Electronic Music 1960-1973
CD version. Bülent Arel's (1919-1990) work occupies a special place in the history of electronic music, with one thing being certain: Arel's work is still fresh, groundbreaking, and it always look outs for the next adventure in sound. Sub Rosa present a collection of his works here as part of their Early Electronic series. Bülent Arel was a Turkish-born American composer of electronic and contemporary classical music. He was also a devoted teacher, a sculptor, and a painter. From 1940 to 1947, A…
The Fall: Dennis Johnson's November Deconstructed
CD Verison. The Fall is a deconstruction of November by Dennis Johnson. Written for solo piano in 1959, November is the first example of minimalist music composition and was the inspiration for La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano (1964). The 66-minute piece is a collaboration between legendary artist Lustmord and renowned classical pianist Nicolas Horvath, in which they reduce Johnson's original November to its core element and place it in a landscape of complimentary sound. The Fall echoes No…
Remote Dreaming
Dark Entries summons Philadelphia synthesizer scribes The Ghostwriters to rouse their ambient masterwork Remote Dreaming. The late Buchla maestro Charles Cohen and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Cain joined up in 1971 to craft electroacoustic chaos as Anomali, later renaming themselves The Ghostwriters. Their collaborations with choreographers and visual media artists led to their singular style, straddling improvisation and composition, the oneiric and the immediate. Following their debut album, Ob…
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"Before starting this collaboration, Maurizio Bianchi and Daniele Veronese had been in contact for a long time, united by a bond of mutual appreciation. Daniele Veronese - a well-known musician in the electro-acoustic and electronic area - has been on the scene for a long time with various monikers (Tastiera, Outdoor Sex, Susje Ristch), and grew up listening to Maurizio Bianchi, Tasaday and the Italian industrial music of the 80s. Like many, he was fascinated by the aura of M.B., a reserved, elu…
आकाश (Äkäsh)
Chandra Shukla (Travelogue, Xambuca +++) has embarked on a debut solo release entitled Äkäsh, that merges his past North Indian classical music training on sitar with modular synthesis, midi control, studio effects and guitar embellishments. All of which can be heard on solo work under his name alone.
“You really get something completely unique and mesmerizingly beautiful. A masterpiece all in itself.” - Jan Willem
Unmapping The Distance Keeps Getting Closer
12k is very happy to help usher in the return of Ezekiel Honig, a New York City-based artist and founder of both the Anticipate Recordings and Microcosm labels, which have released music from Sawako, Nicola Ratti and Mark Templeton, among others, throughout the 2000s.
Honig returns with Unmapping the Distance Keeps Getting Closer, an album of very stark, and often dark and vulnerable music. Honig describes the work in the context of the feeling of listening while walking through the city, and th…
Deep Valley
Deep Valley is a new work by Australian artists Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Matt Rösner, composed and recorded during a week long residency at Bundanon Art Museum on the south coast of New South Wales. The Bundanon property was gifted to the Australian people by renowned artist, Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne in the 1990’s. In making this gift, the Boyd’s opened a creative place for artists to immerse themselves in a truly distinctive Australian landscape. The property sits on the banks on the…
Negative Space : Gradients
Originally conceived as a four-song experiment, “Negative Space: Gradients" marks a new chapter for Lehnen. Building on the lush synthesizer and ambient textures of its parent album, “Gradients" brings the ambient and electronic elements to the forefront, setting it apart from anything else in the band’s discography. While attentive listeners may recognize familiar melodies, tracks, or structures, many of the album's songs transform into something entirely new. Where “Negative Space" channels th…
Virtual Dreams II - Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999
The next installment of MFM's popular multi-artist compilation Virtual Dreams: 'Virtual Dreams - Ambient Explorations In The House And Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999'. As with Part One, released in 2020, 'Virtual Dreams II' shines a light on house and techno-adjacent music that helped redefine the definition of ambient music during the 1990s.
Plume
‘plume’ is the latest in a series of cassette releases Nate Scheible made following his acclaimed album ‘Fairfax’ (2017), following ‘indices’ on Never Anything Records (2019) and ‘prions and scrapie’ on Unifactor (2020). The sounds on ‘plume’ date back to around 2021 when Scheible received a small grant from Rhizome in Washington, DC to produce work for a new Community Supported Art initiative. His contribution to the program included recordings of over 100 miniature pieces which were distribute…
I Am The Dirt Under Your Fingernails
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* Since 1983, Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, Council Estate Electronics, The Sidewinder, etc.) has been producing largely solo, but sometimes collaborative, work under the Final moniker. Beginning as a more obviously power electronics-inspired project it has during the past two decades or so evolved into one which still retains that sonic intensity but has a more expansive sound. 'I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails' is the latest album, closely following 'I…
Multiple Musics
**500 copies** Previously unreleased live recording from the Ranta archives. The creative duo of Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi performed many times in the 1970’s and 1980’s. On this outstanding performance, recorded at the Japanese Culture Institute in Cologne in 1987, the application of an advanced multi delay system, independently utilized by both players, plays a central role. The smartly treated cyclic tapestry of the delay system (modulated, transformed, harmonized) injects additional d…
Ephimeral
SOFA is proud to have discovered a great jewel in Spanish music. The Madrid based soundartist and composer Miguel Angel Tolosa has during the last five years become a special member of the SOFA family, having contributed on several SOFA albums both as an artist and as a recording and mastering engineer. Now, on "Ephimeral" we hear him all alone. Tolosa says about his music that it's not meant to convey extramusical contents, such as philosophical or religious ideas, political propaganda or adver…
Angel Tears in Sunlight
Angel Tears in Sunlight is Pauline Anna Strom’s first album in over thirty years; an assemblage of music that refracts the expansiveness, and minutiae, of imagined realms while embracing the kaleidoscopic echoes of our distant epochs.
The capacity to collapse time might elucidate the enigma of Pauline Anna Strom. A mystic force in music, emerging during the dawn of new age as the Trans-Millenia Consort, the pioneering synthesist channelled primordial energies into future-facing sound through a s…
Jazz Plates
'Jazz Plates’ finds Ulla and Perila making music in the same room for the first time, exhaling an improvised ambient-jazz air gently crackling with a dream-textured haze for the ages. It’s remarkably intimate material, linking the duo’s own hypnagogic portrait of jazz, in all its most hushed permutations. ‘Jazz Plates’ catches the mutual spirits measuredly channelling their shared love of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders over three sessions, making use of voice, clarinet, guitar, piano, vocals…
Atlas of Green
Ever-evolving the mythologies and magic of Dialect’s sonic sphere, Andrew PM Hunt returns with Atlas of Green, elegantly molding unexacting details of memory and mistranslation into the framework of the British musician and composer’s creative pursuit. The album imagines a young musician named Green working in a future dawning era where lost signals and enduring impulses are unearthed from the sediments of technology and time. Across twelve compositions, which embrace encounters with the malfunc…
A Colour For Autumn
"Somehow, 15 years has passed since I worked on A Colour For Autumn. This recording was, in many ways, a critical one for me. In some respects, it rounded out a period of work that was focused on a particular marriage of thematics and harmony. Like For Varying Degrees Of Winter, it dwelled on old world impressions of the seasons, something that, in the southern hemisphere, isn’t intrinsically part of our way of approaching place. I think it was this incongruity with my own lived experience that …
home recordings 2018 - 2021 / synth waltzes & accordion laments (remastered)
Big tip!
Home Recordings (2018-2021) “Who is Yara Asmar and how does she make music so strangely beautiful? The 25-year-old instrumentalist-puppeteer lives in Beirut with her cat, Mushroom, and presumably that’s the feline’s shadow next to the artist’s on the album’s back cover. The warm light of that photograph and the quiet beach scene of an abandoned lifeguard’s station and an empty net tells you all you need to know. Home Recordings 2018-2021 is an assured debut album that builds an eerie te…
Blickwinkel
Tip! LP version. After dipping into the archive to deliver a series of essential reissues, Bureau B continue to encourage the chaotic brilliance of Faust with an LP of brand-new music curated by originator Zappi Diermaier and a band of musical friends, including fellow founder Gunther Wüsthoff. Over the years Faust has become many things, each as separate as the fingers, but as together as the hand which makes up their eponymous fist. From 1971 to 1974 the Hamburg band blazed a bold sonic trail,…
Enmixed
*50 copies limited edition* Moody cacophonies, sonic dispatches from Japan, crystalline breakbeats that are more environment than rhythm: Jake Muir’s enmixed, described by Muir as a “(re)mixtape,” is a mind-bending deep dive into the enmossed archive. Besides reflecting the history of the label, Muir’s mix is a production in its own right. A Los Angeles native based in Berlin, Muir is a DJ and field recordist who “sees mixes as a vehicle to explore narratives outside of the album format.”
In Bat…