Random and emblematic: The sound of space
"It’s a pleasure to bring together, on this album, musicians with whom we feel a very special connection, namely Felicia Atkinson, Büşra Kayıkçı, Carmen Villain, Kuniyuki Takahashi, Pavel Milyakov, KMRU, Ana Quiroga, Abul Mogard and Pedro Vian. All of them have been very generous in their willingness to participate in an artistic experiment: to build bridges between architecture and music.
Each of these artists chose a space and translated it into a piece of music, and the result is a sonic kale…
Killer Road (A Tribute To Nico)
A shimmering ambient tone, an electronic underlay to the lulling chatter of crickets, makes way for the unmistakable voice of Patti Smith, quietly intoning, ominously, “The killer road is waiting for you / like a finger, pointing in the night.”
Behind the music and concept of Killer Road is international trio Soundwalk Collective – Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi – who, alongside Patti Smith's daughter, Jesse Paris, conceived an immersive exploration of the tragic death o…
Body Traffic
* 300 copies limited edition * Jon K and Elle Andrews’ MAL imprint returns with an LP from one of the London experimental underground's best kept secrets, Rory Salter aka Malvern Brume. His music is rare, eccentric and mysterious - somewhere between Coil's bleak ritual magick and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's most experimental, minimal fringes. Malvern Brume operates just beneath the radar, occasionally turning up at Café OTO lineups and on a smattering of releases for Low Company, Alter, Infan…
Like Floating Leaves
*200 hand-numbered copies limited edition* Wil Bolton is a London-based artist whose work uses synthesizers, guitars, acoustic instruments and effects to create warm and emotive melodies, fragmented and submerged among beds of droning ambient textures and environmental sounds. Wil has released albums on labels including Home Normal, Hidden Vibes, Krysalisound, Audiobulb, Hibernate, Eilean Rec, Dronarivm and Sound In Silence. He has also shown his sound and video works in exhibitions at ICA, Inch…
Like Floating Leaves
*300 hand-numbered copies limited edition* Wil Bolton is a London-based artist whose work uses synthesizers, guitars, acoustic instruments and effects to create warm and emotive melodies, fragmented and submerged among beds of droning ambient textures and environmental sounds. Wil has released albums on labels including Home Normal, Hidden Vibes, Krysalisound, Audiobulb, Hibernate, Eilean Rec, Dronarivm and Sound In Silence. He has also shown his sound and video works in exhibitions at ICA, Inch…
Clarté Déserte
*300 copies limited edition* New 10 track studio album by Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk, recorded 2020-2021 at Impression Lointaine and Kulta Saha.
"Forth unobserved I wentIn darkness and security,By the secret ladder, in disguise,In secret, seen of none,Oh night more lovely than the dawn!Lost to all things and myself,And, amid the lillies forgotten,Threw all my cares away"
Aurinkopari
Aurinkopari plays with polarities as it seeks to find something celestial in the mundane. The brightest sound of the album is captured in the darkest night of the year. Sine waves, scaled according to old wartime engineers, are performing as a magic flute. A hydrophone detects other-worldly sounds of a drowning compost and a ceremonial Javanese gendèr is recorded in a bunker… While the processes of recording the album were often playfully esoteric, I think the music itself is warmly heartfelt.
Musik Ohne Ende
"In the 1970s, serious music lovers had a reel-to-reel tape deck. My father certainly loved music and had one to tape classical music off the radio. I recorded my first musical experiments with this machine, fascinated as I was by slowing down the speed so my pieces last longer. Later on, I had some more experience, and my father turned to playing CDs, so the reel-to-reel machine has used a lot less, and I was allowed to drag it upstairs, and I borrowed one from the likewise serious Phillips emp…
I - Kamermuziek
Biggest Tip! "Muziekkamer is a minimalwave project by Martin Keuning and Cees van de Oever, based in Leiden, the Netherlands, in the 1980s. The first album, 'I' (aka Kamermuziek), is a self-healing calm unified by hushed-toned electric guitars and faint synths, while the second album is a more experimental and pop minimalist/electronic sound, similar to Kubus Kassettes' work. The guitar harmonics are hazy. The long, dreamy parts, with a vague layers of guitar harmonics, is one of the best ambien…
Aeonium
Tarotplane's new tape on Constellation Tatsu comes after many years of research and correspondence. They find him seeking to recreate the unique sound of the late great legend that is Manuel Gottsching. As such, his Aeonium album is a truly psychedelic treasure that fuses some magical moments from Krautrock as well as plenty of new and innovative sounds in between. It has twinkling cosmic melodies and sleek synth lines that are in constant flux. This one comes with great cover art in the form of…
Music From The Temple Of Light
Peter Culshaw was described by Malcolm Mclaren as “the Indiana Jones of World Music” and has tracked down music from the Amazon to Siberia and lived with Pygmies in Central Africa and dervishes in Istanbul. Culshaw interviewed many of the greats including Fela Kuti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Caetano Veloso and Ibrahim Ferrer. His book Clandestino, now published in ten languages, was a biography/ travelogue on the road with Manu Chao. The result of decades of research is this, his first solo album. …
air near silence
Tip! Truly intrigued as a kid by the weird sounds his DIY electronica building kit could make, Mich L. (aka Mich Leemans of Paper Hats and curator of AB Salon) never stopped his quest for more beauty in hidden frequencies and harmonics of modular synths and old tape recorders. His search into the deep mysterious sound spectrum unexpectedly made a surprising u-turn after a seizure of increasing tinnitus and enduring nausea. The concept of listening, as stated by Pauline Oliveiros as 'the involunt…
That Space Somewhere
Cold Spring present That Space Somewhere, the first new album in 14 years from Lull -- the pioneering, isolationist dark ambient project of Mick Harris (Scorn, Fret, ex-Napalm Death). Lull was conceived by Mick Harris in 1990, in an attempt to create music that would stretch, if not forsake entirely, the structures of conventional music by developing and exploring sound without beats. Mick Harris on Lull: "I finally heard the way of recording, making profound sounds. Lull is purely something I c…
Mt. Hadamard National Park
Electro-acoustic composer and instrument designer Matthias Puech uses math to spin filigree "audio-naturalist noise" yarns using processed environmental recordings, dissociated instrumental vamps and sculpted electronix.
The Clear Distance
"I got a note from Stephen. As the consummate archiver he had inherited a tape of an interview with me in 1985 done with Kevin Concannon, in particular about my music production. He points out that in it I mention “a device called a digital delay” that I had been exploring. A Deltalab Effectron II Digital Delay, which let you make little short 1 second loops and manually inject other sounds among other things – nice kind of kluge aesthetic. We knew each other through Electronic Arts Intermix wh…
Arcoiris
*200 copies limited wedition. In process of stocking* "Backwards is really pleased to present the new Fabio Orsi release. This time Fabio offered a monumental work: eight long tracks contained in a huge box set with four compact discs. Musically it stands on the new course of the artist: together with the classic ambient and drone atmospheres that we know well, the work has more dynamic parts with rhythms and pulsations, and more melodic parts. A perfect meeting between ambient music and berlin-…
Inerte
*300 copies limited edition.* First collaboration between Massimo Amato (also known for his acclaimed La Centrale Elettrica (2016) album), and Fabio Orsi, born from a mutual esteem that later became a solid friendship. The collaboration was born from an exchange of material, which immediately creates a synergy and an understanding between them. The six tracks of Inerte draw inspiration from the composition of noble gases, creating the perfect synthesis between the sidereal and electronic sounds …
Secrets From A Squirrel
This is music grounded in modular synth, field recordings, and the norns programming tools. Each LP also comes with an 8-page color booklet to showcase Zander's visual art too.
The Fifth World Recordings
AI-32 signals the arrival of ‘The Fifth World Recordings’, by Son of Chi (Hanyo van Oosterom) and long-term collaborator Arthur Flink. A tribute to the late Jon Hassell, who passed away in 2021, the album connects a deep running thread that goes back to the source of Chi project. Carrying on from where Hassell left off, the album takes inspiration and references from his Fourth World music concept and the ancient Hopi tradition of Native America. Illuminating the subliminal space of the arising …
Manifold Vista
*150 copies limited edition.* Six new floating and dense pieces by Greek sound artist Thanos Chrysakis. Manifold Vista is the new album by composer/producer Thanos Chrysakis. Rarely can something so meticulously assembled together sound so fluid. A distinct, disciplined sense for composition emerges from each of these works, displaying formal integrity while at the same time, they are also effervescent, forceful, fiercely idiosyncratic and beautifully shaped and transformed. The album discloses …