Postcards
Tip! The original environmental album from the Kyoto Connection available on Vinyl for the very first time. The album was composed, produced and recorded by Argentinian producer Facundo Arena over the course of one month in early 2018. A self trained musician and digital synths enthusiast, for this project Facundo wanted to move out of his comfort zone and compose the album purely using plugins and sequencing software on his iPad, running the songs directly onto tape, in this case his trusted 19…
Grapes from the estate
**2023 repress. In process of stocking* Black Truffle make Oren Ambarchi's Grapes From The Estate available once more on vinyl. Originally released on CD on Touch in 2004 (TO 061CD) and reissued on Southern Lord as a limited double-LP in 2006 during Ambarchi's tenure as a member of Sunn O))), Grapes From The Estate was a landmark release for Ambarchi, seeing him expand his sonic palette beyond the clipped, bass-heavy electric guitar tones he was known for at that point. Incorporating subtle laye…
Ecological Plantron
"Ecological Plantron" was a CD released in 1994, the audio document of an installation held in 1994 at a gallery in Tokyo. The Plantron is a bioelectric interface developed by botanist Yuji Dogane; it was designed to give voice to plants, using electronic means to make audible the energy of the natural world, prioritizing the non-human aspects of nature. Dogane was assisted in the project by composer Mamoru Fujieda, who helped to convert the vegetal energies into audible sounds. Though they stre…
Neighborhoods
2022 Repress expected to ship early November - Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score …
Stikhiya
*2022 stock. Limited edition of 100 copies.* “Having realised the errors in rational knowledge I found it easier to free myself from the temptation of futile theorizing” Leo Tolstoy (1880) I understand this phrase as an expression of Stikhiya, the word used by Russian poet Aleksandr Blok in early 20th century to describe the fundamental value of primitive immediacy. Contradictory to intellectualism and rationality, Stikhiya is emerging from organic holistic experiences, it is perceived as an unf…
Moonbuilding Summer Special
Colin Morrison's Castles In Space label has launched a new publishing venture in the shape of Moonbuilding mag. The A5, 48-page full-colour title is fronted by former Electronic Sound commissioning editor Neil Mason and comes with a 13-track sampler CD featuring previews from forthcoming CiS releases and a number of exclusive tracks. While Moonbuilding is a Castles In Space publication, it also covers a raft of like-minded DIY labels and artists. The debut issue stars I Monster/The Sound Of Scie…
The Flower, The Bird, And The Mountain
During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,…
Trace: Sound Design Works 1986-1989
Never released until today! A collection of 11 unreleased tracks produced during the Sound Process Design sessions, right after the release of his classic album Nova.
Sound Process Design was Satoshi Ashikawa's company, home of his Wave Notation trilogy (Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music For Nine Postcards, Satsuki Shibano's Erik Satie 1866-1925 and Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way).
Morning Brings The Light
This album is about the micro world of a garden in a small coastal town. For two weeks either side of the 2021 summer solstice Kieran Mahon routinely made field recordings of his garden from pre-dawn until the first stirrings of people beginning their days. “After ending up with hours of recordings”, Kieran explains, “I then spent a long period listening and immersing myself in the environment - the ebb and flow, the subtle changes in atmosphere, the conversations between birds and insects, the …
Sounds From Phantom Islands
** 2021 Repress ** Faitiche presents a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas.With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A master…
Electro-Symphonic Landscapes
**2020 stock** This 1979 album, by the husband and wife composing-performing electronic music duo of Priscilla and Barton McLean, showcases two pieces, “Invisible Chariots” by Priscilla and “Song of the Nahuatl” by Barton. Begun in 1975 and completed in 1977, “Invisible Chariots” is a three-movement piece, named after a Carl Sandburg poem, about the “intuitive creative force” that shapes composition. Composed in 1976, “Song of the Nahuatl” was underwritten by a grant from the National Endowment …
The World Music Theatre of Jon Appleton
**2020 stock** This 1974 recording by electro-acoustic music composer Jon Appleton is designed to take the listener to different musical landscapes. Appleton notes differences in context that will make the music more and less effective (“not everything I intended will be heard by the listener because no two listeners share the same aural experiences…because we are continually expanding our aural vocabulary, the sounds used assume a different significance as time passes”). Liner notes contain a b…
Visions - Music for Orchestra, 2 Pianos and Computer-Generated Tape
**2020 stock** This 1979 record is a five-movement composition for large chamber orchestra by David Cope. First presented by the Santa Cruz Chamber Symphony in 1978, the work attempts to demonstrate the relationships between sound and physical space and to translate them to recorded sound as well as performance. The tapes in the piece were composed at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and were “spliced” digitally rather than physically. Liner notes contain drawings of the way that Co…
Navajo Dedications
**2020 stock** This 1976 Folkways release by David Cope presents modern music based on Cope’s intensive research into—and respect for—Navajo ceremonies, and Navajo music in particular. Ranging from pieces for large chamber ensemble to a work scored for a single performer, the four compositions are unique interpretations of Native American Indian myths and culture. The liner notes include detailed explanations of the inspiration, organization, and arrangement of each of these complex works.
This …
Digital Soundology #1 Volk von Bauhaus
Official reissue of Takashi Kokubo essential ambient/minimal/environmental album: "A musical expressions that shatters the old values". Originally released on King Records in 1985, composed and written by Takashi Kokubo. Includes liner notes of an interview made with the artist. Remastered by Music Matters Mastering from source material. Pressed by Pallas.Takashi Kokubo makes archetypal Japanese ambient, new age and experimental synth sounds. But not only that, he also created the nationally-use…
Ocean Front Property
**CD in gatefold carboard wallet, 300 copies. To be released in mid July 2020.** Ocean Front Property represents a desired experience juxtaposed with a banal reality. The work investigates the idea of longing to be somewhere else, a mirage of aspired imagery and sound, made within the landlocked province of Alberta, where the nearest ocean is over 1000 kilometres away. The objects, spaces and sounds act as metaphors, part of a concrete existence they reside in, but contrasted with the imagined e…
Teredo Navalis
**in process of stocking** "This work represents a further step into my on-going research on the Venetian Lagoon. I was interested to keep an ecological perspective while focussing on a precise aesthetic. In fact, I considered field-recording practice as a tool for critically investigating the territory. The album is based on sounds recorded via electromagnetic sensors, binaural microphones, hydrophones, contact and condenser microphones. It combines compositions where the sound of water, in its…
Four Letters - Life
Tiheäsalo & Ahti are Topias Tiheäsalo and Niko-Matti Ahti from Turku, Finland. Four Letters – Life was first released by Glistening Examples in the US and is now being released as a CD in Europe by Passing Tone.Four Letters – Life touches on the very basic issues of human condition, life and death, and the preparedness for something that is impossible to be prepared for. The work could be described as a fragmentary and associative piece of sound art more coherent than the sum of its parts. It to…
Nostalgia Por Mesozóica
Tip! File next to Andrew Pekler's Tristes Tropiques, highly recommended. **100 copies** "After four years of silence that have elapsed since the release of Ode To The Sea LP back in 2016, Muscut is bringing out Nikolaienko’s next collaboration, a duo with Arthur Mine, a Kyiv-based keyboard maestro and an ex-member of the Blacklazer band.Nostalgia Por Mesozóica is an exploration of "experimental exotica" consisted of synthesized tropical attributes — an artificial landscape isolated behind the g…
Oto No Wa: Selected Sounds of Japan 1988-2018
"For the fifth entry in our Collector’s Series we enlist the skills of Japan-based musical connoisseurs, Ken Hidaka, Max Essa, and Dr. Rob. Their compilation Oto No Wa sets out to map the evolution of chilled Japanese sounds across 3 decades. Collecting 14 tracks, produced by a wide range of artists. From ambient pioneers to dance-floor veterans. Roping in 9-piece reggae band, Little Tempo, percussionist Kotani Kazuya, and organic, psychedelic collective, Olololop.Beginning in the late 1980s, th…