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LP
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HOL 145LP
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Edition of 100 copies. Acchiappashpirt is the sound and video, poetry/poetronic collaboration between the Albanian poet and vocalist Jonida Prifti and the Italian sound artist Stefano Di Trapani. Ninulla was conceived as a suite of lullabies that were written and sung for, with, and by their son Arion. An album divided between conscious and unconscious recordings, where dream and wake merge. Despite the obvious gentle and holistic conception of Ninulla, the album is a deeply experimental excursion into sound practice, entirely rethinking the notion of what a lullaby might be. Drenched in a deep sense of atmosphere and reverberance, with drifting, often processed vocals floating and weaving their way through simple and seductive melodies, haunting environmental images and textures, and flirtations with playful left-field pop, the album has the unavoidable effect of catapulting you into the joyous, elemental nature of music making at its purest form, while also throwing a wrench in the cogs every step of the way. Composed and recorded by Jonida Prifti and Stefano Di Trapani. Produced by Antonio Giannatonio and Acchiappashpirt. Edited by Antonio Giannatonio. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover artwork by Re Delle Aringhe. Includes the poem "Ai miei figli e ai miei nipoti" by Dania De Vincenzi.
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2LP
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HOL 138LP
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"Towards the end of the 1970s, a film about me and my work was made in Kabul for the South German TV program. The director was Arpad Bondy. In order to find a venue for my music that is typical for Afghanistan, it was agreed that my 'percussion environment,' a tubular cube of 2x2x2 meters including the associated instruments, would be transported on a barren, stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains. The people called the place 'Maidan,' which means nothing but 'place.' While a couple of men dragged the frame pipes and the instruments up the hill, I decided to carry my large Wuhan gong (100 cm diameter) up the mountain, in a kind of ritual. Michael Ranta sent me this gong from Wuhan/China to Kabul. With slow and careful steps, carrying the heavy gong like an umbrella on my head, I walked over the difficult rocky terrain without a path up. Suddenly a snake about two meters long came out of the rocks towards me and hissed aggressively at me... As I later discovered, it was a very venomous snake... I had to bring myself to kill the beautiful animal... I decided to name my solo performance Requiem For The Snake Of Maidan... While I was playing I only had one musician with me: the wind. I hung my metallophones on the linkage so that the wind could touch them and create sounds. The recording captured a few parts where I didn't have to lift a finger and the wind did everything that was necessary. The room was a wide landscape without any echo. If an echo can be heard in the recording, it is the reverberation from the big gong. Only a few noises came, apart from the wind, from outside... The big gong and the boo chals (Tibetan cymbals) produced a whole series of overtones. The string instruments, the metallo- and lithophones dominate the recording. In addition to the acoustic environment of my instruments, in some parts of my improvisation I used a battery-powered tape recorder (Uher 4400 report stereo IC) with a pre-recorded feeding tape that I had pre-recorded before alone or together with Michael Ranta in Kabul. The stones of the lithophone were collected by Ranta and myself in the valley of Goldara around an old collapsed Buddhist stupa. Almost each of the hundred stone plate we had lifted was ringing." --Hartmut Geerken
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HOL 142LP
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Edition of 500 copies. Nancy Mounir's debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album -- whose title means "Promenade of the Souls" in Arabic -- explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir's own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own ambient arrangements over voices haunted with passion and desire as she creates a sound that is warmly familiar but utterly new. On the album, Mounir slips into the gaps left by the lost frequencies of the aging recordings, finding space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony. Elegant melodies unfold in measured gestures as Mounir -- who plays most of the instruments herself -- revels in the plaintive intonations and brash lyrics of the departed singers. With layers enmeshed together, it's at times hard to pin down when the past ends and the present begins, but beneath it all is a liberating attitude of defiance that feels timeless. Nozhet El Nofous is brilliant in the way it explores the techniques and perspectives of a more freewheeling time period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized by the Middle East's cultural power brokers in the early 1930s. As she summons a rich, atmospheric landscape of tone and texture, Mounir engages an older generation of musical rebels in a creative dialogue across time and space - and the results are stunning in their ambition and beauty. Mixed by Adham Zidan. Mastered by Heba Kadry. Remastered for vinyl by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio. Artwork by Egyptian filmmaker and photographer Ahmad Abdalla, with original typography and design by Salma Shamel. Lyrics translation by Katharine Halls. Includes an eight-page booklet with lyrics in English and Arabic. Featuring Naima El Masreya, Saleh Abdel Hay, Abdel Latif El Banna, Mounira El Mahdeya, Hayat Sabry, Fatma Serry, and Zaki Mourad.
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HOL 134EP
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Two pieces made with dismantled toy pianos, wind-up toys, popping candy, bow, toy spring reverb, Buddha Machine, Tamayura bell, Japanese iron wind chimes, electronics, and voice. Percussive rhythms, hypnotic sounds and Cantonese words used like magic formulas. Somewhere between minimalism and gamelan, but still unmistakably unique. Recorded and mixed at Outlau'd Studio, Brussels, in 2020 (Chinese Year of the Rat) during pandemic, and finalized in 2021 (Chinese Year of the Ox). Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover illustration by Eleusi.
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HOL 144LP
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Edition of 300 copies. Gold foil printed sleeve. Includes 12-page booklet and two leporello inserts printed on translucent paper. On the centenary of the birth of Luigi Nono, the Maurice Quartet -- Georgia Privitera (violin), Laura Bertolino (violin), Francesco Vernero (viola), and Aline Privitera (cello) -- reinterprets the composition for string quartet by the Venetian composer: Fragmente: Stille, An Diotima, dedicated to LaSalle Quartet on the occasion of the thirtieth Beethovenfest in Bonn, in 1980. The driving force of inspiration must have been Beethoven, understood as a radical innovator of the conventions of his time. This same definition was attributed to Nono after composing this work, so much so that the critics of the time spoke of the "turning point work." An extreme chamber music work, at the same time private and political, which Nono himself summarized as follows: "I have not changed at all. Even tenderness, the private has its collective, political side. Therefore my String Quartet is not the expression of a new retrospective line in me, but rather my current position of experimentation: I want the great, rebellious affirmation with the minimum means." The edition includes a set of evocative photographs of the Giudecca in Venice -- which follow the aesthetics of the fragment -- realized by Sophie-Anne Herin and a precious musicological contribution by Francesca Scigliuzzo. The Maurice Quartet -- active for more than twenty years in the field of experimentation between contemporary music, electronics and multimedia -- joins the numerous homages that the world of music pays to Nono one hundred years after his birth with a recording work of great philological and interpretative relevance, aimed at capturing the most intimate and feverish side of one of the most significant composers of the last century.
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HOL 141LP
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Edition of 500 copies, screen printed cover. Includes two inserts: a replica of the original insert and the English translation. Henry Krutzen is a relatively shadowy figure in the history of experimental sound. Between the early '80s and the 2010s, there are only a handful of albums that bear his name, and very little information about them. A multi-instrumentalist and composer who studied percussion, saxophone, and harmony in various schools and jazz clinics across Belgium, over the years he played in a diverse range of musical projects across the idioms of jazz, new wave, heavy metal, experimental, chanson française, world music and progressive rock, before relocating to Brazil during the early 2000s. Silances, originally released by Igloo Records -- the Belgian imprint founded in 1978 by Daniel Sotiaux -- sitting alongside astounding and remarkably unique albums by Leo Küpper, Jacques Bekaert, Henri Chopin, Arthur Pétronio, André Stordeur, and numerous others, is an entirely singular gesture at the borders of sound poetry, musique concrète, and radical electroacoustic practice that draws upon disparate elements of drone, jazz, minimalism, ecstatic tribalism, and various traditions of music from across the globe. Decades on from its original release it remains as striking, unique, and compelling as it did upon its release. In a note that Krutzen penned in 2022 when he was contacted for the reissue of Silances, Krutzen recalls: "Since I was 16, I had been experimenting with concrete music with a technician friend and we used all a teenager's room could offer to make sounds into music: faucets, glasses of water, metal springs on ladders, objects of any kind? I had hours of recordings I pitched to Daniel [Sotiaux], to see if he was interested in making an album. I also had other ideas I wanted to be able to develop. What a joy when he accepted to work on the project! So I got to work. First, I set up a vocal improvisation quartet, and we spent long afternoons rehearsing using input I provided? We went into the studio and recorded almost two hours of improvisation, from which I then chose the best moments for the final product."
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HOL 136CD
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Limited restock. Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama during 1914, Sun Ra first emerged on the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. One of the great avant-garde composers of his generation -- leading the way on piano, organ, and (eventually) synthesizer -- beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting until his death in 1993, led the Arkestra, a band through which a near countless number of important artists passed and collaborated with, and many remained for the duration of their careers, notably Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, and June Tyson. Known for their wild costumes and theatrics, Ra's eccentric image and claims that he was from Saturn was deeply political, imagining an alternate social order, history, and future for African Americans that rests as a pioneering force in the Afro-Futurist movement. Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980, comprising an astounding 27 compositions, including the highly celebrated "Astro Black," "Mr. Mystery," "Romance of Two Planets," "Space Is the Place," "We Travel the Spaceways," and "Calling Planet Earth." High among the greatest live gigs by the Arkestra captured on tape, carefully mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio, Live in Rome 1980 is a near perfect snapshot of the band's versatility and range, including many of their most notably and famous songs, as well as striking renditions of the Horace Henderson penned Benny Goodman number "Big John's Special," Fletcher Henderson's "Yeah Man!," and "Limehouse Blues," displaying Ra's willingness to address and rework the entire, diverse history of jazz in a single go. Heard in its totality, perhaps what makes Live in Rome 1980 most striking is the way in which the concert plays out. Roughly the first half encounters the band locked in some of the most out-there, free jazz fire that can be imagined, weaving a startling sense of interplay and furious energy into a brilliant tapestry of writhing sonority, the likes of which were only really achieved by this band. The second half, with only moments of exception that return to the furious energy of the first, is a very different affair, easy toward the vocal standards, led by June Tyson's vocals and the joyous collective chanting of the band, for which they have become so widely celebrated, threading the sounds of off-kilter big band swing with heavy grooves and imagines of outer space.
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3LP BOX
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HOL 136LP
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Repressed on LP. Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama during 1914, Sun Ra first emerged on the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. One of the great avant-garde composers of his generation -- leading the way on piano, organ, and (eventually) synthesizer -- beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting until his death in 1993, led the Arkestra, a band through which a near countless number of important artists passed and collaborated with, and many remained for the duration of their careers, notably Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, and June Tyson. Known for their wild costumes and theatrics, Ra's eccentric image and claims that he was from Saturn was deeply political, imagining an alternate social order, history, and future for African Americans that rests as a pioneering force in the Afro-Futurist movement. Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980, comprising an astounding 27 compositions, including the highly celebrated "Astro Black," "Mr. Mystery," "Romance of Two Planets," "Space Is the Place," "We Travel the Spaceways," and "Calling Planet Earth," over six vinyl sides. High among the greatest live gigs by the Arkestra captured on tape, carefully mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio, Live in Rome 1980 is a near perfect snapshot of the band's versatility and range, including many of their most notably and famous songs, as well as striking renditions of the Horace Henderson penned Benny Goodman number "Big John's Special," Fletcher Henderson's "Yeah Man!," and "Limehouse Blues," displaying Ra's willingness to address and rework the entire, diverse history of jazz in a single go. Heard in its totality, perhaps what makes Live in Rome 1980 most striking is the way in which the concert plays out. Roughly the first half encounters the band locked in some of the most out-there, free jazz fire that can be imagined, weaving a startling sense of interplay and furious energy into a brilliant tapestry of writhing sonority, the likes of which were only really achieved by this band. The second half, with only moments of exception that return to the furious energy of the first, is a very different affair, easy toward the vocal standards, led by June Tyson's vocals and the joyous collective chanting of the band, for which they have become so widely celebrated, threading the sounds of off-kilter big band swing with heavy grooves and imagines of outer space.
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HOL 125LP
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Mediterranean Music Water (Mare nostrum in moedium terrae) Op. 203, a never before issued tape composition, belongs to a body of work embarked upon during the 1980s and '90s connected to Sicily, the other most notable and available being Op. 201 L'Essere Umano Errabando, La Voca Errabando, issued by The Henning Christiansen Archive in 2020. These works were an extension of Ursula and Henning Christiansen's meeting and befriending the Sicily based couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, with whom they regularly visited and collaborated. Like its predecessor, the aforementioned Op. 201, Mediterranean Music Water Op. 203 is a conceptualization of abstract theatricality at the connection of place and its relationship to the sea. Performed by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen and recorded at a small performing arts theatre in Erice, Sicily -- Teatro Gebel Hamed -- during December of 1991, the abstract for this work reads: "In the morning (after the storm), on the beach. The sea has thrown some things on the beach. Blue light -- some mist? On the ground. Ursula's slides on the wall. Henning is rolling from the background of the stage slowly, very slowly, towards, in a fish net. I come in looking for the things the sea has left and discover him. I roll him out of the net, he's nearly dead, and try to get life in him. Light in the background in rainbow colours. Ursula wears a partlett dress, as a siren." These images lay a foundation and context for the sounds that emerge over the album's two sides, a fascinating conjunction between the power of water and the human spirit. Through the processing of heavy delay and reverb, we encounter the howling utterances of violin tones, vocalizations, and countless unplayable instrumental and non-instrumental sound sources, gathering in a vast and sprawling serious of sonorous expanses that seem to echo the power, movements, and myths tied to the Mediterranean.
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HOL 106RE-LP
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"I have worked together with sheep before," says Henning Christiansen, introducing the performance he did in front of the Brucknerhaus in Linz in July 1988. But this time he went beyond, building a "Concert-Castle" with hay blocks where thirty sheep could perform music. Another time the animals -- Christiansen's obsession and passion -- become the musical instruments used for his compositions. Schafe statt Geigen (Sheep Instead of Violins, 1988) and "Verena" Vogelzymphon (Bird Symphony, 1990) first appeared as a small CD edition issued by Galerie Bernd Klüser in 1991. Both works, each one occupying a full side of this LP edition, extend from one of Christiansen's long standing conceptual strategies -- deploying recordings of animals as stand-ins for musical instruments, sheep and birds respectively. While each work allows these sources to take the natural lead, at times masquerading as field recordings, both feature subtle tonal and electronic interventions by the composer, creating strange and brilliant compositions which shift the terms and subjects of music as they were long understood. Accompanied by a twenty-page booklet featuring drawings and texts by Henning Christiansen, as well as pictures of the performance by René Block.
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LP
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HOL 112LP
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Coupla Triples is a collection of two recordings made by MP Hopkins in 2014. The first piece, "Spins, Groans, Tones," was previously self-released as part of a CDR/chapbook edition, while the second piece "Waves, Feedback, Thoughts," has remained unreleased until now. Both pieces were created using a simple compositional method, in which random word prompts were selected from a list of sounds and "interpreted' in an immediate manner with only basic recording equipment -- a microphone, a tape loop, a voice recorder and an amp. Three sounds, twice. Arranged carelessly but carefully. A coupla triples, nothing fancy. Recorded and mixed on the land of the Gadigal people, Sydney, 2014. Pressing info: 200 copies, black vinyl, A2 poster.
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HOL 133LP
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Limited 2024 repress! Reissue, originally released in 1974. Blending Native American references into a body of sonority that draws on free improvisation, experimental electronic music, and spiritual jazz, Pygmy Unit's Signals From Earth -- originally self-released by the band in 1974 -- forges a singular and almost entirely unknown path, and stands almost entirely on its own in the history of west coast American jazz. First appearing on the San Francisco scene sometime during the early 1970s, almost nothing is known about the Pygmy Unit, a seven-piece band steered by Darrel De Vore, who contributed flute, bass, percussion, piano, and vocals to the band's lone LP, first appeared with percussionist Terry Wilson within the psychedelic folk rock band, The Charlatans, who belonged to the legendary Family Dog scene. Jim Pepper, a Native American tenor saxophonist known for being a member of the Mal Waldron Quartet, played with Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, and numerous others, and produced the cult favorite, Pepper's Pow Wow, for Embryo Records in 1971. John Celona, who contributes parts on sax, synthesizer, and percussion, would later go on to be regarded as an electronic composer of some note. Of the remaining members, saxophonist Frank Albright, bassoonist Ron Grunn, and percussionist Marvin Kirkland, very little else is known. It seems this LP is more or less all they recorded. While undeniably jazz -- riding a remarkable line between avant-garde electronic music, spiritual jazz, and free improvisation -- the band was very much a product of the diverse creative ferment that developed in their hometown of San Francisco during the 1960s. Embodying the raw spirit of DIY (many of the instruments used in the recordings were made by DeVore himself, self-described as an "itinerant flute-maker") the ensemble channels references -- via passages of chanting and percussion, as well as conceptual underpinnings -- from Jim Pepper's Native American roots, intuiting them with the soulfulness of spiritual jazz, wild moments of avant-gardism centered around synths and electronic effects, and explosions of wild free improvisation. "Development of new music is a continuous path that grows directionally according to psychoacoustical phenomena available for unification. This record is evidence of that development, containing 12 performance pieces, at 12 separate times in different acoustical spaces with various combinations of musicians and instrumentation. The music is shaped by signals, received and sent by life forms on this planet. It is unwritten, unrehearsed, utilizing new and traditional approaches to energy, motion, and form. Eventually, music develops as a natural extension of the environment in which it exists. It is the aim of the traditions... to signal the universe from the Earth." Includes two booklets/replicas of original DeVore's publications.
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2LP
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HOL 131LP
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For more than a decade, Giovanni Di Domenico, Jim O'Rourke, and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto have been coming together in various combinations -- duos, trios, and larger ensembles -- slowly becoming one of the most noteworthy, understated collaborations in the landscape of experimental sound. In 2015, the trio recorded a brilliant LP entitled Delivery Health for Silent Water, laying the groundwork for an enduring project that adopted that album's title as its name, debuting properly in 2017 with the stunner Hard Off (SW 014LP, 2017). Over the years since, Di Domenico, O'Rourke, and Yamamoto have played together in Bonjintan, their project with Akira Sakata, and in further collaborations with Eiko Ishibashi and Joe Talia, not to mention O'Rourke and Di Domenico's prolific work as a duo. A bit more than five years on from Hard Off, Delivery Health finally return with SuperDeluxe!, a stunning new double-LP on Holidays Records. Comprising roughly four years of early activity from the trio that rests at a fascinating juncture of electroacoustic composition, free improvisation, and noise, it's easily among the most engaging and intoxicating efforts yet from one of the most dynamic bands working today. Like its predecessors, SuperDeluxe! rides a beautiful line between striking singular creative ambition and accomplishment, and simply feeling like a free-wheeling conversation between friends who have relinquished their egos and presumptions out of a deep sense of mutual respect. Ironically, as forward thinking as it feels, the album is a kind of retrospective rewind, comprising five live documents recorded, of course, at the legendary SuperDeluxe! in Tokyo between 2012 and 2014 across its four sides. Taking you deep into the very beginnings and previously unheard activities (at least for those who were there on these nights) of Di Domenico, O'Rourke, and Yamamoto, the trio weaves a knotted tapestry unfurling as sheets of sound, that sidesteps signifiers and the expectations that one might have of each of these artists on their own. Ranging from brisling ambient passages drawing on latent melodic flirtations, heavy jams on guitar, drums, electronics, and keyboards, and outright, full throttle noise, each moment represents a visionary excursion into the depths of experimental, improvised sound, revealing a shocking sense of real-time dexterity from each player, as much as the collective whole experiments in improvised sound. SuperDeluxe! is an immersion into the joys of music making, collaboration, and ultimately listening. Contemporary improvised music at its absolute best. Insert with Japanese text on colored paper; obi; edition of 300.
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HOL 126LP
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Block Gifts is a collection of three works for organs composed by James Rushford between 2015 and 2018. Using harmonium, portative organ and electric organ, each piece is linked by Rushford's idiosyncratic combination of strict intervallic systems in different tunings (Werckmeister, quarter-tone, equal temperament), and haptically-informed rhythmic and expressive freedom. Creaks, stutters and sweeping fingers on keys become instrumental sounds in their own right, creating a further logical layer in Rushford's compositional world. An intimate, nocturnal, and slightly suffered dialogue between the instrument and the body building a shining and fragile monument to the ephemeral nature of the organ, one of the most intriguing and ancient families of musical instruments in history. Composed and recorded 2015-2018 at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart). Mixed by Joe Talia, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut by Daniel Krieger at SST, Frankfurt am Main. Cover artwork and fold out poster by Graham Lambkin. Includes fold-out A2 poster; edition of 300.
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4CD BOX
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HOL 121CD
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Lasse Marhaug and Jon Wesseltoft have collaborated in a variety of projects over the years, but started the Tongues of Mount Meru duo back in 2008 as a collaboration to pursue their shared interest in sustained and closely calibrated sounds, and the phenomenological impact they have on the act of listening. They started recording a session each year from 2008 to 2011 in Oslo utilizing harmoniums, organs, shruti boxes, oscillators, and computers and accumulated a large pool of material. Some of that material wound up on tapes and vinyl over the years, but they kept the hour-long pieces with an intended major future release in mind. These pieces are now collected in this monumental four-disc box set. Clocking in at the total of over four hours, with over ten years in the making, this music was crafted with a clear intent to influence its listeners sense of time and mental color analogous to the music's stringently, and at times claustrophobic, unfolding narrative. Slowly blooming clusters of wave interference kaleidoscopic blending together with lower frequency binaural pulse patterns. It is as if light has been pitched down, and its oscillating and shimmering coating of gradually shifting overtone cycles opens up and crashes down again into the ocean of waves continually churning around its own time axis. Drawing upon their joint interest in minimalism and long-form music, raga theory and electroacoustics, Marhaug and Wesseltoft conjures up a focused power of both beauty and unease to deeply establish a state of hypnotic attentiveness. The result is a hallucinatory and intense set of finely tuned and tectonic long-form pieces, and is a must for anyone even remotely interested in any form of sustained sounds, and its impact on the mind. Black cardboard box set with embossed gold print; edition of 200.
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2LP
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HOL 120LP
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For a few years, Alessandro Bosetti has been collecting voices that become part of the Plane/Talea archive. The creation of the archive stems from dozens of individual meetings and recording sessions, in which each voice is detached from its owner or originator and anonymized. With each new iteration and performance, Bosetti plays the archive as if it were an instrument. He searches for hidden details and correspondences through exploration, immersion and contemplation. Each re-activation of the archive results in a dense and swarming polyphony made up of thousands of short utterances -- shorter than any word bearing a meaning -- recombined and interwoven into complex textures. The particularity of the grain of Plane/Talea lies in the autonomous and darting life that each of these fragments lives in a teeming community of voices. Such polyphonies are rich in microtonal detail emerging from the incessant juxtaposition of vocal objets trouvés. Harmonic relationships are sometimes rough and chaotic, other times surprisingly just. The voices are never treated electronically but only recombined and musical tension is provided by the particular grain, inflection, energy of each one of them in counterpoint to the others and to a frugally used instrumentation (harpsichord, Ondes Martenot, Cristal Baschet, grand piano, analog synth, Hammond organ). Implicit reference goes to ancient, modern and postmodern forms of vocal polyphony. Plane/Talea 31-34 -- the continuation of the homonymous 2016 LP (HOL 096LP) -- is a work of sampling that projects an imaginary community and a disembodied choir. The four arching and extensive tracks were created between 2017 and 2018 and bear the trace of two specific moments: August nights in a country house in Vicobarone, in the hills of Piacenza (31-32) and a week-long residency at the "Studio Venezia", an environment created by French artist Xavier Veilhan in the French pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale (33-34).
"Encounters of this sort did happen, with the voice still clinging onto its own origin, and then seen, as it were, coming out of the original mouth and caught saying other things, with a slightly different intonation, a slightly different timbre, maybe due to a little aging, an extra cigarette, a cold. At that point we would come out unsettled, or maybe convinced that it was not the same voice anymore, but another." Edition of 300.
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HOL 128LP
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First ever vinyl reissue of Jean-Yves Bosseur's visionary LP Musiques Vertes, recorded by the legendary French ornithologist and wildlife field recordist Jean-Claude Roché, originally issued by Atelier 82 in 1982. Utilizing handmade instruments constructed from plants and other natural materials, played by a collective of children and untrained musicians, its radically experimental sounds build a revelatory bridge between the avant-garde and ancient forms of folk. Jean-Yves Bosseur is a relatively obscure figure in the history of the French avant-garde. A student of Henri Pousseur and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as a close associate of Knud Viktor, he belonged to the legendary collective Groupe d'Etude et Réalisation Musicale GERM, widely celebrated for their realization of Terry Riley's Keyboard Study 2, issued by BYG/Actuel in 1970. The Musiques Vertes project began in South East France during the late 1970s, spearheaded by Christine Armengaud, who was investigating, via elderly people in the region, a long tradition of musical instruments made with organic materials and plants. With their help, she was able to construct 240 instruments, collected in her book Musiques Vertes, published in 1978 by Christine Bonneton éditeur, that had long been used for bird calls, dancing, toys of young shepherds and children, and much more, but had been lost to common usage following the First World War. In 1980, the Direction de la Musique awarded the composer Jean-Yves Bosseur a grant to start a collective practice of music using the instrument constructed/reconstructed by Armengaud. He chose to use locals and children he encountered in Aix-en-Provence between 1981 and 1982. The Musiques Vertes album is the result of hours of practice and recording by these players, in each case, within the album 11 musical excursions, utilizing a series of instructions or games set up by the composer in an attempt to create collective musical exchange, as well as a dialogic exchange between this practice and active listening within a natural environment. While the acoustic practices that underscore Musiques Vertes display a deep resonance with those embarked upon by artists like Akio Suzuki, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Jeph Jerman, the structural resemblance, held deeply within utopian avant-garde principles, falls far closer to experimental electronic works that might have emerged from experimental electronic studios like Groupe de Recherches Musicales or EMS, or subtle object oriented efforts in free improvisation. Bubbling textures and atonalities, blended with sounds from the natural environment, intermingle with staggering birdsong-alike tonalities and rattling percussive passages. A document of pure sonic magic and stunningly organic creativity. Includes 20-page booklet; edition of 300.
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LP
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HOL 135LP
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During Holiday Records' long friendship and incredibly prolific collaboration with Hartmut Geerken -- who sadly left this planet on October 21, 2021 -- he never ceased to surprise. He lived many lives, traveling the world as an employee of the Goethe Institute, playing with other incredible musicians, and being smart enough to record most of the concerts he did. His archive is in fact full of treasures, and any conversation with him could lead to the rediscovery of unheard master tapes preserving true music gold. It was during the one of these conversations we had at his house - while searching for pictures to be used for the 50th anniversary reissue of Heliopolis (HOL 124LP) -- that he pulled the original score of Music for Angela Davis No. 2 out of a folder, saying with a smile: "Let's see... I should have the complete recording of this one"!
Recorded at Nile Hall, Cairo, on December 4, 1971, Music for Angela Davis is a 24-minute composition that encounters two full ensembles -- respectively conducted by Geerken himself and Hubertus Von Puttkamer -- playing simultaneously without listening to each other, rising and falling within a brilliant and structurally complex expression of call and (non) response. Collective improvisation in its most heightened and sophisticated form.
As described by Geerken in the liner notes: "One of my attempts with the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was my time-related, but timeless composition Music for Angela Davis. I divided the ensemble into two groups of roughly the same size, each with a conductor, and both groups played simultaneously, according to the different hand signals of the conductors, without one group reacting to or considering the other. The only two-tone sequences consisted of the music-able notes of the name Angela Davis, i. e. a-g-e-a and d-a s. The composition was an attempt to get together in society through the medium of improvisation and a protest against the racial measurements of the American governments." Unreleased archival recording; single-sided LP; edition of 500.
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LP + 7"
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HOL 132LP
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A mind-blowing collaborative artefact from the long-standing, prolific partnership between the seminal Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata and the Italian pianist and composer Giovanni Di Domenico. While most of Di Domenico's recent releases have veered toward the electronic and electroacoustic realm, And Life Also Same -- stretching across a full LP and a 7" -- refreshingly encounters him returning to his roots as an absolutely brilliant pianist. Recorded in May of 2018 at Studio 107, Radio France, both players are in top form, firing out complex arrangements and clusters of tonal interventions that collide in a stunning display of conversant artistry, ranging from restrained passages within which Sakata delivers beautiful primal vocalizations backed by the patterns of Di Domenico's notes, to full on hard blow free jazz fire. Music can be studied on the road. And life also same. Edition of 300.
Born in 1945 and trained as a marine biologist, for decades Akira Sakata has stood at the forefront of Japanese jazz and improvisation, first emerging during the early '70s as a member of the Yamashita Yosuke Trio, before venturing out as a solo performer, recording widely and collaborating with a vast number of distinguished players from the global scene.
Giovanni Di Domenico, currently based in Brussels, over the last two decades has emerged as a definitive voice, bridging improvised music and advanced forms of electroacoustic music, producing a discography of critically heralded solo efforts, and intimate collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Arve Henriksen, Alexandra Grimal, Nate Wooley, Chris Corsano, and others. His collaboration with Sakata began during the 2010s and has since produced nine releases with numerous configurations and line-ups.
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LP
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HOL 127LP
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A collaboration between two up and coming stars of experimental music -- Mette Rasmussen and Pak Yan Lau -- offering glimpses of probable futures of improvisation. Recorded in Antwerp during late 2017, Traditional Noise features Rasmussen on alto sax, preparations, objects, voice, and Lau on toy pianos, synth, sampler, modified wok, typatune, and electronics, locked in an evolving, conversant sound expanse that pointedly avoids the explicitly musical as the two artists bristle against each other, delivering textural and tonal interventions defined by careful restrain and space. Edition of 300.
Mette Rasmussen is a Danish saxophone player based in Trondheim, Norway, who first gained attention as a member of Trio Riot, before increasingly branching out as solo artist, working with the likes of Alan Silva, Chris Corsano, Fire! Orchestra, Tashi Dorji, and Ken Vandermark. Drawing from a wide range of influences, from free jazz to textural sound work, Rasmussen's practice delves into the exploration of the natural rawness of her instrument and its capacity for expression, with and without preparations.
Based in Brussels, Pak Yan Lau is a sound artist, improviser, musician, and composer. Over the last decade, she has developed her own singular sonic universe blending acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic approaches and working both as a vocalist, as well as with prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics and various sound objects across a number of solo efforts, in addition to live and recorded collaborations with Chris Corsano, Akira Sakata, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Tetuzi Akiyama, Rie Nakajima, and Darin Gray.
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LP
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HOL 124LP
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2022 restock, last copies. Holiday Records present the first ever authorized reissue Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble's Heliopolis, originally released in 1970. Released under license from the artist. One of the great projects in Egyptian jazz, the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was formed by Salah Ragab and Hartmut Geerken as an avant-garde offshoot of The Cairo Jazz Band, the first jazz big band in the country. Formed in 1968 when Ragab was appointed chief of Egypt's Military Department of Music and had at his disposal a vast staff of musicians (almost three thousand!), an entire military building, and a full range collection of musical instruments. When encountering this recording, issued in 1970, the deep resonance found between the ensemble and its American counterparts becomes startlingly clear. Heliopolis is a stunning blend of big band spiritual jazz, the music of the Middle East, and the fire and energy of free jazz, unveiling a deep creative resonance with the contemporaneous efforts of Pharaoh Sanders, Phil Cohran, and of course Sun Ra, combining jazz instrumentation and musical style with indigenous melodies and instruments to create a musical object with few parallels. The album is a throbbing, squealing, wild journey through the creative heights of sound channeling swirling, focused artistry that taps future and past in a single blow. Copies of the original pressing are between the rarest and most sought-after records in canon of recorded jazz.
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2LP
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HOL 119LP
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Holiday Records have worked with Hüseyin Ertunç during his terrestrial transit. After the label reissued his wonderful album Musikî in 2016 (privately released on Intex Sound in 1974) and a few collaborative albums with the Konstrukt collective, in 2017 they finally managed to invite him, Doğan Doğusel, Cem Tan, and Umut Çağlar to play some shows in Italy as a quartet. Things got really complicated when their visas got rejected -- only one week before their plane was scheduled to take off -- but then Holidays Records found a stalwart supporter of free jazz music at the phone of the Italian Embassy and incredibly they got the visas in time so they could spend a whole week with Hüseyin and his band, touring Italy and playing four shows of the best spiritual free jazz the label heard in a long while. Right after that, the label took the chance to book a recording session at the good old Outside Inside Studio, where their loyal partner Matt Bordin captured on tape two days of improvisation by Hüseyin Ertunç (Fender Rhodes electric piano, Philicorda organm and chant), Umut Çağlar (percussion and bamboo flutes), Doğan Doğusel (double bass), Cem Tan (drums), joined for this special occasion by the almighty Jooklo Duo: Virginia Genta (tenor and sopranino saxophones, clarinet, flutes) and David Vanzan (percussion). What came out of this is an incredible musical document, and not only for the fact that -- unfortunately -- it was Hüseyin's last session on this world. Edition of 300.
"Most of Ertunç's recorded appearances have been on drum set, where he's employed a massive and materialist cymbal approach that takes Sunny Murray's explosive chatter as a lifting-off point. Ertunç waxed one LP as a leader in 1974, Musikî (with then-regular partners Michael Cosmic and Phill Musra, issued on the tiny Intex label), and returned to Turkey in the early 1990s. Ertunç's playing, relentless as it might be, evinces a strident, swinging quality that reaches back decades. His pianistic approach is rooted in the outpouring of voluminous, allover rhythm in concentrated shards. One might first think of early Cecil Taylor, though another Boston resident is also worth mentioning -- Jaki Byard, who could move from barrelhouse to crepuscular romanticism and dense chordal superimpositions at the drop of a hat. If he and Ertunç didn't necessarily work together, their spirits are kindred." --Clifford Allen
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LP
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HOL 122LP
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Chicago-based percussionist Michael Zerang presents his first solo recording after a long career as an exploratory musician and composer, Assyrian Caesarean. Recorded and mixed by Matt Bordin in the woods at (the new) Outside Inside Studio, the album features a range of approaches to percussion that Zerang has developed over the years, including the use of vibrating drumhead surfaces, expressive friction passages, multiple timbre percussion, and straight-up trap-set drumming -- all infused with a rich sense of melodic, rhythmic and textural innovation. Zerang has performed and recorded with some of the most adventurous artists of his era, including a fourteen-year stint with The Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Joe McPhee's Survival Unit III, and an extended collaboration with drummer and percussionist Hamid Drake. Frequent collaborators also include cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, pianist and synthesist Jim Baker, bassist Kent Kessler, trumpeter Axel Dorner, along with an ever-widening pool of international improvisors. He also recently began performing with the experimental Middle-Eastern super group Karkhana, with Mazen Kerbaj, Sharif Sehnaoui, Maurice Louca, Tony Elieh, Sam Shalabi, and Umut Çağlar. Edition of 300.
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LP
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HOL 114LP
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The Four Horsemen was a sound poetry group of Canadian poets composed of bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery. They started performing in 1970 and quickly moved from radical improvisation to the use of a notational system, with an effort to develop a scoring method adequate to the group's dynamic and visceral sound show. The four-piece soon became a living workshop with regular weekly rehearsals leading to the best refined group-conceived and group-written compositions. The third volume in a series of sound poetry coordinated by Luca Garino, Nada Canadada, nine outbursts of controlled madness dedicated to the memory of Hugo Ball is indeed one of the highest examples of poetry as product of a community. "The number of words we still use in our poetry comes as somewhat of a surprise to us, especially in the light of this album. Strictly speaking we cannot call what we do sound poetry if by it is meant that poetry which has its basis in non-verbal, vocal, and sub-vocal elements of sound. Nor are we into the electronic ramifications of sound in any sense beyond doing a record. We are in fact reluctant to pin the aesthetic continuum on which we operate to the first wall available. Still, perhaps the best name for what we do is what it always has been: poetry". --Rafael Barreto-Rivera. Edition of 250, embossed lettering, 16-page booklet.
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7"
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HOL 110EP
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Primorje is the most recent collaboration between Giovanni Donadini (Ottaven, Fantamatres) and Matteo Castro (Lettera 22), focusing on the use of the four-track recorder as their only instrument. Tape loops, field recordings, dub echoes, damaged beats and downgraded tempos creating two short, minimal and slithering compositions. Edition of 100.
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