Music from Italy

2005 release ** "Italian Avant-Noise legend M.B. and Land Use collaborate on dramatic, subterranean wall-of-noise constructions and swirling textural storms, dense and complex arrangements, shifting and shimmering tones barely under control, streaming toward some distant and indefineable precipice. Not noisy, but way too tense and corrosive to be called ambient. These vibrant monoliths of sound shift the listeners pysche into a restless sort of zen, a blissful chaos - truly mind and mood-alterin…

An extraordinary collaboration between the hystorical italian de-composer Maurizio Bianchi and the eclectic electronic-ambiental experimenter Nimh (Giuseppe Verticchio). An unmissable 4CD box that's a long and kaleidoscopic journey at the edges of sound, from the dark-industrial feelings of Together's Symphony, CD that gives the box the title, to experimental-lyric-introspective atmospheres of Secluded Truths, to sonic multicoloured collages of Niddah Emmhna, by the only M.B., and the electronic…

'I really don't know what to say... I have just released a 10' by my favorite band! Released to coincide with the first Sigillum S concert in the US, which we hosted in Chicago on June 7th, 'Organic Skyscrapers & Occult Wastelands' features three brand-new tracks. With unusual electronics, processed and treated guitars, piano, etc., and a host of other elements, rhythms and loops, it takes the listener on a bizarre and beautiful journey.The music and imagery of Sigillum S has intrigued and capti…

Alo Girl is an obscure Italian noise project that keep with-in  deeper roaring and at times almost subterranean obsessive & paranoid tones through-out the piece, as well as managing to keep the sound tinged with a nice sleazy and airless atmosphere.Last Rape is a Richard Ramirez project that saw its debut in 1995. This harsh noise/HNW project remained untouched until 2005 relaunched with Naoki Chisato (ex-Forced Orgasm). In 2008, Sean Matzus (In The Land of Archers) replaced Chisato and is…

LAST COPIES - LP album, numbered and stamped vinyl limited edition of 250 copies. 'I've taken inspiration for this medicative work from the sordid persecution of the early Christians, but in other ways we receive objectivistic persecution every day from this standardized system, from our wretched condition and from the modern persecutors which are hidden behind their threatening countenances. The appropriate soundtrack of such perturbed sufferings is this justifiable work, 'Persecutionem', in wh…

Long deleted, this is a must have cd collecting all the Scelsi pieces for string orchestra. "An internal struggle, stemming from the introductory tremolo, all through its serene yet chaotic means of lumonisity"

They call their home studio the Space Room; they name their pieces after galaxies and nebulas; and their cat appears to be an alien. Please act surprised when you learn that this duo from Torino, Italy, plays space music -- not your ordinary brand, though: experimental space music. Maurizio Opalio and Roberto Opalio are exploring the cosmos through epic improvised journeys involving astral percussion, electric astral guitar drones, and space toys. Their territory is somewhere past the fringes of…

Packaged in a three-panel lenticular sleeve. Artwork & concept by Staalplaat. Limited edition of 500 copies.

The renowned American architects Sullivan, Wright and Mies van der Rohe are the center of attention in the composition Ekphrasis [Continuo II], even though originally Berio had no such thing in mind: "While I was working on Continuo, it was not my intention to compose a metaphor for architecture, or write a homage to the famous Chicago architects... Neither did I refer directly to the amusing but nevertheless solid constructions by Renzo Piano... However, as the work progressed I became aware th…

A king listens: its subtitle identifies Un Re in ascolto, this special combination of music and drama, as a "musical action by Luciano Berio and Italo Calvino". A dialogue between composer and writer, between different forms of theater – and also, if you like, between Shakespeare and Thomas Bernhard. And, indeed, he is a "Theatermacher", an impresario, this Prospero (Theo Adam), who is accompanied by the director (Heinz Zednik) and the actor "Friday" (Helmut Lohner) and to whom a musical and sce…

The second CD of col legno's Wien Modern Edition is dedicated to Luciano Berio, who throughout his life kept on searching for new sounds, and new instrumental and orchestral organizing principles in his work. His Sequences for solo instruments are among the most important landmarks in recent music; later on, Berio decided to "comment" on some of these notoriously complex solo works from an orchestral perspective. Chemins and Chemins IIb are adaptations of the Sequences for harp and viola. "The b…

A brand new album of minimal, cryptic & static sounds. The inexistence is the aplanatic condition of what is not existing, therefore doesn't subsist in the shot reality. Transferring this entomologic concept to radical music, we're consequently asking: inexistent sounds for existing people or existing sounds for inexistent people? Without schizoid presumption, "Inexistence" is replying to this existential question

Numbered edition of 600 numbered copies in a trifold 10" inch sleeve with original artwork. Re-issue of the Maurizio Bianchi's early Lp Mectpyo Bakterium . Included in this re-issue is a bonus disc with 55 minutes of ultra rare material officially published on CD for the first time here.Disc 1: First two tracks are from the 1982 LP 'Mectpyo Bakterium' released by DYS Records, USA. Third track is from '40 Days/ 40 Nights' compilation on Stratosphere Music, Japan. Fourth track is from 'Internation…

One of the most significant musical works of the twentieth century is now available in an archive-quality recording. Only now, using surround-sound technology can the twenty-six channels be balanced out and distributed, spatially and dynamically, with minute accuracy across the five speakers: a time-consuming and fascinating task, evoking the optimist Sisyphus. With this double SACD, André Richard and Peter Hirsch’s team, who had already worked on the first performance of the then new Prometeo i…

Works of art are often triggered by private events. Sarà dolce tacere (1960), for example, was written on the occasion of the 40th birthday of Bruno Maderna, Nono's (former) teacher and close friend; and also in 1960 Nono wrote Ha venido for his daughter's first birthday. Djamila Boupachà (1962), ¿Dónde estás, hermano? (1982) and Quando stanno morendo (1982), on the other hand, are clearly expressions attributable to the politically involved, the committed cosmopolitan Nono.

"All my works always start out from a human incentive: an event, an experience, a text in our lives leads to my instinct and my conscience and wants me to bear witness, as a musician and as a man." This is how Nono, in 1960, described his motivation as a composer, the incentive inducing him to speak up through his music. His opus 1, the Canonic variations on the series of op. 41 by Arnold Schönberg, is based on the twelve-tone series used in Schönberg's composition; it actually takes effect in t…

Researching into the fringe ranges of hearing, and actually going to the limits: electronics – live or prerecorded – was one of the tools employed by Luigi Nono in pursuance of this object. In his work Das atmende Klarsein he moreover endeavored to expand the ability of listening: "Waking up the ear, the eyes, human understanding, intelligence, is what is essential today," the composer, also a politically aware man, observed in the early 1980s. Das atmende Klarsein "is a key work of Nono's final…

MY CAT IS AN ALIEN is the improv duo formed by the brothers MAURIZIO and ROBERTO OPALIO from Torino, Italy, in late 1997. They both primarily play electric and acoustic guitars, various toy-instruments and voice toy-microphones, percussions.

Original copy, the title of Scelsi's song cycle possibly refers to the fact that the sign of the Capricorn corresponds with an area of the Earth stretching from India to South America and includes, most significantly, the Amazon. The Amazon, as Scelsi noted, is a place where a pre-historic human culture survives. Scelsi's Songs (19) of the Capricorn, reduce the concept of "song" to poetically loaded vocal utterances imaginatively recalling the conditions of music and language in humankind's dist…

Giacinto Scelsi’s relationship with the piano is interesting and contradictory. For no other instrument has the Italian composer and poet composed so many pieces; to no other instrument does he seem so closely attached, both personally and biographically; and no other instrument disappeared so abruptly and finally from his scores as the piano, the European showcase instrument. With the piano, we can follow the break lines and develop-ments in the musical thinking and works of Giacinto Scelsi, wh…