B…
Broken Music: Artists' Recordworks
**Facsimile edition of the definitive (and legendary) guide to records by artists. Comes with flexi 7"** Broken Music’ is a holy grail avant-garde music publication, a compendium of recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations created by thousands of visual artists between WWII and 1989. Unavailable since the original, sought-after 1989 edition, it features essays by its compilers Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier, as well as Theodor W. Adorno, Milan Knížák and Lasz…
Himalaya
Following his critically acclaimed collections Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, Carl Stone quickly follows-up Baroo with a double-LP album of recent works, including the final section of Fujiken, his epic journey through southeast Asian field recordings and street cassette culture.On all six tracks, composed between 2013 and 2019, Stone’s pan-global playground of looping synths and Asian pop culture remains as fertile as ever, …
Spontaneous
**500 copies. Holy Grail territory here...** Maybe the best Alessandroni’s album ever. A true holy-grail for any collector and worldwide music lover, which we can consider nowadays as the most sought-after record of the whole legendary RCA SP 10000 series, and as the rarest album from the king of Italian libraries. Jazz, mellow-funk, downtempo breaks, and incredible rock blends, make this record a refined portrait of the 70’s American way of life, viewed through the fully Italian lens of Alessan…
Hamdelaneh
Another greeat release from Dark Companion Records. "Chance doesn’t exist. I met Markus Stockhausen after inviting him and his wife to “Musiche Nuove In Piacenza” festival in autumn 2018. Immediately I felt a strong empathy towards him. That doesn’t happen very often. I knew his work and had always admired it, especially the spontaneous compositions he performs and the way his unique talent blossoms in these situations.We talked at lunch and I dared propose to him to record an album for our smal…
ExpoZoom 1969
The history of music is never concrete. It’s forever changing and rewriting itself. The past becomes the present and the present reforms the past. What was lost is found, and what was known is lost. Our era, defined by the reissue and archival release, will likely be regarded as a definitive period of historical reparisal and reevaluation. Monumental figures have fallen. The obscure and unheralded have finally received their rightful due. Dark Companion’s latest LP - Ron Geesin’s ExpoZoom 1969, …
PerpetuaI Possibility
LP version. Bronze vinyl; edition of 500 (hand-numbered). Perpetual Possibility is an album that bears witness to the collaboration between Lino Capra Vaccina, living legend of Italian minimalism and the avant-noise duo Untitled Noise with an interesting album on the label Dark Companion. Perpetual Possibility is the faithful transcription of the concert held by the trio at the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate, Italy and is the first recorded live album by Lino Capra Vaccina. Untitled Noise weaves deli…
Spectre of Radiants
R Keenan Lawler & John Krausbauer's “Spectre of radiants” is a droning, everlasting buzz of strings, gently undulating and intersecting. Unconventionally played, as usual, the resonator guitars and the banjos, builds the perfect stream of sound to accompany your longest days. Fitting in the ultraminimalist/drone panorama, this acoustic gem follow the lineage draw by authours like Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad or Eliane Radigue, mixing and confonting it with the direct attitude toward sound of peopl…
Schwingende Luftsäulen 2
Werner Durand Schwingende Luftsäulen 2, the second chapter dedicated to Durand's music applied to the Pan-Ney, the wind instrument of his own invention. With gorgeous artworks by Karlheinz Bux and extensive liner notes by Adelio Fusé. "Schwingende Luftsäulen 2 is the second chapter of a trilogy featuring the Pan-Ney with its tubes or columns of vibrating air (Schwingende Luftsäulen, in fact). This second chapter, in which the Pan-Ney is flanked by the tenor sax, reconnects where the first one en…
Die Mauer
**500 copies** Die Mauer is a collection of previously unreleased music composed, performed and recorded by Michael Ranta in 1988/1989 for a ballet choreographed by Philippe Talard. CD is housed in a 6-panel fold out sleeve.
Contrée
Unreleased before collection from French electroacoustician Régis Renouard Larivière. Contrée is an LP of quizzical, sometimes eerie voyages into unknown noise. "Allégeance Volatile" and "Esquive" each tackle the same issue in their own way. Overcoming time: whether it be successive, additional, enumerative, or repetitive. However, there is nothing here about the ensuing nature of so-called "repetitive" music. These are types of high-end music. And it is more about insistence, the obstinacy of a…
Cyro
When Cyro Baptista moved to New York in 1980 from his home city of São Paulo, he brought with him an arsenal of percussion instruments, including the cuica (friction drum), surdo (the booming bass drum associated with samba), berimbau (single-string bow with resonating gourd), and cabasas galore, in the next few years deploying them most notably in numerous ensembles curated by John Zorn, who helped set up this studio session in 1982.As you might expect from someone whose infectious grooves have…
Lady Maid
CD version. WRWTFWW Records present the reissue of impossible-to-find cult album Lady Maid by Japanese outfit Normal Brain. Originally released in 1981 as a limited vinyl pressing of 300 copies on Agi Yuzuru's fabled experimental label Vanity Records (R.N.A. Organism, Dada, Sympathy Nervous, Tolerance), Lady Maid is a testament to the creativity of the early '80s Japanese electronic and experimental scene, encapsulating a prolific era when audio gear became affordable for musicians to explore so…
Dialogue Ordinaire Avec La Machine
**Limited edition of 300 vinyl copies, comes with a 30x30cm 4-page booklet. Gatefold cover** 2019 has been a fantastic year for the late, great master of electroacoustic music, Luc Ferrari. We’ve witnessed the release of two astounding LPs of archival works - Photophonie, via Transversales Disques, and Music Promenade / Unheimlich Schön, via Recollection GRM, not to mention the incredible, sprawling volume, Complete Works, published by Ecstatic Peace Library. Now we’re thrilled to see yet anoth…
Sense Sound / Sound Sense
** Expanded and revised edition, published on the occasion of the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition 2019-2020 ** "Keeping the rebellious nature of its wicked subject intact, Sense Sound Sound Sense nevertheless provides an impeccably researched, crystal-clear narrative of Fluxus's true revolutionary spirit." The Wire)Truly necessary catalogue accompanying an extensive exhibition dedicated to art works and musical scores and their relationship with Fluxus, an interdisciplinary movement of internatio…
Bern · Melbourne · Milan
Killer! 300 copies packaged in a double gatefold ruby recycled cardboard sleeve with silver embossed text on front, including a 32-page booklet. Archival and live recordings from Australia’s premiere prepared acoustic improvising trio. Formed in 2002, Melbourne’s Pateras/Baxter/Brown toured heavily between 2004 and 2008, playing a regular residency at the Empress in North Fitzroy in between extensive European tours. They performed multiple concerts in classical, electronic, jazz, grindcore and a…