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Search Result for Genre EXPERIMENTAL
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LP
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WHYT 087LP
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$29.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/31/2025
Wojciech Rusin presents Honey for the Ants via AD 93. Honey for the Ants completes an "alchemical trilogy," after The Funnel and Syphon. These albums are informed by mystical and gnostic texts, celebrating the weird, unhinged and occasionally beautiful. In this album the tonalities have shifted from mediaeval and renaissance to modernist dissonances. New singers and instrumentalists contribute to an emotional and textural richness achieved in a collaborative process. Distant musical periods, real and fictitious, are nonchalantly interwoven to create a delirious mongrel that salutes the imagination. Wojciech Rusin is a Polish-born audio-visual artist based in London. He draws inspiration from alchemical and gnostic texts, early renaissance choral music and Eastern European mythologies. He released Syphon LP on AD 93 in 2022 and The Funnel LP on Akashic Records in April 2019. He designs and makes 3D-printed reed instruments, reworking ancient designs with contemporary 3D modelling technologies. In 2020 he released Meat for the Guard Dogs on Cafe OTO's Takuroku digital imprint, and the Rufus Orbis cassette for Boomkat Editions/Documenting Sound series. His music has been featured on BBC Four and he has worked for The National Theatre and The Southbank Centre.
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ZEIT 018LP
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$29.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/24/2025
Furthering the passionate exploration of cinema that has guided her two previous LPs -- 2017's Fassbinder Wunderkammer and 2020's I Should Have Been a Gardener -- the Milanese guitarist/composer, Alessandra Novaga, returns to Die Schachtel with The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle, two sides of shimmering, tense compositions freely inspired by the life and work of the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Classically trained at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland, over the last decade Alessandra Novaga has emerged as one of the leading figures within northern Italy's thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar embarks upon a relentless deconstruction and rethinking of her instrument's unique properties through distinct applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone, creating in a deeply personal and emotive music, seeking narrative and meaning within the abstractions of sound. The seeds of The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle can be traced to a conversation that Novaga had with Alan Licht relating to the connections between music and cinema, which led her to consider Andrej Tarkovsky's use of Bach's music within a symbiotic framework: how the music illuminates the imagism of the films, and the film illuminates new dimensions of the music. Slowly developing over the subsequent years, the resulting album comprises six individual works, some of which draw directly upon pieces of Bach's music that Tarkovsky used in his films -- specifically "Erbarme dich, Mein Gott," "Das alte Jahr vergangen ist," and "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ" -- while others draw upon the sensibilities and moods evoked in the imagination by the director's films. Encountering Novaga moving into fairly uncharted waters, three of the album's pieces incorporate the human voice, including that of the poet Arsenij Tarkovsky, the director's father. Roughly alternating between solo excursions on guitar and bristling electroacoustic pieces, over the course of the album's two sides Novaga weaves one of her most abstract and ambitious bodies of recordings to date, shifting between the complex tonal mediations generated by the six strings of her instrument, and phycological densities activated by the expanded pallet of sonority made possible by the tactics and approaches of musique concrète. The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle is available on as a limited edition of 300 dark turquoise vinyl LPs. The LP, designed by Bruno Stucchi/dinamomilano, comes with an eight-page insert illuminated by Alessandra's text as well as the lovely and intense photographs of Matilde Piazzi.
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FANTOM 005LP
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$33.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/24/2025
Dischi Fantom's Sussurra Luce series, blurring the boundaries between text, music and voice, returns with its fifth instalment, an expanded version of Hanne Lippard's Talk Shop. Sculpting a fascinating bridge between radically experimental sound practice, conceptual art, and sound poetry, across its two sides the Berlin based multidisciplinary artist taps an almost dada sensibility, delivering a suite of poems and texts where singular words and sentences are looped and repeated creating a sensory experience of the efficiency and stress found in private as well as public life. An extension of the Milan based cultural platform Fantom's broad and diverse activities (exhibitions, installations, performances, etc.) across numerous artistic disciplines, the Sussurra Luce series, curated by Francesco Cavaliere and Massimo Torrigiani, delves into the "science of imagination," working with contemporary authors to explore and blur the boundaries between text, music and voice. Released in a limited edition of 200 copies and coming with an LP-sized booklet, it combines orality and textuality with the idea of loop and repetition to explore the notion of time, and it's a stunning gesture of performative poetics that plums a startling range of subjects through its sonorous forms. Working across the fields of text, vocal performance, sound installation, printed objects and sculpture, for more than a decade Hanne Lippard has deployed language as the raw material for her work. Talk Shop began as a live performance. Combining orality and textuality with the idea of loop and repetition to explore the notion of time, its relationship with the world of work today, and its personification through the experience of the human body, the conceptual underpinnings of the piece depart from the notion that the human voice has become commodified by the ubiquitous nature of contemporary productivity, and intertwined with the mechanics of capital. Addressing vocal anonymity as a spearhead of the digital economy, Lippard's Talk Shop taps this dada sensibility through its unexpected layers of meanings drawn from a maximalized approach to the potential of the human voice, creating an engrossing and challenging listen from the first sounding to the last, that continues to reveal itself and unfold with every return.
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DSDM 008LP
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$31.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/24/2025
LP, one-time edition of 250 copies, pressed to 180g black vinyl and housed in a pro-printed jacket contained in a silk-screened PVC sleeve. I Hate All The Words by Luca Scarabelli and Michele Lombardelli's Untitled Noise, the eighth instalment in Die Schachtel's celebrated Decay Music series, is a concept album composed of three tracks designed to explore the remote and hidden depths of psyche: "Misery," the awareness; "The Time," the suspension of disbelief; and "Heaven," the existential atonement through detachment. The sounds and the voice proceed alternately, overlapping, where each, in its progression, asserts itself autonomously -- entities unto themselves, presences in dialogue at the edge of possibility. At times primitive and obsessive, they emerge as reminiscences of the unconscious and emotions, which coincide with unconscious, altered, and unexpected lowness. Sound and voice in unison are a burst of a great energy. Noise-glitch sound patterns, distortions, and objects set into vibration in the "soundscape" are mainly performed by Michele Lombardelli. The lyrics, interpreted by Erica Bazzeghini, were written by Luca Scarabelli, drawing inspiration from a personal experience as well as his art. In Luca's reflection, I Hate All The Words is a path to test the truth, the mystery and the meaning of words. "Self-reflection has been an intimate journey, often conducted in the seclusion, away from the chaos of external reality. In the lyrics it is mirrored in three distinct stages: self-awareness marked by 'Misery,' the suspension of disbelief symbolized by the passage of 'Time,' a moment of misgiving, and finally, recovery through detachment, in the track 'Heaven.' In my thoughts, I see the works of poets like T.S. Eliot, Georg Trakl, and Sylvia Plath, who explored personal pain and transformation." In I Hate All The Words all the "colors" have become dull. Fragments of thoughts and a sonic exploration change the perception of the present reality, evoking the ghosts of the past, in a shattered time, with the weight of whispered words.
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RM 4206CD
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A note from Alvin: "It has taken me over 50 years to write these words. Since my initial successes in the 1970s, many have urged me to 'release' unpublished works from the same period, pieces that featured the VCS3 synths or the amazing Serge (which I regret not having used enough) or pieces featuring soundscapes from my classic environmental composition style. For reasons of persistence and empathy, Lawrence English at Room 40 was the most persuasive; now, nearly three years after our agreement, a new publication composed with materials from that inceptive period has come to fruition. While I'm condemned to live evermore in the past, it is the future where I continue to put my remaining creative energies. Nonetheless, in the creation of these two 'new' works I did all I could to avoid sentimentalism or get buried by my own history and the musical riches of the late 20th Century. Relistening to these forgotten fragments of old tapes included inspiring and useful surprises."
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PRO 416CD
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"Steve Roach's 1984 Structures from Silence is an ambient classic often spoken of in the same breath as Eno's Music For Airports. Projekt celebrates Structures' 40th anniversary with a beautiful remastered edition. The breathing, suspended embrace of atmospheres and serene melodies instantly struck a chord with listeners in 1984; the album continues to reiterate its timeless resonations with new listeners today. On this landmark recording of gentle proportions, the three long-form tracks were the birth of something new: an original and pure balance between diaphanous and understated, deep and reflective. The tracks evoke a sense of silence within the music as well as the space between the chords. Pitchfork: 'Top-40 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Contemplative bliss, full of purring drones and high notes that shimmer and fade. Like a desert mirage, these structures hover forever at the horizon, an oasis from the din surrounding it.' Structures From Silence remains an iconic American release in the ambient and electronic genres. A well-respected soundtrack for contemplation, relaxation, meditation, and creativity, it's emotional, powerful, and enriching. It is a living example of music's true healing quality. Yoga Journal Magazine: 'Top ten all time releases for Yoga.' Rediscover this timeless classic. The new mastering reveals the stillness within, setting the tone for the next 40 years of silence."
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CD
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ANGELICA 057CD
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Francesco Serra (Cagliari, 1980) is a self-taught guitarist living and working in Bologna. His research focuses on identifying performance practices aimed at extending the timbre qualities of the guitar and emphasizing the evocative potential of sound. Throughout his musical journey, particularly in the three albums released between 2008 and 2019 under his solo project Trees of Mint (Micro Meadow, Trees of Mint, and NW, released by Here I Stay and Trovarobato Parade), he has progressively deconstructed the song form through sound experimentation, making the physical phenomenon of sound and its interactions with the performance space the focus of his exploration. His previous album, Guest Room (i dischi di angelica, 2022), born of a residency project promoted by AngelicA/Centro di Ricerca Musicale, was actually structured as a form of dialogue between the signals generated by the minimal electro acoustic setup prepared by the musician (electric guitar, two amplifiers, three snare drums, and loop machine) and the physical and emotional responses of the unique sound architecture of Teatro San Leonardo (a former three-nave church) that hosted him for a month during the pandemic. Personal, his new release for the Angelica label, continues the musician's "reductionist" and abstract approach with an even greater essential rigor. Here the initial setup is acoustic: a sound flow beginning with sparse, exploratory phrases of acoustic guitar that, after a temporary completeness found in movement three, starts falling apart in the encounter with the resonances of a drum snare in movement four, eventually dissolving into a completely different "soundscape" (Sardinia, Serra's birthplace): a long field recording of distant night echoes, on which the guitar returns only at the end, now extended in the drone of the e-bow.
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R 111CD
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Zachary Paul is a violinist and composer currently living in New York. Having played in orchestras for most of his life, his beautiful violin work has recently emerged in the new music scene on the East and West coasts. Recently collaborating with musicians like Simon Scott and Patrick Shiroishi, Zachary has long been a "session violinist" for many Recital releases. It's with great pleasure to finally release a full-length solo album of his work on Recital. Calendar is a collection of unfinished demos, compositional experiments, and edited re-released tracks which span the past eight years. Recital operator and composer Sean McCann took seven hours of Paul's music and edited it down to these eight tracks over 50 minutes, folding them into themselves and into one another. The editing is also sometimes crude and immediate, with creases and torn edges. This album reflects trying to break one's perception of time into its smallest parts, watching the seconds pass, and freezing these snapshots into saturated memories and moods. "Wind of midnight" is a pastoral quartet piece (two horns, cello, and violin) that breathes slowly, not unlike an Ingram Marshall work. While "Fear" conjures up memories of Los Angeles at night, an imagined soundtrack for a hazy Michael Mann-ish cobalt landscape. A gust of smog on "Possessor" interrupts this vaporous scene, getting swallowed up in tape destruction, then settling back into the underlying pastel dusk of Calendar's unhurried chamber ambience. Glass-mastered CD edition, limited to 200 copies. Includes a 12-page booklet.
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RM 4186CD
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From Lawrence English: "There's two things I can tell you about Ueno Takashi, without reservation. The first is he knows the best coffee spots in Tokyo. I am the happy recipient of this knowledge. The second thing I can tell you is that he is someone for whom the guitar is a platform of exquisite promise. Ueno Takashi, who many of you would recognize as one half of the legendary unit Tenniscoats, is also responsible for an impressive series of solo guitar recordings which stake out a claim that tests the fringes of extended technique, harmonic relation and post-blues modes. His approach is simple; the guitar must lead and through allowing this he has unlocked a potential in the instrument that is entirely personal and profound. Arms, which collects together a series of recordings made during the past few years, is by far one of his most melodic and structured recordings. Here, using only the simplest of tools and techniques he crafts a suite of pieces that orbit one another with a gentle gravity. His playing is, at times, intensely delicate and at other moments more free and playful, but never careless. Ueno's way with the guitar is one attuned to 'what is needed,' and he seemingly shuns excess. While some might call this approach minimalist, his unique sense of time opens another reading which extends beyond those traditions. Arms is a complete universe within which we are invited to be. Ueno is your host, and guide here. Enjoy."
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2LP
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CVSDLP 011LP
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Corbett vs. Dempsey and Studio Williams announce that Radio Play is available on long play vinyl for the first time. The double-disk set contains two adaptions of Inklusive. Inklusive is a play written by Bavarian playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz. It is part of a trilogy of radio plays from 1971 titled Trilogie Münchener Lebens. The play was first broadcast as a radio play in former West Germany on Südwestfunk in 1972. A second version was broadcast in former East Germany on Rundfunk der DDR in 1974. The West and East German broadcasts are the basis for two radio play adaptations by artist Christopher Williams. Both adaptations will be recorded in German using the same technology used to produce the original broadcasts of 1972 and 1974. Eva Mattes (O.k., The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) is an actress born in Tegernsee. Sebastian Bezzel (Tatort, Eberhoferkrimis) is an actor from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Norbert Stöß (Abschnitt 40) is an actor born in Dresden. Andreas Leupold (The Human Centipede) is an actor from East Berlin. Rüdiger Carl is a free jazz artist born in Goldap, East Prussia. Mo Stern is a sound engineer, visual artist, DJ and music producer born in Hamburg. Franz Xaver Kroetz is a playwright, actor, and director from Munich. Christopher Williams is a Los Angeles-born artist and professor of photography who lives and works in Cologne. Maximilian Klemens Sänger is an artist and filmmaker based in Düsseldorf. Packaged in cardboard sleeve with paper insert. Produced and directed by Christopher Williams; executive production by: John Corbett & Jim Dempsey. Edition of 500.
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LP
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VIA 008LP
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Step into the enigmatic realm of Funeste Human Nature, an audacious collaboration between avant-garde luminaries Jac Berrocal, Pascal Comelade, and Vincent Epplay. In this mesmerizing sonic odyssey, the boundaries of experimental music are shattered as Berrocal's haunting trumpet, Comelade's whimsical piano, and Epplay's immersive soundscapes converge to create a kaleidoscope of textures and emotions. A journey through the depths of the human psyche, where surrealism meets primal instincts and the absurd dances with the profound. The trio's fearless exploration of sound, inviting listeners to unravel the mysteries of the human condition through an eclectic tapestry of sonic experimentation. From the eerie whispers of forgotten dreams to the jubilant cacophony of uninhibited joy, Funeste Human Nature is a testament to the boundless possibilities of artistic collaboration. Embrace the unexpected, embrace the sublime, and immerse yourself in the haunting beauty of this extraordinary musical venture. Pascal Comelade, born in Montpellier, France in 1955, is a prolific Catalan musician and composer known for his distinctive blend of minimalism, surrealism, and musical primitivism. Comelade's work is characterized by its eclectic influences, ranging from rock and folk to classical and avant-garde. He has collaborated with various artists, including PJ Harvey and Robert Wyatt. Jac Berrocal, born in 1946 in Saint-Jean d'Angély, France, is a pioneering avant-garde trumpeter and composer known for his fusion of jazz, rock, and experimental music. His career, which began in the early 1970s, is marked by innovative albums like Musiq Musik and extensive collaborations with artists from Nurse With Wound to Vince Taylor. Vincent Epplay, born in 1964 in France, is an innovative sound artist and musician known for his work in creating immersive audiovisual environments. His artistic approach often involves the manipulation of sound to explore its interaction with space and audience perception. Epplay's works are characterized by a keen interest in the experimental music tradition, incorporating elements of chance and the use of unconventional sound sources. He has collaborated extensively with other artists, including Jac Berrocal and David Fenech, contributing to a dynamic and exploratory sound art scene.
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ZORN 094LP
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"Early European composers felt that their work reflected in its structure the divine nature of the material world. Via tuning, form, and contrapuntal alchemy, these musicians sought to illuminate and edify the complex and perfect order of existence. The music recorded here also reflects the contours of an ordered world, but it is no place any of us has ever visited. By assembling far-flung building blocks from the detritus of a 21st century musical vocabulary, Orlando Furioso brings the listener into a bizarre new cosmos. The result is deeply expressive music that speaks not with the voice of a narrator or memoirist, but with that of a cartographer. Like a science-fiction Dante, the listener is taken on a tour of many diverse and colorful provinces of an alien world. Though each composition references its own set of real-world musical locales (from the Andes to Indonesia to Italy to New Orleans), they are bound by stylistic consistency into a coherent, continuous geography. Permeating this world is an uncompromising commitment to microtonal harmony, rhythmic intensity, and an ability to deploy the esoteric (Nicola Vicentino's notorious 31-tone temperament) and the head-smackingly obvious (a surprise djent breakdown) with equal conviction. Though Atria Vicente's compositions are steering the ship, serious recognition is due to all the players on the record for their ability to meet these demands. Our omnivorous musical diets offer real abundance. They enrich our craft by providing access to limitless approaches from which to choose -- more masters to study, traditions to absorb, and techniques to hone than is possible in multiple lifetimes. They can also inflict heavy and often contradictory burdens of influence . . . When completed with precision and with no stone left unturned, the seams between the pieces vanish and the listener is deposited somewhere beautiful and strange, left to assign their sensations meanings of their own." --Mat Muntz
Orlando Furioso is led by Atria Vicente and features David Acevedo, David Leon, Andrew Boudreau, Alec Goldfarb, Daniel Hass, Simón Willson, and Niña Tormenta. Orlando Furioso celebrated its release at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY, as a part of Wet Ink Ensemble's 24th Season opening concert, a performance lauded by The New York Times. Winner of the Deutscher Jazz Preis: Best International Debut Album 2023.
"Making liberal use of microtonal harmony and hypnotic, ostinato rhythms -- as well as the occasional stylistic smash-cut, reminiscent of John Zorn -- Orlando Furioso announced itself on Wednesday as a punchy, creative force on the New York scene. (...) Atria's rhythms had a welcoming, social propulsion, and the microtonality of his writing for keyboard proposed an individual -- even insular -- language." --Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times.
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IMPREC 535CD
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American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta is a legendary figure who has worked with some of the most significant names of 20th century music but despite this and impressive body of work of his own, he has remained an obscure figure. Important Records presents Transits Volume 1 the first in a series of releases by composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies documenting never-before-heard chamber works mostly composed in the 1970s while Ranta was living in Taiwan. Mastered by Tom Eaton at Sounds & Substance. Based overseas since the late '60s, Ranta is known primarily as a percussionist who worked closely with Harry Partch, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Toru Takemitsu, and Jean-Claude Éloy but is also an accomplished artist himself with a vast body of work spanning improvisation, electronic music, and composition. The works in the Transits series comprise a dozen works of scored compositions for solo and chamber ensembles almost all of which are completely unknown with no known performances or recordings since their original premieres. Volume 1 includes "Mharuva," a 30-minute marathon tour-deforce for solo marimba, "Seven Pieces for Three Percussionists," and the 40-minute "Continuum II," a stunning display of virtuosity for two bass clarinets, percussion, and electronics. Transits, Volume 1 features performances by Sarah Hennies, NYC clarinetists Madison Greenstone and Katie Porter, and the Bard College Conservatory Percussion Ensemble.
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SR 549LP
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Double LP version. In April 2023, the first part of the Fluxus edition called Stolen Symphony was released. Now, in 2024, there is the second part, called Keep Together. At the center of this edition was a broken piano, acquired by the Opening Performance Orchestra for the purpose of making live and studio recordings. During this time other new works for this broken piano were written by diverse Fluxus and non-Fluxus composers. In the spring of 2022, the Opening Performance Orchestra and the broken piano participated in an event hosted by Mieko Shiomi. This was a new version of her early work Spatial Poem, documentation of which was presented at the 2022 Aichi Triennale in Tokyo. At present, the broken piano lies in the open air in Prague and is subject to gradual decay. This edition contains new and old pieces, live and studio recordings, finished pieces and scores to be performed, solos and pieces for ensemble, using classical and special instruments from 33 Fluxus artists, which have been played by ten soloists and four ensembles. There are new essays and articles from 15 writers on the theme Fluxus, as well as original photos and other documentation in the booklets. The Belgian label Sub Rosa provided technical support and a good place for the grand-scale release. The audio restauration and mastering were done by Gabriel Séverin at Laboratoire central, Brussels, and Kakaxa, 3bees, Prague. Archivio Conz in Berlin provided access to their extensive archives and Edizioni Conz provided co-production. Ursula and René Block made possible the realization of John Cage's historical composition "Mozart Mix" from the Edition Block archive. The photographic material comes from Marie Knízáková and Milan Knízák's private archive, the German photographer Wolfgang Träger, Archivio Conz's Fluxus archive, the private archives from diverse Fluxus artists and Opening Performance Orchestra's digital archive. Milan Knízák, Henning Christiansen, La Monte Young, Philip Corner, Bengt af Klintberg, George Maciunas, Takako Saito, Toshi Ichiyanagi, John Cage, Geoffrey Hendricks, Nam June Paik, Sara Miyamoto, Ken Friedman, Yoko Ono, Josef Anton Riedl, Giancarlo Cardini, Ay-O, and George Brecht.
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FW 1040LP
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On this new LP, Harry Bertoia shows why he may have been the first industrial musician. Bertoia often referred to his sound sculptures as a "collaboration with industry" and on this new LP Bertoia is intentionally creating heavy, rhythmic music he described as "mechanized," "mechanical," and "factory like." This first edition is packaged in a full color sleeve with metallic inks. Mastered by Tom Eaton at Sounds & Substance. Recorded in 1971, percussion and repetition emulate the pounding rhythms of machinery on this unique pair of conceptual Bertoia compositions. Bertoia utilizes innovative performance techniques to create new sounds unheard in his ouevre. Even in the busy factory of Bertoia's mind, distant stillness rises up as Bertoia exhibits the massive amount of control he possesses over his many looming sculptures. Mechanization is just one of the many sonic directions Bertoia took while composing and recording between the late 1950s and his death in 1978. He documented all of his ideas and directions in notes accompanying the hundreds of tapes discovered in his barn. This first edition of 500 is printed using metallic inks. Bertoia's recordings are as much a celebration of sustained tones, intervallic relationships, healing vibrations, deep listening and shimmering harmonics as Indian Classical music, singing bowls, The Well Tuned Piano or Benjamin Franklin's glass armonica. Through these rich harmonics and pulsing pure tone, Bertoia was able to more clearly articulate his inner spirit than he could with sculpture alone -- a point he made himself many times in interviews. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances; his brother Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures' sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania. Learning by experimentation was common for Bertoia and he mastered the art of tape recording, turning the Sonambient barn into a sound studio with four overhead microphones hanging from the rafters in a square formation. He would experiment with overdubbing by performing along to previous recordings, sometimes backwards, constantly improving his methods while also honing his performance skills. The story of Sonambient barn collection will slowly be told through the release of recordings from the archive as well as installations and performances built from Bertoia's own recordings, lectures and a book.
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SR 549CD
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In April 2023, the first part of the Fluxus edition called Stolen Symphony was released. Now, in 2024, there is the second part, called Keep Together. At the center of this edition was a broken piano, acquired by the Opening Performance Orchestra for the purpose of making live and studio recordings. During this time other new works for this broken piano were written by diverse Fluxus and non-Fluxus composers. In the spring of 2022, the Opening Performance Orchestra and the broken piano participated in an event hosted by Mieko Shiomi. This was a new version of her early work Spatial Poem, documentation of which was presented at the 2022 Aichi Triennale in Tokyo. At present, the broken piano lies in the open air in Prague and is subject to gradual decay. This edition contains new and old pieces, live and studio recordings, finished pieces and scores to be performed, solos and pieces for ensemble, using classical and special instruments from 33 Fluxus artists, which have been played by ten soloists and four ensembles. There are new essays and articles from 15 writers on the theme Fluxus, as well as original photos and other documentation in the booklets. The Belgian label Sub Rosa provided technical support and a good place for the grand-scale release. The audio restauration and mastering were done by Gabriel Séverin at Laboratoire central, Brussels, and Kakaxa, 3bees, Prague. Archivio Conz in Berlin provided access to their extensive archives and Edizioni Conz provided co-production. Ursula and René Block made possible the realization of John Cage's historical composition "Mozart Mix" from the Edition Block archive. The photographic material comes from Marie Knízáková and Milan Knízák's private archive, the German photographer Wolfgang Träger, Archivio Conz's Fluxus archive, the private archives from diverse Fluxus artists and Opening Performance Orchestra's digital archive. Milan Knízák, Henning Christiansen, La Monte Young, Philip Corner, Bengt af Klintberg, George Maciunas, Takako Saito, Toshi Ichiyanagi, John Cage, Geoffrey Hendricks, Nam June Paik, Sara Miyamoto, Ken Friedman, Yoko Ono, Josef Anton Riedl, Giancarlo Cardini, Ay-O, and George Brecht.
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R 107LP
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Recital presents an artists' record from the two giants Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth. Hamilton (1922-2011) is revered as the father of British Pop Art as both theorist and practitioner, in addition to famously designing the artwork for The Beatles' White Album. Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a Swiss German artist who blithely ignored all artistic boundaries and aesthetic dictums. His oeuvre includes hundreds of artist books, almost half a thousand prints, sculptures, multiples and records, all balanced between magnetic playfulness and self-deprecating paranoia. Roth also ran his own record/book press Dieter Roths' Verlag, and was a major force in the reckless improvisational music group Selten Gehörte Musik (1973-1979). The two artists most significant collaborations happened between 1976 and 1978, beginning with a series of 74 paintings in which they reworked each other's art. The paintings were made for an exhibition for dogs (as suggested by the late Marcel Broodthaers, to whom the works were dedicated) in Cadaqués, Spain. Hamilton and Roth then produced the catalogue Collaborations of Ch. Rotham with reproductions of all the paintings alongside four brilliant new collaborative texts. The narrative of the texts sprung from the "fairy story" (Hamilton) quality that emerged from these dog paintings -- a hallucinatory tapestry of sausages, gestating giants, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote, and a donkey. Together they gallop, humorous and beautifully absurd, across the wild field of an imaginary seaside backdrop with endless garbled iterations of ever-mutating names riddled with mad typos. For these recordings the individual texts were read by Roth and Hamilton, actor friend Duncan Smith, and a huge cast of British artists for the final play Die Grosse Bockwurst, performed at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1977. The recordings were first released on cassette on the Audio Arts label in 1978, and have now been remastered from the original tapes for this double vinyl edition. Also included are two booklets: one is a new essay written for this edition by artist and co-producer Malcolm Green (Red Sphinx, Atlas Press), alongside full reproductions of the Roth/Hamilton collaborative Ch. Rotham texts. Thanks to Björn Roth, Rita Donagh, Hansjörg Mayer, William Furlong, Tate Modern, and Hauser & Wirth.
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LP
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R 110LP
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Nour Mobarak's Dafne Phono is an adaptation of the first opera, Dafne, composed and written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598. Drawing on the myth of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid's Metamorphoses -- a story of unrequited love, patriarchal possession, conquest, and transformation -- Mobarak's multimedia and multispecies reimagining splinters the opera's Italian libretto. Alongside English and Greek versions, it is translated into some of the world's most phonetically complex languages -- Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon. In this process, the narrative -- and an artifact of Western culture -- is dismantled, metabolized, and rendered into unruly utterances that shape the sensorium as much as they do the capacity for sense-making. These voices are given material form by a cast of mycelium sonic sculptures whose rhizomatic compositions and broadcasted recordings resemble the formation and mutation of language over time, reconstituting speech into a new, polyphonic body politic, composed of voices whose striking, poetic utterances transfix and transcend meaning. The A-Side of the record presents a stereo version of Mobarak's 15-channel sound installation, Dafne Phono. The B-Side uses a recording of a portion of the translation process the libretto underwent in Namibia, live-processed by the artist. Dafne Phono is released in tandem with a book of the same name, published by Wendy's Subway.
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LP
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RM 4225LP
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From Lawrence English: "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 kick-started the interest in making these recordings. The intention had originally been to take Vivaldi head-on, as the holder of the Four Seasons terrain (I jest of course), but shortly after completing this album, it became resoundingly clear that even in the old world, seasonality was a thing that was known 'then', and unknowable 'now'. Climate change, as a lived experience and not merely as a 'possibility', suddenly came into focus with reports flooding in about the climatic dynamics since the turn of the century and events like the Black Saturday fires here in Australia. It felt like, and continues to feel like, seasonality as some predictable measure of our world is relegated to the 'before' times. This record is not about these climatic shifts however, more a recognition of how we have used patterns and predictability to guide us over the centuries and perhaps a realization that the way forward is not the path we have known historically. Listening back to the record with fresh ears, a process made completely delightful by Stephan Mathieu who has carefully remastered it, I am struck by how minimal some of the structures were. There are moments that strike me as uncharacteristically patient and even generous, allowing one element to hold without interference. I'm grateful to still feel a deep connection to this edition and to the people and places that helped shape it. I hope you find some sense of your place here. It's offered with that intention and invitation."
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CD
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R 109CD
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Recital presents a collection of new sound poetry works from Vittoria de Franchis (b. 1993, Bruxelles), an independent curator, language researcher and writer operating between London, Berlin and Rome. Solo Voce, Vittoria's first album, carries a certain arousal and intimate elation, a kind of sensual communiqué absent from much contemporary music. As Vittoria divulges: "These tracks were made for voices I wanted to touch rather than bodies. Voice is the uttermost source of fantasy for me, fantasy in general and erotic fantasy. Cities have been another tonica of the album. I love to just wander through cities and listen to sounds around me, experiencing this sort of perennial concert. What makes me click with a metropolis is its soundscape, in the same way I'm more attracted to a voice rather than a body. I like to eroticize voices. I remember taking days off just to walk, sometimes I would walk for hours without eating, guided by a specific cacophony I was drawn to or by a conversation I would overhear in a bookshop. Of the 16 tracks that make up this album, some were written and then performed, others just appeared; triggered by something around me and I recorded them with my phone (intentionally merging with the context that inspired them). As much as I'm fond of crystal-clear recordings which give space and transform the voice into space, I'm extremely attracted by overlaps and mismatches between voices. I don't know how this obsession started. I have always had a special connection with my voice, I used to talk out loud to a lot of imaginary friends and loved to sing. I hardly listen to lyrics in the same way I have a hard time looking at movies without subtitles as I automatically transform the voice into sound and can't follow the plot. Solo Voce is an album or composition of compositions or composition of the desirerer's desires in which voice is the solo instrument. It deeply excites me to think I can do everything with my voice just by repeating, looping, overdubbing, collaging. I always perform, every day and every moment, this is why there is this 'totale' appendix to my name, and I mostly perform when I speak." Glass mastered CD edition, limited to 200 copies. Includes a 16-page booklet of concrete poems by the artist.
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Cassette
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DC 923Z-CS
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"The work of Whitney Johnson a.k.a. Matchess, is, in their own words, 'a material history of reproduction.' From our grateful vantage point, it sounds like sequences of hypnotic and engaging forms, a combination of musical concepts and available materials for the purpose of transcendence. Hav (DC 923A-LP) and Stena challenge linear description, and even language, reflecting the perceived values and details of multiple times/intentions/places into essential aspects, repurposed as music. Hav and Stena began to exist in 2021 while Whitney was researching the Cult of Hermaphroditus and visiting all the available sites of the cult's activity in Cyprus and Greece. She collected materials from the sites via VHS footage, 35mm photos, and field recordings. The cover image for Hav is from that trip, as are some of the field recordings included on Stena. During her travels, Whitney read Shelley's Frankenstein for the first time. As a sequel to that harrowing moment, and with respect to Shelley, the two new releases feel within and without themselves like creatures of post-mortem assembly, collaged more than birthed. Stena in particular sifts through fragments of once-was, surgically bonded and given electric shock treatment to induce music. Its sequence contains a hidden cover of The Nuns' 'It's a Dream.' A lot of Stena was recorded in Miller Beach, Indiana. Other recordings were made in a barn in rural Sweden during the winter of 2022, where Whitney was living alone and working on music while mulling over considerations of biological and symbolic ancestry. The cover image for Stena is a burial cairn photographed while there. As with 2022's Sonescent, one way to examine these records is how they resonate in the body. Throughout their gestation, attention was given to the use of certain frequencies as a focused means of transport; the Solfeggio Frequencies, a conception in sound healing, are referenced often in these new works."
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LP
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BT 122LP
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Black Truffle presents A Song for two Mothers/Occam IX, the first ever solo release from Laetitia Sonami. Born in France in 1957, Sonami studied with Éliane Radigue in Paris before moving to California in 1978 to study electronic music at Mills College. Sonami is perhaps most closely associated with one of her inventions, the Lady's Glove, an arm-length tailored glove fitted with movement sensors allowing the performer fluidly to control digital sound parameters and processing, as well as motors, lights and video playback. Having performed with the Lady's Glove for 25 years, Sonami retired it in 2016, turning her attention to the interface/instrument heard and pictured here, the Spring Sprye. After decades of aversion to documenting her work on recordings, A Song for two Mothers/Occam IX treats listeners to two side-long performances with the Spring Spyre: the very first piece developed for the instrument and the most recent, the two contrasting remarkably in sound palette, energy and form. "A Song for two Mothers" (2023) spins an intricate web of rippling synthetic burbles, rapid sweeps and fizzing textures. Performed in real time with the sensitive and partly uncontrollable Spring Sprye, the music is delicate yet chaotic. Abrupt gestures hover against a backdrop of silence, "devoid of spatial or temporal direction." After several minutes, the sound-world becomes metallic and percussive, tapping and ticking in pointillistic flurries before a wavering harmonic cloud emerges, sprinkled with resonant drips and pops. "Occam IX" is a radically different proposition. At the outset of Sonami's exploration of the Spring Sprye, she asked her former teacher Éliane Radigue to compose a piece for it -- and her: like all of Radigue's work since she ceased working with analogue electronics at the beginning of the 21st century, "Occam IX" is written not only for an instrument but also for a particular performer. These scores are developed verbally, through meetings and conversations between performer and composer; each is grounded in an image (usually kept from listeners, to avoid influencing their experience); all magnify the subtlest acoustic phenomena and require great commitment and patience from the performer. Beginning from a rumbling low tone, the listener is gradually immersed in slowly lapping waves of synthetic tones, eventually thinning out into delicate bell-like pings against a background of white noise. Accompanied by notes from Sonami, her longtime collaborator Paul DeMarinis, and Radigue, and illustrated with scores, photographs and images of the Spring Spyre, A Song for Two Mothers/Occam IX is an essential document celebrating an under-recognized pioneer of electronic music and performance.
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BT 123LP
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crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings (BT 096LP), Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole's work, presenting three rigorously conceptualized commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions. The side-long title piece is a stereo version of an eight-channel sound installation exhibited in 2023 at the Tabakalera Art Center in Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain. The piece uses a multitude of instrumental, vocal, concrete and electronic sounds to evoke the soundscapes cole encountered during nocturnal listening session in Bali, Indonesia in 2018 and 2019. In this world of night sounds, she explains, she "observed the complex interplay between amphibian, lizard, bird and insect communication, domestic animals (roosters, dogs), man-made sounds (airplanes, vehicles, conversations and evening activities) and sounds that were difficult to place." Drawing on field recordings as memory aids (but including none in the finished piece), cole's piece uncannily reproduces the spatiality and pacing of environmental sound without attempting strictly to replicate it. While at times it can be difficult to imagine the source of these sounds, at other points they are clearly instrumental or electronic in origin; in its placement and layering, though, the whole assemblage suggests the glorious, unthinking richness of a non-musical sound environment. Suggesting at once the electronic gardens of Rolf Julius and the little instrument expanses of classic AACM, the piece is a brilliant enactment of the Cage-ian drive to "imitate nature in her manner of operation." "Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr? (pt. 1)" began as cole's contribution to an Issue Project Room commission to realize a score from Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood's Women's Work, a 1975 collection of text and conceptual scores by women artists and composers. cole's piece begins from Beth Anderson's "Valid for Life," a complex arrangement of the letter R in various typefaces. Accompanied with extensive liner notes, photographic documentation and a download code, Making Conversation is an exciting next step in cole's work, extending her signature concerns in new sonic and conceptual directions.
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2LP
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TROST 248LP
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Double LP version. The trio of Japanese saxophone legend Akira Sakata with the Scandinavian rhythm section presents already his fifth album! While the trio was on a Japan tour in 2019, Sakata arranged for a handful of special collaborations, with some of Japan's most important artistic figures. Featuring the avantgarde dancer Min Tanaka, the pianist Yuji Takahashi and a heavyweight veteran of Japanese experimental music -- drummer Takeo Moriyama. Moriyama was playing with Sakata in the Yosuke Yamashita Trio and is his unflinching sparring partner on the explosive 2022 Trost duo recording Mitochondria. Japanese saxophonist and improviser Akira Sakata turned 79 in February of 2024, but this singular musician shows no little sign of age. Over the last 15 years or so, as he neared the typical retirement age, he formed a couple of searing working bands that finally earned him a devoted international following despite his crucial role in establishing his homeland as key center for free jazz as a member of the Yosuke Yamashita Trio in the 1970s. Arashi, with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and Swedish bassist Johan Berthling, has become his primary touring group, a fiery unit operating with a collective improvisational drive that lifts his white-hot alto saxophone and clarinet playing to new heights and provides the ideal platform for his over-the-top vocal exhortations. While the trio was on a short Japanese tour in 2019, Sakata arranged for a handful of special collaborations, bringing his two younger Scandinavian colleagues face-to-face with some of Japan's most important artistic figures. They performed with Min Tanaka, the singular experimental dancer, who famously improvised with guitarist Derek Bailey and pianist Cecil Taylor, as well as the legendary new music pianist Yuji Takahashi. The concert documented on this phenomenal recording features the third veteran of Japanese experimental music Arashi worked with on that tour, drummer Takeo Moriyama, the third member of the Yamashita trio. As the present recording makes patently clear, Moriyama fit right in. The percussionists melded beautifully, driving the music but also clearing space for one another and forging astonishing feats of interactivity. Rather than canceling one another out or laying it on too thick, they quickly find a method to co-exists, tapping history without the slightest hint of nostalgia. The trio nonchalantly becomes a quartet, absorbing more history, more ideas, and more energy, spitting it back out with greater concentration and focus than ever.
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CD
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TROST 248CD
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The trio of Japanese saxophone legend Akira Sakata with the Scandinavian rhythm section presents already his fifth album! While the trio was on a Japan tour in 2019, Sakata arranged for a handful of special collaborations, with some of Japan's most important artistic figures. Featuring the avantgarde dancer Min Tanaka, the pianist Yuji Takahashi and a heavyweight veteran of Japanese experimental music -- drummer Takeo Moriyama. Moriyama was playing with Sakata in the Yosuke Yamashita Trio and is his unflinching sparring partner on the explosive 2022 Trost duo recording Mitochondria. Japanese saxophonist and improviser Akira Sakata turned 79 in February of 2024, but this singular musician shows no little sign of age. Over the last 15 years or so, as he neared the typical retirement age, he formed a couple of searing working bands that finally earned him a devoted international following despite his crucial role in establishing his homeland as key center for free jazz as a member of the Yosuke Yamashita Trio in the 1970s. Arashi, with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and Swedish bassist Johan Berthling, has become his primary touring group, a fiery unit operating with a collective improvisational drive that lifts his white-hot alto saxophone and clarinet playing to new heights and provides the ideal platform for his over-the-top vocal exhortations. While the trio was on a short Japanese tour in 2019, Sakata arranged for a handful of special collaborations, bringing his two younger Scandinavian colleagues face-to-face with some of Japan's most important artistic figures. They performed with Min Tanaka, the singular experimental dancer, who famously improvised with guitarist Derek Bailey and pianist Cecil Taylor, as well as the legendary new music pianist Yuji Takahashi. The concert documented on this phenomenal recording features the third veteran of Japanese experimental music Arashi worked with on that tour, drummer Takeo Moriyama, the third member of the Yamashita trio. As the present recording makes patently clear, Moriyama fit right in. The percussionists melded beautifully, driving the music but also clearing space for one another and forging astonishing feats of interactivity. Rather than canceling one another out or laying it on too thick, they quickly find a method to co-exists, tapping history without the slightest hint of nostalgia. The trio nonchalantly becomes a quartet, absorbing more history, more ideas, and more energy, spitting it back out with greater concentration and focus than ever.
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