Elektra Bidasoa
** Edition of 200 ** A collaborative project between two seasoned sound artists dedicated to a profound listening of sonic phenomena. Created with original recordings from power plants along the Bidasoa river in the Basque Country, Erkizia and López have built vivid, straighforward and transformed sound environments from a myriad hums, rattles, crackles, and drones from the wide variety of machinery and industrial electrical facilities inside the power plants. A macro and microscopic journey int…
Songbirdsongs
Songbirdsongs is among John Luther Adams’ seminal works. This is the first time the cycle appears on CD. Although music has been written involving the sounds of birds for centuries, no composer has ever approached the concept in this way. Based on Adams’ observations and studies of actual bird songs, he scored them for various ensembles of piccolos, ocarinas, flutes and percussion. Rather than having a fixed score, each piece consists of a collection of unordered phrases for each instrument. T…
Strange and Sacred Noise
** 2021 Stock ** John Luther Adams is an Alaskan composer. For Adams, Alaska is not a catalogue of ideas and sounds, instead, Alaska is a provocation. For all of its enormity, Alaska leans inward towards essential qualities and purified forces, and in Adams’ music we find this same sense of space and the same tendency inward towards the purified. His is an intimate and focused music that reverberates in a large place. Strange and Sacred Noise is a monumental work for percussion quartet in 9 move…
Neutral Love
** First pressing of 200 cassettes on Red Tint shells ** Amirtha Kidambi and Matteo Liberatore’s duo of voice and guitar creates improvised aural landscapes that are glacial and highly evocative, unfurling through dynamic gestures that are at once spacious and restrained. Juxtaposed against the frenetic pace characteristic of the New York improv scene, the pair applies the compositional aesthetics of Morton Feldman or Pauline Oliveros to a free environment. The project is set apart from Kidambi…
Grounded
** First pressing of 200 ** Astral Spirits presents Grounded by Aaron Novik. This album was made with the acoustic sounds of the clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet with minimal effects. It was recorded during lockdown in Elmhurst Queens, NY, April-May 2020. Mixed by Eli Crews at Spillway. Mastered by Jon Cohrs at Bear Call. Cover Art by Ariadna Garza.
On No On
A CD of duo improvisations by two of Montreal’s great improvisors: bass clarinettist Lori Freedman and drummer/percussionist John Heward. The two have performed together in various ensembles over the years. Both have produced significant discographies. These unedited studio improvisations were recorded in Montreal in 2011. It is the third set of duos featuring John Heward on Mode/Avant. Cover art by John Heward. Liner note by Eric Lewis. Photos by Sylvia Safdie.Lori Freedman, b-flat & bass-clari…
Kambium
** "Mini-LP" style sleeve with spine. Printed outer and inner sleeves with high gloss varnish. Glass-mastered CD. Fold-out 4p insert ** Piętnastka is back. The duo project of Piotr Kurek and Hubert Zemler returns with a fantastical album titled Kambium, released almost precisely a decade after the debut Dalia. Seamlessly fusing eerie organs, haunting reverbs, clanging percussion and a handful of other instruments, the album's seven tracks radiate something oddly mythical yet futuristic. Just lik…
Stories of the Dotted Indian Whale
** 3 tapes shrink-wrap together with all three parts of Stories of the Indian Dotted Whale ** Three part journey into an imaginary Indian Sub-Continent from three artists working on the fringes of Field recordings. Stories of the Dotted Indian Whale features italian artist Giovanni Lami, Hannibal Chew III aka Gonçalo F Cardoso and Argentinean noise prankster Bardo Todol. First part from Giovanni Lami is entitled Soap Wolf introducing a collection of ghost recordings from several places in India.…
Antiphonals
Canadian-in-LA electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi has rediscovered her muse since releasing work on her own label, Late Music. Having explored hitherto unheard realms of enchanting melodic organ and electronics drones on her 2020 album Cactus, Descant, Antiphonals further explores these ideas using a sound palette of Mellotron, electric organ, piano, and synthesizer. Referring to church music sung or recited alternately by two groups in its title — Antiphonal is a studied solo affair in whi…
Concrete Feather
David Lynch protégé and Twin Peaks sound designer Dean Hurley coaxes an incredible puzzlebox of atmospheres and mood pieces on this killer contribution to our Documenting Sound series, now remastered and pressed on vinyl for what is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most cinematic and neon-lit instalment in the series. Like a smudged and overdubbed copy of the BoC Maxima tape, with added iridescence.
Fahon
**Edition of 80** New live recordings, oriented with only two instruments, viola and frame drums. The album was recorded during a period of many live sessions between 2019 and 2020 with just a Rode nt4 stereo microphone and one of the very first Sony mz md. The sessions were amplified. Frédéric Charlot - Viola. Olivier Charlot - Frame drums.
Schism
** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…
A More Attractive Way
** Edition of 500 + 20 pages booklet ** A More Attractive Way is a comprehensive study of live performances made by IST between 1996 and 2000. This set begins at the very outset of the group's career and features their debut concert at Club Orange in London and charts its way through further gigs in London, Billericay, Norwich and Cambridge. “A completely different intensity, but an intensity nonetheless,” Jo Fell reflects in notes accompanying A More Attractive Way. Her husband Simon, to whose …
Sale Quanto Basta
Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…
Animast
** Edition of 200 ** Ferns Recordings proudly presents Animast by Francisco López. Few albums would be as fitted for vinyl release as this one. Drawing on both analog-material and digital-immaterial undisclosed sources, “Animast” plays with the sonic textures and responses most suited for the characteristics of this particular analog medium: noisy crispness, compositional ‘loopiness’, contrasting sharp-and-thick textures and cycling dynamics. A must for experimental heads and adventurous DJs ali…
Drumming in the Dark
Neuma presents Drumming in the Dark by Steven Schick. Engineer, Josef Kucera. Production assistance: Roger Reynolds and Terry Longshore. "In 1938 when John Cage formulated his famous dictum, "Percussion is revolution," I doubt that he had my mother in mind..." - Steven Schick
Pocket Music
James Caldwell’s creative life is the embodiment of the principle, Start at Home. In his case that is not only Macomb, Illinois, but even more precisely, in his pockets. Whereas some might consider music to be a soundtrack to their lives, an add-on, Caldwell reaches deep into the spaces around him for sonic potential and helps it emerge. For more than twenty years I have pursued a sporadic project of making small musique concrète pieces. The original set used sounds I made with things I found in…
Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire
Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…