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PLANAM 049LP
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Almost a decade on from his last full length for the label, the religiously themed Teopatia, Marco Papiro returns to Planam with Con un occhio aperto, his most challenging and ambitious work to date. Known as one of the most dedicated contemporary investigators of the potential of analogue synthesizers, the musicality and personal touch of Papiro's work stand apart from a field dominated by gear fetishism and nostalgia. In recent years, one of the unique ingredients of Papiro's music has been his use of synthesized human voices, often lending his productions a dimension of uncanniness. Here, he pushes this aspect of his work much further, presenting a suite of four pieces where most listeners would be hard pressed to trace the sounds they hear back to electronic sources. The opening title piece, "Con un occhio aperto" (i.e. "With One Eye Open"), begins with metallic textures, similar to bowed cymbals or gongs, which are soon joined by waves of percussive sound, both drum-like and metallic. Irregularly rising to the surface and receding into the background, at times reminiscent of natural rhythms of rain, wind, or sea, these percussive textures are accompanied by haunting voice-like tones, at once strikingly realistic and disorienting in their non-human patterns of articulation and attack. Perhaps the closest parallel to these overlapping waves of rattling, pulsating percussive sounds and eerie extended tones is Jon Gibson's classic "Visitations," where the line between instrumental, electronic, and natural sound is blurred in a mesmerizing drift. Threaded through this hypnotic arrangement are recognizable synthesizer figures, alongside long tones performed on alto flute and bass clarinet by Christoph Bösch and Toshiko Sakakibara (members of Basel's Ensemble Phoenix). Like Teopatia, Con un occhio aperto arrives in a sleeve bearing beautiful and comical self-portrait photographs of his father. While on the earlier release, he styles himself as a saint, here he appears as a fur-clad hunter: a fitting image for this singular, exploratory music, which, like the photographs, is at once playful and primal. Edition of 300 copies.
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PLANAM 050LP
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Lorenzo Abattoir's work has focused on researching various breathing and amplification techniques to create a sort of non-verbal language through which to express the sounds of an "inhuman" being. The first act of this transformation takes place in Disincarnazione; the artist frees himself from his own corporeal state and the cultural structures sedimented over millennia of evolution to explore the sonic possibilities of the animal body as a medium and instrument of his work. Continuing to explore these possibilities in Second Act and then Third Act, Lorenzo Abattoir's new work succeeds in giving shape to this creature. The artist assumes the form of this new beast, delineating its field of action and incorporating movement into his practice. With Mess (Akt IV), the fourth act of his research issued now on PLANAM, Abattoir consecrates a new being in a state of sonic confusion, no longer human but not entirely beast, taking its first steps in his sonic and performative universe. The amplification delivers to the listener the sonic image of a hybrid primate amidst the entirety of the noises of its body, from breaths to movements, in a non-place that allows listeners to explore the depths of the animal body. All the material of Mess (Akt IV) was recorded at Nub Project Space, Pistoia Italy. Very limited LP edition including an insert with drawings, score and notes. Only 150 copies made available for international distribution.
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PLANAM 048LP
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PLANAM presents ...et après a suite created by Ensemble Laborintus highlighting their collaboration with Luc Ferrari and well underlining the creative heights reached by the composer during the last years of his career. Laborintus, so named in homage to Luciano Berio, was an ensemble born in 1993 and dissolved in 2014, formed by Hélène Breschand (harp), César Carcopino (percussions), Sylvain Kassap (clarinets), Franck Masquelier (flutes) and Anaïs Moreau (cello). The main vocation of the ensemble was to give voice to the music of today by working in close collaboration with living and active composers, confronting current technologies, as well as practicing improvisation and musical theater. Laborintus developed a special relationship with composers, with Luc Ferrari in particular. Each creation was the occasion for an in-depth encounter. For Laborintus, the music of Luc Ferrari was always a bearer of joy, a carnal joy -- a joy of sound, and a joy of playing. There is a balance between the concrete character of the sounds that builds a poetic topology, and the virtuosity of the score, which allows a pleasurable physical involvement in the heart of sound. Bristling with stunning dances of acoustic and electronic sound, ...et après -- collecting a full two LPs worth of material -- presents the final unreleased work that Ensemble Laborintus created in collaboration with Ferrari, including "Bonjour, comment ça va?", two realizations of "Tautologos III" featuring the voice of Brunhild Ferrari and a new version of Ferrari's work "À la recherche du rythme perdu", created under the supervision of Brunhild Ferrari for harp and percussion; as well as an homage to the composer, composed by Sylvain Kassap titled "Arezzo" and Hélène Breschand "L", for flute, clarinet, cello, harp, percussion and fixed sounds. Both "Arezzo" and "L" were composed using sound archives by Luc Ferrari. This double LP also includes as a "bonus" the realization of Ferrari's "À la recherche du rythme perdu", recorded live by Hélène Breschand and eRikm in 2019. The selection of tracks and the title of the album ...et après were chosen in the spirit of a continuation with the legacy of Luc Ferrari: a balance between heritage, transmission, and continuity, transformation over time. Like Russian dolls that fit together Luc encouraged encounters and bonds are still forged today, through his music. Privately produced by Laborintus and issued by PLANAM. Gatefold sleeve; edition of 500.
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PLANAM 045LP
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2021 restock. A Light In The Window Will Guide Us Safely Home, the new and unique LP by Little Skull, is an album defined by places, journeys between them, and the traces we leave: Warbly guitars and a town hall in rural Waikato; Wheezing melodicas and a train through Tongariro; Tinny autoharps and a bus stop on the Canterbury coast; Scratching violins and mattresses on the floor in flats in Dunedin and Wellington; Squalling saws and the detritus of a life abandoned and rediscovered in Waitati -- These all jostle to be heard over the murk and cassette hiss whether they deserve to be or not. Insignificant instrumentation congregates on insignificant locations, leaving behind ghosts in a place of their own. We each choose our own light to follow in the hope it is the right one. Handmade paper-cut, fold-out sleeves; micro-edition of 200.
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PLANAM 047LP
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Alga Marghen present a reissue of Donald McPherson's Some Songs LP, self-released in 1994 in an edition of 20 lathe-cut. As Stefan Neville, coordinator for this edition, suggests: "... the first time I heard anything about Donald McPherson was when my friend David Muir told me excitedly about this guitarist from Ravensbourne who could play really beautifully properly but also just as wonderfully wrongly. I first heard him playing a rare live performance in Dunedin in about 1997. It remains one of the most heavily self-deprecating sets I've ever seen. Abandoning songs halfway through, Donald couldn't contain his belief that his efforts were worthless and that he hadn't practiced as much as we were idiots for listening. He made a good show of appearing not to care but the quality of the few pieces of music he did play showed a personality and idiosyncratic natural ability that could only come from the most meaningful places. And he was totally right... we were idiots tolerating any old shit, just as he was an idiot for being so ridiculously good. Donald is most well-known for the free range guitar instrumentals of his Bramble CD (Metonymic, 2001) and the Vinegar & Rum (WEAVIL 012CD/LP, 2006) collaboration with Tetuzi Akiyama, but it's his 1994 album Some Songs that his friends and fans hold in the highest regard. It sparkles with beauty, wit, and wonder and it crumbles under its own self-sabotaging cynicism. Lyrical flowing folk melodies with playful irritations and grafted on textures, bare-boned hyper-sensitive pop songs, and scrambled spontaneous sketches. Donald always sounds to me like he is resisting his talents as they are too embarrassing, but at the same time embracing the chance to express everything he is feeling no matter how awkward or humiliating it may be. It seems like such a crippling difficult perspective to create from but Some Songs always sounds playful, honest, humble and hopeful to me!" Includes extra tracks taken from Decap (1995) and The Trees (1996) 7" lathe editions. Edition of 200.
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PLANAM 043LP
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As reported by Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, Our Love Will Destroy The World, C-Psi-P): "I narrowly avoided an English-second-language tete-a-tete in Belgium once when I refused to believe in the face of all evidence that Sunn O)))'s newly released Flight Of The Behemoth (2012) was not CJA. I was wrong, but whatever... I was already ascending Lucifer's path to the stars not garbed in chic grim-robes but a pilling homespun jersey that stunk of wet dog. I confess and repent... for me, all 'this kinda music' was an exercise in deftly crafted slovenliness and anonymous surface texture, but in spending time with a tape simply labeled Sido Not Dead I was struck dumb with the burning religious fervor of real people who had truly forgotten to give a fuck and at that very moment unto me was bestowed a mighty vision of two-bar heaters, worn cream carpet, mooching about in slippers with cups of budget herbal tea. A long winter weekend that passed too close to a tape recorder and whose glacial momentum had accidentally combed the little magnetic thingies on the cassette into recognizable geometric shapes. This was my (unwashed) fork in the road: facile, nihilistic, too lazy to make it to the letterbox, yet enlightened, enlivened, ascended, eternal... blangblangblang... GRONGGRONG... blangblangblang... GRONGGRONG... Fellow pilgrims and travellers to furthest inner outposts... herein lies your scripture." Silkscreened sleeve; Edition of 200.
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PLANAM 044LP
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Matt Middleton (Crude, The Aesthetics, Dirtlove): "The Futurians are a band that have soul. Their music, a pulsating, minimalist, primitivist, machinistic monster of a thing is at once fiction and fantasy, at once politics and hyper-reality. Theirs is an approach synthesizing elements of no-wave, new-wave, synth-rock, drone rock, doom rock, kraut-rock, Dunedin dirge, robot rock, riot grrllism, and calculator punk." Brad Rose: "Clayton Noone and his posse of Duckling Monster, ISO12, Rocko Mandroid, and Krauss have enough energy to light a small town for a year. Have enough energy to light a small town for a year." Full-color sleeve; Edition of 200.
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PLANAM 040LP
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As reported by Stefan Neville: "Clayton 'CJA' Noone and Jon 'Sugar Jon' Arcus are some of my oldest and dearest friends. I've been listening to their band Armpit pouring out infinite sweat and toe jams for 20+ years and I still can't work out what Armpit even is. They are the wrongest band I've ever heard. We were all part of the same gang in early 1990s Hamilton, New Zealand. Armpit would always happen in rooms next door. They would keep me awake with the eternal strumming of bad guitars through bad equipment, bottles falling over, people falling over, things catching fire and always lots of giggling. I saw them play at a party once where they were too wasted to plug in their guitar pedals. They wrestled with them giggling for about ten minutes and then gave up. They didn't make a sound but it's one of the greatest concerts I've ever seen. Their recordings are always confusing. They display their deepest awful humanity and their sweet, sweet hearts, all in the same mouthful. Scorched hateful noise, incompetent absurdity, smoochy crooning folk songs with poignant words and brutal sausage fingered editing to highlight the horror and hilarity. Leisure & The Elderly was recorded in Dunedin in the mid-1990s. Jon was doing a nursing foundation course and learned to simulate giving a skinhead a sponge bath. A classmate gave him some of her tortured poetry so Armpit blended it with a nursing textbook and disappeared into the room next door to record the album in one go, ping-ponging recordings with two tape decks." It was originally released on cassette in an edition of just three copies. Edition of 300 copies in a silk-screened sleeve.
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PLANAM 039LP
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One more top mysterious trace from the Little Skull legacy: Dean Brown's album Ubique (i.e. "everywhere" in Latin) marks the passing of time and people. This sense of loss is very present through the whole record; not getting around to saying the things we meant to say and making sense of the leftovers. Screaming calmly, Dean Brown's Little Skull has shrunk, even more, until his head is almost just sore meat - this music sounds like it was made to soothe that inflammation. Currently living in the UK, Little Skull is Dean's long running solo project. He plays all of instruments, even if it sounds like he is barely touching them and yet, his obscure personal fingerprints are all over the place. His instinctive spontaneous playing finds ways to make them glow and fizz and ripple. The very complicated hand-made cover is astonishing. It incorporates religious imagery and patron saints expanding in space and creating a three-dimensional architecture filled with mysterious presences. Dean Brown is a New Zealander from Hamilton. A joke city to much of the rest of New Zealand, but its feral mongrel out-of-it-ness is well known to those that have lived there. Dean coped with Hamilton through his bands Negative Eh and Nova Scotia and then buggered off to other cities and other countries. After several privately produced lathe-cut editions and a sold-out LP on Elica, Ubique is reissued here on LP in a one-time-only pressing limited to 250 copies.
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PLANAM 041LP
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A dogroll is a cheap giant sausage of bad meat to feed your pets. Teen-X-Ray came from Hamilton, New Zealand, which is known for agricultural innovation, frosts, fog and Taniwha in the Waikato river. Live cows with windows permanently inserted into their bodies for research live on the edge of town. As Stefan "Smetal" Neville recalls: "Glen Frenzy asked me to join his new 'rock n roll' band Teen-X-Ray at a ska concert at the Hillcrest Tavern in Hamilton in 1993. He had probably already recorded most of the first cassette The Ballad Of Vince Neil using the karaoke sound on sound function of his flat-mates stereo. Then and now I would do anything Glen asked of me so I've been in X-Ray ever since." Glen also recruited Dusk, his girlfriend's German Shepard who howled when she heard sirens. She would bite and claw at Casio keyboards. She didn't share her dogroll. Teen-X-Ray recorded their music on cassette decks, performed on top of kitchen tables and released many tapes on the Plop, M60 and Stabbies And The Rocket labels. Glen and Dusk got a reel-to-reel tape machine, moved to Upper Hutt, making noise long into the night. Dusk got into Neil Young and killing mice while Glen got into home brewing beer and computers. Stefan Neville moved to Dunedin but Upper Hutt became his favorite holiday destination and each visit would result in new albums. Upper Hutt is known for its pig hunting and for producing New Zealand's first hip hop group. Spirits Dogroll was compiled from recordings from 1994-1996. Teen-X-Ray is still active today. LP comes in full color sleeve, in an edition of 300.
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PLANAM 042LP
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Soibiast Anti-Culler was recorded in 1995 by the winterless north of New Zealand's Witcyst. Another monolithic skid mark serving of crackers plucked from the man's vast lifetime archive of sound making and beard. Witcyst makes his music with oceans of constant daily mutation. Machines get used upside down and back to front and inside out. Layers of string, tin foil and expired medicine are saved up to dazzle the eye. Parcels in the post come and go full of nostril hair and pamphlets and wool. What would that sound like through a funnel and a heavy metal pedal? Is the room shrinking? One knock for yes. Two for no. This audio is severely distressed and swollen. It is particularly buried and murky and howling here. Are they voices or organs? Meat or musical instruments? Is that a drum solo or decades of tape degradation? Are the hums musical or malfunctioning? It starts to sound like it was recorded inside your brain and has always been there. Who knows if it means any harm? And then it starts to sound like a basket full of wise puppies. Soibiast Anti-Culler is one of the most relevant works among at least a thousand albums Witcyst has originally released on cassettes and CDR's on his own Extemporaneous and Lifespace labels since the early 1990s. Edition of 300 copies in a silk-screened sleeve.
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PLANAM 035LP
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Since the early 1990s, Michael Veet aka Witcyst has been the stunning secret diamond of the New Zealand noise underground. A short-circuiting monolith on top of the rubbish heap of NZ art and sound. This LP contains two pieces originally issued on cassettes in 1995. "Screuma" sounds like a guitar being fed through a washing machine -- a giant guitar made from old medicine bottles and beard hair. The washing machine is on full spin and it has pinecones in it. Witcyst mumbles a running commentary. It goes on and on. All outputs are fed back into the inputs. "Chilli Song" is a Witcyst rock song stretched into a spitting blur of strumming and singing. Streaks of hiss and saturation swamp and dissolve the riff. Someone is frying old meat and Witcyst has a lot to say about it. It goes on and on. All outputs are fed back into the inputs. Witcyst's instructions for completing the sleeve artwork: "If the vinyl comes with unprinted blank card covers rub them a bit on rough concrete, cut out the center holes like a 12" sleeve, but not perfect circle -- like rough chop chop. Hack or lay a cover on wood, slab with a big metal pipe end, slam down off center like cutting with a cookie cutter, and tear the centers out. That would be goodly!" Witcyst lives and works in a concrete-floor shed in Whangarei, in the far north of New Zealand. His releases on his own labels Extemporization and LifeSpace run into the thousands. Each item is hand-made from insect casings, old X-rays, beer cans, and elbow grease. Exquisite drawings, obsessive collage, unreadable calligraphy, and photocopying onto tinfoil. His music is always a surprise and wrestles every potential sound out of endless mutations of endless new ideas. Every variation is layered, wrung out, and exploded. It is the freest of all the free noises. A complete drooling feast for the eyes and ears. Witcyst makes everyone else seem like a baby with a coloring book and one crayon. Edition of 300 copies in DIY sleeve.
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PLANAM 037LP
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A collection of Pumice recordings from 1993-'99, when teenagers Sugar Jon Arcus and Stefan Neville learned about music by doing it. The album covers the earliest days of the band recording on ghetto blasters with untuneable guitars at home in Whatawhata and Hamilton, New Zealand. There are a couple of recordings from their first public performance with drummer Ugly Dog Davies, at which their friends yelled at them relentlessly. There is material from their years spent living in Dunedin, NZ, with cassette four-track machines. Living cheaply in a cheap city with pet dogs and all the time in the world. Finally, the album includes music from the move back north to Hamilton and Auckland. Material that was released in microscopic editions as lathe-cut 7"s and cassettes, documenting Arcus's final participation in Pumice activities. The LP features trio and duo recordings as well as solo recordings by both Arcus and Neville. The basic multi-directional creative impulse for which Pumice is known is there from the beginning. One-chord pop songs, crumbling folk music, and smeared-organ sound-sculptures. Small speakers shitting themselves with distortion and tape saturation. Acoustic guitars twanging and Neville and Arcus clearly learning to write songs of real quality. This music-making manages to be bold, reckless, and stupid, as well as delicate, sad, and instinctive. Pumice has always done whatever the fuck it wants to. Edition of 300 copies in silkscreened sleeve.
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PLANAM 038LP
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Thee Ideal Gus began in Hamilton, New Zealand, in the early '90s, sprung from the same gene pool and time as Armpit, GFrenzy, and Pumice. Its participants include Sugar Jon Arcus, Clayton Noone, Indira Neville, Kaatarama "Motty" Morehu, Stefan Neville, Witcyst, Dan "Eemonk" Powell, and Rachel Garbott, but membership has never been settled or defined. The band have released numerous cassettes and lathe-cut records on such cult labels as Plop, Root Don Lonie for Cash, and Stabbies and the Rocket Recordings. Thee Ideal Gus love double-barreled year numbers, so during the year 1999, they conducted daily recordings in Whangarei and Wellsford in the far north of New Zealand, and Dunedin in the far south. Diaries were kept, artwork was assembled, and tapes were mailed up and down the country. In 1999, Stabbies and the Rocket Recordings released the resultant material as 1999, in an edition of 20 lathe-cut double LPs. 99 is a selection of material compiled from that ridiculous obscurity by Clayton Noone and Stefan Neville. The music Thee Ideal Gus made that year documented the days as they happened. It charted weather patterns, prophesied the future, and celebrated team sports. Eddie Murphy and Yoko Ono are held in equally high regard. Nude drunk partying and the New Zealand general election of 1999 are all there in this record, on which a rusted clothes line is played alongside an elementary school xylophone, sampled techno records, and ukulele through a heavy metal pedal. It is mundane and marvelous. Edition of 200 copies in very elaborate packaging, including prints on acetate, xerox inserts, and several hand-drawn original artworks.
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PLANAM 033LP
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The subtitle of this album describes it as "Messa in scena arcaica per strumenti elettronici e voci ingannevoli" -- a play on words which could be translated as "Mass in an archaic scene (or archaic enactment) for electronic instruments and deceptive voices." The Italian graphic designer and musician Marco Papiro deliberately plays with different forms of religious music, and loosely oscillates between the spiritual and the illusory world, starting with the cover, where we can see a self-portrait of his father disguised as a saint with a steering wheel in place of the halo. As for the voices, they are deceptive in a double sense -- not only because they seem to promise eternal bliss, but also because they are completely artificial, and have been masterfully created -- like everything here -- from scratch, with an array of aged modular synthesizers. It's the thin line between the human warmth and the eeriness of its simulation that makes up the fascination of the music on Teopatia, which, by the way, is the term used to describe an indirect divine contact. Though this record might be too odd to become a religious classic, it might very well help future generations understand the turmoil of an early 21st-century youth converting to synthesizers after growing up with Catholicism.
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PLANAM 031LP
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"Recorded during a week-long sojourn in Norway, Sonja Henies vei 31 is a profoundly moving document of the personal and artistic union between Crys Cole and Oren Ambarchi. Abandoning their usual instrumental artillery, both performers make themselves vulnerable to the listener, undertaking a committed exploration of pure physical gesture. Surrounding an explicitly intimate duo performance is a hazy collage of field recordings, tape hiss, metallic clinks and wandering voices. This forces the listener to hover in a disorienting psychological space between a confronting real world, and a swirling dream-world. While the latter's abstraction cannot penetrate the former's emotional directness, both environments function to obscure one another's meaning. What is most affecting for the listener is how he/she inadvertently becomes part of the record's scenery: a dreamer, narrator and voyeur in equal parts. Sonja Henies vei 31 is a brave personal statement, a celebration of the idyllic, and a tragic theater of emotional longing." --James Rushford, Melbourne, 2014; Due to the very intimate nature of these recordings, the first pressing has been limited to 150 copies only.
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PLANAM 028LP
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2023 restock. The 20 years-old young David Chesworth experiments with the gigantic Serge synth that occupies half the room of the Latrobe University electronic studio. On the traces of pioneers such as Tristram Cary or Warren Burt, a new avant-garde is blooming in Sidney and Melbourne with bands like Severed Heads, The Makers, The Loop Orchestra, and the like. David Chesworth will soon play a major role by coordinating the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in Melbourne, by co-founding the cult label Innocent Records and by playing in acts such as Essendon Airport, The Dave And Phil Duo, → ↑ →, as well as conducting a solo career. He would later become one of the leading figures in contemporary sculpture and sound installation in Australia and abroad and a recognized and awarded composer with his The David Chesworth Ensemble. His first solo LP titled 50 Synthesizer Greats! was released in 1979 and recorded in the same period as the LP presented here. While his first LP is a compilation of very short and eclectic tracks, "Five Evolutionary Things 79" and "The Unattended Serge 78" are structured as suites. Drawing skeletons for pop tunes to come, these minimal electronic pieces are at times very experimental but never brutal, reminding of the best moments of Udder Milk Decay's Take a Teat or sharing the apparent naïve melancholia of Harmonia's Musik Von Harmonia. Hints of elegant musique concrète à la François Bayle can be heard, but also out of space blip-beats, as if Pietro Grossi or Erkki Kurenniemi went groovy. This beautiful, unknown gem of ozzy underground is now available for your ears in an edition limited to 300 copies.
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PLANAM 034LP
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Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics. In Spectral Arrows, Marco Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end of the working day, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and preparations to lend an aura to the performance, and affirming the deskilled ethos of his work. For the audience, the length of the performance frustrates the expectation of a manageable form, forcing all but the hardiest audience members to content themselves with only a fragment of the whole. Even for those who stick it out, the extended duration, like in the late works of Morton Feldman, destroys the listener's ability to retain and assess the structure of the performance. Breaking with both the traditional form of the musical performance and, through Fusinato's resolutely anti-social position facing away from the audience, the standard affective relationship between audience and performer, the sound of Spectral Arrows becomes a monumental aural sculpture, filling the space, not with steel or concrete, but with vibrations traveling through air. Spectral Arrows: Sydney was recorded at Artspace Sydney in 2012 during "The Color of the Sky Has Melted," a survey exhibition of Fusinato's recent projects. Fusinato performed facing a large, purpose-built wall that bisected the exhibition space and displayed his "Double Infinitives" series. Fusinato's sculpture "Aetheric Plexus," which unleashes 13,000 watts of white light and a 105db blast of white noise when triggered by the audience was active in the space during the performance and provides an aleatoric counterpoint throughout the recording. The crushing volume and harshness of the performance is intensified throughout by the reverberant gallery space, which creates a swirling, almost psychedelic effect as Fusinato's sounds bounce from wall to wall. Spectral Arrows: Sydney, issued in an edition of 200 copies, condenses a six-hour performance into under 40 minutes. Compared to the rapid-fire cut-ups of Spectral Arrows: Rotterdam (issued by De Player in 2013), the pacing here is more measured. Disorientating explorations of asynchronous stereo fields fade into periods of minimal drone, broken by the distant eruption of "Aetheric Plexus"; bottom-heavy oscillations give way to pointillist chatter; continuous streams of hum and crackle grow steadily until they form monumental aural sculptures.
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PLANAM 018LP
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2022 restock. Visitation, created on April 1st, 2011 is a very unique kind of collaboration between two French sonic artists, master Luc Ferrari and eRikm. Here is eRikm's direct testimony about this work: "When the sun set on April 1st, 2011 I heard through the windows of my house the repetitive song of a night bird. Madeleine brought me immediately back to Luc Ferrari¹s electroacoustic piece Presque Rien N° 2. I became curious about comparing the bird that was officiating in the garden of Cap15 (in the North area of Marseille) with the bird of Presque Rien. My curiosity triggered the desire to play Luc's piece in the acoustic space of my house. With my rudimentary recorder I moved inside and outside the house, moving back and forth between both spaces. I played with the depth of field, the beat between these two birds separated by 34 years, and immersed myself in these acoustic events. This Ursprung or temporal Klein bottle was recorded and edited in one single sequence shot." It's very hard to compare anything with one of the all-time masterpieces of modern creation as Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien N° 2, but listening to this piece you immediately get the impression of a perfectly accomplished work, published now on LP on your favorite label. So here is the first-ever LP by eRikm, elegantly released with Presque Rien's iconic mouth picture on the sleeve; dedicated to Brunhild Ferrari and to Natacha Muslera. One-sided release.
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PLANAM 019LP
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2022 restock. Planam proudly presents the second LP by the artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel. Born in 1941 in Strasbourg, France, Michel Vogel's artistic activities started in 1960 when, as a painter under the influences of Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet, his mineral and sound experimentations built a universe influenced by free jazz, extra-European music and Olivier Messiaen. His research developed with new sculptures and the creation of his own resonating metal instruments. His friends of the minimalist group, and especially the Fluxus artists, supported and pushed him to carry on his acoustic explorations while his sonic creations got closer to the music of John Cage, Philip Corner, Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. After the deep, cosmic night-music of Une petite music de nuit (Vogel's first LP) Planam decided to issue two more early-morning oriented realizations, or "Ronde mattinale à Amillis" and "Berenice." These alpha-wave improvisations for "prepared" gongs and self-built metal instruments, selected in direct collaboration with the artist, will make you enter into luminous sonic dimensions. Features a full-color space cover and inner sleeve.
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PLANAM 005LP
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2009 release. Planam proudly presents the first LP by the artist and sound sculptor Michel Vogel. Born in 1941 in Strasbourg, France, Vogel's artistic activities start in 1960 when, as a painter under the influences of Antoni Tapies and Jean Dubuffet, his mineral and sound experimentations built a universe influenced by free jazz, extra-European music and Olivier Messiaen. His researches develop with new sculptures and the creation of his own resonating metal instruments. His friends of the minimalist group, and especially the Fluxus artists, supported and pushed him to carry on his acoustic explorations while his sonic creations get closer to the music of John Cage, Philip Corner, Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. For this first project, Planam selected, in direct collaboration with the artist, an improvisation for large size gongs "prepared" with metal rods, a little gong, a Chinese cymbal, and a caoutchouc ball, titled Une Petite Musique De Nuit. Recorded live with no over-dubbing the night of January 18th, 2002. A very deep, alpha-wave-oriented listening that will make you discover very intimate, as well as stellar new sonic dimensions. Features a full-color space cover and inner sleeve.
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PLANAM 006LP
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2009 release. Klaus Röder is a guitar virtuoso and electronic music artist who studied with Kelemen and joined Kraftwerk for their famous Autobahn LP. He often works with very small sound particles, whose sound comes from different sources, like tearing paper, the voice, a musical instrument, synthesizer or computer sounds. Sound structures are built by joining together those sound particles and, by mixing those structures, Röder forms chords. Then the process of crystallization begins. Usually crystallization means that small parts are deposited around a germ and form a growing crystal. The shape of the complete crystal is a consequence of outer influences. A series of sound crystals form, then the complete musical composition. Side 1 presents two electronic music works: "10: 11: 12" (1980) for self-built Impulse Generator is an obscure, very minimal and abstract pulsating piece, while "Kristallisation 4" (1991) for Computer Sounds and Yamaha DX 802 might be considered one of the peaks of Klaus Röder's Kristallisation series. Side 2 introduces us to a different formal result of Röder's crystallization process: the short "Hänschen Blues" (1993) for children singing and crying and the Yamaha TX 802 controlled by self-made programs for Atari TT is both a playful and sinister electronic assemblage anticipating the peak of this record. "Potpourri" (1985) is a collage of short sound particles from German pop hits of the 1970s and 1980s. From a sound-collage perspective (from Battiato's "Ethika Fon Ethica" to Bladder Flask's first LP, from NWW's most surrealistic works to John Oswald's classic plunderphonics), "Potpourri" might be closer to the brut masterpiece "InOut" by Anton Bruhin, only constructed in a more advanced and scientific way. Includes a series of inserts with the diagrams and schedules of the four compositions presented on this LP.
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PLANAM 012LP
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Limited 2022 restock. Planam proudly presents the second LP production by Klaus Röder featuring two more pieces from the electronic Kristallisationen series -- "Kristallisation 5" (1993) for microphone recordings of children's chimes (played by children), Yamaha TX 802 digital synthesizer and EMS Synthi A analog synthesizer, "Kristallisation 7" (1997) for microphone recordings and computer sounds, as well as "Frozen Sounds" (2002) for electric guitar sounds and computer sounds and the more concrete "Life-Music 1" (1999) for microphone recordings in the zoo of Wuppertal, computer sounds and Yamaha TX 802 digital synthesizer. Klaus Röder is the archetype of the challenging challenger -- the perfect outsider. Nothing bad about it -- true geniuses often are hiding behind their uncompromising ethic. "Ethic in the attic" would define the home-studio work of this ex-Kraftwerk banned banned banned auf Die Autobahn. The independent, time-stretching composer Klaus Röder is by necessity an inventor. Systems, machines, treatments, everything is (hand)made to provoke, to induce a musical result not only technically superb but loaded with the author's intimacy: humor, sound elements of a private life, a kid giggling... indeed, a highly emotional and poetic approach. Klaus Röder mixes and plays with outside influences -- cut-up, musique concrète, psychedelia, plunderphonics, pop, even blues -- in order to create a patchwork-like but coherent corpus over nearly 40 years of compositional activity. His music blends the warmth of strings and of humanity with the icy matter of electrical components and seems to have just one borderline: that of our ears. Features a full-color sleeve.
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PLANAM 015LP
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2010 release. Luc Ferrari conceived this work in 1977 as a sequence of seven individually or collectively improvised exercises for tape and any instrument or group of instruments. Never performed before, Exercices d'improvisation have been released by the GOL collective and issued on LP by Planam. The seven exercises follow each other in a suite of growing intensity where GOL's acoustic and electric instruments react to Luc Ferrari's tape, lively re-interpreted by Brunhild Ferrari: from a more meditative form, the music turns into free mental spiraling sections to finally culminate in a live musique concrète drama. The tracks were recorded at Ferrari's Atelier Post-Billig on April 12th and 13th, 2010, a few days before the world premiere performance at La Maison Rouge in Paris. Exercices d'improvisation on one hand presents a new perspective on Ferrari's music and on the other pays a panorama-like tribute to his rich and eclectic corpus; somewhere between "Tête et Queue du Dragon" and "Tautologos" with a touch of "Danses Organiques." GOL was formed in 1988 in Paris by Jean-Marcel Busson, Frédéric Rebotier, Ravi Sharda and Samon Takahashi. On this record GOL play flutes, electric guitar, bass guitar, melodica, janotron, ocarina, nagara, electric guembri, vocoder and message box. This LP is the fourth in the "Gollaboration" series, after records by GOL with Dumitrescu/Avram, with Charlemagne Palestine and with Charles Hayward of This Heat fame. The front sleeve shows a four-color wild collage by the French artist, film-maker and Ferrari's collaborator Jacques Brissot, based on photo sessions done by Myriam Tirler, who also shot the back cover and inner sleeve images presenting GOL members and Brunhild Ferrari in Kagel-Exotica-like appearances. Includes an insert with the complete score by Luc Ferrari. Please note: this previously-unpublished work revealing a hidden part of Luc Ferrari's poetics is not included in the INA 10CD box set. Only available on this LP edition.
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PLANAM 003LP
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2008 release. Dendoshi is Keith Connolly (No Neck Blues Band), Raymond Dijkstra (Asra), Dave Nuss (No Neck Blues Band) and Timo Van Luyk (Af Ursin, In Camera). Dendoshi: "sent to propagate the ceremony" or "missionary" (Japanese). There had actually been a previous incarnation of Dendoshi (hence Dendoshi 2), which was a large group performance in New York that ventured upon elucidating the memories of a 50-plus foot tall dead weeping cherry tree re-contextualized as a sculptural exhibit. Some thematic reference: The name "Dendoshi" originates from the work of Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose films also inspired the content of the first performance. When the opportunity presented itself for Connolly, Dijkstra, Nuss and Van Luyk to come together to make a session, it was the perfect opportunity to realize Dendoshi not as a one-off performance on a theme, but as a recurring ritual in development. The resulting music widened the conceptual reflection of the band, bringing to mind the history and ideas of Franz Mesmer. Mesmer, the 18th century Austrian spiritualist healer, was among the first to put forth the theory of what he termed "animal magnetism," regarding a universal fluid which permeates all matter and can be influenced by the will, not dissimilar to some of Eliphas Levi's concepts. What seemed to set Mesmer apart was an attention to mood and atmosphere, an aesthetic component to what were scientifically quite dubious theories, which lent his work an aura of portent -- thus the parallel with the music captured as Dendoshi 2. Reflecting the qualities that all four musical sensibilities had in common, the album is a statement upon the ephemeral nature of atmosphere and will, and the relation of reverie to oblivion as opposed to ecstasy. The symbol, or mark on the front cover created by Connolly came intuitively and without revision. Its applied function is that of distinction rather than that of protection or as a seal. It was first applied to the photograph by Clarence H. White from 1904, where the first resonant depiction or personification of reverie and oblivion as applied to Dendoshi was found. By applying the mark, Connolly is ceremonializing the image, thus rendering it distinct from its original form, not as an appropriation, but as a recognition. The other images followed, and each of them were recognized instantly without having to search. The last was Vermeer's image from Van Luyk's basement, and upon receiving this, the series of four inserts was complete. There is a trace of fear and a sensation of suspended time in these images which suits the music very well. Edition limited to 300 copies with a gold cover.
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