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LP
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EE 008LP
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Empty Editions present the debut 12" from mysterious electronic outfit Taibach. Conceptualized by ABCs, Taibach has emerged from the shadows as a blunted East-Asian historical consciousness failing to return home after becoming a stranger to itself. With a nom de guerre which references both the infamous Slovenian proto-industrial group Laibach and their mythologized homeland of Taiwan, Taibach restages the classic thematics and aesthetic strategies of industrial music for a contemporary moment in which shifting balances of power between east and west herald new hegemonies and exhume old grievances. Their martial approach to electronics follows in a brood of decidedly cryptic underground music: drawing on the sound of classic industrial bands, early '90s techno, and more recent developments at the intersection of noise and rhythmic music. Taibach embraces futile Taiwan-based nationalism by celebrating the seldom-criticized reactionary tendencies of the region as a document of its history and its current political impasses. Taibach's debut LP contains a rawness and intensity that excels in club contexts, spilling over into more varied strands of experimental and underground music. While the music itself is primed for big room sound systems, the omnivorous use of guitar, effects pedals, and sampling techniques alongside stalwart drum programming also allow for more intimate listening -- soundtracking both club depravity and solitary walks in equal measure. The kosmische proto-electro bite of "Spicy Test" furnishes a terse blueprint for Taibach's aural vocabulary: skeletal drums brought deliberately into the red provide a burnt, metallic underpinning to the record's five tracks. Across the LP, rhythm is complemented by asymmetric washes of tape hiss, feedback, and filtered voices which ride alongside the drum patterns. Tracks "You Are Shit!" and "Enemy Inside" carve out wide expanses for filtered chords and sequenced synths to reflect against uncoiling rhythms. The LP culminates in "Rocket (Live)," an opus of live sound system music that carries with it the hot heat of a subterranean, neon-lit industrial catacomb filled with vampiric club-goers. As guitar noise billows out over a militant rhythm that recalls everything from darkwave to Container (or early Suicide records) the track builds into an assailing polyrhythm that showcases a dancefloor severity at the height of their transportive powers. Includes photocopied insert of a watercolor painting depicting an anonymous man hanging from a streetlamp.
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2LP
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EE 004LP
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Empty Editions presents Palina'tufa, the newest work from saxophonist Seymour Wright and percussionist Paul Abbott's long-running duo XT. Wright and Abbot's respective practices have been marked by a simultaneous engagement (with) and desire to challenge the limitations (of) the British tradition of improvised music -- represented by groups such as AMM and John Stevens's Spontaneous Music Ensemble. This album charts a new trajectory for Wright and Abbott, as they draw on recent live collaborations with RP Boo and Container in developing a sound which hybridizes the spontaneous interplay and timbral experimentation of free improvisation with the recursive formal structures of dance music. The album's title is an enigmatic portmanteau of "Palina" (taken from the name of a species of butterfly sighted by the duo during recording) combined with the word "Tufa" -- a type of rock composed of ash ejected from a vent during a volcanic eruption; the bedrock of the island of Hong Kong. Compellingly, the green sheen of the Palinurus butterfly is not produced by pigments, but emanates from the microstructure of its wing scales. Similarly, XT's Palina'tufa contains a brilliant internal logic of stacked component parts all amalgamated into a singularly iridescent instrumental structure. Recorded during a two-week studio residency in Hong Kong, Palina'tufa departs from XT's previous albums -- primarily documentations of live performances -- in its embrace of the recording studio as a form of instrumentation: a tool to sculpt, overdub, and (re)assemble their chimeric sounds. The result is a striking cybernetic version of the classic sax-and-drums duo pioneered by legendary groupings such as John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, Evan Parker and Paul Lytton, and Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille. Wright's unconventional use of feedback and Abbott's heavily deconstructed electro-dance textures expand upon this simulated space, unfurling their instrumentation into an authentically liberated territory. Across four dynamic fifteen-minute cuts, the duo craft an esoteric response to the real (and imagined) landscape(s) of Hong Kong. Interpreting their experience of the island as a kind of extended metaphor, Palina'tufa translates chance encounters, pockets of cultural history, vernacular architecture, and local wildlife (among other phenomena) into organizing principles for the creation of speculative music. Palina'tufa is a brilliant showcase of Wright and Abbott's composite sound: naturally synergistic, with careful attention paid to how psycho-geographical experience is transposed into the deeply considered interplay of their respective instruments. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Featuring artwork by Ikebana artist Kosen Ohtsubo. 180 gram vinyl; edition of 300.
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LP
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EE 003LP
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Empty Editions present Failed Celestial Creatures, an unexpected collaboration between composer-guitarist David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, The Red Krayola) and Tokyo-based musician Taku Unami. Primarily recorded in Kyoto, the album takes inspiration from the duo's shared musical and literary influences, emerging just as much from their improvisatory explorations as from an eclectic reading list exchanged prior to the recording sessions. The album's narrative inclinations are rooted in both artists' previous experiments with the complex reciprocity between sound and text, including Grubbs' work with the poet Susan Howe and Unami's collaborations with writers such as Eugene Thacker and Evan Calder Williams. Failed Celestial Creatures draws in particular upon a group of short stories by the short-lived Japanese author Atsushi Nakajima (1909-42) -- perhaps best known for inflecting Classical Chinese folktales with a modernist vein of absurdist and existential foreboding -- as the imaginary backdrop for its set of guitar-based instrumental explorations. In Nakajima's The Moon Over The Mountain, a mad-poet metamorphosed into a hybrid-tiger recites poetry with an obscure defect, while The Rebirth of Wujing sees the titular river monster self-identifying as a "failed celestial being" [堕天使]. The cryptic collapse read in both of these episodes resonates with Unami's research into the etymology of the chinese character "堕," meaning "to fail" in modern usage, but historically understood as referencing "sacred meat from the altar fallen on the ground." Such a primordial scene evokes the violation of the sacred as a tacit aspect of ritual. This failure of ritual, always a condition (and perhaps even a technique) for musicians of Grubbs and Unami's ilk, can be broadly understood as the primary point of departure for Failed Celestial Creatures. Situated within this affective terrain, the album's title-track consists of a side-long progression of dirge-like riffs enveloped by clouds of vaporous electronics -- eventually erupting into unruly squalls of feedback as Unami joins Grubbs on electric guitar. The B-side features a cluster of luminous guitar duets which are beguiling in their seeming effortlessness and simplicity. Threadbare and fallen, Grubbs and Unami invoke the failed ritual, the spilling at the altar, always suggested at the precipice of sonic emergence. Recorded by Taku Unami at Soto, Kyoto, August 7th and 9th, 2017; Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. 180 gram vinyl; Edition of 500.
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LP
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EE 002LP
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Empty Editions present Jean-Luc Guionnet and Daichi Yoshikawa's collaborative debut, Intervivos. Recorded during a week-long residency at Hong Kong's Empty Gallery, Intervivos (Latin for "between the living"), refers to the vital and unexpected acoustic synergy that developed between Guionnet's extended alto saxophone techniques and Yoshikawa's feedback systems during these sessions. Although Guionnet and Yoshikawa both come from prolific backgrounds in free jazz and electroacoustic improvisation -- Guionnet plays in The Ames Room with Will Guthrie and Clayton Thomas and Yoshikawa studied with AMM's Eddie Prevost -- Intervivos sees them developing an approach to improvising which seeks to escape the increasingly narrow stylistic confines of these musical provinces. The album is characterized by a brutal foregrounding of process and material lacking from the experimental music of so many of their contemporaries. Rather than seeking refinement or resolution through existing structures, Guionnet and Yoshikawa prioritize a sort of collaborative musical searching in which the aural entanglement, layering and folding of their scorched intonations creates an emergent musical form -- a non-linear music which sounds both ancient and futuristic. Coruscating alto saxophone riffs appear suddenly, before disintegrating amidst slabs of feedback and flurries of metallic percussion. Other times, Yoshikawa and Guionnet conjure shifting clouds of sustained tones from the timbral meshing of their instruments -- yielding a sound somewhere between the dense textures of Iancu Dumitrescu and the floating harmonics of Gagaku. Far from improvisation as we know it, this album instead gestures towards a speculative "electronic" music created through the ritualistic misuse of acoustic instruments. Intervivos is a fierce, undecorated triumph in the ruinous expression of instruments -- exalted in both its turbulence, and in its extreme testing of improvisational reality. Put summarily by Seymour Wright in the album's liner notes: "You don't need me to tell you how it sounds, or how to listen [...] this record begins when you play it." Features artwork by Jean-Luc Guionnet. Liner notes by saxophonist Seymour Wright. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Comes in a letterpress on Foldkraft paper sleeve. 180 gram vinyl; edition of 500.
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2LP
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EE 001LP
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Limited repress. Empty Editions present Eli Keszler's Last Signs Of Speed as their inaugural release. This release has represented a labor of love for both Eli and the label. Last Signs is Eli's first solo release since 2012's Catching Net (PAN 032CD) and explores a very different side of his unique acoustic universe. One in which the macro-cosmic percussive collisions of his earlier work give way to a gradual unfolding of dub-influenced rhythmic constellations. Eli has described Last Signs as his response to playing in club environments over the last few years; an attempt to negotiate a delicate balance between the materiality of his acoustic instrument and the hyper-mediated sonic ecosystem of the club sound system. Coming off like an inspired synthesis between Scientist and Xenakis, Last Signs Of Speed is a truly unique work by an artist at the height of his power.
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