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DLC 015LP
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De La Catessen offers the first re-release in over 40 years of the long-lost soundscape composition Sounds Like Work, initially privately released on cassette in 1978, by South Australian composer and scholar, Chester Schultz. Drawing from material recorded in late 1976 in the workplaces of members of the Maylands Church of Christ congregation, subsequently edited at the electronic music studio of Adelaide University in early 1978, Sounds Like Work has an oddly contemporary cast, given both the sophistication and intelligence of its composition, and the ever-relevant address of the meanings of the "working environment" that Schultz explores here. Doing this via sound, however, reveals plenty of previously unnoticed, or under-recognized, things about peoples' lives at work. Schultz's composition is refreshingly free of direct polemical or political intervention, though there is a subtle undercurrent of critique of the way the workplace makes us both suffer, and conform to expectation. Schultz's questions about the workplace -- what it does to the worker; the ways the worker tries to wrest control of the working day; work's alignment, or not, with our inner private lives and beliefs -- are poetically explored through lyrical editing, curious juxtaposition, and an unerring ability to know when to 'leave things be.' There's also an understanding here that the socio-cultural context of sound has both its specificities and its generalities. The voices heard here could be from nowhere other than Australia, yet what they speak of, and the everyday sounds they're surrounded by, could come from most anywhere. Schultz's approach to the use and understanding of sound via the soundscape came predominantly from reading and listening to R. Murray Schafer, and you can certainly hear the implications of Schafer's thinking in Sounds Like Work. It also recalls other, loosely analogous compositions, like Luc Ferrari's acousmatic tour de force, Presque Rien. Most of all, though, Sounds Like Work is a startling composition, one which subtly redraws the histories listeners long been told about Antipodean avant-garde sound.
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DLC 012CD
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With Empyrean Traces, De La Catessen Records focuses on another aspect of Adelaide composer David Kotlowy's career -- his works for trio. It follows the 2021 release of Final Fragments: Piano Music of David Kotlowy, where David Kotlowy's solo piano compositions were performed by composer and scholar Stephen Whittington. The three compositions on Empyrean Traces are brought to life by the Benaud Trio, whose ability to carry the gentle poetics of such work allows for bravura performances: as Luke Altmann of De La Catessen says, "it often felt during these sessions less like we were listening to the Benaud Trio and more like we were scanning for a signal from outer space." Indeed, Kotlowy's compositions share something otherworldly. His compositional ethos is informed by several key influences -- Japanese musical aesthetics; John Cage; Morton Feldman; Ross Bolleter and his ruined pianos -- but while you can hear relationships between Kotlowy's compositions and these forebears, Kotlowy is not beholden to that which has come before, and over several decades, has marked out his own patch of aesthetic territory with unerring clarity. The works on Empyrean Traces span the 1990s to 2020s, with two "earlier" pieces, "Chromatic Traces" and "Under Stars", revised earlier this decade. While significant time has elapsed between their composition, the three pieces on Empyrean Traces share the same "sound world", one where an exterior seeming-fragility masks a resolute interior: these are sturdy, powerful pieces. Kotlowy draws from several compositional tactics -- the use of Cagean time brackets, or breathing as measure, such that this album, in his own words, "traces a transition from outer to inner clock time." There is also a "relaxing of musical austerity" as Empyrean Traces progresses; the spare chill of "Chromatic Traces" acquiesces to the relative richness of the title composition. A gorgeous album of deeply moving music, Empyrean Traces is sure to appeal to fans of composers such as Morton Feldman, Jürg Frey, or Tōru Takemitsu. CD version comes in edition of 300.
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DLC 012LP
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LP version. Edition of 300; hand-numbered. With Empyrean Traces, De La Catessen Records focuses on another aspect of Adelaide composer David Kotlowy's career -- his works for trio. It follows the 2021 release of Final Fragments: Piano Music of David Kotlowy, where David Kotlowy's solo piano compositions were performed by composer and scholar Stephen Whittington. The three compositions on Empyrean Traces are brought to life by the Benaud Trio, whose ability to carry the gentle poetics of such work allows for bravura performances: as Luke Altmann of De La Catessen says, "it often felt during these sessions less like we were listening to the Benaud Trio and more like we were scanning for a signal from outer space." Indeed, Kotlowy's compositions share something otherworldly. His compositional ethos is informed by several key influences -- Japanese musical aesthetics; John Cage; Morton Feldman; Ross Bolleter and his ruined pianos -- but while you can hear relationships between Kotlowy's compositions and these forebears, Kotlowy is not beholden to that which has come before, and over several decades, has marked out his own patch of aesthetic territory with unerring clarity. The works on Empyrean Traces span the 1990s to 2020s, with two "earlier" pieces, "Chromatic Traces" and "Under Stars", revised earlier this decade. While significant time has elapsed between their composition, the three pieces on Empyrean Traces share the same "sound world", one where an exterior seeming-fragility masks a resolute interior: these are sturdy, powerful pieces. Kotlowy draws from several compositional tactics -- the use of Cagean time brackets, or breathing as measure, such that this album, in his own words, "traces a transition from outer to inner clock time." There is also a "relaxing of musical austerity" as Empyrean Traces progresses; the spare chill of "Chromatic Traces" acquiesces to the relative richness of the title composition. A gorgeous album of deeply moving music, Empyrean Traces is sure to appeal to fans of composers such as Morton Feldman, Jürg Frey, or Tōru Takemitsu.
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DLC 014LP
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Superior State is the second Leitmotiv Limbo album released by Port Adelaide's De la Catessen Records, after the 2022 CD Spiritual Disturbance. This time, Leitmotiv Limbo's isolationist studies have been bumped to vinyl, which feels like the perfect format for these twelve miniatures. The project of Adelaide artist Elijah Värttö, Leitmotiv Limbo has, over the past few decades, tracked a history of quietly insistent experimentation, embracing several technologies -- invented instruments; analog filters; drum synth -- to sketch desolate, cavernous structures, sometimes performed in reverberant spaces, such as church halls, which gifts the recordings a ritualistic air. For Superior State, Värttö is more intently focused on rhythms and pulses, resulting in a beautifully sculpted collection of poetic vignettes. You can hear some trace elements, here, of the minimalist techno-not-techno of artists like Pan Sonic, or Studio 1/Freiland, in their reductionist ethos. But also, in the insistence of Värttö's attention to detail, and his careful focus on a delimited number of elements, the twelve pieces on Superior State recall the work of mysterious German outfits Werkbund and Mechthild Von Leutsch, or the solo explorations of artists like Asmus Tietchens, Achim Wollscheid, and Goem. It's intensely evocative music, recalling all kinds of phenomena, both man-made and natural: electricity pulsing through wires; the humming of the central nervous system; the quiet hiss of deserted computer laboratories; the pulsations of plant life; the molecular vibration of atoms. Värttö has tapped into the poetry of the programmatic on Superior State, and he's sharp in his grasp of the significant effect that the incremental shifting of a few simple parameters can have on the overarching structures he's building here. Indeed, that poetry is echoed back in the beautiful liner notes by Adelaide artist Michael Hocking. Alive, flickering with incident, Superior State is energy transmitted, coursing through the collective's veins. Edition of 300; hand-numbered.
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DLC 010CD
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De la Catessen Records present the original score of the celebrated cinematic feature documentary Franklin by AACTA nominated composer Luke Altmann (Transfusion, Fell, The Leunig Fragments). Franklin (dir. Kasimir Burgess) tells the story of the seven-year campaign to save Tasmania's wild Franklin River from being dammed, through Oliver Cassidy's rafting adventure in the footsteps of his late father -- one of the original activists of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. Franklin had its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2022, and has since screened around the world to wide acclaim. From moments of quiet musical intimacy to sweeping orchestral grandeur, Luke Altmann's original score for Franklin features stunning performances by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Benaud Trio, and Konstantin Shamray. Franklin is the first original soundtrack release by Luke Altmann on De la Catessen records.
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DLC 011LP
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De la Catessen Records presents a limited vinyl release of the original score for the 2023 film Transfusion (a Stan. original film) by Luke Altmann (Franklin, The Leunig Fragments, Fell). Leaning into the sense of fragility, grief, and volatility of the film's central characters, Luke Altmann's original score for Transfusion combines compelling performances from ensembles of understated and gorgeously recorded drifting strings, trumpet, ronroco, and broken piano, with the visceral and barely suppressed dread of growling brass and orchestral percussion. Transfusion is the second original soundtrack release by Luke Altmann on De la Catessen records, following his score for the celebrated cinematic feature documentary Franklin (dir. Kasimir Burgess).
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DLC 013CD
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As co-director of new music organization The Firm, Raymond Chapman Smith has quietly presented over 130 concerts of new music. But his uncomplicated disinterest in recognition or recording means his music is rarely heard beyond the walls of Adelaide's Elder Hall, where The Firm's annual concert series is presented to a regular audience of 50-100 initiates. This is the first album of his work, played by US born Australian-Iranian pianist Amir Farid. As a teenager in the 1970s, Chapman Smith began performing in AZ Music in Sydney with the recently returned Australian assistant to Cardew and Stockhausen, David Ahern, feeding new ideas into the local music scene, and fielding phoned-in performance instructions from La Monte Young for their improvisations at Brett Whiteley's gallery. After moving to Adelaide to study with Richard Meale, through the '80s and '90s Chapman Smith founded and co-helmed loosely Cageian composer-performer collectives. Since 1996 he has co-directed new music organization The Firm, reveling in the poetic aesthetic of 19th Century German romanticism. On Ländler from 2002, Chapman Smith says: "The references, the paying of homage to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf, and Zemlinsky are so obvious as to hardly need comment. They are heard through lenses polished by a later, more reductive aesthetic and a somewhat fortuitous arrival at a kind of diatonic serialism." Of 2003's Nachschriften: "Some of my thoughts while making this music revolved around a passage from a speech which Paul Celan gave in 1958. Celan, of course, was speaking of lyric poetry but I would respectfully paraphrase his words as follows ... 'Music is not timeless. Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time -- through it, not above or beyond it. Music, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the -- not always greatly hopeful -- belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Music in this sense too is underway: it is a making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps towards an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.'"
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DLC 006LP
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2023 restock. In Last Blues, De la Catessen Records presents a mysterious folio of sonic snapshots, as much recaptured as composed, by Jon Dale's project, Moth, in Adelaide in the late '90s and early '00s. We're invited to tune in to these liminal frequencies, to observe and inhabit them, and relish the glowing sensual overdrive of their manifestation. From the ready means and at-handedness of guitar, amp, and tape, a congruous but diverse selection of unnamed tracks emerge -- musical moments borrowed from oblivion with the as yet unfulfilled good intention of returning them. Their sounds evoke abstract Polaroids of winter seascapes flecked with spare, brittle detail, or the scaly-winged flutterings of elusive nocturnal insects. Here, a homely hum like a vacuum cleaner on sunny childhood's weekend morning; there, suburban power lines buzzing gently in the mist. The last track of Last Blues is like a reverent vision of lava-flow for harmonium, the slow-motion eruption of a single chord, which echoes in the mind for hours. Last Blues comes from somewhere that doesn't exist anymore, and shows us something that may never have happened there.
"Jon Dale collapses old dichotomies (such as organic vs. inorganic and heavy vs. light) into a pure horizon of tone with only guitar and a little harmonium. Sonically, it makes me think of a middle point between if Organum snuck into the studio to remix Glenn Branca, and what I imagine the electric synapses firing off in Raymond Roussel's brain would've sounded like if committed to wax cylinder. Which is to say, it sounds rad." --Ben Chasny, Six Organs Of Admittance
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DLC 007LP
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Limited restock. Selected Live Recordings is the third release De La Catessen Records has divined from the archives of New-York-via-Adelaide minimalist composer Alex Carpenter, and the second in this series for his shape-shifting collective, Music Of Transparent Means. It follows the two side-long fantasias of 2021's self-titled album; this time, we pan out slightly, to grant the listener a varied and yet more complex understanding of the material Carpenter was writing and performing when this music was happening, during the noughties. On this album, you can hear the results of some intensive explorations of the possibilities of minimalism both at its most delicate, and at its most feverish. The heavenly stasis of "Disappearance #1", for massed wine glasses and bowed guitars, feels like being jettisoned in a water tower filled with ether; the wooziness of "Burial Music" captures something of the spirit of Fripp & Eno's (No Pussyfooting), but as though the tape is slowly disintegrating; the music is blurred at the edges, warped and sidereal. Perhaps the centerpiece of Selected Live Recordings, though, is the simple, yet ravishing, "Rose Street Womb". With its performers given a simple set of instructions -- to continually repeat and elongate a series of phrases, while listening and responding to the overall sound of the ensemble -- its pastoral psychedelia recalls the gentle slippages of Arthur Russell's landmark composition, Tower Of Meaning. Elsewhere, "Mountain Piece #2" is a thunderstorm for massed drums, while "Second Presencing" uses delays as a structuring device to paint an "audio canvas" from a clutch of damaged tones. Throughout, you can hear Carpenter's knowledge and deep study of the history of minimalist composition -- he has written extensively on the work of La Monte Young, and there is certainly some aesthetic and ideological crossover with the likes of Phill Niblock, Terry Riley, and Arnold Dreyblatt. But it is also very much his own thing, the result of an intensive period of study and exploration of the possibilities, not just of minimalist composition, but also of Just Intonation. With the material long whispered about in reverent tones, and circulating on CD-R only amongst a small group of like-minded souls, De La Catessen's ongoing series of releases of Carpenter's music is a major development, bringing to light one of minimalism's hidden histories.
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DLC 008CD
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The first widely available edition of this singular, long-form composition, Within Our Reach: A Symphony Of The Port River: Soundscapes, by Port Adelaide, Australia-based pianist, composer, writer and researcher Chester Schultz. Originally self-released by Schultz in 1996, on his own Waterhole imprint, Within Our Reach was initially distributed free as a community resource, and not available for sale. De La Catessen's reissue is an invaluable contribution to developing histories of music and composition from Adelaide. It also offers the chance for germane reflection on the implications of late capitalism, gentrification, and "development" for both landscape and inhabitants. For Within Our Reach, Schultz has mapped out, via field recordings, an intricate, generous composition that documents the sounds of the Port River tidal inlet area of the greater Adelaide city. The recordings cover the period between 1989 to 1995, during which time the last of the industries based on the banks of the Port's higher land closed; there's something of a ghosted psychogeography of industry past during parts of Within Our Reach, with Schultz's evocative use of field recordings offering the listener clues as to the ongoing spatial rearrangement of the Port River area. Throughout Within Our Reach, you hear the interaction of multiple phenomena. The cawing and singing of birds, individual and en masse, broadcasts out over the submerged drone that modern transport "gifts" to the urban soundscape; for example, a rambling human voice, singing the traditional song "Down By The Riverside", is tangled up in the hum and purr of traffic, and the call of the seagull. Water and wind interact; the wind plays the guitar strings like an Aeolian harp; on "Hulks", Schultz and friends 'play' the debris of the mudflats, tapping on rusty bolts and rotting wood; a scherzo of people, wandering through the everyday, leads into a documentation of families gathered on the mudflats, playing guitar, recorder and clarinets, humming along idly; story fragments drift by, from Schultz and others. The delicate balancing act undertaken here, between the sounds of the natural world, the intrusions of the industrial world, and the constant negotiations of the people and animals that live within, and around, these spaces, is testament to Schultz's sensitive ear and careful, considered composition. Dedicated to theologian social critic Jacques Ellul, composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, soundscape composer R. Murray Schafer, and the residents of Port Adelaide, Within Our Reach is a deeply moving document of the transformation of public space, and a profound, genuinely critical "music of place".
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DLC 009CD
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De la Catessen Records presents Spiritual Disturbance from Elijah Värttö's project Leitmotiv Limbo. Currently based in Port Adelaide, Australia, Leitmotiv Limbo has developed, slowly but surely, over the past few decades, through international travel and relocation, including five years in Estonia (2008-2012), where Värttö set up the Servataguse Muusika concert series. Spiritual Disturbance was recorded in 2020 and released privately as a small run of recycled cassettes -- this CD version is the first widely available Leitmotiv Limbo release since their 2018 split cassette with RNPno2 on Finnish label Hyster Tapes. Central to the Leitmotiv Limbo ethos are Värttö's self-made instruments, built from discarded, repurposed, and found objects, such as loose springs and other metallic implements. Affixed to wood sourced from a disused and dismantled piano frame, their deep resonance, both percussive and timbral, positions Värttö's approach within a trajectory of instrument builders/creators -- you can hear echoes of the music of artists like Z'ev, Hal Rammel, and Rod Cooper in the shattered textures and industrial drones of tracks like "Submersive", for example. There's also a tactility to the performances here, a haptic resonance, and a strange, viscous sensuality to the material. Värttö recorded Spiritual Disturbance in a church hall in Adelaide, on a four-track, using room mics and direct line input, and it's made up largely of one-take performances on Värttö's self-made instruments, with minimal intervention, at times, from analog filters and a drum synth. The combination of the evacuated tonalities of the instruments, plus the cavernous reverb of the recording space, gives Spiritual Disturbance a distinctly ritualistic sensibility; poetic and primitive, but eloquent in its exploration. It also brings to mind mysterious projects like Organum, Morphogenesis, Metgumbnerbone, perhaps even an acoustic Voice Crack, where conceptual rigor meets unpredictability via real-time improvisation. Spectral and haunted, Leitmotiv Limbo's Spiritual Disturbance is a compelling collection of oneiric expression, and an eloquent articulation of a unique, invented universe. Includes four-page booklet; edition of 300.
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DLC 004LP
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Limited restock. The first ever vinyl release from the archives of Music of Transparent Means, the constantly evolving minimalist ensemble of up to 21 players active in Adelaide, Australia from 2002-2007. Long celebrated by a tiny circle of initiates and hardcore minimalism aficionados, Music of Transparent Means shaped the sound of its native city to its most euphoric and immersive state with a series of terrifically intense concerts of original compositions. After its leader Alex Carpenter was lured to New York in 2007, the surviving artifacts -- coveted CDr editions handmade by Carpenter himself -- were circulated only among the most trusting fans. De la Catessen Records presents "Chord From The Second Delphic Hymn" alongside Music of Transparent Means' anthem "Emerging Like An Infant From The House Of Truth", recorded live at an evening performance at De la Catessen Gallery in 2007. Lovers of the music of La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and Arnold Dreyblatt will discover much on this album to rejoice.
Alex Carpenter is an Australian-born artist and researcher living in New York City. His large-scale minimalist orchestra Music of Transparent Means won notoriety in the early 2000s for its experimental live marathons, with as many as 21 players and as few as one.
"Joyous sensory over-stimulation (...) a kind of blissful, obliterated exhaustion (...) the music is, quite simply, a head-fucking blast to listen to and swim through" --Jon Dale.
"Staggering... one of the records of the year" --Shame File Music.
"'Chord from the Second Delphic Hymn' shimmers and undulates clangorously like some freshly awakened metallic beast... textures chime like an orchestra of dulcimers ... controlled thunder ... a kind of inner euphoria ... the result both a mutating organism and volcanic forcefield" --Textura
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DLC 005LP
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De la Catessen Records presents a reissue of Alex Carpenter's Excavation Patterns, originally released by the Vanished Records imprint in a tiny CDr edition in 2005. This epic four movement work for electric guitar and delay is available on vinyl for the first time. Excavation Patterns is a uniquely pervasive touchstone of Adelaide's music culture, and has since put down roots around the world among devoted aficionados of minimalism, ambient music, and improvisation. At 52 sprawling minutes in length, Excavation Patterns follows De la Catessen's 2021 release of "Chord From The Second Delphic Hymn"/"Emerging Like An Infant From The House Of Truth" by Alex Carpenter's minimalist orchestra Music of Transparent Means (DLC 004LP). In contrast to that white-hot furnace of molten drones, Excavation Patterns reveals an achingly fragile and delicate side of Carpenter's work. Direct metal mastered and pressed by RAND in Leipzig; edition of 300 (hand-numbered).
Alex Carpenter is an Australian-born artist and researcher living in New York City. His large-scale minimalist orchestra Music of Transparent Means won notoriety in the early 2000s, and he has since continued to expand his practice in recording and public performance.
"Notes fall ... like careful snowflakes ... on a slow drift into the night" --Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly.
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DLC 003LP
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2021 release. Final Fragments is the first album dedicated to the music of quiet revolutionary David Kotlowy, and surveys his piano music from the early '90s to the '00s. Kotlowy's music is often extremely delicate, sometimes straddles the threshold of audibility, and creates pregnant silences, producing a maximum effect from a limited amount of material. Among the selections on this record are examples of his gorgeous and original "breath pieces", in which the duration of musical notes and gestures are determined exclusively by the performer's unhurried breathing. Stephen Whittington's performances of new piano music have long been celebrated worldwide, but until now he has been extremely elusive on disc. De la Catessen Records presents his first commercial album as solo pianist. Since the 1970s, he has shaped the development of new music by giving the first performances in Australia of works by Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew, James Tenney, and many others.
"Radically beautiful, and perhaps, most of all, radically human (...) Throughout, I am struck by the music's poetics, its capacity to still the moment, and its ability to balance rigor of praxis with gentleness of touch" --Jon Dale.
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