Diving into the archives of Alter Ego -‐ the Italian experimental ensemble of Manuel Zurria, Paolo Ravaglia, Aldo Campagnari, Francesco Dillon, Oscar Pizzo, and Eugenio Vatta -‐ Die Schachtel present Microwaves, a never before released body of recordings of works composed by Atli Ingólfsson, Giovanni Verrando, Yan Maresz, and Riccardo Nova, made with Pan Sonic (Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen) in 2005. Resting at the outer reaches of avant‐garde chamber and electronic music, the LP's blistering structures, tones, and textures ‐- plowing forward with frenetic energy ‐- remain radical and ahead of their time, more than 15 years after they were first laid to tape. A modular chamber ensemble with a pointedly antiacademic approach to music, over the course of its activities -‐ running roughly between 1990 and 2010 -‐ Alter Ego developed a devoted following among some of the most forward-thinking voices in experimental music. Alter Ego's diverse activities can be understood as interventions with the disposition toward formality within contemporary chamber music, often pairing themselves with artists working well beyond their own context as a means to develop highly original interpretations of a specific composer's work. In 2004, this process led them to instigate a collaboration Pan Sonic, the Finnish duo of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen, pioneers of a remarkably distinct form of rhythmic, experimental electronic music, and regarded by many as one of the most visionary and irreverent projects working in the field during the '90s and 2000s. Initially conceived with Fausto Romitelli in 2004 before being sidelined by the composer's untimely passing the following year, Microwaves acts, in part, a remembrance in sound, featuring four works by some of his closest friends, the composers Atli Ingólfsson, Giovanni Verrando, Yan Maresz, and Riccardo Nova. Each composition, Ingólfsson's "Snap", Verrando's "Harmonic Domains #3", Maresz's "Link", and Nova's "Thirteen13x8@Terror Generating Deity", have roots in a pallet of samples and fragments drawn by each composer from existing works by Pan Sonic. Upon completion, these compositions then entered into a collaborative process between Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen (Pan Sonic) and Alter Ego (Manuel Zurria, Paolo Ravaglia, Aldo Campagnari, Francesco Dillon, Oscar Pizzo, and Eugenio Vatta), and were performed collectively by both groups during an extensive tour that year. Distinct and free‐standing, while operating as a seamless whole, the four works encountered across the album's two sides ‐- built from the sounds of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, electronics, and further treatments -‐ present an engrossing intersection between electronic and acoustic sound that diverges from most standing conceptions of electroacoustic music. Edition of 350.