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viewing 1 To 19 of 19 items
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BLUE 033LP
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"In the Merry Month of May is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad's most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe's clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise. The sheer sonic force of opener 'In the Merry Month of May' recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad's Slapping Pythagoras. Ramshackle, go-for-broke performances provide gist for your next twelve months of earworms. Conrad's and Walshe's prior work are about the only relevant reference points, and even then In the Merry Month of May is a one-of-a-kind concoction whipped up by two fearless and often peerless souls. It's a joy to hear the two of them, with such manifest mutual regard and commitment to busting a gut. According to Walshe, early in their collaboration Conrad related how they
'first began working together after they ran from service as servants of King Pepy I at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt. They were subsequently monks in Carolingean Gaul during the period roughly 820 to 850, Venetian courtesans at Pope Eugene's court during the mid-15th century, and prisoners on what was then Van Diemen's Land in 1843, where Walshe tried to secure Conrad's escape using 'remote viewing' techniques. The unfortunate outcome of the latter incident resulted in Conrad's work as a stage magician in Australia in the 19th century, where in trying an audience riot, they both accidentally ingested leprosy vectors and subsequently lost three legs and two arms between them.'"
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BC 031LP
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2018 release. "Lacrau is the first U.S. release of music featuring the legendary Portuguese guitarist's guitarist Manuel Mota. Mota's mysterious, uncompromising, resolutely personal approach to the instrument has most often been captured on solo recordings -- and typically of an immersive length, such as Rck, a 5-CD release from 2013. Lacrau captures the ambience of a warm Sunday afternoon in late fall in Lisbon when longtime friends Mota and David Grubbs sat down for this waking dream of a first duo performance. The session unfolds with a real-time, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings, and tube amplifiers. These explorations are as apt to find emotional weight in the solitary note in all its fret-buzzing glory as they are in unexpected turns of phrase briefly referencing blues and jazz. 'Lacrau' is an older Portuguese word for 'scorpion' (predating 'escorpião'), as well as the name of a good, cheap restaurant in Manuel's hometown of Ericeira, on the west coast of Portugal. Its quality of being out of time, its rough texture, and its multiplicity of meanings make it as good a name as any -- and better than some -- for this beautifully unconventional and unconventionally beautiful album, one that occupies a unique place among the recordings of Mota and Grubbs. Apart from his solo performances and recordings, Manuel Mota is known for his collaborations with a range of musicians including Phill Niblock, Noël Akchoté, Margarida Garcia, David Maranha, Okkyung Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Toshimaru Nakamura. David Grubbs has played in Gastr del Sol, The Red Krayola, and Squirrel Bait and performed with Tony Conrad, Susan Howe, Pauline Oliveros, Eli Keszler, and many others."
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LP
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BC 037LP
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"David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner met in the mid-1990s when Grubbs was playing with Gastr del Sol and The Red Krayola and St. Werner in Mouse on Mars and Microstoria. After years of exchanging ideas, Translation from Unspecified marks their first-time locking horns as a duo, and it's clear this deck-clearing collaboration was long overdue. In January 2020 Grubbs arrived at Mouse on Mars' Berlin studio Paraverse with a guitar and 'Translation from Unspecified,' an open-ended, seemingly self-generating poem suggesting AI, one of the themes in St. Werner's recent work. This became the side-length title track, a winding corridor of electronic fanfares and spontaneous musical miniatures urging Grubbs's slow and steady recitation to grow wings and graduate into song. Who knows where this idiosyncratic mise-en-scène -- day-glo, extrovert electronics and task-oriented human -- came from? Reference points, distant ones, might include Robert Ashley and Paul De Marinis's In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven... and the sound poetry of Anton Bruhin. Flip the record and you have 'Soixante Ooze,' a live-in-the-studio duo for guitar and computer more recognizably St. Wernerian and Grubbs-like that reconfigures elements of the title track before finally morphing into needle-pinning monoliths of sound."
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CD
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BLUE 021CD
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"Onrushing Cloud is the first recording by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). Prior to meeting, all three had released recordings on the excellent Swedish label Häpna, and were already fans of one another's work. In the spring of 2009, Belfi and Pilia were invited by the Harlem Studio Fellowship for a residence in New York, and the three took this opportunity to get down to the brass tacks of forming a power trio. Onrushing Cloud is characterized by the eccentric, fleeting symmetries of Grubbs's and Pilia's guitar playing simultaneously mediated, punctuated, and over- and underscored by Belfi's hybrid assemblage and deeply personal vocabulary of electronics and percussion. Although ultimately divided into five songs, this is clearly a single start-to-finish skein. Originally released on LP in 2010."
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BLUE 025CD
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"The second full-length album by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). If Onrushing Cloud represents a single stylistic arc in which these three first found commonality and shared musical means, Dust & Mirrors sees the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in the group operates. What changed? From the epic, multi-part sprawl of 'Charm Offensive' to Stefano Pilia's distantly Robbie Basho-esque 'The Distance, Cut,' and from the mechanized riffing of 'The Headlock' to the wild improvisation 'Ambassador Extraordinaire,' Dust & Mirrors sees this group exploding outwards from their more steely, contemplative beginnings."
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LP
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BLUE 025LP
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10"
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BC 024EP
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"Strange to say, but Borough of Broken Umbrellas is David Grubbs's first record of solo guitar improvisations, a profoundly unhurried probing (sometimes worrying, like a tongue and a tooth) of a handful of gorgeously spare themes. It divides its sides between two long (c. 12') tracks for electric guitar and nylon-string guitar. Comparisons are unnecessary and perhaps misleading. On the surface, the Guitar Roberts (Loren Connors' former nom-de-guitar) albums on St. Joan? Tetuzi Akiyama in his more lyrical mode? Jozef van Wissem's mirror-image melodies for lute? Japanese koto and Korean kayagum sanjo music? Borough of Broken Umbrellas is living-room music in real time, with the windows open."
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LP
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BLUE 023LP
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"The third full-length album by songwriting juggernaut The Wingdale Community Singers. It finds the core trio of Hannah Marcus, Rick Moody, and David Grubbs augmented by a cast of effortlessly sympatico guests including Jolie Holland, Tanya Donelly, and Oneida's Kid Millions. The Wingdale Community Singers have always drawn from folk, gospel, country, and pop, with reference points ranging from the Carter Family to the Fairport Convention. Night, Sleep, Death is their most assured album, and also the one with the most viscerally pulsing through-line."
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CD
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BLUE 022CD
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"Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. It follows Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and Thiefth (2005), both of which appeared in the Records of the Year lists in The Wire. Writing in Artforum, Bennett Simpson described Souls of the Labadie Tract as 'a confrontation with history, community, language, and sound that is truly harrowing.' Where the previous works began with prose introductions that contextualized the poems' embeddedness in history, Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe's celebrated collage poems. Looking at one of Frolic Architecture's poems on the album's cover, it's apparent why Howe initially thought the poem to be unperformable. For long stretches, it is impossible to separate Howe's real-time performance of her fragment-strewn text from Grubbs's further deformations, scatterings, and layerings. These aberrant vocalizations are placed in a landscape in which individual pitches pulse autonomously within thick chords; gravel and cicadas duet. There is no foreground, no background. Frolic Architecture is the most radical and abstract of Grubbs's and Howe's work together."
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BLUE 021LP
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"Onrushing Cloud is the first recording by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). Prior to meeting, all three had released recordings on the excellent Swedish label Häpna, and were already fans of one another's work. In the spring of 2009, Belfi and Pilia were invited by the Harlem Studio Fellowship for a residence in New York, and the three took this opportunity to get down to the brass tacks of forming a power trio. Onrushing Cloud is characterized by the eccentric, fleeting symmetries of Grubbs's and Pilia's guitar playing simultaneously mediated, punctuated, and over- and underscored by Belfi's hybrid assemblage and deeply personal vocabulary of electronics and percussion. Although ultimately divided into five songs, this is clearly a single start-to-finish skein. 'Hermitage' records the preliminary gestures of these musicians' first encounter, and the album steadily builds towards the appearance of Grubbs's vocals on 'Onrushing Cloud,' a tale of being stranded atop a mountain and facing a rapidly approaching storm:
City rats on a mountain pass
In onrushing cloud
Lightning marked a moment's suspension
Events commanded our utmost attention"
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CD
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BLUE 020CD
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"David Grubbs's 26-minute soundtrack to Angela Bulloch's Hybrid Song Box.4 picks up sonically where An Optimist Notes the Dusk left off. Grubbs brings his thick, solid-body electric guitar tone to the most relaxed of tempos, the most spacious of handlings. This instrumental soundtrack is based on a short piece for electric guitar, followed by an interstitial section created with feedback from the last note of the guitar piece. This A/B structure is repeated three times. With each iteration, the guitar composition becomes progressively more scuffed, more degraded. The interstitial section begins at its gentlest and most transparent, and the material gradually becomes stronger and more harmonically distinct over the course of its three iterations. The first composition wanes, the second waxes. Hybrid Song Box.4 is Angela Bulloch's most recent work in a series of 'Pixel Box' sculptural installations. Hybrid Song Box.4 was first shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Theanyspacewhatever."
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BLUE 019CD
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2023 restock. "Les Arythmiques is one of the final works created by electroacoustic composer Luc Ferrari. A starting point for the piece was the challenge to represent in sound the jolt of electricity that had been sent across his heart to treat his arrythmia. The sound that he finally crafted to his satisfaction is the crackling, vaguely terrifying one that jolts Les Arythmiques into life and reappears throughout to interrupt the proceedings at the most unlikely moments. The sound environment that the electrical shocks interrupt is that of the EKG's regular beeps, the distant tolling of a church bell, and even more distant sounds resembling birds. In other words, it's the sound of enforced rest, of a patient immobilized. This relatively small repertoire of concrete sounds is examined with a disorienting repetitiveness that brings to mind the mobile-like quality of many of Ferrari's electroacoustic works. Here that quality is combined with the lightning-quick stabs associated with Erik M and Otomo Yoshihide, two artists with whom Ferrari collaborated in his final years. Les Arythmiques ultimately moves beyond the hospital room by delving into an archive of remembered sounds. Murmurings in Italian give way to the English-language interjection 'Are y'all familiar with the parts of a saddle?' -- the composer's reflection on material gathered in the American Southwest for his Far-West News series. Ferrari's characteristic humor is here, particularly in the superimposition of diverse sound environments. But Les Arythmiques also possesses a nagging unease, a persistent gravity that both listener and composer cannot shake. Les Arythmiques was included as part of the ten-CD box set Luc Ferrari: L'Oeuvre Électronique (Ina GRM). This is the first time that it has appeared as a separate release."
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BLUE 018CD
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"Some of you may remember Circle X's corrosive, caterwauling, and unutterably fabulous self-titled EP, which was originally released in 1979 and reissued a little over a decade ago by Jim O'Rourke's and David Grubbs' Dexter's Cigar label. Now the story picks up again with the long-overdue first CD release of Prehistory, Circle X's first full-length album. Prehistory was recorded in 1981 and released in 1983 by Index Records, making them, strangely enough, labelmates with Wall of Voodoo. Circle X were formed in 1978 from the remnants of No Fun and the I-Holes, Louisville, Kentucky's first two punk bands. (No Fun, also featuring Tara Key of the Babylon Dance Band and Antietam, finally appeared on the excellent Bold Beginnings: An Incomplete History of Louisville Punk compilation.) Circle X got the hell out of Dodge quickly enough, settling upon New York, then Dijon, France, and then back to New York again. The self-titled EP is a lurching, squalling monster. Prehistory is a tire-burning left turn. The pendulum arc of Tony Pinotti's vocals still contain throat-shredding howls, but expands to contain croons, moans, speech. Bruce Witsiepe's lacerating guitar is dumped into a dubbish aquarium of reverb, and Rik and Dave Letendre worry obsessive polyrhythms nearly to death. After the trash-compaction of their first EP, this is the sound of unhurried, committed exploration. So where did Circle X fit in among their peers? It's fair to describe them as a genre unto themselves. They came from punk rock and art school and sounded like none of their potential allies. They arrived in New York at the tail end of No Wave, at the same time that equally ornery bands like Swans and Sonic Youth were getting revved up. Circle X are every bit as distinctive and attitudinal as Throbbing Gristle, PiL, Theoretical Girls, DNA, or Mars, and yet they don't particularly sound like any of these groups. After Prehistory, they resurfaced with four white-vinyl 7"s, (later collected as the box set The Ivory Tower) and the 1994 Celestial, an album for the then-fledgling Matador label. Bruce Witsiepe passed away in 1995, marking the end of the group. Critic Jordan Mamone hit the nail on the head when he wrote: 'Every rare utterance from these unsentimental adventurers possesses a passion and a manifesto-writing fervor usually reserved for turn-of-the-century culture movements.'"
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BLUE 017CD
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"Souls of the Labadie Tract is the second collaboration between musician David Grubbs and poet Susan Howe. Susan Howe's and David Grubbs' collaboration is largely without precedent. (Cage and Tudor? Robert Creeley and Steve Lacy?) Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point a substantial new poem by Howe that will appear in a collection bearing the same title, to be published in 2007 by New Directions. The Labadists were a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. All that was to remain of it was the 'labadie poplar.' Thiefth, beginning with its title, is a glittering assemblage of shards. By contrast, Souls of the Labadie Tract sustains a sound world of buzzing reeds and electronics. After a prose introduction, individual poems occur as regularly as grave markers. Howe's reading is a marvel of hushed intensity. Grubbs' chosen instruments for this piece include two species of khaen, Laotian free-reed mouth organs that at signal moments fluoresce into a full ensemble. A distant VCS3 synthesizer slowly moves to the foreground with what becomes a full-circuited roar."
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BLUE 010CD
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"The brothers Oehlen are stellar, oft-decorated visual artists with a long history of thorny, helpful interventions into the world of music. Albert has been a Red Krayola mainstay and provocateur since the mid-1980s, and is also responsible for the fabulous Lelterwagen label. Markus drummed in the legendary German punk band Mittagspause, and records for Leiterwagen under the name Don Hobby. They were there as punk shaded into post-punk and scraped together the Deutschmarks for an analog synth. They're still here as various reissues of DAF, Der Plan, and Palals Schaumburg hang out in 'new releases' sections and find themselves spun by electroclash DJs. And they're still making music as odd, is-that-funny?, and darkly otherworldly as the early Suicide rehearsal tapes that recently saw the light of day."
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BLUE 007CD
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"Workshop's first US release in their decade-plus existence. 'You and your physicalness is loved by a dropout' is their translation of the title. On this, their fifth album, Workshop is the duo of Stephan Abry and Kai Althoff, currently divided between Hamburg and Cologne. With the current record, they have cut their cloth into shorter sections (the previous one, Meiguiweisheng Xiang, consisted of three long pieces), emphasized lyric- and songwriting, and marshaled a distinctive palette of sounds that favors nylon-string guitar, harp, synthesizer, sitar, and overlays of drum kit and drum machine. Their European label Sonig (home of Mouse on Mars and Lithops) refers to is as 'krautfolk.'"
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BLUE 008CD
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2023 restock. First ever release of a large scale electroacoustic piece five years in the making that revisits numerous periods from Ferrari's five decades of work. From the composer's liner notes: "I have been composing a new series of works under the general title Exploitation des Concepts. The point is to take concepts I have been experimenting with throughout my entire life as a composer, and to put them to use in every possible direction: in instrumental as well as electroacoustic music, in video, in multimedia installation, in new technologies as well as old ones.... These Exploitations go in all directions: the Tautology, superimposed cycles, the minimalism of the Presque Rien series, architectures of chance, anecdote, narrative, everyday sounds, arte povera . . . souvenirs . . . etc. -- all these concepts that have always preoccupied me but which until now I hadn't really exploited. So we find images of my childhood, my street, my subway; places I passed through and which struck me enough to record them, certain villages in Italy or the sea in Portugal; of my present, too: workplaces, my souvenirs, my house. The Cycle des Souvenirs also means that all the elements are structured in cycles which, when superimposed, produce chance encounters." -- Luc Ferrari.
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BLUE 005CD
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"Responding to the invitation of Quentin Rollet and Noel Akchote to make an LP for their Rectangle label, Grubbs penned 'The Coxcomb,' an adaptation in song of Stephen Crane's short story 'The Blue Hotel.' This seventeen-minute moritat is scored for three voices: The Narrator (Stephen Prina, white-hot on the heels of Push Comes to Love); The Swede (Grubbs, wild-eyed and singing through gritted teeth); and The Cowboy (played to perfection by deep-voiced Sasha Andres, singer of the group Heliogabale). Grubbs's engrossing guitar-yarn is gorgeously fleshed out by the saloon band of Didler Petit (cello, voice), Yves Robert (trombone), Thierry Madiot (bass trombone), and Quentin Rollet (alto sax). The original LP and picture-disc LP version of The Coxcomb featured as its B-side 'Aux Noctambules.' In its place is 'Avocado Orange,' recorded during The Spectrum Between sessions."
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BLUE 001CD
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2023 restock. "Ferrari -- along with Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, François Bayle, and others -- is one of the pioneers of the particular style of tape music known as 'musique concrète'. More significantly, he must be counted as one of the most complexly, most idiosyncratically compelling of post-War composers. Ferrari has time and again ranged far afield of musique concrète, and Interrupteur/Tautologos 3 is one such foray into instrumental music. But what a setting-forth! Mon dieu! These particular realizations came about through Ferrari's directed improvisations of Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble, and the recordings were originally released in 1970 by EMI in their 'Perspectives Musicales' series. 'Interrupteur' is largely static music, a music of long tones periodically interrupted by aleatoric events. If it references musical minimalism (particularly Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Robert Ashley), this surely counts as an intuitive, very personal result. 'Tautologos 3' pursues the idea of the superposition of cycles of different lengths that, once set into motion, will continually result in new events. Conventionally understood, a tautology is a redundancy in which the same meaning is expressed in different works; the same things are 'said' repeatedly in 'Taulologos 3', but as the context shifts through the displacement of the various cycles, how could there be no gain, no furtherance of both logic and sensation? In a world: exhilarating.""Interrupteur" is from 1967 and features the following instrumentation: English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, trumpet, violin, viola, cello, two percussions, two electric organs. It is one of the most outright powerful and devastating recordings within the avant garde realm. "Tautologos 3" is form 1970 and features: flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, viola, cello, double bass, electric guitar, electric organ & vibraphone.
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