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KR 118LP
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$33.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/21/2025
For her new and most radical album Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone, Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming -- almost ambient and always demanding your full attention. Aiming to analyze and understand their interaction beyond the composer's control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. While the halldorophone -- famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her Joker score -- roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on "minimal interventions -- some string strumming and plucking" that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O'Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. Indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay. Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener "Omen in G" is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, "Nominal in D," plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. "Fades in C" -- the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes -- unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and "Organon in D" closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni's unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound.
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KR 109LP
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$24.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/7/2025
The Burning Bright Light is a mind-meld between improvisation trio DROMEDARIES (saxophonist Keir Neuringer of Irreversible Entanglements, Shayna Dulberger on double bass and percussionist Julius Masri) and sci-fi writer/vocalist ALEXOTERIC (Alex Smith), evoking epic sci-fi cinemascapes, vocabulary, and reference-rich underground writing, the liberatory jazz tradition, and playful avant-garde experimentation. Recorded in a single high voltage burst of cosmic collaboration on an October afternoon at Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Soundworks, The Burning Bright Light is a sonic document like no other. The album emerges organically on a foundation of speculative fiction, free jazz interaction, avant-garde textures, and freestyle refrains. With no rules set in advance, each participant brought their entire creativity to bear on a session that birthed a constellation of shimmering stories narrated through equally deep music and words. While it retains all the power and excitement of a spontaneous meeting, the album also reveals deep and atypical shared affinities that are simultaneously sonic, musical, social, political, and cosmic. A key figure in multiple Philadelphia arts subcultures, Smith's literary voice is unlike any other, and on this recording he stretches his vocal acrobatics to their greatest extent yet. Listeners hear references to grounded, earthly concerns and figures shot through the farthest reaches of spacetime, always with Smith's incisive queer Afrofuturist lens. Smith describes the album as "a future color spray, a hidden missive laser etched into the seams of your galactic multi-death cult corporation flight jacket, the snow fallen ash and embers of a world you can only view through a prism-powered holo-sim. Wild jazz, bad, fresh with no jive -- the perfect script for the download digital age, transcending experimental musics through the solar battery at the bio-borg filling station. The anti-Boeing, proto-mothership, swinging the body eclectic, crash landing on a brass planet. Dromedaries are plugged in and transforming, delivering ancient spells like slam poetry on Cybertron." All of the music you hear was recorded in real time; for their part instrumentalists Shayna Dulberger, Julius Masri, and Keir Neuringer expanded their energetic, telepathic, playful mode of collective improvisation developed over the past decade together to both embrace Smith as a fourth and equal voice and elevate him as a sacred cosmic orator.
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KR 115CD
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A new piece by minimalist/experimental composer Phill Niblock (1933 - 2024), co-composed and performed by Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern. Intense, menacing layers of thick drones and alien sounds. In summer 2022, within just a few weeks and by pure coincidence, two proposals regarding Phill Niblock albums arrived at Karlrecords: one suggesting an overdue vinyl reissue of a CD release, while the other email was from Anna Clementi saying she and Thomas Stern were working on new pieces that Phill Niblock has written for her. When Zound Delta 2 was complete, Phill sent photographs for the two artworks, and Karlrecords met with him twice to discuss details, but unfortunately he died unexpectedly in January, 2024, so the album now is a posthumous release. An intense goodbye from one of 20th century's most iconic composers.
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KR 115LP
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LP version. A new piece by minimalist/experimental composer Phill Niblock (1933 - 2024), co-composed and performed by Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern. Intense, menacing layers of thick drones and alien sounds. In summer 2022, within just a few weeks and by pure coincidence, two proposals regarding Phill Niblock albums arrived at Karlrecords: one suggesting an overdue vinyl reissue of a CD release, while the other email was from Anna Clementi saying she and Thomas Stern were working on new pieces that Phill Niblock has written for her. When Zound Delta 2 was complete, Phill sent photographs for the two artworks, and Karlrecords met with him twice to discuss details, but unfortunately he died unexpectedly in January, 2024, so the album now is a posthumous release. An intense goodbye from one of 20th century's most iconic composers.
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KR 106CD
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Reinhold Friedl (piano) meets Radian member Martin Siewert (guitar, electronics). Three spontaneous sonic explorations -- subtle and explosive! With over a dozen releases on Karlrecords, and a total output of more than 100 albums in general, Reinhold Friedl doesn't need much of an introduction to anyone interested in contemporary music/avantgarde: his ensemble Zeitkratzer is as respected as it is feared for its radical approach on music, and it seems redundant to mention all collaborators and projects. Friedl is known for his unique piano sound, his advanced techniques, and his musical intensity paired with precise exuberant sound constructions and consistent compositional thinking. He has cooperated with musicians from Phil Niblock to Lou Reed, Mario Bertoncini (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza) to Whitehouse, Laurie Anderson to Rashad Becker, and works as guest professor at various universities across Europe. The "multi-talented renaissance man" (as Naut Human turned it) is also known as a specialist for Iannis Xenakis, and curates the Perihel series on Karlrecords. Lichtung is the collaboration of Friedl and no other than Vienna-based Martin Siewert, himself a highly prolific and repudiated innovative guitar player and producer in groups like Radian and Trapist. Martin Siewert has played with the who-is-who in experimental and improvised music and has celebrated his strong musical identity in international collaborations with Otomo Yoshihide, Oren Ambarchi, Meg Stuart, Christian Fennesz, Sainkho Namtchylak, and The Necks. Siewert's guitar plays at the intersection of acoustic/electronic-generated sounds is unique, evoking echoes of krautrock and musique concrete to electronic jazz and avantgarde. Lichtung was recorded in Vienna: several studio meetings condensed to three intense tracks, a statement and musical adventure between noise and silence, subtle and explosive! Two musicians who couldn't be more diverse, and yet here -- in every sense -- they act in concert.
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KR 102LP
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LP version. 180 gram vinyl; includes download card. zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl and his ensemble present new compositions, grounded on Domenico Scarlatti's piano sonata F-minor K.466. Commissioned by the dance company Rubato and dedicated to Mario Bertoncini (1932-2019). Little is known about Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). His music is, so to speak, left to its own devices: free, cheeky, playful, sonorous, surprising. Harmonically strolling again and again into unforeseen regions, the ear leads, not the theory; and also, the fingers get their right: playful and haptic it goes. Scarlatti explained, "since nature has given me ten fingers and my instrument provides employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use all ten of them." Freedom, friction, and listening pleasure instead of convention: "He knew quite well that he had disregarded all the rules of composition in his piano pieces, but asked whether his deviation from the rules offended the ear? He believes there is almost no other rule than that of not offending the only sense whose object is music -- the ear." Reinhold Friedl applied this principle and composed the music for a choreography by dance company Rubato. Dance music drawn from Scarlatti, who was so inspired by dance music. The material of the piano sonata F-minor K.466 is twisted anew in all its richness, shifted back and forth, declined, frozen, noise-ified, sound structures extracted, floating. Those who know the sonata, will more than smell its shadows. Dedicated to Mario Bertoncini (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza) who was particularly fond of K.466, on which all the music presented here is grounded.
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2LP
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KR 108LP
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Repressed; First ever, remastered vinyl version. The core duo plus guest collaborators expands its sonic palette of Rick Brown's elemental percussive patterns and Che Chen's ecstatic modal guitar style to a new musical richness. With some tape releases and their first album Wooden Bag, 75 Dollar Bill quickly introduced themselves as one of the hottest, most unique and essential groups at the heart of NYC's underground -- the following Wood/Metal/Plastic Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (GB 047CD, 2016) made the duo known internationally, and the 2019 double vinyl I Was Real (TW Q-LP) turned out a major success at the critics and audience alike with the #1 spot in The Wire's albums of the year list. Then came the pandemic, and in lack of opportunities to actually perform in public, the core duo of Rick Brown and Che Chen released several Bandcamp only albums in digital format, one of these being Power Failures. Brown's elemental percussive patterns (often simply played on a wooden box) and Che Chen's ecstatic modal guitar style (often under the influence of his studies with Mauritanian guitarist Jeich Ould Chigaly) are at the core of the tracks with guest collaborators like Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan (guitar), Sue Garner (violin), or Steve Maing (saxophone, guitar) expanding the sonic palette to a new musical richness. Trance-inducing psychedelia, "placeless, gripping grooves" (The Guardian), collaged rehearsal and field recordings, mantric percussion, microtonal guitar sounds -- 75 Dollar Bill sound as deeply rooted in traditions as they sound fresh-of-today, a kind of future music from the past. Hard to grasp by words, and impossible to resist! 180 gram vinyl; gatefold; includes download card.
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KR 105LP
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Modular synthesizers/electronics + a drum kit enhanced with triggers and sensors: on its self-titled debut album, the duo hÄK/Danzeisen creates a sonic energy that oscillates between high-precision rhythm patterns, analog sounds and frenzy climaxes. One must imagine hÄK/Danzeisen as a man-machine apparatus. A collection of cables, resonating bodies and restless limbs that together question all routines. Who overthrow conventional role of instruments and explore the possibilities of a new sound language. Bernd Norbert Würtz alias hÄK operates modular synthesizers, self-soldered circuits and control knobs. Philipp Danzeisen plays a drum kit enhanced with triggers and sensors. These two poles are connected to an interdependent whole in which a constant musical dialogue takes place. The dependencies within this system have been meticulously defined by hÄK/Danzeisen: Drum rolls and sound modulations are interconnected in such a way that there is no contradiction between the strict technological structure and the creative outburst that is possible at any time. What drives hÄK/Danzeisen is the basic idea that the contrast between acoustic drums and synthetically produced sounds must be overcome in order to create a new experience. Würtz, Danzeisen, and their combined instrumentation simultaneously rub up against the same edges, finding a single, piercing voice. Ideal manifestations of this approach are the duo's live performances: raw energy that oscillates as precisely as it surprises between drones, abstraction and noise attacks, driven by an impudent take on jazz. Constantly oscillating between the registers of "composed" and "improvised", each performance by hÄK/Danzeisen ultimately becomes one of a kind. 180 gram vinyl; includes download postcard.
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KR 101CD
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11th album by the one-of-a-kind collective: psychedelia and free form jazz (not jazz) trigger a sophisticated excursion into weird textures with drastic turns. Dislocated dense music full of secret connections.
"... On Schemen, familiar fragments float gently around their core -- a Fender Rhodes tone, a bass figure, a guitar motif, a masterful drum shuffle, a moment of icy stasis borrowed from the harmonium playing of Christa "Nico" Päffgen. Triggering brief associations, they slowly rush off in other directions through free jazz-informed editing work, whereupon such zones can also arise in which perception has a few tricks ready and earlier experience suddenly breaks into the now in a completely different way. Half suspected, half seen. Half-music like Can from Cologne -- also masters of improvised editing -- sometimes produced a few decades ago in their in-between moments. The first minutes of 'Future Days' for example, which fade in gently, sketch a barely graspable figure emerging from all directions of the room. Kammerflimmer Kollektief also engages in similarly open moments of development. Loosely, it eludes the first formative impressions, keeping itself ready for moments that do not follow any logic of appointment. This looseness in handling makes Kammerflimmer Kollektief so fluidly audible, even when dissonant peaks and free playing arise. What Karlheinz Stockhausen is to Can's understanding of composition, the recordings of The Cocoon are to Kammerflimmer Kollektief. The Cocoon, a meeting of garage psychedelics from the Hannover area with free jazzers from the Galaxie Dream Band, whose album While The Recording Engineer Sleeps, recorded in 1985 in unguarded moments, operates in a very similar way with decentralized perceptual ambivalences and only appeared more or less secretly four years later on Wilhelm Reich Schallspeicher. Other traces of Schemen lead to the debut album of Quicksilver Messenger Service. The guitars of Gary Duncan and John Cipollina, which refer to themselves in an unforced manner, are instructions to let go. They don't want to be traced in every note as a solo, but they give their music a sense that the essential takes place off center, in the mutual and intuitive gift of loving attentions..." --Werner Ahrensfeld
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KR 101LP
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LP version. 11th album by the one-of-a-kind collective: psychedelia and free form jazz (not jazz) trigger a sophisticated excursion into weird textures with drastic turns. Dislocated dense music full of secret connections.
"... On Schemen, familiar fragments float gently around their core -- a Fender Rhodes tone, a bass figure, a guitar motif, a masterful drum shuffle, a moment of icy stasis borrowed from the harmonium playing of Christa "Nico" Päffgen. Triggering brief associations, they slowly rush off in other directions through free jazz-informed editing work, whereupon such zones can also arise in which perception has a few tricks ready and earlier experience suddenly breaks into the now in a completely different way. Half suspected, half seen. Half-music like Can from Cologne -- also masters of improvised editing -- sometimes produced a few decades ago in their in-between moments. The first minutes of 'Future Days' for example, which fade in gently, sketch a barely graspable figure emerging from all directions of the room. Kammerflimmer Kollektief also engages in similarly open moments of development. Loosely, it eludes the first formative impressions, keeping itself ready for moments that do not follow any logic of appointment. This looseness in handling makes Kammerflimmer Kollektief so fluidly audible, even when dissonant peaks and free playing arise. What Karlheinz Stockhausen is to Can's understanding of composition, the recordings of The Cocoon are to Kammerflimmer Kollektief. The Cocoon, a meeting of garage psychedelics from the Hannover area with free jazzers from the Galaxie Dream Band, whose album While The Recording Engineer Sleeps, recorded in 1985 in unguarded moments, operates in a very similar way with decentralized perceptual ambivalences and only appeared more or less secretly four years later on Wilhelm Reich Schallspeicher. Other traces of Schemen lead to the debut album of Quicksilver Messenger Service. The guitars of Gary Duncan and John Cipollina, which refer to themselves in an unforced manner, are instructions to let go. They don't want to be traced in every note as a solo, but they give their music a sense that the essential takes place off center, in the mutual and intuitive gift of loving attentions..." --Werner Ahrensfeld
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KR 104CD
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Ereignishorizont is Schneider TM's new and with a duration of over 80 minutes truly epic album: experimental guitar, technological innovations and excursions into musical territories beyond the usual. Schneider TM is a multidimensional music project of Dirk Dresselhaus which oscillates extensively between adventurous electronic pop-music and experimental, sometimes improvised freeform music, while occasionally bringing these and other opposing elements together. Ereignishorizont sounds and feels like a soundtrack for a yet-to-be-made sci-fi movie and exposes the essence of Dresselhaus's artistic approaches, crafted here with a more pared-down set-up, an awareness of advanced musical techniques, the physicality of sound, and an improvisational spirit that is based on the experience that things are strongest when they happen first. The main tools on Ereignishorizont are two customized electroacoustic guitars: The "FireSchneiderTM" has sound chambers featuring removable bakelite lids and piezo mics, that can be used as percussion tools, vocal mics, or filled with interesting sounding materials like screws, etc. The next step in the long-term collaboration between Schneider TM and Deimel Guitarworks is the "Spark": In addition to conventional magnetic and piezo pickups the guitar also has playable reverb springs, one of which is attached to the tremolo construction and can be tensioned. The different sound sources can be combined via a global selector switch and sent to an integrated electronic LesLee, which oscillates back and forth between the signals and is connected to CV In & Out sockets for integrating e.g. modular synthesizers via control voltage. The "Spark" can not only be played acoustically, electrically and electronically, but as an electro-acoustic sound object it also offers possibilities for playing techniques that are not typical for guitars. The sci-fi feel of Ereignishorizont is complemented by the artwork by Sebastian Mayer who, just a few weeks before Dresselhaus contacted him, got the opportunity to work as a betatester with some of the first available AI based image generators (for which Mayer himself prefers the name "neural network image generator" because there's no "intelligence" -- yet -- in these networks).
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KR 104LP
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Double LP version. Includes download. Ereignishorizont is Schneider TM's new and with a duration of over 80 minutes truly epic album: experimental guitar, technological innovations and excursions into musical territories beyond the usual. Schneider TM is a multidimensional music project of Dirk Dresselhaus which oscillates extensively between adventurous electronic pop-music and experimental, sometimes improvised freeform music, while occasionally bringing these and other opposing elements together. Ereignishorizont sounds and feels like a soundtrack for a yet-to-be-made sci-fi movie and exposes the essence of Dresselhaus's artistic approaches, crafted here with a more pared-down set-up, an awareness of advanced musical techniques, the physicality of sound, and an improvisational spirit that is based on the experience that things are strongest when they happen first. The main tools on Ereignishorizont are two customized electroacoustic guitars: The "FireSchneiderTM" has sound chambers featuring removable bakelite lids and piezo mics, that can be used as percussion tools, vocal mics, or filled with interesting sounding materials like screws, etc. The next step in the long-term collaboration between Schneider TM and Deimel Guitarworks is the "Spark": In addition to conventional magnetic and piezo pickups the guitar also has playable reverb springs, one of which is attached to the tremolo construction and can be tensioned. The different sound sources can be combined via a global selector switch and sent to an integrated electronic LesLee, which oscillates back and forth between the signals and is connected to CV In & Out sockets for integrating e.g. modular synthesizers via control voltage. The "Spark" can not only be played acoustically, electrically and electronically, but as an electro-acoustic sound object it also offers possibilities for playing techniques that are not typical for guitars. The sci-fi feel of Ereignishorizont is complemented by the artwork by Sebastian Mayer who, just a few weeks before Dresselhaus contacted him, got the opportunity to work as a betatester with some of the first available AI based image generators (for which Mayer himself prefers the name "neural network image generator" because there's no "intelligence" -- yet -- in these networks).
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KR 099LP
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Electronic music legend and head of Editions Mego, Peter Rehberg, teams up with zeitkratzer mastermind Reinhold Friedl. Three side-long pieces melting electronic/contemporary avant-garde. When Peter "Pita" Rehberg and Reinhold Friedl first met each other, they did not like each other "at all," as Friedl emphasizes with a hearty laugh. The two would however eventually bond over the years thanks to a mutual respect for each other's music. In the summer of 2021, they entered the studio together for the first time. Their joint album for Berlin's Karlrecords is a faithful document "no editing, no overdubs" of their improvisations during two recording sessions shortly before Rehberg's sudden and untimely passing on July 22nd of that year. The three pieces see Rehberg working with electronics and Friedl with his inside piano, proving that they had indeed managed to find a common ground -- up to a point where it at times becomes hard to tell who plays what on this record. Friedl ran into Rehberg in Zbigniew Karkowski's tiny Tokyo apartment in 1999 while organizing the first edition of the Off-ICMC that was set to take place in the following year. "I came uninvited and slept a night at Zbigeniew's before Peter arrived and I had to move out," remembers Friedl, who ended up inviting the Mego founder to perform at the Off-ICMC even though he found it hard to relate to his music. "We had very different backgrounds: he came from industrial and I had roots in classical music and improv, a high-brow prick!" After having met several times at different concerts without ever really speaking to each other in the following years, a concert in Vienna in the late 2010s marked a turning point in their relationship (or lack thereof). Playing their sets back-to-back and loving every second of what the other was doing, the two finally clicked on musical level. The two would go on to become good friends, meeting regularly to discuss music and everything else while both were living in Vienna just a few minutes away from each other. Eventually they entered the studio twice for sessions that were completely improvised with no prior preparation. "Caciara," "Chiasso," and "Clamore" -- named retrospectively after three Italian words for "noise" -- capture the spontaneity of two artists who had always been outliers in their respective fields finding a common ground in sprawling dynamics and sonic intensity as well as enabling each other to expand their individual sound palettes. These recordings -- carefully mixed by Dirk Dresselhaus, but otherwise virtually untouched -- perfectly encapsulate the energy unleashed by two free spirits coming together over a shared love for pushing the envelope of improvised noise music. 180 gram vinyl; includes download postcard.
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KR 097LP
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Cello player and electronic artist Martina Bertoni returns with her second album for KarlRecords. Hypnagogia delivers six new, masterfully crafted tracks between experimental ambient, drone, and modern composition. Cellist and composer Martina Bertoni started playing the cello at a very young age. Classically trained, her career further developed around experimental and film music, for which her cello has been featured in numerous records, works, and soundtracks for films and series. After two EPs and her debut full-length All The Ghosts Are Gone (2020), Bertoni joined the Karl roster where she released Music For Empty Flats in January 2021 (KR 083LP) to critical acclaim (listed as one of the "Top Ten drone albums of 2021" by A Closer Listen). On her new album Hypnagogia she continues to explore the sonic possibilities of her cello which she uses as primary source for composition and sound processing through reverbs, feedbacks and sub-bass frequencies, thus crafting sonic sculptures, rich of atmospheres and frictions, fed by ambient as much as drone and modern composition. In the words of Martina Bertoni: "The six tracks that constitute Hypnagogia have been written during 2021 and partially inspired by the reading of Stanislaw Lem's book Solaris. The title refers to a transitional state of consciousness from wakefulness to sleep, during which one might experience sensorial hallucinations and lucid dreaming, and can tap into the pristine structures of the subconscious. Hypnagogia portrays an imaginary cosmic journey of the Self that crash ends into a blinding sun." 180 gram vinyl; includes download postcard.
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KR 095LP
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By zkr director Reinhold Friedl's personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of groundbreaking compositions by James Tenney. James Tenney (1934-2006) was a composer, music theorist, and pioneer especially in the field of microtonal music, being an influential part of the so-called New York avantgarde scene (Cage, Feldman). Besides his compositional work, Tenney was teacher at various universities with students like Charlemagne Palestine, Carl Stone, or Catherine Lamb, and a close friend with Eliane Radigue. This album by zeitkratzer presents compositions by Tenney whose music has been part of zeitkratzer's repertoire since their beginning: "Critical Band" -- Tenney's late classic -- with maximum clarity and precision of bearing tone rhythms and microtonal tuning as light effect and the first recording of "Harmonium #2". Both works demonstrate the remarkable power and resplendent sharpness which Tenney achieved with his microtonal settings. zeitkratzer's approach to Tenney's music as a sensual sound adventure, finally available on vinyl. 180 gram vinyl; includes download postcard; download includes additional track, "Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion".
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KR 092CD
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Electroacoustic Works celebrates the 100th anniversary of Iannis Xenakis (on May 29th, 2022). Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is one of the most important composers of the 20th century avantgarde whose influence on music can be traced to the present day -- not only in the world of conservatory-trained composers but also in various streams of current non-academic underground aesthetics such as experimental electronic music, noise and industrial. After he arrived in Paris in 1947, Xenakis not only studied composition with Messiaen and later became a member of the famous GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales), he also worked as assistant to the famous architect Le Corbusier and realized, amongst others, the Philips Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Brussels 1958. His compositions often are based on mathematical principles which give his music an unprecedented aesthetic and "shocking otherness" (The Guardian). Although Xenakis also composed for orchestra (his most famous works are "Metastasis", "Pithoprakta", and "Terretektorh"), electronic music became his way for exploring new ideas and concepts and to develop new techniques like a graphic interface for sound synthesis or later, when computers were more easily accessible, his so-called "stochastic synthesis" (Gendy 3, S.709 > Disc V, Late Works). Xenakis's first electroacoustic pieces, like "Diamorphoses" or "Bohor", turned out groundbreaking works while the latter even caused, as Michel Chion put it, the "greatest scandal of electroacoustic music" on the occasion of its performance 1968 at the GRM in Paris. His so-called "Polytopes" were overwhelming multimedia performances with especially designed architectures, laser and light shows etc. where sometimes up to several hundred loudspeakers were used to move the sounds in space. For example, his most famous composition "Persepolis", commissioned by the Persian Shah, premiered in 1971 in Shiraz-Persepolis (Iran) as a performance including light-tracks, laser beams, groups of children walking around with torches and 59 loudspeakers to project the music in an open-air situation. The most radical aspects of sound can be found in Xenakis's late work and its merciless reduction to harsh, almost ruthless sound synthesis. In the early nineties, he devoted himself to the concept of a composing machine: a machine that designs everything independently and calculates the finished piece, the algorithm is the work. Years of source studies and comparative research by zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl, in collaboration with sound engineer Martin Wurmnest, made these critically reflected stereo mixes possible, which were appropriately mastered by Rashad Becker and which, in addition to the aspect of fidelity to the source, put the listener in the center. 5CD box set includes booklet with English/German liner notes by Reinhold Friedl (zeitkratzer) and rare photos from the Xenakis archive.
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KR 089LP
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Iannis Xenakis's early electroacoustic works define already the compositional space he is using later in his mature, almost one-hour long works like Persepolis or La Légende d'Er. After arriving in Paris as a Greek refuge in 1947, Xenakis quickly found a work as construction engineer with the architect Le Corbusier. He tried in vain for several years to become a member of the Groupe De Musique Concrète (GRM) and thus to gain access to the electroacoustic studios at the French radio. Pierre Schaeffer accepted him only when not only Messiaen pushed for it, but also the conductor Hermann Scherchen lobbied for him. Diamorphoses was his first attempt at composing musique concrète and was to remain his only one. He carefully recorded small sounds and worked on them systematically in weeks of tape-snapping. But he also combined sound material that presumably came from the GRM's Sonothèque, and here his fable for powerful sound masses was already apparent. Concret Ph originally was a sound installation: as Le Corbusier's assistant, he had been allowed to completely design the architecture of the pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair 1958, but his music was only to serve as a break filler between the repetitions of the main attraction: the Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse with projections by Le Corbusier. Under the title Interlude Sonore, Xenakis created a tape consisting of the most minimal tape snippets sticked together and got something that sounded almost like the tickling of glowing coal. Xenakis anticipated granular synthesis in analog tape form: the combination of little sound grains giving birth to a new sound. Orient Occident is an extract from music for a documentary film about the encounter of Eastern and Western cultures, shortened by about half. Xenakis had also used non-Western music for it, most of which is absent from the electroacoustic piece -- and yet even here one finds a reference to his many adaptations of ethnological music. Bohor caused -- as Michel Chion put it -- the "greatest scandal of electroacoustic music" -- on the occasion of its performance 1968 at the GRM in Paris. Curiously, hardly anyone noticed the piece when it was premiered in 1962. Xenakis simultaneously played four stereo tapes at extreme volume on eight speakers positioned around the audience, creating an ecstatic sound experience: close-ups of Persian jewelry are used, and large thunderbolts and stringed instruments like those built at the GRM by the Baschet brothers at the time the piece was written.
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KR 024LP
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Individual LP from the Electroacoustic Works boxset. The second release in the Perihel series is one of the most famous electroacoustic compositions by Iannis Xenakis. When Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), who had fought against the occupation as part of the communist resistance, moved to Paris in 1947 it was the start of a highly creative and impressive career. Xenakis not only studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and became one of the most innovative composers of the 20th century, he also worked as assistant to Le Corbusier and realized a.o. the Philips Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Brussels, 1958. His compositions often are based on mathematical principles (in 1966 he founded the CEMAMu - Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales), which give his music an unprecedented aesthetic and as The Guardian would say, a "shocking otherness". The most famous works of Xenakis, who won the Polar Music Prize (considered the unofficial Nobel Prize for music) in 1999, are his compositions for orchestra Metastasis, Pithoprakta and Terretektorh (where the 88 musicians are spread within the audience) and the electroacoustic compositions Persepolis, Concret PH, Bohor and La Légende d'Eer where Xenakis integrated his stochastic synthesis sounds for the first time. As legendary as this piece is, there is an impenetrable thicket of versions and stories around La Légende d'Eer, it exists in different releases, with wrong sample rates or digitized backwards. This version uses the 8-track-version that Xenakis himself presented at Darmstädter Ferienkurse in August of 1978. As the automatic spatialization is lost, this became the only original version of this composition and is presented here (mixed down to stereo by Martin Wurmnest who tried to preserve the spatial movements as perceptible as possible. La Légende d'Eer not only became a milestone of electroacoustic music but is also an important reference for noise and industrial musicians up to the present day. Mixed by Martin Wurmnest, mastered & cut by Rashad Becker. Includes insert with liner notes by Reinhold Friedl.
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KR 091LP
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Iannis Xenakis's late electroacoustic music became electronic: all sounds are synthetic "explicit computer music" as Peter Hoffmann called it. The music presented here shows Xenakis's way back from spatialized immersive music and multimedia spectacle to simple loudspeaker music. The sound does not move anymore, there are no synchronized visuals: nothing remains but structured noise. Xenakis used two inventions he had already presented in the context of the Polytopes: sounds created by stochastic synthesis in La Légende d'Eer and sound from his graphic interface transferring music into sound, the UPIC machine, in Mycenae Alpha for the Polytope de Mycènes. For Taurhiphanie and Voyage Absolu Des Unari Vers Andromède he so-to-say "painted" the music, using his UPIC machine: drawings are transferred directly into sound. Better to say: into noise! Xenakis's predilection for noise, found especially in his electronic music, became more and more obvious and even more pure and raw. Again, Xenakis was ahead of his time: what began as industrial music in England and started its triumphal procession as noise music and power electronics at the end of the eighties is found in his later electronic music in an even more radical form. At the premiere of Taurhiphanie in his last Polytope-like multimedia production with bulls and horses in a bullring in Arles, France, even the animals reacted so disturbed that the performance became a great failure. Remaining is only the digital music composition Taurhiphanie, music to intimidate bulls. Towards the end of his life -- his last composition was realized in 1997 and he died in 2001 -- Xenakis concentrated on one of his most contradictory dreams: a composer who invented such powerful overwhelming and emotional music as Xenakis thought he could teach a machine to do the same. He believed in the possibility to invent a composing machine and he worked hard on it. The computer, with the help of which he realized his last two electronic works, Gendy 3 and S.709, created random-based digital sample values and then transferred them directly into sound. Multidimensional computation of random values or changes in parameters produced similar but different pieces. Xenakis was never ideological, he simply chose the most beautiful results (the numbers in the titles probably refer to the versions).
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KR 090LP
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"Hibiki Hana-Ma" was created in 1969 for the Steel Pavilion of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation at the Expo 1970 in Osaka as musical part of a multimedia show. Even though the work does not bear the designation in its title, it can be already regarded as a Polytope: it was created for a specific architectural location, lasers and mirrors have been installed: a light choreography by the Japanese artist Keiji Usami accompanied the spectacle. This concept of synchronized laser and light choreographies -- now directed by Xenakis himself -- can soon be found in Polytope de Cluny 1972 and 1978 again in the Diatope (La Légende d'Eer). But Hibiki Hana-Ma is also a hermaphrodite in another sense: on the Japanese record release from 1970 Seiji Ozawa is credited as conductor of the Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and Kinshi Tsuruta as Biwa-soloist (a traditional Japanese string instrument). By listening one quickly realizes that the music is not orchestral or Biwa music, but only uses electronically processed recordings as source material for an electroacoustic music. Xenakis's first explicit Polytope (Polytope de Montreal 1967) was originally conceived for four orchestras, and then transferred to tape for practical and financial reasons. The first concept of a Polytope was an installation with live-orchestra-music -- as the tape version is a recording without further electroacoustic treatment, it is not included in this release. Like Hibiki Hana-Ma, Mycenae Alpha is also a special case but for another reason: it was composed for his last Polytope (Polytope de Mycènes 1978) and consists exclusively of synthetic sounds, realized with his graphic system UPIC. The result is rough and sober and marks the beginning of his last electroacoustic compositions, shifting back to purely electronic music. With Hibiki Hana-Ma and Mycenae Alpha, the first side of the record vividly demonstrates the vast musical range of the Polytopes, from recorded orchestral sounds to purely electronic parts. The synthesis of the most diverse musical materials had taken place in between, especially in compositions like Persepolis (1972) and the joyful-noisy Polytope de Cluny (1972) that is presented here on Side B. Polytope de Cluny was performed several times a day for six months in Paris and was a real multimedia event: the audience could relax on pillows on the floor of an old Roman bath in the middle of Paris and listen to Xenakis's architecture of sound and light.
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KR 044LP
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Individual LP from the Electroacoustic Works boxset. After La Légende d'Eer in 2016 (KR 024LP), the Perihel series presents one of the milestones of electroacoustic music: Iannis Xenakis's mind-blowing, 54-minutes oeuvre Persepolis. Persepolis is the longest electroacoustic composition by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) who ranks among the most influential 20th century avant-garde composers. Commissioned by the Persian Shah, the piece was part of a multimedia performance -- Xenakis's so-called "polytopes" -- which premiered in 1971 in Shiraz-Persepolis (Iran) as a performance including light-tracks, laser beams, groups of children walking around with torches, and 59 loudspeakers to project the music in an open-air situation. Xenakis had realized Persepolis on 8-track analog tape in the Studio Acusti in Paris and released a stereo reduction on vinyl in the famous Philips series "Prospective 21e Siècle" in 1972, adding the new subtitle "We bear the light of the earth", his most hymnal title ever. Out of print for decades now, the LP became -- especially the Japanese edition from 1974 -- one of the most expensive collector's item of electroacoustic music. There were some later CD versions with different durations -- too long due to a wrong sample rate, others shortened by three minutes due to other reasons. The Perihel series now presents a new version: mixed from the original master 8-track tapes by longtime zeitkratzer sound engineer Martin Wurmnest and mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin -- the same experts who had already taken care of the 2016 Karlrecords release of La Légende d'Eer, another milestone composition among the works of the Greek-French avant-garde composer. Previous releases in the Perihel series, curated by Reinhold Friedl: Guy Reibel's Douze Inventions en Six Modes de Jeu (KR 028LP, 2015); Iannis Xenakis's La Légende d'Eer (KR 024LP, 2016), John Cage's Complete Song Books (KR 029LP, 2016). 180 gram vinyl; Includes insert and download code.
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KR 096LP
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Italian sound artist Giulio Aldinucci returns with his fourth album on Karlrecords: Real is again a truly masterfully composed and sound-designed ambient masterpiece and a more than worthy follow-up to the critically acclaimed Borders And Ruins (2017), Disappearing In A Mirror (KR 055CD, 2018), and Shards Of Distant Times (KR 076CD/LP), which all made it onto several year's best lists. With now his fourth album for Karlrecords, the sound artist from Siena, Italy has proved a steady and prolific artist on the label roster. And each time, Giulio Aldinucci delivers a new ambient masterpiece that clearly carries his signature as composer/producer and yet reveals a slightly different approach to his modus operandi. Aldinucci's massive layers of sound, built from field recordings and an array of electronic gear, blend drone-y ambient with heavenly voices/sacred music that create an atmosphere of a consolatory melancholy -- alien, but with a graspable presence of human souls. And each album deals with a topic that Aldinucci came across in his observations of and reflections about today's society. In the words of Giulio himself: "The digital media we live with shape and define reality by filtering it, letting us run the risk of living without our personal and unique one. My new album expresses a need of something unmediated and authentic. Real is a reflection on the endless possibility of sonic transformation, the ability we have to create new realities transmuting the soundscape around us and the inner soundscape inside us, even only by imagining it. A (deep)real experience permeated by dreamy lyricism." 180 gram vinyl; gatefold sleeve; includes download card.
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KR 098LP
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By zkr director Reinhold Friedl's personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of compositions by Alvin Lucier. Alvin Lucier (1931-2021) was one of the most influential American minimalists. Some call him "sound physician" as his compositions are often based on acoustic research settings. His pieces tend to turn inside-out the properties of space and instruments: poems based on acoustic settings. zeitkratzer worked with the composer in Dijon, France in 2008, and presented his music in various places. These recordings have been realized at Philharmonie Luxembourg that turned out to be the ideal space for this music. On this album you can hear how Lucier enables zeitkratzer to create sounds a lot of people have never heard before. Ringing overtones, a singing piano, a thrilling concert triangle, pencils on little objects, and how irritating a violoncello, a viola and a piano can sound together creating shifting sonic interferences. Sound phenomenology, evoking a sensual listening experience. 180 gram vinyl; includes download.
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KR 094LP
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The ongoing series/tradition of a Konstrukt release in August this time returns to the early beginning: the overdue double vinyl reissue of the Turkish free-formers' studio meeting with the German Free Jazz titan Peter Brötzmann from 2008. As written in several info sheets before, the Istanbul-based collective led by multi-instrumentalist Umut Çağlar (also member of Karkhana) and reeds player Korhan Futaci has since its formation in 2008 created an impressive catalog including collaborations/performances with significant musicians like Keiji Haino, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Akira Sakata, Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Michael Zerang, Alfred Harth or Alexander Hawkins -- and Peter Brötzmann. The German free jazz titan was invited to the Deneyevi Studio in the Turkish capital in November 2008 where they recorded Dolunay, an album that was released three years later on a small label in Turkey only. Back then a quartet with drums and percussion, guitar, reeds but no bass player, Konstrukt and their iconic guest took off on a session full of fire and fury: shrieking reeds, thundering drums, and -- free jazz of the wildest, most energetic and cathartic (afterwards) kind! Just as they did a few months before (May 2011) in a former church as documented on Eklisia Sunday (HOL 095LP, 2016) and then once more in February 2014. Remastered for vinyl by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, Dolunay is now finally available as double-LP and it shouldn't be missing in any proper jazz collection. 180 gram vinyl; includes download.
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KR 087LP
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The new album by the Peruvian-born/Berlin-based experimental artist Ale Hop was conceived in a context of immobility and provides six sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness, and experience. In collaboration with Ana Quiroga, Concepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M'balla, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño, KMRU, Manongo Mujica, Moises Horta, Nicole L'huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau, Tomas Tello. Following her explorations on music's inherent fixation to geographic space and time, be it through the longing of home -- Apophenia (BR 127LP, 2019) -- or scientific magnification of invisible worlds -- The Life of Insects (BR 141LP, 2020) -- Berlin-based Peruvian-born experimental composer Ale Hop's fourth album, Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City?, was conceived in a context of immobility. During the lockdown months, she started a process of remote collaboration, by sending messages, posted from various cities along a South American trip, to thirteen musicians from around the world. She journaled her impressions upon these places to an intimate fictional character while reflecting on matters of time, sound, space, cosmology and colonial memory. The thirteen musicians dialogued with this voice by taking upon the challenge of responding to the messages with sound collaborations. Field recordings, mouth drumming, drone cellos, electronic loops, arrhythmic rhythms, and voices came back from this experiment. Ale assembled them, by layering, twisting and turning, into sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience, making it the first time she's set her guitar aside. Expect no answers to the album's title question, but an innermost psychedelic rumination. The release of Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City? is accompanied by a 50-minute audiovisual installation that will premiere at CTM 2022 Exhibition in January, which was created in collaboration with the Mexican technologist and artist Moises Horta. 180 gram vinyl; gatefold sleeve; includes download card.
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