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The Splitter Orchester is a Berlin-based collection of internationally respected Composer-Performers which draws inspiration from many genres and is most comfortable in the creative borderland between composed and improvised music. It is a defiant musical organism that has developed an extraordinary artistic profile - uniting across continents, generations and aesthetics. Utilising a broad variety of extended techniques on traditional, electronic, and especially constructed and tailored instrume…

Formed in 2011 by Angélica Castelló, Mario de Vega, Attila Faravelli and Burkhard Stangl, the Austrian-Mexican-Italian quartet SQID focuses on live sound art and sound performances that push the bounds of the conventional formats of the concert and recording situation. In July 2012 SQID performed at the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen festival and played a four-hour installative concert entitled “240” in the protestant church. The sound performance was so well received by the audience and critics th…

Exploration of time, perception and place is the recurring theme of the work of Simon James Phillips. Blage 3 was an extended installation and performance piece curated by Phillips — a one-off five hour uninterrupted improvisation with an ensemble of six of Berlin’s most visible experimental artists – Tony Buck (drums and percussion), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), BJ Nilsen (electronics), Liz Allbee (trumpet), Arthur Rother (guitar) and Simon James Phillips (piano). The ensemble was placed i…

Walking through the night. I’m not even supposed to be here today, and so is Silent Bob.New news of dying migrants. No attention for the paperless, what can the sailors do when the captain feels mean? Meanwhile Guy Maddin tells us his tales of amnesia, incest, death, and transfiguration decked out in low-rent expressionism and dime-store surrealism. Such a joy, joy, joy to meet somebody new. The insonnia of the homeless in the Termini train station addressing Heinrich Heine, trying to convince u…

Rhodri Davies was commissioned by the London Musicians’ Collective to put together an ensemble and present a new work for each of the five nights of the 14th LMC Festival of Experimental Music in 2005. Since then the group has invited a number of musicians to join the core members of the ensemble. The current full line up consists of the trio heard on this CD as well as Angharad Davies and Lina Lapelyte. Morden Tower is one of Britain’s best-known cultural landmarks. For the past 45 years, hundr…

“…for it feels like being overwhelmed by an external force, entering an alien world, but full of glorioles, and this doesn’t happen anytime but dependent on specific preconditions, and it takes a special nature glowing from inside, that’s that. A strange occurrence breaking off the everyday chest, and it is a copulation of mind, an excess, a secret…” - Friederike Mayröcker. Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling. A veritable mind excitement is taking place when Tamara Wilhelm, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and …

Can you say something about a quartet for guitars? Hmm. Where to start? Well let’s start with why “Affetuoso e sostenuto”? And what about those track tittles: “Ineptitude”, “Awkward”, “Gaucheness”, “Underwhelm” and “Failing”? Google “Affetuoso e sostenuto” and probably a reference to Haydn will appear on the screen, a nine minute section from his String Quartet Op. 20. No. 1 ( the third movement). For the musicians on this recording after an examination of the score their very first instruction …

In Why Is The Sea So Blue Margareth Kammerer continues to explore songs in experimental music contexts, elaborately interweaving lyrics into nine wistful soundscapes. Originally recorded in 2006, with the band consisting of Christof Kurzmann (voice, saxophone), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Burkhard Stangl (vibraphone), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), Big Daddy Mugglestone (percussion) and Marcello Silvio Busato (drums), the album’s final shape emerged with the production of Valerio Tricoli in 2011, …

The first Mikroton release featuring Russian musicians Ilia Belorukov, a saxophonist from Saint-Petersburg, and Kurt Liedwart, an electronic and computer musician from Moscow who also runs the label. It’s their second longplaying work following Obwod which was released on Copy For Your Records. On the new CD the duo goes even further into the realm of unknown contriving to work with silence, space and chance with their traditional means like sinewaves and saxophone’s long tones. Saxophone prepar…

The recordings for the piece were gathered over the course of a year from Huddersfield, Stirling, Aberdeen (United Kingdom), and s’Hertogenbosch (The Netherlands). These were used to create an installation consisting of over 100 tracks that were remixed in real time during each performance. The set up varied from show to show, sometimes playing through 6 speakers and 3 subs, and at other times, through 12 speakers etc. The performers were positioned at the centre of the audience, who in turn, we…

Ten years ago, a week before Christmas in 2002, Teruto Soejima, a Japanese experimental/avant-garde music critic, organized a festival at a small live venue called Knuttel House, located in the east side of Tokyo. Named as “Independent Underground Music Festival”, it was held with the following message by Mr. Soejima: “Today in the advanced improvised music scene, new artists keep coming up one after another. In there, free jazz, contemporary music, techno, prog, traditional music, experimental …

The French WPB3 trio explores areas between abstract minimalist contemporary concrete instrumental improvised music and energetic noisy free jazz with an uncompromisingly totally free approach. Nusch Werchowska has been involved in improvised music since she met Barre Philips in 1993. A pianist who is able to translate a conversation between Debussy and Cecil Taylor as well as John Cage using all kinds of prepared techniques. She played with numerous musicians in the field of improvised music su…

Limmat is the second CD from Günter Müller, Jason Kahn and Christian Wolfarth, following their first album Drumming released in 2005 on Creative Sources. Recorded during one afternoon in Kahn’s Zürich studio, “Limmat” features three unedited improvisations melding microsounds, percussive mastery and swaths of noise and static into a mesmerizing whole. Originally from Los Angeles, Jason Kahn has lived in Europe since 1990. He has performed or recorded with musicians such as Günter Müller, Norbert…

Over three decades Jason Kahn developed his unique sonic language, now exploring the interaction between sound and space using a compact setup of percussion and analog synthesizer. He has performed and recorded albums with Günter Müller, Norbert Möslang, Kim Cascone, Arnold Dreyblatt, Steve Roden, Dieb13, Richard Francis, Ryu Hankil, Jon Mueller and many others. He ran his own Cut label from 1997 to 2008, releasing 25 albums. Asher is one the most interesting new composers in the United States, …

It is now 5 years that I travel to Latin America. My home base in Buenos Aires; and from there to almost all the other countries. When I arrived there first, I did not know much about the music scene, especially about any scene committed to “New Music” or “Improvisation”, but with the time i encountered a lot of movement, a lot of interesting music (of any form or genre) and I encountered musicians, that if they had been born in the so called “civilized West” would be within the most important p…

Cym_bowl is Günter Müller’s fourth solo CD. On cym_bowl he follows even more consequently the idea he already realized on his last album reframed; focused on the sound of one cymbal and one singing bowl; he feeded his iPods with dozens of variations of processed sounds. Afterwards he conceived with recorded material from sessions he improvised with processed cymbal and bowl sounds only the 4 pieces for his new album. cym_bowl could easily go as a symbol of getting lost in time.

Exploring the expressivity within intense states of being, Latinx identity, and pluralistic sensibilities, Helado Negro’s Private Energy is an engrossing statement achieved through lyrically personal and political avant pop music. Private Energy carves a deep groove through the electronic music landscape, challenging to best Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange’s previous accomplishments under the Helado Negro moniker. Half a decade and half a dozen albums later since Helado Negro’s 2009 d…

From the legendary Deneb series, one of the grooviest Italian library ever. Amedeo Tommasi and Gerardo Iacoucci (alias H. Caiage) at their best. An explosion of heavy organ sounds, jazz & psych-beat, with killer drumming breaks and mellow tunes

Presenting one of the greatest works by maestro Armando Trovajoli; a solid Italian easy listening masterpiece. After its commercial debut in 1968 as an original soundtrack of famous Italian TV-movie, this record gained renewed interest in the 1990s when four tracks were compiled in the immortal Easy Tempo series. From then on, La Famiglia Benvenuti has not only been considered one of Trovajoli’s most sought after records, but has achieved the status of being the manifesto of the Roman swin…

So(u)len(skin(ner) is the second solo LP Katt Hernandez has released. After 13 years as a veteran of the variated wonderments of the experimental music scenes of the east coast, Katt moved to Sweden. She became a producer at Fylkingen and several other organizations for new and experimental music, started making electro-acoustic music alongside her long beloved violin at EMS and the Royal Music Academy alike, and is playing all about Sweden and further with a burgeoning tumult of new and fantast…

**Full-color picture disc, released in an edition of 233 copies. 2021 Stock ** Much of Matt Shoemaker's recorded output prominently features the use of field recordings (see his "Tropical Amnesia One" CD), but in this case he has eschewed such grounded measures and has instead sculpted a two-part puzzle which seemingly exists on some other plane(t). Layer upon evolving layer of sonic phenomena is still the methodological trademark, but the content is almost entirely electronic, lending a great d…

** 515 copies ** Here, finally, is the gorgeous presentation that astronomy domine Rick Reed's music so richly deserves: Two black vinyl LPs, pressed on 180-gram virgin vinyl, with full-color labels, inside black poly-lined sleeves, housed in a matte-finish full-color gatefold jacket adorned with Reed's vibrant and fantastically evocative paintings. Included with each copy of this set is a full-color download card featuring access to high-quality MP3s of the complete contents of the vinyl record…

Transport rushes through all sorts of unholy rituals and improvised excesses – from Tanz um den Melkeimer to the Ekelzentrum and on to the Traumbaum. A Space Odyssey without rules or certainties, apart from the filthy power of an uproar of etheric synthesizer washes and motoric drum pulses. On their Milchreise, they boldly stimulate cosmic regions of your brain that no band has stimulated before (probably apart from Amon Düül, Ash Ra Tempel and Boredoms). Milchreise is their thundering, …

* 2021 stock * The structures of Chris Newman's music are apparently simple, like his music pictures: large, thick dots of notes, but a lot of space in between: "The raw and the cooked" (Roland Barthes). He himself likes to cook well and with pleasure. Just his lamb chops, for example. He only puts them in a hot pan with oil; there is also chard, just pulled out of the water, but also more complicated things: coq au vin or bœuf bourguignon.His music has a strong physical structure, is quasi carn…

* 2020 stock * Dedicatorias is a series of 60 sound works each lasting 1 minute which were largely accomplished between 2013 and 2015. The list of dedications is neither exhaustive nor can it be. It is subjective art which comprises very different techniques, influences and materials: sound remnants, illuminated in their confrontation, metamorphosis and combination which bring up to date and question the bearer and media. Radio is the paramount reference. In these miniatures, there is a place fo…

*2021 stock* What is one to make of Maria de Alvear’s two long solos for piano, De puro amor (‘Of pure love’) and En amor duro (‘In hard love’), both composed in 1991. The scores themselves, if one decides to start from here, are completely perplexing. Pages and pages are marked with hastily scratched notes, sometimes repeating themselves dozens of times. Little priority seems to have been given to rhythm, dynamics or articulation; even less to the notational conventions such as barlines, spacin…

*2021 stock* Angelus novus is the third opera by Madrid composer Jorge Fernández Guerra. This time, he draws on a selection of texts by Walter Benjamin, which he uses to create a dialogue of sorts between a male character and a female character, who could be an alter ego or perhaps an angel. The dialogue appears to transpire during the final moments of the character’s life, which may be reminiscent of Benjamin’s final moments at the Spanish border as he fled the Nazis.  Angelus novus premiered a…

Seventy years ago, computers were as big as swimming pools and were programmed by country girls. ENIAC, the world’s first fully electronic, vacuum-tube-based universal computing machine, sported a weight of 27 tonnes and used 18,000 vacuum tubes for calculating. And, each day, at least two of those vacuum tubes gave out. When this machine was presented to the world public in 1946, six young women, most of them maths students from the rural Midwest of the USA, had spent three years inventing a me…

**2021 stock** Flores, like any other work of Maria de Alvear, deals with the ideal of inner freedom. This is not a mere claim, it is manifested in the shape of the piece itself. Written in the author's typical mixture of composition and notated improvisation, the text leaves a certain scope to the seven instrumentalists as to the elaboration of the rhythm and at times also the intonation. The score has almost no directives for the parts of the two singers: what and how the singing is performed …

The Nine Unfinished Symphonies were conceived as one entity. They are written in my musical native tongue; the musical grammar and idioms with which I have become so familiar that I can converse in them spontaneously, without thinking, so that I can devote my full attention to what I actually want to do. It appears that we need narratives, such as the ‘sacred’ number nine with symphonies, or the concept of the Unfinished, which stands in sharp contrast to the fragmentary or the ‘uncapitalized’ u…

When you are listening to his pieces and are completely at ease, they offer the listener the beauty of pure sound: I believe this also applies to his likeminded friends. Even when and if they are of a continuous narrative type, they just create the right situation to listen to sounds. As the title reveals: Painted cakes are real, too. The beautiful sounds are repeated in order to remain purely sound. This repetition does not build up a narrative, it becomes more complicated and excited not in or…

"Leukert brings back intuition into the computer-mechanical techniques of contemporary classical music. His compositions derive from the hearing experience - he has become a David Lynch for the ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, who is operating with the ironically associative scepticism of Godard. A blessing that Maria De Alvear’s small label ‘World Edition’ now produced eight of Leukert’s audio pieces on CD; among them the enchanting trilogy Wildwechsel" . - Alban Nikolai Herbst

That’s the name of the game... Marco Blaauw plays on a quartertone double bell trumpet, a shell, brought from Madagascar,a slide trumpet, piccolo trumpet, quartertone flugel horneven megaphone and flexible tube. Gijsbrecht Royé plays on a self-made bass-zither. To play on the four groups of bass grandpiano strings, he uses different kinds of sticks; two bows (normally used for double bass), metal strings, nails, brushes, knives, rat-tailed files and metal scouring pads.

* 2021 Stock * Metamusic. A suitable term for all these works, if by this we understand that musical aspects are somehow transcended, transgressed. Sitting between chairs. A transgression which leads, through interactions of materials and intentions, controlled use of randomness or indeterminacy, conceptual game of measurement or definition, to the contemplation of music itself as yet another fragment of the whole, because the sound objects may have a dramatic or musical nature. How could this w…

**2020 stock, 300 copies** "Collaborative release by a dangerous Italian friends trio. Iugula-Thor is the Italian Industrial / Power-Electronic monster born from the minds of Andrea Chiaravalli and Paolo Bandera (Sigillum S / Sshe Retina Stimulants) in the early '90s. Suction Melena is the other harsh face of Giovanni Mori (Le Cose Bianche), the new man in the Italian Harsh Power-Electronics. This is sharp and uncompromising Hard Power-Electronics in pure Italian-Style. Scraping vocals, Analogic…

Having explored a lot of Southern Vermont-based artists over the past decade and a half, it now seems time to cast our gaze northward. From the cold shores of Champlain comes the music of Wren Kitz, a singer and guitarist from Burlington VT. Unlike much of his earlier work, which falls into what might be called a 'progressive/experimental folk bag,' Early Worm documents a harder sound. As Mr. Kitz says, 'It's my rock n roll album.' And he ain't kidding. While some of the tunes were initially dev…

The five-album solo project One Man Sessions by Massimo Martellotta, continues after the synthesizers of One Man Sessions Volume 1: Sintesi (2018) and the mellow prepared piano and drum grooves of One Man Sessions Volume 2: Unprepared Piano (CNMM 002LP, 2018). With One Man Session Volume 3: One Man Orchestra, there is another change; it is indeed a full-fledged orchestral album, conceived with the film music composers of the 1950s in mind, Bernard Hermann et al. One Man Session Volume 3: One Man…

Totally brilliant and obscure psych era Italian library music. Originally released in 1971 for the microsmall label Vi.Di.Elle, the same label as another psych bomb, "The Black Fire - Cream". Behind the mysterious "The Green Birds" name is a marvellous trio of unsung composers like Franco Bonfanti, Romano Rizzati (Corfull)and Renato Sperduti (Myrval), playing here some really dope jams in the style of the Braen's Machine's Underground LP. The whole album is full of psych effects, synth m…

With nods to historical giants like John & Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Jimmy Smith, Tramp’s brilliant Contemporary Jazz compilation traces the globe, capturing present day adventures in modal, spiritual, and groove oriented jazz, handpicked to prove that the artform is alive and well.

The show on this album was performed in Olomouc, Czech Republic, at the Moravian Theatre, in the year 2010. The Ceasar gallery organized a retrospective exhibition called “The Residents Residence“ in Olomouc. The exhibition contained art, constumes, masks and other artefacts of The Residents and Už Jsme Doma were asked if they could create their own versions of The Residents’ songs, and play them to support the exhibition. As Randy, the Residents’ singer, was invited for the opening and staying …