Sleep Like It's Winter
Jim O’Rourke returns with his first physical solo album since 2015’s Simple Songs, following a relatively steady supply of download-only releases via his Steamroom Bandcamp (over 20 of them since 2015) and collaborations with John Duncan, Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi, Peter Brötzmann, Merzbow, Fennesz and others in the interim. Anyone familiar with his exceptional Steamroom output will have an inkling of what to expect here; this is Jim O’Rourke at his most meditative, absorbing and quietly subver…
Immersions
Rod Modell returns as Deepchord for his first solo release on Astral Industries since inaugurating the label with his sought-after ‘Lanterns’ EP. Consisting of two stunning long-form pieces split on one side each, 'Immersions' captures the emotive, halcyon sound that Rod has long become synonymous with. Opening with glistening ambient textures, ‘Immersion I’ grows into an 18-minute piece of deep rolling dub techno. On the other side ‘Immersion II’ paints pristine soundscapes of soft, lapping wav…
Radiance
**few copies back in stock, very last around** It hardly needs to be said that the context of experimental music is defined by incredibly ambitious efforts. But there’s ambitious, and then there’s ambitious. The German composer and musician, Stephan Mathieu, might have taken the cake. Back in 2016, he began issuing his sprawling Radiance project, the culmination of a decade of work, in the end amounting to twelve thematically linked album length pieces, built around the concepts of stasis, unfol…
Kantamoinen
Kantamoinen is perhaps the most intimately beautiful yet little known LP in MIka Vainio's Ø canon, bridging the gap between his classic ‘90s minimal techno productions - compiled in the vital Metri and Olento collections - and the project’s subsequent turn to more ambient, kosmic and dub wise dimensions in the coolly brilliant Oleva and Konstellaatio albums.
Upon original release it was an immediate favourite of ours - a go-to disc for hazy daydreaming and post-club head salvage alike, dr…
In Praise of Shadows
Sublime immersive session for computer generated sound, guitar and electronics from Yuen Chee Wai and Lasse Marhaug. In collaboration, they find a deeply immersive equilibrium where their tempered, haptic gestures give rise to a play of shimmering tones in negative space recalling the soundtrack to some black light theatre piece or Far Eastern classical.Yuen Chee Wai is a musician, artist, designer and curator based in Singapore. Often inspired by ideas drawn from philosophical and literary te…
Terroir (miniCd)
All source material recorded in Krems, Langenlois, Kalvarienberg at Schönberg am Kamp at, April - September 2016. Recordings made of the terroir, harvest and fermentation during vinification. Original four channel version presented at the opening of Drahtsicht, an outdoor sculpture by Günter Wolfsberger, 9 October 2016. BJ Nilsen Is a sound and recording artist. His work is based on the sound of nature and its effect on humans. He primarily uses fieldrecordings and electronic composition as a wo…
Nature Always Needs Improving
**Last copies. Limited to 100 copies only** Ned Milligan now presents his new album, Nature Always Needs Improving, building on the momentum generated by his admired third LP, Continental Burns. Echoing that album’s mode and structure, Nature Always Needs Improving offers a handful of tender, minimalist pieces before giving way to a spectral side-length conclusion. The deep intimacy of the album is enhanced by its process—primarily recorded outdoors on porches or in yards—and by the unpredictabl…
The Future is a Forward Escape into the Past
The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is the latest album by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak, and his second for Touch. It considers the relationships between memory, time, and context through four vibrantly constructed tracks that push Novak's work in a new direction while simultaneously exploring his sonic past. The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is composed as a sonata -- a single gesture broken into four parts -- that meditates on the…
Meditative Music
Pulse Emitter’s Meditative Music series captures an artist’s dedication to evolution through years of traversing a myriad of textural and contemplative terrains. Active in the ambient, drone, and noise scenes of Portland, OR since the early 2000s, Pulse Emitter (the project of Daryl Groetsch) has grown fathoms since the project’s inception, from Groetsch’s humble homemade synthesizer, to his embrace of the worlds of possibility digital instruments and processing could unfold. Originally s…
The Nazgul
Lost-in-time kosmische/kraut/avant-garde artifact produced by Toby Robinson, aka The Mad Twiddler, circa 1975 for his private Pyramid label. From the moment they emerged during the mid 90’s, mystery has swirled around Psi-Fi’s six Krautrock gems. Each, the label claimed, had been recorded for the long lost Pyramid label, based in Cologne during the 1970’s. Embraced and loved by many, others cried hoax. Some ventured further, implicating the perpetrator - the voice behind this assembly of drifti…
Still Life - Requiem
Conceptualized (2010-2013), composed and produced (2014-2017) by Carl Michael von Hausswolff in Palma (Majorca) and Stockholm. Still Life - Requiem is a musical piece consists only of sounds emitted and extracted from physical matter using emission spectroscopy as the sole basic technology. Acknowledgements to Linköping University (IFM), Sweden. Still Life - Requiem consists of one piece with the same title and is divided up into two to fit the LP format. The piece is, as the title suggests,…
Musikaliszer Pinkos
This music was inspired by “Musikaliszer Pinkos” – a collection of more than two hundred Hebrew religious hymns and Chassidic songs compiled and published by Abraham Berenstein in the year 1927 in Wilna (nowadays Vilnius). The selection of songs from “Musikaliszer Pinkos” was used by Arturas Bumšteinas as a source of fragmentary pitch material and re-interpreted in a new context of electronic sound and cut-up composition. All music was recorded with the use of Soviet-era Russian synthesiz…
Saturday’s Notes
The debut LP by Chicago-based artist Guido Gamboa, Saturday’s Notes is a multi-faceted collection of sonic studies born from a day of studious and diaristic note-taking. The music flows in idiosyncratic segments taking on a form akin to an artist’s sketchbook, constantly crossing and challenging the line between the aesthetically curious and the personally candid. Various influences are apparent as the listener is weaved in and out of hollowed concrète construction zones, beds of frayed a…
Film Works
As part of the 2016 festival Night of the Experimental Film, French duo Opéra Mort (= Èlg + Fusiller) performed a live soundtrack for two films that centre on the paradoxical symbiosis of love and death: The Potted Psalm by Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, and Dream Work by Peter Tscherkassky. Both films convey love and death as both direct opposites and kindred concepts, turning to cryptic surrealism, poetic hallucinations and flickering alternations between flesh and ecstatic abstraction. …
First
Following numerous small run releases and years of private development First is the debut CD release by Benjamin Nelson. Recorded and mixed in the summer and fall of 2015 in Oslo First represents the culmination of Nelson's live and studio practice since 2008 focused on long form, reductionistic, and near-static electronic music. First explores the perception of time, interference patterns, room reflection and hearing fatigue as primary compositional elements. Favoring textural over tonal …
Hotel Record
For many, the geography defying partnership of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi is the likely source of envy and awe - a creatively rigorous adventure in sound, egged forward by the romance they share. Ambarchi needs little introduction. Over the last 20 years, he has risen as a leading light of experimental and electroacoustic practice, as recognised for his collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Sunn O))), Keith Rowe, Fire!, John Tilbury and countless others, as he is for his solo work.…
Several Circles
LP version. Richard Scott’s ‘Several Circles’ is a seamless blend of improvised performances and forensically detailed electronic music that bristles, writhes and grows like some mutated living organism. Recorded between 2013 and 2015 in both Manchester and Berlin, this vital new album is a combination of instant, improvised performances and highly structured acousmatic compositions that have been, in Richard’s own words, “microscopically edited, constructed, layered and mixed over many hours in…
Traced
Hugely impressive second album from Jasmine Guffond landing again via the collectable Sonic Pieces imprint and sounding something like a much more disturbed Holly Herndon or this years mind-altering new album from Felicia Atkinson. It’s a compellingly immersive study of digital surveillance technologies and the way they, along with myriad other machines, impinge upon and frame our waking life.
In Traced, Guffond takes the textural and spatially sensitive ambient aesthetics of her previous L…
Reconstructing Debussy
Double LP version. Includes download code. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was one of the most popular and forward-thinking composers associated with impressionist music. His innovative and at this time new way to compose music with non-traditional scales and chromaticism inspired countless artists from the likes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock. Remarkable attributes of his music include the usage of parallel chords, bitonality, and the many compositions using whole…
Eine Menge Papier
“Eine Menge Papier” assembles 20 minutes of sounds derived from using paper as the sound souce. Two tracks originally came out as a limited 7” record on the austrian Syntactic label in the 1990ies and appear here for the first time on CD. The other two tracks were planned for a follow up 7” on the same label that never materialized. The fifth track is a study of sonic material in the same series. There are two further tracks from the P.I.G. series that are considered by the artists as failed att…