Reissues
Fluxus Anthology: A Collection Of Music And Sound Events
Restocked, reduced price. Song Cycle offers another remarkable addition to the canon of early sound art experimentalism, with this legendary collection of Fluxus audio works compiled by Italian conceptual artist and publisher Maurizio Nannucci. Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers who challenged accepted ideas about what art is. It characterised itself as a shared attitude rather than a movem…
The Entire Musical Work Of Marcel Duchamp
Another legendary album which was issued on LP by Multhipla label, "The Entire Musical Work of " Marcel Duchamp realized by Petr Kotik and S.E.M Ensemble. Work planned and composed in 1913, based on chance operation. Recorded 7 May, 1976. B2 is a track for player piano, recorded in Buffalo, New York on a Steinway player piano. In the turbulent years from 1912 to 1915, Marcel Duchamp worked with musical ideas. He composed two works of music and a conceptual piece -- a note suggesting a musical ha…
Two And Two
Restocked, reduced price. Legendary debut from sound artists Christina Kubisch and Fabrizio Plessi mixing sound and visual elements, a seminal LP record originally published on the hugely influential Multhipla, run by Gianni Sassi (also founder of Cramps Records) in conjunction with Fluxus collector and editor Gino Di Maggio. Two And Two was a live performance for two performers (Kubisch and Plessi), two video cameramen, a wall of monitors and uncommon objects and instruments. Throughout the per…
Ragas Of Morning & Night
At long last, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela reissue this seminal, hugely influential album on their Just Dream imprint, the legendary recording from 1968 India of Pandit Pran Nath titled 'Ragas Of Morning & Night'. The original studio session was produced in New Delhi, February 1968, by Jimi Hendrix associate Alan Douglas, it features recordings of "Raga Todi" and "Darbari", which showcase Pran Nath at his prime. Pran Nath's exquisite control between microscopically fine degrees of pitch ca…
Rags/The Golddiggers
Consists of the whole of the LP previously issued as Re/arc and most of "The Golddiggers". Featuring Lindsay Cooper, Sally Potter, Phil Minton, Georgie Born, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Marilyn Mazur, Kate Westbrook, Collette Lafont, Eleanor Sloan, Lol Coxhill and Dave Holland. Explores the song form as so many of the early post Henry Cow records by ex alumni did. With a full book of texts and pictures (74+ minutes).
CMCD (Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic And Electronic Works 1970-1990)
This essential piece of history at last reissued, redesigned and repackaged. Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium. It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition of 1917; Georg Katzer's monumental 'Aide Memoire' ('7 nig…
Winter Songs
A reissue of the brilliant second album by Art Bears, a band/project featuring Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause, formed in 1978 after disputes over the musical direction within Henry Cow. 'Winter Songs', originally released in 1979, placed Art Bears in the forefront of the Rock In Opposition Movement. Art Bears' intense and brutal avant-garde approach on the album comes across as primordial expression, which is nailed down by Krause's violently charismatic voice. As a piece of music re…
The World As It Is Today
The third classic Art Bears record, and the most austere. Remastered and repackaged.
If you thought Henry Cow was a pretty political band to start with, you may be even more taken aback by the Art Bears, which was put together following Henry Cow's demise by former Cows Chris Cutler (percussion), Fred Frith (guitar, violin), and Dagmar Krause (voice). On The World as it is Today and its predecessor, Winter Songs, the Art Bears move away from the long-form art rock of Henry Cow and get much, much…
Deceit
CD edition. Another essential reissue, This Heat’s classic Deceit completes an official trilogy of reissues from their seminal and hugely influential run of late ‘70s/early ‘80s recordings which set the template for so, so much avant-rock, noise and experimental music ever since. With their debut album and follow-up maxi single Health and Efficiency, This Heat sowed the seeds of post-punk, avant rock, noise rock and post-rock, placing the trio -- Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth …
This Heat
A landmark recording by one of most important British bands, full stop. This, their first release, tore up the book and laid new rules for band composition and performance. First, the music: without precedent, then, the musicians: all extraordinary, all uncompromisingly radical, then the way it was all put together: endlessly surprising, hammeringly intense, and the sound: hard, radical, crafted, rich, with complete control of the frequency range. Beautifully recorded, radically mixed, th…
Collaborations
Collects together the re-mastered Duck and Cover (Tom Cora, Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Heiner Goebbels, Alfred (23) Harth, Dagmar Krauze, Gerorge Lewis) and Cassix (Chris Cutler, Franco Fabbri, Umberto Fiori, Heiner Goebbels, Pino Martini) recordings, and the Cassiber/Otomo Yoshidide collaboration on one CD, the newly assembled live and out-take The Way it Was, plus a DVD of two concerts, one from the Frankfurt Jazz festival, the other from Brasil, with short documentary, made in the GDR, o…
Beauty. And The Beast
Beauty and the Beast, the second LP by Cassiber, was released in 1984 simultaneously on the British label Recommended and the German Riskant with a small difference in contents -- the ReR Megacorp CD reissue includes all tracks from both LP versions. This album represents a giant leap from the group's 1982 debut, Man or Monkey. Yet, the same technique was used: No songs were written in advance. Drummer Chris Cutler had written lyrics to be used when considered suitable by singer Christoph A…
Perfect World
Cassiber's second album moves one step ahead in the refinement of the group's music. From Man or Monkey, the trio (Christoph Anders, Chris Cutler, and Heiner Goebbels; Alfred 23 Harth had bid farewell) retained clashes of noise, a taste for cheap synthesizers, and Anders' declamatory style. But this time the music is much more organized and arranged. Songs are short and focus on atmospheres and the alienating settings of Cutler's words. More political than before, they take their cue from t…
Man or Monkey
Man or Monkey was Cassiber's first album. It was released in 1982 on the German label Riskant as a set of two 45 rpm LPs -- a format that turned it into a pricy collector's item. For this first effort, Christoph Anders, Chris Cutler, Heiner Goebbels, and Alfred 23 Harth entered the studio with only a handful of the drummer's lyrics and a few melodic ideas. They improvised, letting structures and arrangements develop by themselves, so to speak, and singer Anders threw in a text when he fel…
A Face We All Know
'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.
The Way It Was
Cassiber (phonetically: 'a message smuggled out of prison') crashed like a locomotive into the Deutsche Neue Welle. Founded by Heiner Goebbels, Alfred Harth, Christoph Anders and Chris Cutler (his first major project after News From Babel), Cassiber managed to fuse materials and attitudes drawn from experimental rock, fringe jazz, punk, pop, plunderphonics, improvisation, close structure and musique concrete into an energetic and complex form of studio (and then concert) composition uniqu…
All's Well
After This Heat broke up in 1982, Charles Hayward formed Camberwell Now. The new group included Trefor Goronwy, from the short-lived four-piece version of This Heat, on bass and guitar; and Steven Rickard, who is heard on Sub Rosa's Myths 1 compilation, on tape manipulation and field recordings; Charles Bullen from This Heat, who subsequently left to study music in India, is heard as a guest on the first 12" single "Meridian."
The group, recording in This Heat's Cold Storage studio, onl…
So Far
Faust's second album moves closer to actual song structure than their debut, but it still remains experimental. Songs progress and evolve instead of abruptly stopping or cutting into other tracks. The opening song "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl" begins as a repetitive 4/4 beat played on toms and piano with the title sung over the top. But for seven minutes the song adds instruments, including a lush analog synth line, and ends in a memorable sax riff. Faust's lyrical side appears on t…
BBC Sessions +
The radio session was first broadcast 1/3/73, and is 20 minutes of pure Faustian hell. The Lurcher is a kind of electric period Miles Davis slouching drum rhythm, augmented by stabs of horn and electric guitar. Krautrock is a 12-minute post Velvet Underground riff, drone and noise-driven meditation, far superior to the version on the Virgin release Faust IV. The session ends with Do So, an outrageously corny slice of sixties pop. The remaining 30 minutes of the CD is prime Faust, culled f…
Faust
"The first 1971 Polydor (transparent) album and one of the great testaments to originality and innovation in the field. Two years in the making.
A breathtaking achievement that hasn't aged. Remastered, repackaged."