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viewing 1 To 5 of 5 items
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STSLJN 423LP
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Carmen Villain follows 2022's Only Love From Now On with this new full-length exploration of soporific, slow-moving ambience and disemboweled dub, a score she composed for a contemporary dance performance by acclaimed Choreographer Eszter Salamon. Simply put, it's one of the most captivating things we've heard this year; all luxurious texture-cycles in possession of a delirious, dreamlike quality that hits a rarified spot somewhere between Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol.II, classic Chain Reaction and Jim O'Rourke's meditative electronic recordings. Music from the Living Monument was written for choreographer Eszter Salamon's dance performance of the same name, a lavish and sculptural show for 14 performers dressed in ornamental fabrics (which you can see on the album art) while surrounded by slowly shifting environments. Carmen reflects the measured gestures of the dancers, ruminating on slowness and burying instrumentation in sensual abstraction. Edited down from almost three hours of music, the album opens with "Multicolor" and triggers the same sense of suspended animation you get from Selected Ambient Works Vol.II, its brooding mix of glacial gestures and fizzing pads suggestive of fuzzed, liminal states. From here it only gets deeper and more disorienting, peaking with the frankly majestic "Silver", deployed at a pace that makes Rhythm & Sound's beatless dub abstractions seem almost giddy by comparison. Villain locks us into infinitesimal movements with a slow, heartbeat-thud of a bass drum crumbling around choral pads that grow in intensity over its nine-minute duration. It's one of those pieces you could get lost in for hours, such is the power of its swirling, meditative vibrations. "Pink" ends the set by flexing more angular muscle, contorting what sounds like glassy clangs into electroacoustic pulses in a way that feels effortlessly engrossing, harmonizing with Jim O'Rourke's stunning Hands That Bind OST. Microtonality is an overused buzzword right now, but Carmen penetrates the essence of its magic, emphasizing sensuality and mysticism in a way that feels like someone whispering softly into your ear as you pass from the waking world into a deep, dreamless sleep.
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STSLJN 355LP
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Pavel Milyakov (Buttechno) and Aleksandra Zakharenko (Perila) unveil their collaborative debut as pmxper. Recorded (mostly) remotely between 2020-2022, but mired in a mutual interiority, their sublimely smoky venture bridges strains of spoken word, strung-out country folk, jazz and etheric kosmische with a timeless control of mood and atmosphere that amounts to one of the finest episodes in either's oeuvre. In a properly enchanted blurring of identity, they almost entirely dispense with digital tools in favor of more pastoral and timeless energies; guitar, sax, jazzy brush drums and a Rhythm Ace FR-3 drum machine, a sort of precursor to Roland's simmering CR-78. It's that sax that takes you places though, daubing accents of blushed romance over walls of guitar in various formations, all of which sidestep the widescreen cliché in favor of something more nuanced and unusual. This isn't the open road of Lynch and Badalamenti, more the careening trailblaze of Conny Plank and Holger Czukay, Angela Conway and Bruce Gilbert, The Jesus & Mary Chain and Hope Sandoval's Stoned & Dethroned, like a melted Venus in Furs, soft, and fritzed.
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STSLJN 380LP
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Farewell to Faraway Friends finds Anja Lauvdal at her Wurlitzer, captured by two mics in the room, with no additional overdubs or edits. Her set of hushed, jazzy flourishes and pregnant pauses is so well realized that it's hard to believe they were improvised, while the "kitchen feel" of the room recording (as Marhaug describes it) enhances a sense of brittle intimacy. Much in the same way that Dominique Lawalrée imbued his ostensibly naive music with glimpses into a multifaceted inner life, Lauvdal explores an ocean of feeling through the most-humble components, transporting us through some alchemical act of emotional teleportation. Lauvdal avoids meandering flights of fancy, instead exposing a filigree level of detail and beauty through the cracks of her spartan recordings. There are no arbitrary found sounds, no sound design or overdubs, just Lauvdal and her Wurlitzer, occasionally singing at a barely perceptible volume in the background. If there's melancholy, it's not self-absorbed or effacing, but trapped behind sunny rays and poetic, romantic phrases. One of those effortlessly impactful records we've not been able to stop listening to for a while now, Farewell to Faraway Friends is apparently the first in an ongoing series. Here's hoping. Required listening if you're into Harold Budd, Loren Connors, Dominique Lawalrée, Robert Wyatt, and Vincent Gallo. Released as part of the Le Jazz Non series. Edition of 300 copies.
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STSLJN 414LP
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Flautist Johanna Orellana teams up with Carmen Villain for a collection of horizontal, pastoral field recordings and close mic-ed flute sounds that zero in on the instrument's unstable resonance and levitational magic. There's no cringe virtuoso business or fourth world firewalking here - just sonic purity, sublime minimalism and the precise capture of time, place and poetry. You might have come across Johanna Orellana before if you've listened to Carmen Villain's music (or seen her perform live), and Villain appears here in a producer's role, using her engineering expertise to impart a level of restraint and sonic fidelity that's quite startling. There are only really two central elements to the album: environmental recordings and flute. There's no psychedelic delay, no cavernous reverb; no audible treatments at all -- Orellana and Villain instead force you to consider the flute and its musical lineage. 'El Jardín I' introduces the instrument as a physical conduit; Orellana allows her breath to distort the sound -- the padded pat-pat of the keys forms a kind of rhythm, closely recorded so it's amplified and jarring, linking to primal wind instruments like conch shells, bamboo flutes and wooden whistles. Recalling the way in which "Debit" interfaced with the ancient world using AIassisted tech on last year's The Long Count, Orellana uses a comparatively modern contemporary transverse flute, an instrument with roots that stretch back through the baroque era, into Medieval Europe, back to the Byzantine era and into Asia. The component that connects the instruments and eras is breath, and its amplification and modification through differently shaped pipes and vessels. Orellana lets the environment sing: insects, rushing water and zephyr-like winds form a stage that presents her mortal energy, suggesting a harmony between our use of breath and its environmental ubiquitousness. Her technique is steeped in folk history and decouples itself from expectation by rooting itself in nature. It allows her to bridge the gap between equal temperament and less ordered (less commercially-focused) microtonality without overstating the concept. Other sounds waft in from the sidelines; what might be an Indian bansuri, stray notes, a gust of air. There's a link to the foundational new age recordings that Joanna Brouk made with Maggi Payne back in 1980, but Orelanna also absorbs the outdoor folk magic of Fonal or Stroom, and the improvisational grist of Bendik Giske or legendary US horn duo Nmperign. Edition of 300 copies, pressed on white vinyl.
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STSLJN 407LP
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Limited restock. Recorded back in 1999, Half a Dove in New York, Half a Dove in Buenos Aires is the recorded debut of a NetCast improv between deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros and Argentinian free music trio Reynols -- a fascinating early example of the internet's capacity to foster remote creativity in-the-moment that deploys the slowest electronics, accordion, voice, trombone and computer sounds on a next level ritual drone incantation recorded in another era, but made for our time. As the story goes, Oliveros first met Reynols in the mid-90s at a Deep Listening workshop she held in their home city, Buenos Aires, where they impressed her with an improvised brass serenade. Years later, in 1999, they met again via NetCast -- a series of very early online live improvisations -- to explore the Internet's potential for collaborations between artists thousands of miles apart. Finally mixed down in 2021 and mastered by Helge Sten (aka Deathprod) after marinating in the archive for 22 years, the album resonates with the late, great Oliveros's legendary work in exploring alternate tunings, spatial dynamics and methods of intuitive performance -- a remarkable slab of omnidirectional drone bearing traces of Miguel Tomasin's vox and Oliveros' just-intoned accordion embedded in its cosmic roil. Broadcasting from fabled record shop The Thing in NYC, with Oliveros (accordion) joined by Jennifer McCoy (ICR), Kevin McCoy (computer processing), and Monique Buzzarté (trombone), and Reynols revolving Miguel Tomasin (electronics, subliminal voice, Alclorse drums), Rob Conlazo (electronics, leather gloves & e-gtr), and Anla Courtis (electronics, rubber foot & e-gtr) and dialing-in from Florida 943 in Buenos Aires, the results are an incredibly absorbing and consistently surprising testament to vanguard, experimental spirits prizing the internet's nascent, unprecedented ability to connect minds and art across continents, language barriers, and modalities. The album's first side, titled "Micro Macro Wind Dance", puts Oliveros's accordion under a microscope, enhancing it with lower case rumble and noise from Reynolds' arsenal. Shifting glacially over 22-minutes, Oliveros plays subtly and slowly at first, letting the accordion breathe in-and-out like a sleeping mythical beast, before she transitions to fluttering bird-like phrases by the end of the side. "Astral Netcast Pigeon" expands the dissonant drones to widescreen, submerging Oliveros's trills and drones beneath layers of dirt and grit. Time-altering music that's basically the perfect mid-point between Oliveros' deep listening practices and Reynols' wildly inspirational free-noise-drone freakouts. Liner notes by Pauline Oliveros. Design by Lasse Marhaug. Produced by Reynols, mastered by Helge Sten. Edition of 500.
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