STUDENTS OF DECAY - Forced Exposure

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Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #

SUZUKI, AYAMI	Remnants	Cassette	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 142CS
$12.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 6/12/2026 Remnants is an album marked by the ambiguity of presence and absence. The pieces, recorded using minimal equipment in what Ayami Suzuki describes as a ritual-like atmosphere, began as a way of processing the loss of her father in 2019. But beyond this, they also come to speak to the ways in which loss changes peoples' relationship with someone, and their experiences of the world. Indeed, the experience of loss is not marked merely by a single event, but is instead a process that unfolds over time. Despite the other's absence, a particular location, the smell of a certain brand of tobacco, a look on a friend's face -- traces such as these are enough to bring about a renewed presence. It is through these subtle traces and remnants, encountered over time, that listeners come to understand loss as not only the acceptance of absence, but the recognition of a continued presence. As Suzuki says, "this is not a solo album." Its creation was instead shaped by an ongoing dialogue, the continued elaboration of a complex and ambivalent relationship. At once melancholic, warm, and embracing, it is this ambiguity, these subtle traces, that Suzuki's compositions speak to. These are not merely the sounds of mourning, but instead have been shaped by the evolving dialectic of presence and absence into something far more subtle and haunting.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
MASON, JOSH	Wave Salt +7	Cassette	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 144CS
$12.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 6/12/2026 Josh Mason's new collection, Wave Salt +7, emerges from an oblique origin. Unearthed from a dormant hard drive, it documents a set of work sessions only partially recoverable, their original continuity and intent fractured by time and technical failure. What remains is a constellation of mercurial gestures that proves, against all odds, to be entirely consonant with Mason's ongoing musical concerns. In a sense, the very condition of partiality proves generative, with elision operating on multiple levels -- structural, sonic, and archival -- shaping both the music itself and the circumstances of its (re)appearance. Phrases surface only to be truncated or displaced, hovering at the edge of resolution, and transitions are implied rather than fully enacted. Absence functions not as a deficit, but as an important compositional resource. Central to the album's sound is a distinctive use of vocoding. Deployed not to simulate vocal presence but as a tool for tonal sculpting, it yields a shifting lattice of smeared harmonics, angular melody, and attenuated noise. Sounds are pressed through one another, their edges softened, shifted, or selectively erased, producing surfaces simultaneously articulated and porous. Rather than reconstructing a lost whole, the album posits a mode of listening attuned to gaps, interruptions, and unstable forms. Even so, in keeping with Mason's broader practice, this music remains grounded in melodic logic and a distinctly human scale, ensuring that its fragmentary structures register not solely as experiments, but as expressions of proximity and feeling.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
DEATH KNEEL	Remembering Well	CD	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 139CD
$14.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 5/29/2026 Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist Max Klebanoff, best known as the drummer for critically lauded death metal outfit Tomb Mold, has slowly expanded the purview of his Death Kneel project. From a spate of hermetic short-form tapes to the uniformly excellent Dawn Simulation on bellwether noise label Chondritic Sound, the project has blossomed into a distinct force within the landscape of contemporary experimental music. Remembering Well might be best understood as a summation of process -- an accumulation of gestures, false starts, and breakthroughs brought into provisional alignment. It articulates a careful balance between immediacy and refinement, tracing the contours of a practice in motion while resolving into a fully realized statement. First takes and impromptu recordings form its backbone, each piece guided by a commitment to capturing a singular animating impulse. Rather than smoothing over discontinuities, Klebanoff leans into them, allowing a dense field of incidents to accrue in which minor sonic events assume equal weight alongside more apparent structural shifts. Central to this approach is an expanded conception of fidelity. Sound is treated not as a neutral vessel but as a variable condition -- elastic, restless, and materially expressive. Phone recordings are diffused through empty parking lots; damaged handheld devices imprint unique distortions onto signals; binaural microphones register the incidental rhythms and spatial responses of rooms. These methods do not simply document the music -- they participate in its formation, producing a layered audiographic surface in which perspective and texture remain in constant negotiation. Despite this fundamental instability, a charged emotional atmosphere emerges: a kind of uneasy intimacy, at once intrusive and disarmingly human. It's a violent sort of pathos that, to my ear, finds its most apt comparison in the harrowing sonics of Jason Crumer's 2008 masterwork Ottoman Black. This is music that maintains a proximity to the abyss, yet is tempered by a softness that draws the listener closer to something fascinating, volatile, and alive.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
SPENCE, ALEXANDRA	Your Whistle Tells Of Landscape	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 141LP
$28.50 IN STOCK Developed over three years across residencies, tours, and periods of deep listening, Your Whistle Tells of Landscape finds Australian sound artist Alexandra Spence continuing her investigations into the perceptual entanglements of sound, place, memory, and imagination. Like much of the artist's work, it unfolds at the liminal edge between the real and the imagined -- between what is heard and what is remembered. Composed from a constellation of materials gathered across sites and seasons -- snowscapes recorded in Vancouver, insect choruses from a Sydney backyard, ceramic fragments unearthed while mudlarking with tinysound -- it renders an intimate cartography of experience: one shaped equally by ecological resonance and internal drift. Each piece traces a kind of imaginary geography, where sonic ephemera become proxies for topography, weather, or myth. The album is informed by time spent at EMS (Stockholm) and MESS (Melbourne), where Spence deepened her engagement with microtonality and tuned feedback systems, and by dialogues with sympathetic artists such as Tashi Wada and Patrick Farmer. Sound materials were sourced from Serge Modular systems, a custom lyre built by Tim Wall, amplified objects, handmade electronics, and Spence's own field recordings captured within rockpools, beneath sand, and among a flock of sheep in the French Pyrenees. On "Magenta," a collaboration with Delphine Dora, the domestic and mythic intertwine, as layers of voice, environmental recordings, and Halldorophone feedback drift in and out of one another like overlapping weather systems. Despite its diverse material palette, the album resists spectacle or accumulation. Instead, it moves with a quiet sense of continuity and a rich interiority -- less a sequence of compositions than a set of situated attunements. Across its duration, sounds seem to murmur, glint, or hover right at the edge of presence, invoking a listening practice that is as much about orientation as it is about reception. These are pieces not simply about place, but of place -- etched with the grains of time, vibration, and breath.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ANKERSMIT, THOMAS	The Dip	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 140LP
$28.50 IN STOCK Students of Decay presents The Dip, a new full-length recording by Berlin-based artist and composer Thomas Ankersmit, marking his debut with the label and sixth album to date. Comprised of two expansive, sidelong pieces composed entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer, it signals a subtle yet significant shift in Ankersmit's trajectory, imbuing the hyper-physical, psychoacoustic intensities of his live performances with introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements. Primarily known for a site-responsive approach to sound, often realized in the moment of performance, Ankersmit's turn toward the studio in the last few years has opened up a new dimension within his practice. It is in this quiet rupture that The Dip emerged, a study in internality and suspended states, rich with cinematic undercurrents and ghostly spatial suggestion. Here, electricity itself feels transfigured -- becoming supple, even organic -- within an environment shaped entirely by analog signals. Over the past two decades, Ankersmit has established himself as one of the foremost practitioners of the Serge, the notoriously idiosyncratic and expressive instrument that has remained central to his work. On The Dip, he harnesses its potential not for brute force or disorientation, but for spaciousness, resonance, and lyrical abstraction. Without resorting to additional processing or effects, he draws out tones that feel simultaneously raw and refined, articulated and blurred -- intricate structures that seem to breathe and evolve of their own volition. The result is a kind of auditory hallucination, a "cinema for the ears," wherein impressions, emotional arcs, and imagined topographies unfold. Each side of The Dip plays like a single gesture unfolding in time -- a spatial narrative constructed through vibration, density, and the movement of air. The Dip follows acclaimed works on PAN, Touch, and Shelter Press, and reaffirms Thomas Ankersmit's position as one of the most focused and probing voices in contemporary experimental music. Quietly radical and meticulously constructed, it is less a departure than a deepening -- a descent into a more private sonic world, where the boundaries between perception, memory, and pure signal dissolve.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
FLUTTER RIDDER	Flutter Ridder	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 138LP
$28.50 IN STOCK Flutter Ridder is the duo of Norwegian multidisciplinary artists Espen Friberg and Jenny Berger Myhre, both of whom play important roles in Oslo's contemporary art and music underground. The pair first collaborated during the production of Friberg's debut solo record, Sun Soon (Hubro, 2022), quickly recognizing in one another a creative kinship rooted in a playful, intentionally naive approach towards making art. In November of 2023, the pair decamped to the coastal town of Hvisten in southeastern Norway to record what would become this debut, self-titled album in an ancient wooden church. Drawing from a palette of Friberg's idiosyncratic Serge modular system and the church's resident pipe organ and intoxicating acoustic reverb, they began recording and sculpting music informed by the notion that air and electricity share a common flow, a continuous current that can be directed through valves and potentiometers. The pair came to think of the Serge and pipe organ as sibling instruments, the former yielding characteristically unpredictable and complex timbres that complement the wooly, reedy drones and strange, microtonal overtones of the latter. At once sublime, liturgical, and whimsical, Flutter Ridder offers its listener a series of moving, cinematic natural landscapes, affirming the sensibilities of its makers and the indelible influence of the environment in which it was produced.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
CONCEPT HORSE, THE	Public Detail	Cassette	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 136CS
$12.50 LOW STOCK LEVEL Operating since the late 2010s, Vienna-based sound artist the concept horse has quietly amassed a distinctive and diverse discography, drawing inspiration from the rich traditions of musique concrète, noise, plunderphonics, microsound, and free improvisation. Public Detail follows releases on labels such as FALT and czaszka [rec.], as well as the artist's own eë editions, and neatly encapsulates the polyglottic breadth of the project. Patinaed piano loops and wistful ambience give way to chance percussion environments, beat research, and treated location recordings, resulting in a suite of evasive and diffuse music informed by dialectics such as repetition/unrepeatability and formal rigor/chaos. "A door space to further diagrams, white on blue, a window." Recorded and arranged in Vienna, Austria between 2021-2023. 35mm photograph taken by the concept horse. Risograph print and cover design by Marie Vermont. Mastered by Angelo Harmsworth.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
DAVIS, JOHN	Landlines	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 137LP
$28.00 IN STOCK John Davis is a sound artist and filmmaker based in the Bay Area. Active since the mid-aughts, he has published recordings on labels such as Root Strata and Digitalis, as well as on his own Bimodal Press imprint. Landlines sees a return to the SOD catalog for Davis, following a full-length release in 2013, and may be seen as somewhat of a spiritual successor to that album. In all of Davis' work, there is a specific pastoral sensibility that feels firmly rooted in the forests and coasts of Northern California, moving with the delicate and erratic cadence of dust motes rendered visible in bright sunlight. Opening track "Verichrome" articulates the soundscape wonderfully, stitching together Music Mouse-esque formant synthesis and meditative vocal sampling with an exquisite minimalist suite for prepared piano. Of these recordings, Davis himself writes, "In a general sense the conceit here is nostalgia, a desire to reflect on the importance of connection -- to ourselves and to the world around us. The title is, of course, a euphemism for the telephone, but I am also considering landscape, horizons, and infrastructure, as well as the invisible lines that connect us, the threads that bind us, and the communities that form us."

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
ROSSO POLARE	Campo Amaro	Cassette	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 135CS
$12.50 NOT IN STOCK Campo Amaro is the fourth album by Rosso Polare, the Milan-based duo of Cesare Lopopolo and Anna Vezzosi. These compositions were inspired by observing the waterways that surround the fields of various Italian regions, the so-called ditches (fossi), bodies of water that are often polluted, but may also be full of flora and wildlife, lined with bitter and edible herbs. Throughout this land, small and distant chants emerge, twisted traditional songs of resistance or made-up tunes of revolution. There are small local legends that survive thanks to anonymous monuments placed in indiscreet contexts, rescued here through the vivid storytelling of Lopopolo and Vezzosi. Written and performed by Cesare Lopopolo and Anna Vezzosi. Recorded between Milan and Brescia, 2022-2023. Mixed and produced by Cesare Lopopolo. Mastered by Angelo Harmsworth. Album art by Anna Vezzosi. Design by Josh Mason.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
MASON, JOSH	An Anxious Host	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 134LP
$28.00 IN STOCK Since the early 2010s, Josh Mason has slowly amassed an enchanting discography, publishing recordings on labels such as Florabelle, Dauw, Longform Editions, and his retired Sunshine Ltd. imprint. Whether focusing on electric guitar or modular synthesizer, Mason approaches his music with intentionality, tenderness, and a keen ear for detail, resulting in an exceptional and enduring oeuvre. His workmanlike approach to craft and monomaniacal interest in circuit design culminated in 2021's Utility Music, a daunting book/CD project that documents and unpacks a yearlong exploration of a Doepfer A-100 Eurorack system. The irony of such a project is that it might lead listeners to believe that academic technique and synthesis technology are the animating principles of his practice, but the reality is that this is only part of the story. Listening to Mason's music one gets the sense that, like a good novelist, he truly cares about his characters, which take the forms of the textures and timbres of archaic wavetable oscillators, idiosyncratic filters, pulverized samples, and exotic noise sources. An Anxious Host feels like a pivotal release in Mason's catalog. It's his first vinyl outing since 2019's astounding Coquina Dose, and it may be the most succinct and potent album he's made. The track titles function like stage directions in a play, intimating a hazy, filmic narrative populated by schemers, dreamers, and lost souls. As ever with Mason's work, place is paramount, and this record is thoroughly shot through with the humidity, warmth, and "end of the line"-ness of the state of Florida. Seasick swells and sunken melodies; swampy, sputtering loops; sonic flotsam pooling together and flowing out, beckoning the listener to come have a soak. Edition of 300; includes download code.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
SCHAFER, THEODORE CALE	Trust	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 133LP
$28.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL The second album in a planned trilogy for Students of Decay, Theodore Cale Schafer's Trust follows 2019's Patience, building upon its motifs and compositional strategies to arrive at a potent document of artistic and personal growth. Recorded between 2020 and 2022, a period in which Schafer relocated to New York City, these arrangements feel like they bear the mark of a change in scale, not abandoning the private, diaristic sensibility of his earlier work so much as imbuing it with a charged atmosphere of vivid, slow-blooming intensity. These songs find the artist tightrope-walking between drama and austerity, narrative and abstraction. Such is the case on both "Luck," in which a captivating wash of baroque strings slowly recedes into a bed of inky, flickering ambience, and "Best Friend," wherein snatches of conversation are halted by entrancing piano motifs and hovering drones. This is an album that develops aspects of Schafer's previous output -- the patiently meted out, barely-there piano melodies, the unexpected resonance of off-the-cuff location recordings -- working them like raw materials into robust, lyrical compositions. At times almost drifting into the romantic realm of the orchestral, Trust is the most generous and expansive offering we've heard from Schafer in his young career. Includes download code; edition of 300. Theodore Cale Schafer (b. 1994) is a musician based in New York City. Informed by his occupation as an audio engineer, his work combines digitally sourced audio and manipulated self-recordings to create music that is equally influenced by Playstation OSTs, modern classical composition, confessional narrative, and spoken word. Recently, he has collaborated with Natalia Panzer, Angelo Harmsworth, claire rousay, Sydney Spann, and picnic, participated in the Neo-Pastiche: Changes in American Music Festival at the Black Mountain College Museum, and curated the "Casualism" mix series with Retreat Radio in Malmö, Sweden.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
AHTI, NIKO-MATTI	Kaivajaiset	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 132LP
$28.00 IN STOCK Students of Decay presents Kaivajaiset by Finnish composer Niko-Matti Ahti. Best known for his work alongside his partner Marja as Ahti & Ahti, as well as his participation in Kemialliset Ystävät, Niko-Matti has been an active participant in the Finnish underground since the late 1990s. Kaivajaiset is his first solo recording and was originally conceived of as an installation. Part hörspiel, part musique concrète, it is a piece of music that draws comparisons to the work of pioneering avant-garde composers such as Henning Christiansen, Annea Lockwood, Luc Ferrari, and Pierre Mariétan. Ahti weaves vivid foley and domestic recordings together with oration and classical instrumentation (violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute) to arrive at an expansive, narrative, and at times thrilling composition. Kaivajaiset was exhibited in two Finnish galleries: B-Galleria in Turku (2019) and 3H+K in Pori (2020). The installation drew inspiration from The Diggers' 1649 pamphlet and Michel Foucault's extension of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of genealogy, and consisted of sounds, opinion pieces, a print copy of the pamphlet, and four cardboard collages. This record is a summary of the sounds of the installation. Includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
AARNI, OLLI	Koko Maailma	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 131LP
$24.00 IN STOCK Since the late aughts, Helsinki-based multi-instrumentalist, linguist, and skateboarder Olli Aarni has released a steady stream of diverse and remarkably consistent recordings via labels such as Mappa, Longform Editions, Cotton Goods, Laaps, and Superpang. Koko Maailma constitutes a major new work in his discography, finding a fertile middle ground between what might be understood as his two primary compositional modes: organic/chaotic/aleatoric music and rule-based, longform works of minimalism. The source material for these compositions was recorded exclusively using the Serge system at EMS Stockholm, but the timbres that Aarni arrives at do not recall archetypal Serge music as most know it. Meticulous editing and processing of the material with an array of digital tools has resulted in music that preserves the erratic and cybernetic character of the Serge system but sounds totally unique unto itself. The first piece, "Ylhäällä," has the sonic character of fireflies at dusk or ants in the dirt -- mercurial, hypnotic, flittering, and scattering tones presented in the spirit of the best environmental music. "Alhaalla" functions almost like a zoomed-out impression of what precedes it, with just intonation tuning applied to sine wave generators to create grid-like, harmonically rich, and surprisingly emotive drone music. Micro and macro -- two pieces of music, two perspectives of a world. Includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
HARMSWORTH, ANGELO	Singe	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 129LP
$24.00 IN STOCK Singe is the new record by Angelo Harmsworth, a musician who hails from the American Southwest and is operating now out of Berlin. Harmsworth's work deals resolutely in extremes, but this music is not concerned with presenting binary or dichotomous relationships so much as it is with reconciling disparate sensibilities and sounds. Layers of meticulously edited and sculpted tones swirl around one another, creating kaleidoscopic patterns and hallucinated choral motifs that seem to thrive on amplitude or the position of the listener's head. There is a visceral physicality to this music that aligns it with some of the core tenets of harsh noise, even while its tonal and timbral choices recall those of ambient music. This record follows excellent releases on enmossed/Psychic Liberation, Angoisse, Opal Tapes, Vaknar, and Harmsworth's own Lime Lodge imprint and may be the high-water mark of his published output thus far. There is drama and implied narrative in these seven compositions that seethes and hums as if reveling in a sort of violent gracefulness. Includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
FLANGER MAGAZINE	After the Bend	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 128LP
$24.00 IN STOCK After the Bend is the second album from Louisville based Flanger Magazine, and the follow up to FM's 2018 debut, Breslin. Whereas Breslin was the solo creation of Christopher Bush, After the Bend is an ensemble affair. An ecosystem, a perfect mutualism bodies forth -- of strings, outdoor recordings, electronics, reeds, and percussion -- featuring new FM players Anna Krippenstapel (Frekons (Freakwater + Mekons), The Other Years), Jim Marlowe (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Tropical Trash, Sapat), Eric Lanham and Benjamin Zoeller (both from Caboladies). The various combos perform with both a distinguished efficacy and unhurried Sunday drift -- charged and beautiful, pulsating and pleasing. The production is subtle and tasteful. Mutating past the old saws of bounded individualism, a strange form of tentacular life accrues, cyborgian-fungral-tangles of the more-than-human variety. Robert Beatty's cover art of otherworldly and interconnected river-scape gradients, coupled with song titles like "Reservoir", "Falls Fountain Removed", and "Sympathies for the River", cue and clue the listener toward a river as a singular multitude analog for the album. Interstitial gaps, clearings and openings give rise and merge into an accumulated flow from the tributaries of spirited improvisational performance, palimpsestic song cycles, and high-fidelity studio production. The composite sound-image of After the Bend refuses to put both oars down into any one of the eddies of the folk, sound, chamber, electronic, or jazz idioms, and instead glides along the currents found within the slipstreams between. Gathering samples, a River Doctor Limnologist inspecting the properties of After the Bend might note the specter of Leroy Jenkin's free-violin heat-light deep in the water's thermal stratification. Or mortgage the late-maestro's time with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to pay down the growing river heat budget. Or take one's dirty buckets to the banks of the 19th laundromat where Walt Dickerson plays his vibraphone parts from Divine Gemini with dowsing rods. Or excavate the bedrock in the drainage basin, noting skeletal remains of a Shostakovich string quartet attempting to tune up a Kentucky Fiddle's subsequent influence on the chemical composition of the water. Or consult the historical revisionist reenactment troupe's episode of Fishing with John (Fahey) in which Codona, The Sea Ensemble, and Nuno Canavarro guest host as their fleet of paddle boats churn river water into a regal lager, and all the fish get drunk in their quest for the leaner enamel Hosianna Mantra GPS coordinates of the Fattened Herb. Includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
AHTI, MARJA	Still Lives	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 127LP
$21.50 IN STOCK Still Lives is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surprising compositions. In the artist's words, "These pieces could be conceived of as vanitas paintings of a kind -- selections of mundane or archetypal objects, sounds that have their own distinct qualities, but exist only by virtue of being temporary events. From another angle, one could think of them as shrines -- objects assembled and set in a particular relationship to each other, charging each other in their given constellations." Includes download code; edition of 300. Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a musician and composer based in Turku, Finland. Originally from Sweden, Ahti has been a part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years in different constellations. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner and as a member of the Himera artist/organizer collective.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
SOFT TISSUE	hi leaves	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 126LP
$10.00 IN STOCK hi leaves is the new full-length record from soft tissue, the duo of Glasgow-based artists Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins. Following their self-titled debut for Penultimate Press in 2019, this collection examines microsound by way of extended amplification technique, bone conduction, domestic recordings, and digital feedback. Tracks like "plant pot" and "kettle" appear to disclose their source material, presenting wonderfully tactile environments of highly articulate sound. Wennborg and Weins prove themselves to be masterful arrangers of discrete, organic material, weaving together knotty and immersive compositions from these sharp, prickly sounds. Ultimately, soft tissue inhabits an intoxicating sound world somewhere in between the patient abstractions of composerly EAI music, the haptic indulgences of ASMR, and the diffuse digital pastorals of the '90s a-musik/Cologne scene. 45rpm; includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
GUTHRIE, ANNE	Gyropedie	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 125LP
$10.00 IN STOCK Gyropedie, Anne Guthrie's third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into her hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie's own words, "Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching snow, frozen playgrounds, broken synths -- I spent a year decoupaging over this, but of course it's still there. A second moon appears occasionally in the daytime, and there are frequent, murky transmissions. California has something alien about it I'm still trying to grasp. Primarily vintage, unabashed, corny, I find myself becoming an impressionist." Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player. She studied music composition and English at the University of Iowa and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph.D in 2014. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics. Includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
SCOTT, TOM JAMES	Mine is the Heron	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 124LP
$10.00 IN STOCK Mine is the Heron is the new Tom James Scott record, the first document of his solo work since 2017. Over the past decade, the UK-based composer has released a diverse body of recordings via labels such as Bo'Weavil, Carnivals, Where To Now?, and his own impeccably curated Skire imprint. This album finds Scott in half-remembered, sanguine moods, some of which are likely to remind listeners of his collaborative work with Andrew Chalk. Fragile acoustic piano runs are meted out with painterly finger strokes, buoyed by subtle, idiosyncratic FM sound design, chimes, and guitar. Culled from recordings composed and put to tape over the past several years, the collection has the feel of a poet's selected works, or perhaps more appropriately, a compendium of letters -- exquisite vignettes that feel simultaneously private and important to disseminate into world. The hermetic nature of this quietly stunning music is evocative of abandoned shingle beaches and misty marshes, and of the Virginia Woolf novel from which the album takes its title: "Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields -- all are mine." Recorded by Tom James Scott on Walney Island, 2016-2019. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
COLE, CRYS	Beside Myself	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 123LP
$19.50 NOT IN STOCK "Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist crys cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (BT 017LP, 2015), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019) Includes download code; edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
SCHAFER, THEODORE CALE	Patience	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 122LP
$18.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL Patience is the debut full-length album by Sante Fe-based artist Theodore Cale Schafer. Alternately murky and narcoleptic and bristling with grit and light, this collection of eight pieces is a delicate play of contrasts. Impressionistic settings unfurl with an unhurried gait, opening with the dream-like disorientation of "Gold Chain" in which a degraded location recording gives way to a soft web of treated piano motifs. Schafer's compositions are sumptuous yet unfussy, recalling perhaps the concise, vignette-oriented tape works of Andrew Chalk, which seem to prioritize spontaneity and ephemerality over preciousness and decorum. This approach yields substantive results, as on "It's Late", which marries a dolorous, clanging guitar sketch to the sound of change jostling in the pocket of a walker and the laughter of friends or passersby. This is diaristic music -- rough-hewn, confessional, and teeming with possibility. Theodore Cale Schafer has released on Amethyst Sunset and Summer Isle. Artwork by Andrea Bjurström. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Includes download code; First edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
RATTI, NICOLA	Continental	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 121LP
$10.00 IN STOCK Continental is the new full-length solo record by Milan-based multi-instrumentalist Nicola Ratti, following recent releases on Where to Now? and Room40. Conceived of by Ratti as a "series of big rooms or places to get lost in, full of small details and characterized each by a single flavor or perfume," it is a surprising and vibrant collection of music. Working with a palette of spare, expertly deployed percussive synthesis techniques, Ratti's work here is both labyrinthine and concise. These eight tracks are able to evoke spaces real and imagined with startling efficiency and clarity. Sprawling old world libraries, cliff caves inhabited by dripping water and rock doves, an automaton nearly slipping its axis but recovering just in time and finding a new sense of purpose in the process. Ratti forms the duo Bellows with Giuseppe Ielasi. "Cuarto" features Dale Cornish. Includes download code; first edition of 300.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
BLUE CHEMISE	Daughters Of Time	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 120LP
$10.00 IN STOCK 2022 restock. Blue Chemise documents the hermetic sound world of Australia's Mark Gomes. Daughters Of Time follows 2017's brilliant full-length Influence On Dusk, released in micro-edition on Gomes's own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. These pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor's evocative "airs", conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their welcome. Regarding their genesis, Gomes points to a quote from Australian artist Robert Hunter: "It's like I'm external to them. They develop their own assertion and character; their becoming finished is a thing they decide themselves. It's unexplainable."

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
GUTHRIE, ANNE	Brass Orchids	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 119LP
$10.00 IN STOCK Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears -- maybe paracusia? Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie's second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist's grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor... An unsettling and strangely beautiful album -- akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting. Includes download code; Edition of 300. Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player living in Brooklyn, New York. She studied Music Composition and English at the University of Iowa and Architectural Acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph.D in 2014. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics.

Artist	Title	Format	Label	Catalog #
CAROLINE NO	No Language	LP	STUDENTS OF DECAY	SOD 116LP
$10.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL Recorded in early 2015 and originally released as a micro edition cassette on World News Records, No Language is the debut collection of songs by Melbourne's Caroline No. The group's unique, beguiling sound sits somewhere between archetypal Dunedin pop and languorous, textural improvisation. No Language was spontaneously recorded with one microphone and the serendipity of the session proves tactile in the listening experience. Heavily reverbed laughter, coughing, fits, and starts with various processing equipment contribute wonderfully to the ephemeral nature of the music. On "Up To Downtown", vocalist Caroline Kennedy implores the band to "just try to stay in time" before lurching into what, against all odds, turns out to be a remarkably anthemic earworm of a pop song. The closer, "Roomer", incorporates granular processing (perhaps a pedal someone forgot they'd brought to the session) to endearing and startling effect. Ultimately, No Language is a marvelous balancing act of a record, drawing from pop, free improv, and psychedelia in equal parts to arrive at something timeless. Students of Decay is a record label based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, run by Alex Cobb. Active since 2005, the label has published a wide range of ambient, drone, micro-sound, and electronic recordings, on a variety of formats. Includes download code; Edition of 300.

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