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Untitled
This was the 10 PM set on 9/11/11, and makes for a perfect pair with the Rowe solo - two very different extremes. Where the Rowe set is in your face visceral, Unami and Malfatti created a gentle atmosphere within the pitch-black room (lit solely by Unami's visuals) and an overarching cumulative feeling in the listener. The too-perfect-to-be-scripted intro and outro frame a set that's almost not there, a radical recording even by ultra-minimal standards
Sinter
Something very cool about erstaeu 002's existing in such a different world than its numeric predecessor (and 003 is altogether different as well). After the sublime compressive intensity of "Dystonia Duos", "Sinter" injects vast amounts of oxygen into the room, air swirling and echoing in huge spaces, light shimmering and hazy. In metallurgical terms, sintering is the making of objects from powder and "powdery", especially with a metallic connotation, isn't the worst term you could use for much …
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…
Schnee live
ErstLive 003 is from the duo of Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann, titled 'schnee_live', the final show on the last night of AMPLIFY 2004: addition. Stangl and Kurzmann began working as a duo in late 1999, releasing Schnee in 2000, and playing numerous concerts over the past four years throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. schnee_live documents how much their duo has changed since the initial recording of Schnee, which was the first time they ever played together as a duo.
Bits, bots and signs
Ever since Otomo got into his minimal misuse of stereo equipment phase, a collaboration with Swiss toaster torturers Voice Crack was on the cards. Although Otomo's refraction of high end sinewaves around cranial interiors may not seem like an ideal partner for Norbert Mšslang and Andy Guhl's usual industrial clang, attempts have obviously been made to find a common ground. There's an intense focus upon the fine detail of the unfolding electronic fields, with the Swiss duo providing a constantly …
Points and Slashes
Over the past decade, Swiss-based Günter Müller has collaborated with many of the most prominent Tokyo-based musicians, recording CDs with Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Sachiko M, Masahiko Okura, and Toshimaru Nakamura. Points and Slashes is the latest of these, a duo collaboration with guitar wizard Tetuzi Akiyama.It's impossible to pin down Akiyama, a musician of diverse interests and activities, with a brief description. He has been playing electric guitar since he was 13, and formed his fi…
Open
Mark Wastell and Matt Davis met and first played together in a workshop led by Eddie Prévost in London during the spring of 1996. Soon after, Wastell was invited to join Chris Burn's Ensemble, in which he played with Phil Durrant for the first time. Subsequently, Phil and Mark worked together in the quartets Assumed Possibilities and Quatuor Accorde, documented on Rossbin and Emanem CDs, respectively.
The debut trio concert by Davis/Durrant/Wastell took longer to organise than any of the partici…
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…
Neuschnee
The five tracks on neuschnee form an ambitious meta-song suite, with the various lyrics and musical styles combining to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The design is again from Berlin designer Marion Gerth, previously responsible for The Magic ID-till my breath gives out on ErstPop. The front cover juxtaposes a satellite picture of snow with the Mao Zedong poem 'Snow', which the musicians discovered in a book bought while on tour in Beijing. "After a long phase of experimental…
Tears
Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida, both from Tokyo, met in 1997 and formed the duo of Cosmos the following year. Sachiko M has developed a unique style utilizing a memory-free sampler, creating pure, piercing sine waves with the device's built-in test tones and noise. She has also recently begun exploring the use of contact microphones, as documented on the second track of Tears. Sachiko has worked extensively as a solo artist, in groups such as Filament, I.S.O., and Hoahio, and in duo with Toshimaru Na…
Extracts
"The first word that came to mind on playing Extracts was understatement, with an almost oriental minimalism and profundity on display. At times I was forced to check whether sounds were coming from the speakers or from outside. However, this is a far cry from the Radu Malfatti school of implied music since it is very much about close group interplay. Simon H. Fell's sonorous bass is of particular note, underpinning, colouring and giving the proceedings a kind of still, stately authority. Likewi…
Home Boy, Sister Out
Don Cherry's downtown Paris funk masterwork Home Boy, Sister Out, produced in 1985 by Ramuntcho Matta and originally released by Barclay in France only, finally gets a worldwide release on Wewantsounds. Featuring French post-punk muse Elli Medeiros, avant-garde poet Brion Gysin, and cult Senegalese drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang (Xalam), this is a unique soundbite of Paris in the early '80s at its coolest when funk, jazz, and new wave were mingling with sounds from Africa, Jamaica, and Latin Am…
Peruvian electroacoustic and experimental music (1964-1970)
splendid double CD set documenting César Bolaños - one of the leading artists of the Latin American avant-garde of the mid 20th century - amazing early electronic work. The recordings bring together for the first time a definitive edition of his work on a double CD, the music have been digitalised directly from the original tapes and really have a fabulous clarity. So much music these days is labelled as experimental but I often I ask myself if it's creators are genuinely experimenting. That ce…
Electro-acoustic
This CD is pure aural pleasure. The Santur sounds (something) like a Chinese chen (or perhaps a Korean Kay-a-gum), but it has (a bit) more body. Kupper composes with high merit, leading the listener on a trek that won't soon be forgotten. You must be focussed on LISTENING, or you'll religate it (incorrectly) to the "background" stack...Leo Kupper was born in Belgium in 1935. He worked with He…
Circular Reference
Masami Akita continues his work as the world's premiere extreme dynamicist on 'Circular Reference,' his latest full-length and first for No Holiday. It's a torrent of synthesized tones colliding against punishing layers of feedback and midrange noise. But there are also snatches of lurching rhythms to be found, as well as moments of relative uneasy calm. More than anything, it's distinctly Merzbow. Released on 2xLP and CD formats, the latest from this titan of noise is sure to please longtime li…
Raven
Raven is the first new Organum album release since that of Sorrow in 2010 (Siren Records) and was recorded in 2017.For the realisation of Raven, Organum was comprised of David Jackman, Alan Jones, and Daisuke Suzuki.The first Organum 12-inch release 'Tower of Silence' (LAYLAH-1985) was a work of multi-layered bowed sound and scraping metallic objects, but there was an innate silence within this wall of noise - as Basho’s Haiku poem echos :“Deep silence, the shrill of cicadas, seeps into rocks.” …
Nyarlathotep - A Tribute To Howard Phillips Lovecraft
'Nyarlathotep was an earthbound deity in the mythos of writer H. P. Lovecraft. Unlike the other gods in these stories, Nyarlathotep appears in humanoid form and can speak human languages. This being, as an abstract concept, provides a fitting name for an album that brings largely forgotten and mysterious music to human ears. Indeed, this album is a newly remastered reissue that was originally released in 1997 by the KADATH label, and gathers eight offerings of experimental underground music of t…
From Industry Home
An elegant decay amassed from the sounds of detritus. That may be an apt introduction to the work of Jo Montgomerie. Of course, The Helen Scarsdale Agency has a long standing infatuation with disintegrated sound in various forms. So, it makes perfect sense we should publish her work! That said, Montgomerie has a fascinating strategy to her long-form smears of blackened mascara ambient and smoldered noise. As a teenager she was a classically trained musician with an eye towards a career as a conc…
Kopk Kopa
Junk DNA is the newly christened project from Brian Pyle, a man of many ongoing pursuits including Ensemble Economique, The Starving Weirdos, and RV Paintings. Born and raised in wilds of California, Pyle has recently been splitting his time in Vilnius, Lithuania, with his Junk DNA debut Kopk Kopa contemplating his time and place within Lithuania. It is true that much of Pyle’s works is reflective about the human condition responding to a particular environment. The slow burn of Humboldt fog, in…
Heavenly Arms with Otomo Yoshihide
Heavenly Arms – featuring Otomo Yoshihide – is a bold new sonic journey that bridges experimental sound, improvisation, and emotional resonance. The record, released in collaboration with the visionary Japanese composer and guitarist Otomo Yoshihide, showcases a meeting of worlds where free improvisation collides with delicate melodic structures.
Across its tracks, Heavenly Arms captures the raw immediacy of live interaction while preserving an intimate, cinematic atmosphere. The album moves f…