Back in stock
Aluminium
It's onward, ever onward for New Zealand's foremost guitar experimentalist, Dean Roberts. Before you know it, he'll be as ubiquitous as Thurston Moore, a New Music gadfly gatecrashing every weird feast going. The latest outpost in a transition from l…
What a wonderful world
Despite the title of the album and several of the selections, listeners who approach this disc expecting something in the vein of Louis Armstrong will likely be disappointed. Then again maybe not, if it's originality that's prized. Jérôme Noetinge…
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 la…
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 p…
Lidingö
Lidingö, a summit between innenklavier specialist Andrea Neumann and percussionist Burkhard Beins, is altogether knottier and gnarlier. Part of the important Berlin scene, the two play together in Phosphor as well as with Sven-Åke Johansson. Beins is…
ErstLive 008
Keith Rowe's concluding set, with longtime partner Toshimaru Nakamura, at the AMPLIFY 2008: Light festival, recorded on September 21, 2008 by Taku Unami. AMPLIFY 2008: Light was an intense and deeply immersive experience for all who were lucky enough…
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 unrav…
Particles and smears
Grainy flickering, strangulated buzzing, blurred sonic shadows and harsh stridulations. Chicagoan Drumm continues to rethink the electric guitar in terms that suggest the microscopic life of ponds, and he deploys electronics along similar lines. Cana…
eh
One of the central aesthetics of the Erstwhile label is the counterpositioning of electronic and acoustic improvisers. Rarely has that been more starkly, and beautifully, achieved than on the opening and closing tracks of eh by guitarist Stangl and t…
Live at the LU
Recorded in May of 2002, almost a year after Fennesz' surprisingly successful (commercially) release, Endless Summer, one might have expected that this pairing would produce an intriguing collision of opposing forces. On the one hand you have all the…
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. Sens…
Between
"between", for me is about the tension and space between objects, and how we might occupy this area, to reside if you like between the conventions, to locate the flexibility that comes from de-theorizing the dogmas. It seemed to me as if Toshi and I …
Musik — Ein Porträt In Sehnsucht
Burkhard Stangl and Kai Fagaschinski both are masters at fluidly combining melodicism and abstraction. Musik-Ein Porträt in Sehnsucht showcases their work as a duo, carefully composed pieces intertwined with judiciously placed field recordings and me…
Till My Breath Gives Out
The magic i.d. is a berlin-based quartet exploring the juncture of song forms with abstract music. The band, consisting of margareth kammerer, christof kurzmann, kai fagaschinski and michael thieke, formed in summer 2005 after previously being connec…
Summary Dismissal
Tim Albro & Tyler Keen, guitars, electronics, objects. recorded Nov 2013 in Jacksonville, FL. mastered by Joe Panzner. design by Matthew Revert.
Medium Rude
Reed Evan Rosenberg-microphones, pedals, max, voice. Ethan Tripp-microphones, motors, junk. Recorded in 2014 and 2015. Mastered by Joe Panzner. Design by Matthew Revert.
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 expo…
Three Exercises
Devin DiSanto is an New York-based artist and composer currently focusing on labor-oriented approaches to performance. This work revolves primarily around functional uses of common/everyday objects in both solo and group situations, emphasizing the p…
Severe Liberties
ErstAEU is a new CD imprint, launched by Erstwhile Records to help document the work of young American experimental musicians working in a post-electroacoustic vein. Kevin Parks originally hails from New York. He is a graduate of the Conservatory of …
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 int…