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Love letters via Echelon
Love letters via Echelon by Nerthus is a spectral descent into coded romanticism and surveillance. Electronic textures, cryptic samples, and cinematic atmospheres evoke the tension between intimacy and secrecy—a sonic correspondence unfolding in digital shadow and memory.
Grain of Light
*150 copies limited edition* Robin Storey’s journey through sound is inseparable from the evolution of post-industrial and experimental ambient music itself. As a founding member of the seminal collective Zoviet France, formed in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1979, Storey helped shape a new sonic vocabulary that blended ritual abstraction, primitive sampling, and immersive atmospheres. When Storey launched his solo project Rapoon in 1992, he distilled that experimental spirit into a more introspective …
Naldjorlak
Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue’s first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This album brings together two complete performances …
Dangerous Women: Early Works 1985-2005
Laetitia Sonami's Dangerous Women: Early Works 1985-2005 traces twenty years of fearless electronic innovation. From her studies with Eliane Radigue in France to mentorship under Robert Ashley and David Behrman at Mills College, this 2CD collection captures her evolution from analog experimentation to pioneering digital performance with her legendary "lady's glove" interface.
Breaking the Surface
Two of Annea Lockwood's dramatic works dealing with issues of spiritual wholeness. Duende (1997), about shamanic transformation, is written with and performed by Thomas Buckner. Lockwood selected sounds which reminded her of certain vocal transformations heard in recordings of shamanic ceremonies. In such singing, changes in the voice mirror and also help to bring about changes in the singer's mind and awareness. Within an improvisational framework, Buckner explores the possibility of change of …
Crone music
2019 repress on CD; 1990 release. Commissioned by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group from New York, for their interpretation of King Lear, Pauline Oliveros's Crone Music is a subtle and haunting electronic music endeavor. Interfacing an abundance of digital delay processors, reverb effects, and foot pedals to bend pitches from piercing to twisted, sonorous tones, with her one-of-a-kind expanded accordion, Oliveros produces rich, eerie textures. Personnel: Pauline Oliveros -solo accordio…
Chanteuse
Since the early 1970s, Jacqueline Humbert has collaborated as performer, visual artist, and designer with leading innovative artists, filmmakers, choreographers and composers worldwide. Her approach to vocal performance has influenced many composers, and the works in Chanteuse represent a new and exciting extension and reinterpretation of the "song" genre. Humbert on the release: "Chanteuse is a collection of new or previously unreleased songs, many of which were written for me by a broad range …
Upper Air Observation
2025 stock 1992 release. Flutist Barbara Held presents works by Alvin Lucier, Nils Vigeland, and Yasunao Tone and a composition of her own. Known for her collaborations with composers, Held has beautifully chosen and performed this wide-ranging sampling of contemporary musical styles. Vara features Joseph Kubera on piano.
Sound Paintings
Joan La Barbara begins Sound Paintings with a scream that pushes you into an unusual world of vocal sound. Her virtuoso singing style, developed over a 20-year period, can be heard on this disc, which combines some of her earlier works with more recent compositions. She takes her extended techniques, which include multiphonics, overtone singing, and glottal clicks, and orchestrates them in layered soundscape compositions using from 8 to 16 tracks of material.
Key
1995 release. Originally released in 1971. Key contains Meredith Monk's earliest compositions for voice. The songs that make up Key
were composed and performed in a three year period between 1967 and
1970, when Monk collected them into this 45-minute "invisible theater"
experience. Meredith Monk on the release: "In Key I wanted to
create a constantly shifting ambience. Each song dealt with a different
vocal character, landscape, technical concern or emotional quality. I
was trying for a vi…
A Sound Map of the Danube
Annea Lockwood has been recording rivers since 1970, "not to document them, but rather for the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches."' Lovely Music, Ltd. released Annea's seminal work A Sound Map of the Hudson River in 1989. Nineteen years later, we are proud to present A Sound Map of the Danube, her largest river recording project to date. Recorded over three years and five trips to Europe, A …
Foreign Experiences
This new release from Lovely Music features Robert Ashley's famous ensemble, the "band" who interpreted his work for 20 years, from 1992 through 2012. They included Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Marghreta Cordero, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and Amy X Neuburg. This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe. Foreign Experiences i…
Concrete
Concrete follows from Robert Ashley's preoccupation in two previous operas with the kind of speech that has not been explored in opera -- in Dust (LCD 1006CD), the speech of the homeless; in Celestial Excursions (LCD 1007CD), the speech of people living together in a home for old people. The three operas are not a "trilogy" in any sense, but they all come from this preoccupation with or fascination with special kinds of speech and special kinds of states of mind. "The characters I'm interested i…
Dust
Dust is an opera by Robert Ashley and Yukihiro Yoshihara (video direction) whose imaginary setting is a street corner anywhere in the world, where those who live on the fringes of society gather to talk, to each other and to themselves, about life-changing events, missed opportunities, memory, loss, and regret. Five "street people" recount the memories and experiences of one of their group, a man who has lost his legs in some unnamed war. As part of the experience of losing his legs, he began a …
Celestial Excursions
2005 release. Following the ground-breaking work, Dust (LCD 1006CD), godfather of experimental opera Robert Ashley returns with Celestial Excursions. Ashley's endeavor explores remarkably uncharted territory -- the kind of language that is common among "old" people who talk all the time or not at all, to anyone passing by or to themselves. The opera premiered at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, before coming to The Kitchen for its U.S. premiere in April 2003. Celestial Excursions delves into the wi…
Now Eleanor's Idea
2007 release. Now Eleanor's Idea was made possible by grants from The Rockefeller Foundation (1984 and 1993), the National Endowment for the Arts' Opera Musical Theater Program (1985) and InterArts Program (1992). Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. At the same time, each opera is an allegory, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), for an individual's self-realization within the co…
In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were...
**Deluxe slip-cased version features a 110-page book** Definitive CD reissue of this original Cramps label album from 1974, an early classic from Robert Ashley with music provided by Paul DeMarinis. This deluxe slip-cased version features a 110-page book, reproducing the original John Barton Wolgamot text along with fascinating liner notes explaining the whole project from Keith Waldrop and Robert Ashley. The CD features one long composition with Ashley reading a text by poet John Barton Wolgamo…
Perfect Lives
*2022 repress now in digipak, with new cover art* Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s." At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980s update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians - "R", the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest…
Music as a second language
2019 Repress. Speech melodies extracted from sources as various as language instruction recordings, hypnotists and televangelists are re-synthesized and applied to digital musical instruments, becoming eerily beautiful, "the singing of voices more ancient than language." Performed by Paul DeMarinis Hidden beneath speech's words and music's melodies I hear the singing of a voice more ancient than language. Brain's secret convulsions making muscles articulate, shaking the world with a song now lo…
Sign Of The Times
Centered around the mesmerizing voice of Robert Ashley, presented here is early version (released on LP by Lovely Music in 1979) of "The Park" and "The Backyard", a masterpiece in its simplicity of form and in the purity and intensity of its effect on the listener. These two pieces were later to become the opening and closing segments of the seven part opera for television, Perfect Lives. Personnel: Robert Ashley - voice; "Blue" Gene Tyranny - keyboards; Kris - tablas.