Virgins
Virgins was recorded during three periods in 2012, mostly in Reykjavik, Montreal and Seattle, using ensembles in live performance. The sound palette of this work is wider, almost 'percussive' and tighter sounding than previous works. While this album remains committed to a painterly form of musical abstraction, it is also a record of restrained composition recorded live primarily in intimate studio rooms. This record employs woodwinds, piano and synthesizers towards an effort at doing what digit…
Chance of rain
A cerebral exploration of the intersection between rhythmic and ambient music, drawing together ideas of movement and stillness, psychedelia and presence of mind. On Chance Of Rain dance tracks are imbued with unpredictable structures, ambient drift and deep harmonic passages, while keyboard-based interludes reinforce both the far-out and contemplative aspects of the record as a whole.” The tracks on the album are apparently fleshed out versions of live hardware improvisations, a move not unknow…
Green heights
Baskaru is proud to present this gorgeous collaboration among three masters of sound experimentation, all three great artists whose soundworlds turn out to be incredibly complementary. Tomoyoshi Date's toy piano and field recordings bring a lightness that has very seldom been witnessed in the projects of Toshimaru Nakamura, whose specialty is the no-input mixing board. As for Ken Ikeda, he uses antiquated equipment (like the DX7 synthesizer) to create unheard-of sonics that bridge the gap betwee…
S/H
Autre membre du groupe Emeralds, Steve Hauschildt nous offre une sélection de son travail solo entre 2005 et 2012 regroupée sur un double vinyl. Comme on pouvait s'y attendre, c'est une musique électronique planante, autant marquée par la niaiserie new-age que la méditation du drone. Les amateurs du genre seront plus que ravis.
Nihtes niht
'The music supposed to be a soundtrack for lonely ice-soundscapes... when you stand there on lonely wide inhuman places and feel lost, but you still stand on ice...' - Baraka[H] The newest collaboration between masters of evocative noise/drone ambient is divided into four long tracks, four directions of nothing. The tracks are entitled in middle ageindo-german language, for north, east, south, west. And the album title means nothing from nothing - very weird notion, as it doesn't exist anymore i…
Memory of a safe place
Orsi is an ambient composer and uses synthetic and natural sounds to create his music, that fits the black and white photography quite well. Lots of pictures of nature, and with a sound that seems to stem straight from nature this is music that is probably best enjoyed outside - be it that taking a record player into nature is a bit difficult. That's the only downside of such a release I guess, which is otherwise filled with some great music. In 'Part 1', I believe to hear a mass of voice materi…
The New Dark Age of Love
The past two years have found Austin’s Lone State dark lord Xander Harris (aka Justin Sweatt) on a heavy transfigurative trip, overhauling his live rig, detouring through an expansive soundtrack project celebrating the 20th anniversary of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, touring outside Texas (from New Orleans to the Netherlands), plus a host of other inner life turmoils and metamorphoses. All of which seems to have seeped into the synthesizer soil of his stunning second full-length, The New Dark A…
Undefined
Undefined is the first collaboration between artists Richard Chartier and Yann Novak. For this piece the artists chose to collaborate in a way that was less about concept and more about the act of listening. The piece began with Chartier creating an unfinished work and sending it to Novak with no explanation, just the instructions to add to it, subtract from it, or a combination in order to finish the piece. Novak was then to send the recording back to Chartier for a simple approval or rejection…
The Mineral Victim
After a lengthy silence, Chora’s Ben Nash came back recently with an album made entirely on his computer, and now here’s another one which seems to have been made with a combination of computer and guitar, carving out slow melodic soundscapes with glassy, patient drones, disembodied voices and a whole variety of tones which swell and recede for quite an ominous, organic-sounding psychedelic thrum.There are two lengthy pieces on here, on the first side there’s ‘From 80 Fathoms’, which is quite sp…
Sólaris
The power of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is not in its futuristic sets, or in the hypnotic shots of the alien planet’s weird, fluid surface, but it’s in the way he juxtaposes his alien, futuristic elements against the intimately familiar. This is a future not just of flashing lights and video screens, but of wood and wool and leather, of dogs and horses, books and photographs. In Frost & Bjarnason’s SÓLARIS we do find the futuristic, gaseous atmospheres and pulses one might expect from a sci-fi s…
Ben Nash / Magic Lantern
2010 release. This one's been brewing at BR HQ for quite sometime, due to come out long ago, this beaut of a split is finally seeing light of day. A mutual respect from these two camps brought about what is surely one of this years most exciting releases in the field of the split vinyl LP. Ben Nash returns after over a year's absence from releasing any solo work, now busy as a full time member of the excellent Chora, we may all be in for a long wait for anymore solo action after this release... …
Here Is Where We Used To Sing
2011 Release. Die Stadt and Janet records are extermely happy to announce on the release of the new Fovea Hex album. "There have been few albums that I remember waiting so impatiently for. Several years have gone by since Clodagh Simonds' first transmission under the Fovea Hex umbrella and finally a full length has appeared. Continuing on from an exceptional string of EPs and singles, Here is Where We Used to Sing finds Simonds and her ever shifting group exploring different aspects of their son…
Secret Photographs
Beautiful new work from Machinefabriek. Secret Photographs was composed as a soundtrack to accompany a film made by Mike Hoolboom using photographs taken by notorious bank robber Alvin Karpis.
Filmmaker Mike Hoolboom discovered a batch of Karpis' photos for auction on eBay. He was the lucky winning bidder. With his newly found treasure, Hoolboom began working on a film consisting of still images, slowly dissolving one into another. Intensifying the slow, hypnotic pace and transitions, the musica…
Proverbs of hell
Daisy Bell is Donck's new group. The live show involves a collection of electronic and acoustic instruments, harmony vocal arrangements, lots of live sampling and sound processing plus a video projection, illustrating each song with minimal, yet evocative imagery. All songs are based on poetry by William Blake with his texts providing a vocal spine to the compositions. These range from experimental musique concrete to pop "with a twist" and all with strong intensity, dark atmospheres and raw bea…
Primeval Nebula
It seems to be a great creative period for Gino Fioravanti, alias
Aglaia, that with each new release continues to expand their vocabulary
and to enriches its palette of sounds and colors. The immersive power of
this work has reached the pure fusion with listening, a liquid
quality.. osmotic, it is an act that rejoins the source of consciousness
from which all true art springs.
The electronic sound have lost any artificial appearance and seem to be
generated directly by the flow of blood, b…
Proscenium
** 500 copies ** Tom Recchion’s Proscenium, released by Elevator Bath, is a beautiful piece of ambient/drone that was originally created for Janie Geiser’s play, Invisible Glass. Proscenium is a subtle and remarkably controlled collection of atmospheres. The air of mystery, deliberate pacing, the deep tones and unidentified sounds of Recchion's 2006 album Sweetly Doing Nothing have been explored even further here. It's a logical development but the results are unexpected and strikingly original,…
Point Of Arrival
Latest release on the excellent Forced Nostalgia imprint, a vinyl edition of a super-rare 1986 tape by sound designer at Oberheim Electronics, Loren Nerell. 500 copies only* Forced Nostalgia make their first physical impression of 2012 with a vinyl edition of a mystical 1986 tape by gamelan enthusiast and Berlin school composer Loren Nerell. A contemporary of Steve Roach and collaborator with Steve Reich, Kronos Quartet, Paul Haslinger and L. Subramaniam, Nerell has a richly varied musical backg…
Parthenon
Spectrum Spools is pleased to release the debut album by veteran musician Toko Yasuda's Plvs Vltra project. Toko has been working for years already in established pop acts such as Enon, Blonde Redhead and now touring with St. Vincent handling synthesizer duties for live events. In all her years of songcraft there have been sparse, if any solo output, until now. Parthenon is a sugar-sweet album of catchy pop songs, crafted with expert precision and outstanding composition logic. Everything is loc…
Oh Lordy Me! (My Heart Is Wandering Again)
250 copies. It's been quite some time since a full length solo Ben Nash release, and it's finally here, and somewhat different from his more psychedelic folk drones he showcased way back on 'The Seventh Goodbye'. Probably best left for Ben to explain this one for you... "I recorded this new full-length record during downtime from playing with Chora and after a long break from recording any solo music. Having become somewhat disillusioned with the process of overdubbing conventional “physical” in…
Midnight In Space
The third of the experimental electronic releases on the PDU label (along with recent Wah Wah's offerings Elektriktus' Electronic Mind Waves and Roberto Cacciapaglia's Sonanze) was released in 1978 and offered amazing cosmic passages in the purest Gillet Lethman & Cosmic Jokers style, built with piano, synth and even a spice of disco rhythms, plus sensual voices in a Cantori Moderni d'Alessandroni or Edda Dell'Orso feel adding for an exotic touch. Reissued for the first time in a limited edition…