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Former WFMU dj, denizen of New York’s A Mica Bunker scene, former Krackhouse (not head) member, and ARP whiz – now living in The Netherlands, having studied elektronische musik in Utrecht. At last, his long overdue first cd. Matt says: “My music runs without stopping, and at a vertiginous speed. The architecture is simultaneity. …Not to perceive noise as music, but music as noise. This is a recording of a live performance: one member of a set of possible solutions. Vertebra is a computer program…

Mike Lazarev drops his first album on Past Inside the Present and it's one that reminds us why he has such a great reputation as being one of modern ambient and classical's finest composers. After exploring notions of time on previous records, for this one, he embraces the here and now and that lends itself to a record steeped in mindfulness and meditation. As such, Sacred Tonalities is a perfect accompaniment to introspective moments with textural soundscapes placing you at the centre of them. …

* Edition of 300. Gorgeous double-CD packaged inside a full-color, eight-panel, heavyweight digipak. Multifold full-color insert with photos and liner notes included. * Quoting Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly "The music is intense on every level, and there is a great underlying tension in these pieces, a mysterious force if you will." Recorded on the hottest days in the longest year, Bob Bellerue's "Radioactive Desire" is a work for free chamber music in feedback environments. Simple improvisationa…

Fred Frith has been heard in all possible contexts, from solo improviser to composer of orchestral music, but he remains at his best when trapped in a studio, alone or with a few musicians, building layered pieces. This process previously yielded stunning albums such as the delicate Middle of the Moment or the avant rocking Speechless. Accidental features Frith performing all instruments and voices, mostly guitars, violin, junk percussion, and random radio tuning. This music was commissioned by …

It was a long wait, but, 12 years after the fact, Fred Frith put together a live album of his group Keep the Dog, which had previously gone undocumented. Comprised of sax/flute player Jean Derome, guitarist René Lussier, keyboardist/harpist Zeena Parkins, sampling artist Bob Ostertag, and drummer Charles Hayward, Keep the Dog was formed by Frith in 1989 to perform a best-of repertoire of his career and remained his last rock group. By the time of this 1991 European tour, the unit had grown beyon…

Somewhere between Musique Concrete and a kind of abstract improvisational work, using extended techniques and electrification that disconnects sound from any recognisable source. A fascinating first record that sits between studio improvisation and extensive post production processing composition.

'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.

Based in Miami, this is a very interesting American band, ploughing its own furrow - whose accent is what they call 'prog' over there, but whose language is more complex by far. Pip Pyle adds a seasoned sophistication - in fact I think this is a great environment for him, he shines - but the whole ensemble is way past the foothills and keeping the oxygen packs handy. An excellent first CD, in a style that, features densely composed, layered, slightly post 5UU-school music - with some sung…

An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…

Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…

Thinking Plague, Hail, EC Nudes, 5UU's bassist and mixmaster with his second solo CD. Fast and furious country picking meets weird fragmentation and fast cut compositions. Guitars, Bass, Drums, Violin and odd unidentifiable noises all flawlessly performed, recorded and mixed into a single organism of musical strangeness. One of a kind.

The strangest so far. Mostly songs; a lot of acoustic instruments, a lot of unidentifiable sounds, a lot of fragments borne on a wind from somewhere else; bizarre picking interludes, humour (maybe) and snatches of incandescent playing. You can't pin this one down; it's full of twists and turns and a geometry that doesn't quite add up. Seemingly casual, there's not an ounce of fat on it, and the production - or anti-production - is, on repeated listening, quite extraordinary. Impressive.

The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob Drake undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable musical logic.

A set of twisty, forty-ideas-a-minute, niftily arranged, irredeemably eccentric, but strangely brilliant songs that skip blithely across genre borders - from Nashville through the Miskatonic by way of the Beach Boys… even the production values range across the history of recording, sometimes switching inside a single song; so it’s a high-information ride - but still engagingly listenable. So far so good: another crafted, dense, idiosyncratic studio album. Now comes the twist. Finished with his …

After Bob Drake's Drive-In, which, in terms of production was quite restrained and minimal, Ornaments sets off in the opposite direction, piling up great car-crashes of overlapping fragments in a production that makes rococo look like shaker minimalism. Playing only drums, guitars, bass, banjo, fiddle, organ, trumpet and piano Bob herds tamed cataclysms of musical debris into the shapes of coherent - if episodic – songs, en route skipping through half a century of recording history. As to method…

A collection of 52 very short songs on uncanny themes, illustrated in the exquisite 24p full-colour booklet with a set of 20 commissioned paintings by Ray O'Bannon. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob Drake plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable tempo synchrony, packing more ideas and material into 50 seconds than many manage on an ent…

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…

An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…

Continuing the definitive Fred Frith edition, this is the CD based on Fred’s music for the second film he made with Humbert and Penzel – following nomads – that features, along with Fred’s compositions and re-workings, a restless and gripping unfolding of atmospheric locations, tuareg and other musics, ethongraphic material and times captured. A collage or a soundwork rather than a straightforwardly musical composition, this is a serious and unfairly marginalised piece (because it falls between …

In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…

Paolo Angeli’s latest is an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar; and although it’s just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than 3 people. Great compositions, each like a short novel, beautifully recorded. Paolo’s unique music defies genre or category - at once accessible, experimental, tuneful, tactile, ambient, with a folk root and a rock inflection and a contemporary outlook. And his instrum…

Since the late 1970s Biota has ploughed its own furrow, producing a body of work that resembles nothing anyone else has done or is yet doing. Their compositions evolve in long, constantly shifting timbral blocks filled with fragments and echoes of quasi-familiar musical languages and sounds – or none - and use instrumental resources that span half a millennium and two thirds of the planet to create unique combinations of timbral colour in constant motion; this is a music in which everything is i…

A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…

Former Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith pays homage to three giants of contemporary classical music: John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. In his own inimitable fashion, Frith has tried to incorporate the chosen composer's own working methods into each of the three pieces that make up The Previous Evening. As he explains in the enclosed booklet regarding his John Cage homage: 'Fragments of text heard in Part 1 were taken at random from Cage's book Silence. Tape editing, the structure of the e…

Steve MacLeans 5-piece ensemble perform complex, composed polyrhythmic pieces interspersed with atmospheric improvisations for guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion and various objects: a journey through complex, composed polyrhythmic pieces interspersed with careful, atmospheric improvisations for guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion and various objects. There is a quiet rigour, almost a formality, about this CD that is rather unusual for the new century - the compositions are not over-elaborated an…

14 pieces originally written for dance and other practical situations, here reassigned and reconstructed for choreographer Amanda Miller and the Nederland Dans Theater. These are loop-based, textural, mood pieces, and invocations of spaces and landscapes, with some fine steel guitar playing. Mostly this is Fred multi-instrumenting, with pianist Daan Vanderwalle, percussionist Willie Wynant, the Arte Sax quartet and Lotte Anker, the Arditti Quartet, Kiku Day, occasional shakuhachi, and vio…

"The debut album by this two-woman, one-man trio presented contemporary British folk with the slightest of pop and folk-rock edges. The most prominent pop embroidery was found in the occasional sweeping, haunting string arrangements; there were also dabs of organ, harp, and percussion here and there. It was pretty but somewhat bland music on the border of late-'60s British folk-rock, the songs faintly echoing those of U.K. peers such as Donovan and Bert Jansch. Bread, Love and Dreams had a sligh…

The new Amphior album, Another Presence, is a longing echo of alienation.

*200 copies limited edition. 2022 stock* Line Spectrum is the new project by Oleg Puzan from Ukraine, who also released some excellent works on the Cryo Chamber label as Dronny Darko. Line Spectrum is a sound art project that is created to expand sonic boundaries through sound manipulations, often in a form of severe minimalism using a vast palette of microscopic sounds forming an immersive auditory monsoon. Slowly evolving textures mixed with field recordings and synthesized particles suits as …

*200 copies limited edition* Five years have passed since Glacial Movements published the wonderful "Wandering Eye" album by the duo Aria Rostami and Daniel Blomquist, whose themes focused on a description of the best places to observe space from the Antarctic Plateau. A further step forward is represented by "Still", whose purpose is to describe how time can change its motion in case of cold weather. " "Still" consists of a few recordings done within our first year of collaborating (2015-2016) …

Glacial Movements celebrates the fiftieth record release with "Smooth Inertia", the new album by Polish artist Stefan Węgłowski. He's a composer, producer, live performer. His works include mostly compositions for small ensembles and solo instruments. In his works he uses minimalist and spectral techniques, combining them with broadly defined area of electronic music. He teaches at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He lives and works in Warsaw.

The first Josh Landes solo full length! Released Thanksgiving 2020. He used a Molasses Industries Rat King, the Greenwood Electronics Limbs Box 2.0, a Boss DD7, and field recordings of a lake and a pig on this record. A sample is taken from Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales" (2006). Electronics recorded in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on 8/25/20. Pig recorded at the Hampshire College Center on 7/26/20. Lake recorded at Ward's Cover in Wilmington, Vermont on 7/30/20.

Uniquely orchestrated with all three members bringing a trove of objects & percussion, the trio of Martin Küchen on saxophones, Agustí Fernández on piano and Zlatko Kaučič on drums are heard in this two-part live concert at BUMF festival in Smartno, Slovenia, for a superb example of intent listening and use of space around confident, stunningly creative & virtuosic playing.

New album by the the Hague-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Lyckle de Jong "This album is titled Os. When I look at the shape of these two letters, O and S, I realize that they are a rotation and an oscillation.  Os is Dutch for Ox. An ox is a castrated male bull.
The primary benefit of castrating bull calves is to 
temper their tempers, making it easier and cheaper for people to handle them. Os is also an abbreviation of oscillation, -cillation being castrated off.
 Oscillation means a …

Sasu Ripatti presents Dancefloor Classics Vol. 1 - 5, a series of five 10" releases coming throughout 2023. Music for imaginary dancefloors, released on Ripatti's own label "Rajaton". ”Look up, into the light” she said, while the camera shutter clicked. ”Like this? Does it look holy?” His neck felt stiff. Her reply: ”Yes, just like that. What do you mean holy? Like religious? ”No, more like trying to look very far, somewhere beyond what we can see.” ”Okay, stand still, I’m going to come close to…

** Limited edition of 300 copies. Silkscreen printing on 350 gm paper, black inner ** In Vivo is a cross-media collaboration between clarinetist and composer Gareth Davis and Slovenian-born photographer Klavdij Sluban, released on IIKKI. It sets Sluban’s images from throughout his career, primarily of jailed teenagers in prisons around the world, to Davis’s contemporary classical music informed by post-rock and noise music.

Fresh imprint Caldeira open their account with the first vinyl retrospective of Swiss composer Louis Crelier, whose FM sorcery and Linn Drum drama takes the listener away to an imaginary Africa. Standing proud amid the sound waves, Caldeira emerges with a singular mission; to bring us music with hidden depth. Whether it’s a reissue or retrospective, archival or original, each release reflects the Michelin-grade tastebuds of label founder Camille Bertin AKA Plastic Bamboo. Operating out of the sh…

This pairing has been in the wings for a few years now by our count, but tripped things come to those who wait, so better late-as-shit than never. Cloudland Canyon have been spanning geographies (Brooklyn, Germany, Memphis) and genres (krautrock, drone, psych-pop) since at least 2002, but only recently has their technological studio-sorcery began to gather steam. Their offering here (“Harvest Hunt”) is a mechanical motorik ascent into symphonic hypnosis. Comparisons to classic Teutonic psych out…

Circle Bros is the longrunning onemanproject of Wim Lecluyse (founder of Morc Records). What started out as a way to experiment with sounds and recording techniques, evolved throughout the years into a more song-oriented outfit. The roots are to be found in the world of drone, lo-fi and improvisation, which results in songs that are half improvised, and therefore have a more spontaneous structure. A sort of singer-songimprovisation for those that prefer soundexperiments over traditional verse/ch…

An imaginary train journey between Bologna and Moscow. The original recording of the entire experimental electronic session performed at the audiovisual festival "Geometry of Now," Moscow (2017) curated by Mark Fell, reworked in Bologna (Italy) with custom analog equipment in 2022. Alexei Borisov, the Moscow underground legend who has spanned new wave, electronic noise and constructivist experimentation, measures up with artist and curator Sergey Kasich, a sound and media artist originally from …