La Ola Interior - Spanish Ambient & Acid Exoticism 1983-1990
Following “La Contra Ola” (BJR015), Bongo Joe is pleased to present La Ola Interior, a compilation exploring the ambient side of the Spanish electronic music produced in the 80’s. It gathers musicians from various horizons and of many generations, who shared the desire to create an immersive soundscape and to combine electronic music with non-Western musical traditions. As a general rule, the Anglo-Saxon tropism did relate the spanish peninsula’s ambient music to the Balearic Sound, that is to s…
Heisei No Oto - Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age 1989-1996
Music From Memory are excited to announce a special compilation that they’ve been working on for some time now; MFM053 – VA – Heisei No Oto – Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age (1989-1996). Compiled by long-time friends of the label, Eiji Taniguchi and Norio Sato, Heisei No Oto delves into a world of music released almost exclusively on CD and brings together a fascinating selection of discoveries from a little known and overlooked part of Japan’s musical history. The last ten or so years h…
Porphyr
** Edition of 200 ** A-Musik is delighted to present Titanoboa's debut album as the first a-Musik release of 2021. "Porphyr" contains eight tracks of delicate Electroacoustic Noire and contemporary Post-Industrial chamber music that were produced in her Cologne based studio. Being equally into rumbling noise, experimental turntablism, angelic singing, organ improvisation and a lot of studio wizardry, these recordings somehow remind of a combination of Pharmakon's raw power, Maximim Bérangère's l…
Narcotic
Narcotic is perhaps one example of an album in both camps of the Muslimgauze spectrum, it denotes the expertise acquired in oriental percussion by Bryn Jones after a crescent development and practice through action, part Tribal, part Ambient with shades of texturized noise, glitch details and field recordings, as result the listener is inside this intoxicant atmosphere of exotic madness, where the basic musical premise constituted by the consistent tribal beats from darbukas and tambourines cont…
Jours de grève
Imagine Prometheus, the thief of fire, the father of civilization, had been spellbound by the sirens chanting and never felt pain, when the eagle bit his liver. Total enchantment, created by sound to overcome the pain of existence. A sound, styled by the ideal harmony of body and soul. And yet, the pain is still there, hidden between the notes, driving a romantic vision of salvation.
If Prometheus could have translated his fictitious epiphany into singing, it might sound like Ghédalia Tazartès’s…
Love's Secret Domain
In 1991 Coil released the third of their early classic full-length albums "Love's Secret Domain", seemingly casting aside the gloom and funereal beauty of its predecessors in favour of a painstakingly multi-layered hallucinogenic electronic beast, which unlike some of their fellow ex-industrial contemporaries' releases of the time wasn't an attempt at easy accessibility or (the-gods-forbid) danceability, but a vibrating psychedelic masterpiece unrivalled in their discography and still a landmark…
Some Deaths Take Forever
2LP + insert. First time vinyl reissue since the original 1980 version. Original remastered album plus second LP with unreleased extra tracks from 'Some Deaths Take Forever' recording sessions. Originally released on Pathé in 1980, the influence and the impact of Some Deaths Take Forever is still vibrating: Carl Craig mentioned it as his all time favorite album in Future Mag, the signature sound of Oneohtrix Point Never feels almost like a not so hidden tribute and the killer sci fi electronics …
Plus
The nine-track Plus comes just 12 days after Sean Booth and Rob Brown released Sign, their first "traditional"-format album since 2013's Exai. This is the second of two new albums that Autechre teased in their lockdown live-stream sessions on Mixlr earlier this year, in addition to their latest batch of live recordings. You might call Sign Autechre's ambient album. The percussive sounds are few and far between, and they create rhythms that are even less legible than the norm for recent Autechre—…
Beside Herself
Michele Mercure often dreams of music, and in her waking life, reclaims
fragments of these fleeting, floating melodies in her compositions and
sound art. Beside Herself, an anthology of Mercure’s self-produced and
distributed cassettes released between 1983 and 1990, collects these
dreamlike passages and lo-fi nocturnes, preserving the qualities of
discovery and intimacy surrounding their genesis. Mercure’s sound is a porous electronic art that overlaps ambient,
abstract, and industrial se…
UkabazUmorezU
"Sugai Ken follows in the vein of RVNG Intl’s Visible Cloaks release with an exquisite meditation on traditional Japanese percussion and 4th world electronics ruptured by unpredictable runs into more abstract terrain.UkabazUmorezU works like a stage set or a variegated series of sonic scenarios, at once smartly demonstrating his compositional versatility as well as a dilated vision of the connections between Japanese tradition and western-rooted electro-acoustic practice. In a way it resonates w…
Hazel
Cosmic yet intimate, long-gestating and free-flowing, diffuse and centered, Dukes turned toward their immediate sanctum, and a network of friends and colleagues, to realize the vision of Hazel. “Pretty much everything we do is without purpose,” the Dukes admit, in line with their pursuit of joy. But it’s not empty hedonism or passivity at play on Hazel, so much as an expression of freedom. “Why not?” was scribbled on the white frame of the Polaroid documenting their first appearance on Tim Sween…
Initiation
Japanese industrial-experimental-synth outfit formed by Tommi Tokyo (synths, drum machines, vocals) and Sayaka Botanic (violin, sampler, tapes). They create a unique mixture of dark minimal synth and avant-noise with striking visuals and stage performances. Group A carries on the very breath of early pioneers such as Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and the Japanese underground scene from the early '80s. This is the vinyl edition of group A's second self-produced album released in October 20…
Affirm, Deny, Reconcile
Pulsating reconstructions of fragmented piano compositions, melded with gritty peripheral field recordings. Transcending from flashbacks, lingering between natural and industrial landscapes. Broken left-field electronica by Maxim Wolzyn for the third Marionette issue.
"...Wolyzn’s work exhibits a decentered and unplaceable aesthetic that sounds very much at home with the cosmopolitanism that Marionette has established." - Inverted Audio
"Imagine Nils Frahm going head-to-head with Plaid and Echos…
Cogitate
Cogitate is the first release from NYC local Promoter and an invitation to gaze inward and sit with sound. Borne of hours lost in loops, Promoter calls forth deep, dubby bass rumble, off-kilter rhythms and murky atmospherics, relishing in repetition and evolving subliminally but surely. Disorienting, engaging and engulfing, Cogitate is the 4th release on NYC-based Patience, catching you off guard then inviting you in.
Cogitate offers two cuts from the same cloth - one locked into the grid, the o…
Magari
* Edition of 300 * Master synthesists Colin Potter (NWW), Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving), and Guido Zen reprise their supergroup for Ecstatic with a seductively serpentine follow-up to their superb debut from a couple of years ago.
PNZ’s pulsing, twanging, expansive ‘Magari’ was recorded between 2018-2020 in the slipstream of ’Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out’, which is surely one of the strongest new kosmiche-related albums of recent years. Where that album refreshed classic styles of European syn…
Sign
‘Sign’ is Autechre’s first new album-album proper since ‘Elseq’ and contains some of their most emosh compositions in eons, perhaps since ‘Tri Repetae’. Practically pocket-sized in comparison to their sprawling torrent of live material and radio recordings in recent years, ’Sign’ is a return to the sort of concision found circa ‘Exai’ and their earlier albums. Effectively they’ve gotten better to grips with their live set-up, and the hyper ideas found in their work-in-progress demonstrations on …
Expedition Bahn
Welcome to the curious world of Peter Graf York: a world full of city centre safaris and epic train journeys, Soviet cosmonauts and Oakland rappers, filtered synths and plucked mbiras. It's a wild ride inspired as much by Jamaican dub sorcery as by playful minimalism outta the Pacific Northwest.
Many of these tracks were composed on the hoof - literally en route across sections of the ever-reliable Deutsche Bahn network. As such, there’s a certain travellin-without-moving dynamic across this col…
RVNG Intl. At 15: Selects / Dissects
There’s no real reason we decided to acknowledge RVNG’s fifteenth anniversary and not our fifth, or even our tenth. But here we are, a decade-and-a-half later and honestly, not so far removed from where we started. We’re still listening and learning, and we’re still loving every moment of the fabled label life.
In the spirit of our very first release, a mixtape from our old friend Julian S. Process (later of Pink Skull) complete with stenciled, spray-painted CD cover, we invited a new(er) frien…
Gateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal and Other Sounds
**2020 stock** Ann McMillan did not record prolifically, but she was at the vanguard of electronic composition in New York in the 1970s. A student of groundbreaking composer Edgard Varèse, McMillan’s primary medium was magnetic tape, which she manipulated to create surreal soundscapes. On Gateway Summer Sounds, her debut album released on Folkways in 1979 and recorded at the legendary Princeton-Columbia Electronic Music Center, she sources sounds from the natural world – frogs, insects, field re…
Sadaam's Children
Long-time Muslimgauze fans with keen eyes and/or photographic memories may immediately notice something about the newly unearthed Sadaams Children album; with some slight orthographic differences, it just about shares a name with a short track from the classic Narcotic (Staalplaat, 1997; the similarity and the difference is pretty much expected from someone who both liked to reuse names and didn’t care for consistency in spelling as Bryn Jones did). While none of the four lengthy tracks found on…