Music from France

Limited edition of 250. Alone, you have to listen to Brume alone, and lie down far from the neon lights, traffic, and gossip, with your lights filtered. In the dominating dark and night, Brume carries an atomized reality to a world where chaos rhymes with spatial waverings, where atmosphere is devoid of impurity, rich with rhythms and sonorities, and dense with emotions, for a mysterious -- but undoubtedly innovative -- energetic trip. Rich, complex, and experimental Ainsi Soit-il!envelopes us. …

The involvement in the improbable challenge of a collaboration with another musical entity takes on its full meaning when the two characters have radically different personalities ! In 2001, the merger of Brume with the American project Bastard Noise could have seem surreal ! One works in the field of Musique concrete, and the others in what we can call Power electronics, making their own sound generators (DIY). The first album of this association materialised with a very successful CD! 2012… po…

Superb re-issue of 2nd cassette release from 1983! The true futuristic/bruitistic industrial machine sound from this French master! "Bruitism is the representation of a living, biological body, not unrelated but on the contrary intimate to the substance. The nature/technique gap is totally, in The Art of Noises, the most accomplished form of a reconciliation with industrial mechanization. By highlighting the autonomy of the dialectical movement in its inaugural tension, bruitism reestablishes th…

In July 1984, the otherworldly entourage of over fifty musicians of Urban Sax swarmed across the coastal town of Pori, Finland, to perform a historic concert at the Pori Jazz Festival. The masked musicians, veiled in space suits and fencing masks, arrived at the scene of the concert in the Central Pori Church by fire engines, forklifts and water buses from all over the town, followed by an ecstatic and bewildered crowd of festival-goers and amazed locals alike. For those present, the explosively…

Although living in separate European countries, Akama (electronics) and Duplant (organ, electronics) have forged a strong musical bond on a handful of collaborative releases, often with titles related to nothingness, which, in turn, mirrors the minimal, contemplative drone pieces contained therein. As its own titling suggests, immobilité (“immobility”) extends their musical concerns, and distills them in an extraordinarily rich way. More textural than event-based, these pieces are exquisitely pa…

New 2015 material from French experimentalists Vivenza, Brume, Le Syndicat, and Lieutenant Caramel. This is their own updated, contemporary vision of the Bruitism sounds and texts. Jean-Marc Vivenza has theoretically and politically linked himself with the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists since the mid '70s. Originally released in 1984, his series of Fondements Bruitistes d'Action (Bruitist Foundations of Action) recordings were inspired by the relationship between the technological…

Laurent Jeanneau aka Kink Gong ethnic electronic project continues on Discrepant... Since the end of the 90’s, Laurent Jeanneau, also an integral Sublime Frequencies contributor, has been recording the music of mostly endangered minorities of South East Asia. Alongside his relentless pursue of remote exotic and unpublished musical traditions, he also started creating electronic versions by combining raw recordings with natural sounds, archive material and electronically treated sounds. For Voice…

Chang Fo Ji are small, plastic, battery-powered soundboxes, available throughout China and Tibet, that play a variety of Buddhist loops, from poppy modern Chinese Buddhist prayers to ancient recordings of famous Tibetan Buddhist masters. They can be taken everywhere, offering the listener portable immersion into the hypnotizing, minimalist world of Buddhist prayers. Both sides of this record contain various loops from various Chang Fo Ji gathered in China by Laurent Jeanneau (Kink Gong) be…

180-gram vinyl. The only survivors of the former line-up, Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz, with a new team of supporting musicians, recorded Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh at the Manor Studios in Oxford in 1973. Many people consider this album to be Magma's masterpiece. From then on, Vander was definitively confirmed as the group's artistic director. If the instrumental performance gains more power, notably with the arrival of Jannick Top on bass, the most striking feature of Mëkanďk …

Cuneiform Records is proud to announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Chronolyse, the masterwork of 1970s analogue electronics that French electronic musician and guitarist Richard Pinhas created in tribute to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic, Dune. This special reissue, pressed on 180 gram white vinyl and featuring the original album artwork, celebrates Chronolyse’s conception nearly 40 years ago as well as the 50th anniversary of Dune, the first volume of which was published in 1965. Ch…

A live recording, made during the Ultra Eczema Strafstudie night at Vooruit in Ghent, one of the most beautiful ballrooms in Flanders. Four turbulent parts blended across two sides. It is sometimes hard to hear who’s doing what here: vocals and strings, tapes, bells and percussion become an oddball of dust, blown into the narrow streets of improv; none of the ‘free music solo rules’ are obeyed here. Somebody else, living in that same street as it were, mentioned that ”it sounds like a whol…

Two major nuclear disasters, Tchernobyl and Fukushima, left its traces in our collective memory. Their devastating impact on the immediate environment left behind the ghost towns of Prypiat and Futaba. French sound artist Bruno Duplant never visited these exclusion zones. He took their existence as a starting point for an electroacoustic composition to investigate the relationship between fiction and reality. Sonic journalism like Peter Cusack's "Sounds from dangerous places" documents the reali…

Rhizosphere, originally released in 1976, was Pinhas' first solo album. It consists of four solo pieces for synthesizer, plus a extended fifth synthesizer piece which is a duet with Heldon drummer Francois Auguer. I have always found it to be a mesmerizing work, on par with its influences of Terry Riley and Philip Glass, but completely different from them due to the usage of only Moog and ARP synthesizers. For this CD release, an additional 38' was added of a previously unheard, professio…

** restocked ** Killer release that puts together, in this sumptuous box set, all the Magma's official live shows, recorded between 1975 and 2000. On top of which are two extra records made of excerpts from shows given between 2005 and 2011, as well as two unreleased records of the unforgettable 2009 concert given at the Alhambra in Paris.For Magma, live performance is essential. Live performance allows – and forgives – no mistakes. You give your all, all at once. You are on a tight-rope, with n…

2024 small repress. "Back to music after three years of silence... On the suggestion of Robert Ashley, Douglas Dunn commissioned this piece from Éliane Radigue for choreography. Only the first part of Triptych was staged at the premiere at the Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy on February 27 1978. Recorded in the composer's studio in Paris. After the premiere of Adnos I (IMPREC 028CD) in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Éliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned t…

2021 restock. "Includes liner notes & archival photographs. 1970 was an important year in Eliane Radigue's musical life since it was the year just before she acquired her ARP 2500 synthesizer. Since 1967, she had been using the feedback as a material; feedback from two tape recorders reworked through intensive studio techniques: slowing down, alteration, superimposition, montage. In 1970, the last year she dedicated to feedback, several milestone pieces saw the light of day: Omnht, a wonderful s…

Masterpiece!!! ""Sacrée Obsession", the new album from the australian percussionist extraordinaire Will Guthrie, comes out of his continuing research into repetition, the ritual, physicality through volume and mass, and complexity through the development of simple ideas. combining pulse and rthymic ideas with melodic and pitch based textures he has succeeded in making truly unique music. obsessive development of minimal material is not new in will guthrie's music, from his brutal tribal l…

Deluxe book with Cd "Réalités servomécaniques” is an improved version faithful to the original recordings with visuals specially reworked, answering to a categorical assertion, theoricaly and practicaly on Vivenza's bruitist point of view, who presents sounds, « noises », under their rawest and genuine aspect: sounds are machines / machines are sounds. Thus Vivenza captured the essence of factories with a strong sense of austerity, radicality, verticality, including thick smokes and intens…

Fondements Bruitistes d'Action (Bruitist Foundations of Action), originally released in October 1984, opens the period in Vivenza's work on bruitist sound when he started to incorporate the question of the relationship between the technological and mechanical industrial fabric, on the one hand -- which makes up the reality of the modern world -- and the human and social environment on the other. This is the first-ever release of the entire 1984 Fondements Bruitistes session. Includes Luigi Russo…

“Friction” is a compression of the two first official tapes of Brume, “Frikture” 1985 and “Le jour du cochon” 1986/87, also including an unreleased that closes the end of side A of this vinylic reissue. A very experimental period, electro-ethnico-indus orientated because Brume went from “all analogical” to the first numeric tests, electroacoustic, to make an hybrid synthesis until today with the computer.