Music from France

***Very last copies*** "Luc Ferrari is one of the most important and intriguing figures of the last forty years, a pioneer of musique concrète at the beginning of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales in Paris, and perhaps 'the only real artist among many excellent researchers' as someone suggested. With a very peculiar sensibility he creates his own musical world in which wit, sensuality, extreme sound realism, playful analytical abilities, social concerns, and love for good food are important a…

The first piece Eliane Radigue ever composed on a modular synthesizer, Chry-ptus was realised in 1971 on a Buchla 100 - the same one Morton Subotnick had recently installed at New York University. Conceived as two simultaneous tapes intended to be played together with or without synchronisation, the work produces, on each new realisation, a different play of sub-harmonics and overtones, slight shifts in amplitude and location altering the surface while leaving the underlying structure intact. Th…

on the occasion of new forms series of concerts in 1999 ryoji ikeda and carsten nicolai did their first joint performance at galerie für zeitgenössische kunst in leipzig/ germany - the project cyclo. was founded. between 1999 and 2001 files were exchanged, material was collected and tracks were made. cyclo sets up a priority on digital quality of the tracks. selective use of automated processes like the overlapping of loops and their falsification through wrong calculation or incorrect condensa…

As the title may suggest, 0°C is a sonic exploration at a very bottom of human perception - the fragile line between life and death, dark and light, noise and silence. The authentic being is never to be achieved with complete and definitive perception of the universe - the limited human is just negligible drop somewhere between infinity and nonentity. There is no fulcrum for pretentious awareness and peace for one's arrogant mind - obscurity, uncertainty and hesitation are the only true man's sa…

This is the third edition of this timeless classic, originally released in 1996. Ryoji Ikeda is Japan's top avant-garde minimalist electronic composer, in the tradition of Alvin Lucier/The Hafler Trio/Bruce Gilbert/CM von Hausswolff/Panasonic, etc. +/- has a particular sonority whose quality is determined by one's listening point in relation to the loudspeakers. Furthermore, the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening. The sound signals c…

Raster-noton's flagship Signal - Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Nicolai - is something like the reference group of one of the pivotal labels of new minimal electronic music. Although only having released one cd so far, their sessions and concerts have been very influential until today. Some of those tracks of the past years now result in a compilation that joins the work of the three masterminds of Raster-noton, but not like a simple aggregation of egos, much rather like a conversa…

"Book and DVD contained in clear plastic slip-case in numbered edition of 3000. [Book]: 186mm x 136mm, 96 pages, soft cover, with 62 full color and 34 monochrome illustrations [DVD]: features eight sound pieces from installation works and a 35-minute full video documentation of the formula [prototype] concert filmed in Tokyo. The DVD is an NTSC/PAL hybrid for world-wide use.This is the first complete monograph about the seminal work of Ryoji Ikeda. With superb attention to detail and layout, the…

1000 fragments is Ryoji Ikeda's first solo album. As early as 1995 Ikeda started with this influential release his consistent work on digital sound design, having an inspiring impact on the the founders of Raster-noton label. 1000 fragments was originally released in february 1995 on Ikeda's own label Cci recordings. Raster-noton is proud to make this important piece of electronic music available again. Here's an early review from www.full-albums.net: 'The works on this disc of japanese computer…

Long before the large audiences came to discover him in the middle of the Eighties, Pascal Comelade has always been an electronic and electro-acoustic music lover. Influenced by or having relationships with musicians like Richard Pinhas, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Carla Bley or Michael Nyman, this French artist has been able to create a music often described as minimalist, made of concise melodic fragments and brief musical experimentations. Listening to Back To Schizo - 1975-1983 enables to measu…

Ethnicities is an electro-acoustical scope of unreleased recordings of PACIFIC 231's post-industrial period. Successive and consecutive cuts were made until he put together the concept of the album as: pluri-cultural diversity of the sounds, tropical steams, exotic journeys & electronic man-made build-up manipulations, urban dins and industrial mazes, ' Ethnicities ' is a psychedelic and unexpected patchwork from PACIFIC 231.

Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meeting across generations and genre. Composer Luc Ferrari, one of the progenitors of musique concrete and a pioneer of electroacoustic music, has previously written scores for improvising musicians. (One of these, 'Tautologos 3' -- in an explosive 1970 performance by Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble -- appears on an earlier Blue Chopsticks release.) But prior to Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Ferrari himself had never played the role of an improviser. Several years ago, Fe…

2004 live recording of a 2000-2001 luc ferrari composition, performed by ferrari himself on cds and erikm on minidisc and kaoss pad. This was to be one of the final performances by mr. ferrari before he passed away in the fall of 2005.

The idea of bringing together Rencontres fortuites, Didascalies and Tautologos III - two recent works for piano, viola and electronics, and one open-ended work - imposed itself at a concert at the Boendael Chapel in Brussels, where Collard-Neven and Royer performed Didascalies, with Ferrari attending. A few months later, we found ourselves in the legendary Brème studios, having to deal with the waiting, the Tonmeister's mood swings, and Luc, sick, having a hard time with long commutes and schedu…

Luc Ferrari's diverse work and aesthetics continue to have a singular impact on the young generations of electronic musicians and artists. The corpus of his work is immense and includes hundreds of compositions of all kinds. Les Anecdotiques - his last composition - is a vast sound-film of more than an hour who explores in 15 steps the intensity of re-composed sounds from his continual travel around the world - with electronic additional structures. 'I have made works that more or less depart fr…

Luc Ferrari is among the best known of the early electronic music pioneers. He was director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales from 1959 to 1960, working closely with Pierre Schaeffer, and his music played a decisive role in defining the range of musique concrète. But he went further to become one of the most radical composers of his time, and this CD, with its incisive character and exceptional sounds, marks the starting point for his artistic evolution. The compositions include 'Etudes aux …

Third volume in the Acousmatrix series. "A lovely work of electro-acoustic music by one of the French pioneers of musique concrete, Petite Symphonie Intuitive Pour un Paysage de Printemps ('Little Intuitive Symphony for a Spring Landscape') recreates the composer's experiences during a climb toward sunset on the Causse Mejean, a high plateau in the Massif Central, including his recollection of a shepherd's flute and its reverberations across the landscape. The flute sounds and multiple echoes co…

2023 restock. First ever release of a large scale electroacoustic piece five years in the making that revisits numerous periods from Luc Ferrari's five decades of work. From the composer's liner notes: "I have been composing a new series of works under the general title Exploitation des Concepts. The point is to take concepts I have been experimenting with throughout my entire life as a composer, and to put them to use in every possible direction: in instrumental as well as electroacoustic music…

Far-West News is the late Luc Ferrari's three-part aural travelogue of time that he and his wife Brunhild Meyer spent in the American Southwest in 1998. Far-West News strains familiar categories of genre; as Ferrari himself writes, 'It's not a report or a soundscape, not a Hörspiel or an electronic work, not a portrait or a recorded reality exhibit, not a transgression of reality or an Impressionist account, not a so on or so forth. It's a composition....[C]omposition in some cases, especially i…

Luc Ferrari -- along with Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, François Bayle, and others -- is one of the pioneers of the particular style of tape music known as 'musique concrète'. More significantly, he must be counted as one of the most complexly, most idiosyncratically compelling of post-War composers. Ferrari has time and again ranged far afield of musique concrète, and Interrupteur/Tautologos 3 is one such foray into instrumental music. But what a setting-forth! Mon dieu! These particular real…

There's a growing consensus that the term "guilty pleasure" is an unhelpful one. It holds that we should embrace the music we love, that if we are pure of heart then all our faves should be unproblematic. Should should should. It is not a consensus to which I subscribe.Aérobruitisme Dynamique is an extraordinary piece of music by the French composer Jean-Marc Vivenza. His work sometimes gets classified as industrial, but he sees it as continuation of the bruitisme of Russolo and the futurists. T…