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Weather sky
That said, "Weather Sky" is another thing altogether. Bruno Meillier invited Toshi to play a duo concert in St Etienne with AMM's no-concessions table guitar master Keith Rowe, and took them into the studio the day after to record for Erstwhile. Sensitivity to pitch is less important here (Rowe, remember, hasn't tuned his guitar since the early 1960s): the album's three tracks are real slow-burners. Rowe can be agile and aggressive when he wants to, but his preferred working method is to lay dow…
Aso
Ami Yoshida and Christof Kurzmann are both well-respected artists within the international community, each performing in a wide range of contexts from abstract to pure pop. Both are best known for their long-running duos, Yoshida for Cosmos (with Sachiko M) and Kurzmann for schnee (with Burkhard Stangl). This project finds them in far less comfortable territory, and a s o is the outcome of two years of hard work.Ami Yoshida strives to create a pure sound, abstracting her voice until it becomes a…
Right after
Right After is a remarkably subtle album of duo electronics by two relatively young Italians with roots in avant-garde improvisation. While Giuseppe Ielasi began his career as a guitarist and Domenico Sciajno was an improvising bassist of note, both gradually moved into the area of pure electronics and sound manipulation. A fine balance of pristine, crystalline sounds and earthy scrabbling noises is shown from the first track, ²at a greater distance² which offsets pinging, high pitched tones tha…
Imaoto
Since the early nineties, Vienna-based Radu Malfatti has been investigating the edges of ultraminimalism in both his composed and improvised work. On Imaoto, he is joined by empathetic explorer Klaus Filip to create an instant classic. Malfatti and Filip have performed a handful of duo concerts over the years, with the first in 2003. In 2006, they played a remarkable set in Maria Chavez's Houndstooth store in NYC, a very memorable show for the couple of dozen listeners in attendance as well as f…
Soba To Bara
Free improvisation has rarely seen significant new movements as influential as the small group of Tokyo musicians once labeled as "onkyo", who have now been a primary driving force in contemporary improvisation for a full decade. Over that decade, these musicians have been responsible for some of the strongest and most radical work on Erstwhile, and Soba To Bara sits firmly in that lineage.Ami Yoshida strives to create a pure sound, abstracting her voice until it becomes almost completely unreco…
Motubachii
'Throughout their careers, both Annette krebs and taku unami have explored the areas between composition and improvisation, innovation and repetition, music and ambient sound. On motubachii, their distinctive styles come together to form a whole that is monolithic yet widely varied, simple yet impossible to fully grasp. Annette krebs studied music and concert guitar in Frankfurt-Main, and has lived in Berlin since 1993. She has worked intensively in the crossover area between improvisation and c…
Twice
** Six-panel digipak, photos by Yan Jun/Zhu Wenbo, design by Yuko Zama ** Erstwhile Records presents Twice by Yan Jun and Zhu Wenbo. Yan Jun: recorded in Beijing, Feb 2021. Zhu Wenbo: recorded in Qingdao and Beijing, Sept 2020 - Feb 2021. Photos/image scans by Yan Jun/Zhu Wenbo. Design by Yuko Zama. Produced by Jon Abbey.
Touching
"Erstaeu 003 is, at once, the most "traditional" of the first three releases and, perhaps because of that, the most difficult to approach, at least for this listener. My previous experience with Graham Stephenson's work (I think this is my first exposure to Aaron Zarzutzki) has often followed the pattern of initial opaqueness followed by gradual transparency, eventually resulting in enjoyment and appreciation. I say "traditional" a bit tongue in cheek, although the set here, trumpet and electron…
Teatro Assente
A minimal theater in sound from Taku Unami and Takahiro Kawaguchi and starring Yoko Chosakabe and Kumio Kurachi, recording at the Ueno Okura Theater Older Building. "Teatro Assente is endearing and provoking, but most of all, endlessly pleasing." Tinymixtapes
Wovenland 2
The first words of Toshiya Tsunoda and Taku Unami’s liner notes to the double CD under consideration here are, “Wovenland became a band.” It should be noted that Wovenland was the name of an earlier album by Tsunoda and Unami, the digipak’s spine still credits this recording to the two individuals. And while it is within Unami’s skill set to pick up a guitar and play a song, nothing like that happens on Wovenland 2. The notes continue: “Our band activities are mainly editing in a studio. Our goa…
Wovenland
Serie of recordings made by Toshiya Tsunoda & Taku Unami in different locations and then processed through different playback speed, noise gate or parallel editing.For 15 years, the Yokohama based artist Toshiya Tsunoda has been releasing remarkable acoustic works into a world that he seems to hear like no one else. His CDs are the most idiosyncratic and rigorous to be found among the many field recording releases of recent years, though his work is just as easy to place in the sound art frame..…
Parazoan Mapping
With fifteen untitled vignettes and varying source material, Parazoan Mapping often feels like an aural scrapbook. And when looking through any scrapbook, the different photos and pieces of ephemera always point to something bigger: a sort of unraveling of the people contained within. The pictures of your family’s vacation from several years ago may not explicitly show it but you very well understand how then compares to now that feeling of joy when you conquered your first wave after hours…
Tenebre
The soundtrack to Dario Argento’s 1982 giallo was written and performed by Claudio Simonetti, Fabio Pignatelli, and Massimo Morante – three musicians from Goblin’s initial lineup who were responsible for some of that band’s most memorable work. But by this point, only one of the three was still in the band; Fabio Pignatelli. In the years before Tenebrae, Goblin had changed hands and the band of old was no more.At the request of Argento, these three musicians got back together to give it one more…
Metti, Una Sera A Cena
Finally, justice has been done and maestro Ennio Morricone has managed to bring home the coveted Oscar statuette. Multi-awarded and acclaimed by a vast public, the Roman composer had come close five times, but had never been on stage to receive the award for an extraordinary career.Among his unforgettable compositions was Metti una sera a cena with which he won his first Nastro d'Argento in 1970. The film, based on a play (1967) by the same director G. Patroni Griffi, tells the story of a rich b…
Time drops
This mini-CD follows on from Akemi Ishijima's previous electroacoustic composition on Variations 2 -- A London Compilation. It includes one new piece and a reissue of "Ab Ovo," previously released on 5 Composers Second Coming on Fylkingen. The two pieces explore a broad range of traditional electronic techniques, both subtle and powerful. "Time Drops" (2000) -- a single stroke of a bell, in its decay, sometimes evokes a sense of infinity in our mind. "Time Drops" is an attempt to express such id…
Fetus
Franco Battiato moved into the 1970s on the crest of the progressive rock wave. This 1972 impossibly strange record inhabits that nether world of pop music, electronics, politics and experimental rock. Fetus is an album beyond all definition. It's a masterpiece of daring and wild risks that work every single time. Battiato takes us through eight uniquely super-detailed songs that tug at the heart strings as no other experimental record ever could."Fetus is an album beyond all definition. It's a …
Pollution
Franco Battiato's wonderfully lively 1973 concept album Pollution is an audaciously psychedelic album drawn from the space rock dimension with good portions of electronics and keyboard layers. Drawing heavily on the VCS3 synthesizer, Battiato and company (besides himself, three backing band members play synth as well) give Pollution an extreme electronic edge. With comparisons to Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, and Pink Floyd, Pollution was declared 'genius' by Frank Zappa.
Prima del terzo
One of my favourite walk is in the harbour of my hometown, because of the sound brought by the wind. For long time I have day-dreamt about including that sound in my own music. I got to the point reading the poem Prologo al buio by Erri De Luca (from Opera sull’Acqua e altre poesie, Einaudi 2002). In the poem there is a Hebraic quote from Genesis, before the third verse (hence the title of my composition, the Italian for “before the third”): “vrúah Elohím merahèfet al penè hammàim”, that means, …
NEY
*175 copies limited edition* NEY, a self-titled debut, is an unbridled exploration of a band’s beginning, a tapestry of intimate field recordings, deconstructed fragments and spontaneous encounters, pieced together in two long-form recordings. During the isolated years of the pandemic, Lisa Fabian, aka Mondlane on ‘The Blue Hour’, traced thoughts, sung melodies and fleeting sentiments into an archive of extemporary field recordings and scattered written notes. In dealing with the loss of a loved…
Nati Infiniti
Following up on 2021’s Scuro Chiaro, Nati Infiniti is a 40-minute piece split into five movements, based on an immersive audio installation that Cortini originally created for the Sónar Lisboa festival in 2022 where it was presented across four floors of the Museu de Lisboa’s Moagem. Cortini later debuted the live performance at Berlin’s Atonal festival in 2023, reimagining the work as a unique, evolving dialogue. The record is mixed by Grammy nominated recording engineer, producer, and mixer Ma…