Music from United States

Following the 2016 tape edition of American Zen, Lee Bannon aka Dedekind Cut links with Hospital Productions for an expanded new vinyl edition clasping a sublime bonus single collab with Alex Zhang Hungtai, who’s better known for his maudlin pop bewts as Dirty Beaches. If you like your ambient music intangible and synaesthetically olfactory, huffable, you’re encouraged to check this one without delay...American Zen finds its centre in quivering, pensive drones and fractured small sounds, but is …

A selection of the most radical impressive works composed by Wayne Siegel when he was mid-twenties. Moved to Denmark, between 1979 and 1980, he began to investigate possibilities of a very personal language, contributing to mould the heterogeneous kaleidoscope of Post-Minimalism results. The early works are constructed around a relentless musical process that consists of delaying and repeating every element in a certain measure, without intentional alteration. Siegel called this process canon te…

Beacon Sound present a reissue of Terry Riley's Songs For The Ten Voices Of The Two Prophets, originally released in 1983. Recorded live in Munich in 1982 using two Prophet synthesizers and voice, this album is a reflection of Riley's ongoing interest in melding improvisation, electronic music, and the raga vocal stylings of his mentor, Pandit Pran Nath. Terry Riley turned the music world upside down with his 1964 work In C, a revolutionary concept based on 53 modules that can be improvised upon…

2016 release. Dominions is the second full-length release from Canadian electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi, following 2015’s Barons Court. A slightly more demure approach is at work here, shifting from the brooding textures of her previous work to softer tones and more delicate movements in structure, as in side openers ‘feeler’ and ‘ordinal’. Recorded primarily at her home base in Vancouver, Davachi returns with her typical assembly of electronic equipment, mostly consisting of vintage synt…

John Coltrane transformed the inner architecture of jazz throughout the mid-1950s and 1960s and long after his premature death at age 40 in 1967. No other American musician could be said to be at the spiritual center of the '60s musical universe as Trane influenced Albert Ayler, La Monte Young, Jimi Hendrix and everybody in between.Cosmic Music, originally self-released by Alice Coltrane in 1968 and later issued by Impulse!, features two tracks ("Manifestation" and "Rev. King") by John Coltrane'…

Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda self-released four brilliant cassette albums. These contained music, inpired by the gospel music of the Deroit Churches she grew up in, and the Indian devotional music of her religious practice. Originally available only throughh her ashram, they are her most obscure body of work. Turiyasangitananda’s devotion to spirituality was the central purpose of the final four decades of her life, an often-overlooked awakening that largely took shape during her four-year …

"The MP3 Deviation album contains pieces that are results of the collaborative research by a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) and myself, led by Tony Myatt at Music Research Center at the University of York in UK in 2009. My idea was to develop new software based on the disruption of the MP3. Primarily I thought the MP3 as a reproducing device could have created a very new sound by intervention between its main elements, the compression encoder and decoder. It turned ou…

Simultonality is the follow-up to Joshua Abrams's critically acclaimed 2015 album Magnetoception (MTE 063-64LP, 2015). Credited to Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society (NIS), it is the first recording in the project's nine year, four album history made by a regularly gigging manifestation, rather than a special assembly of friends. Recorded in 2014 and 2015 in single takes by the full ensemble during and after tours of the US and Canada, Simultonality once more affirms the project's …

A reissue of Robbie Basho's The Grail & The Lotus, originally released in 1966. It's become an oft-quoted statement that John Coltrane was the Father, Pharaoh Sanders was the Son, and Albert Ayler, the Holy Ghost. It could arguably apply to the holy trinity of steel string guitarists as well. Many claim John Fahey to be the Father, Kottke was considered the Son, and Robbie Basho would certainly be considered the Holy Ghost. The Basho/Ayler similarities are many, and both pushed their idioms furt…

A reissue of Robbie Basho's Basho Sings, originally released in 1967. It's become an oft-quoted statement that John Coltrane was the Father, Pharaoh Sanders was the Son, and Albert Ayler, the Holy Ghost. It could arguably apply to the holy trinity of steel string guitarists as well. Many claim John Fahey to be the Father, Kottke was considered the Son, and Robbie Basho would certainly be considered the Holy Ghost. The Basho/Ayler similarities are many, and both pushed their idioms further physic…

Sun Ra is still trying to get our attention 50 years after dispatching this transmission. Humanity’s path since then makes his message even more urgent today. Years after Herman Poole “LeSony’r Ra” Blount “left the planet” he’s still trying to reach us, to wake us up and to change our destiny.Sun Ra and the Arkestra weren’t a traditional studio band, and every star in the vast galaxy of their discography reflects this. The origins of these records can be hard to pinpoint at times, but when it co…

Temporary Super Offer! Reaching a near-mythical status amongst fans of free jazz's most worldly intrepid explorer, these seldom heard Paris soundtrack sessions known as Music, Wisdom, Love have evaded collectors' grasps and confused historians for exactly 50 years. Instigated in Paris in 1967 and filmed during Don Cherry's downtime on a visit to the Chat qui Pêche nightclub in March 1967, where he played with Karl Berger, Henri Texier, and Jacques Thollot, the bulk of this cinematic portrait was…

A beautiful live representation of the energy of the Bitches Brew years – one that has Miles Davis and the group really letting loose with free-flowing, modally-inspired lines – cooking up an incredible blend of acoustic and electric sounds at once! There's a bit of funk here, but not much – and although guitar is sometimes used strongly, it's often not as noisy as in later live sides. Instead, the whole group gels together beautifully – an unlikely assortment of players that includes G…

2015 release. "Barons Court" is the debut full length album by Canadian electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi, following short run releases on Important Records’ Cassauna imprint and Full Spectrum. Trained at Mills College, Davachi’s work marries an academic approach to synthesis and live instrumentation with a preternatural attunement to timbre, pacing, and atmosphere. While the record employs a number of vintage and legendary synthesizers, including Buchla’s 200 and Music Easel, an EMS …

All My Circles Run is the fourth full length release by Montreal-based electro-acoustic composer Sarah Davachi and her second outing for Students of Decay. In a move which may surprise followers of her previous output, the five compositions on this record eschew synthesizer entirely, each focusing on a different instrument, including strings, voice, organ and piano. What remains consistent however is the striking attention to detail and commitment to investigating tonal possibility that c…

A rare and unique meeting of two master musicians, deep and mysterious at times. Recorded on October 27th, 1979 at Centro Jazz St. Louis in Rome, Italy. The musicians are Mal Waldron (percussion) and Johnny Dyani (bass). Limited to only 70 copies, so order fast! "A fantastic pairing of these two ultra-hip musicians – working together in a very open-ended, stretched-out live setting – with maybe an even freer feel than their better-known album together from a few years later! The music is r…

Against the odds of geography - continuously coming together within various collaborations and combinations of the three, Giovanni Di Domenico, Jim O'Rourke, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto have begun to assemble one of the most exciting bodies of organized sound to have appeared in recent years. The trio’s second outing under the moniker Delivery Health is no exception to the rule. Recorded in Tokyo between 2012 and 2013 and emerging on the ambitious Silent Water imprint, Hard Off sidesteps signifiers and e…

2005 release ** "Great to see this particular title of purely electronic pieces by Lejaren Hiller in the series; we last heard from him via the piece "Vocalise" on Creel Pone #039, "Electronic Music, Experimental Studios In Prague, Bratislava, Munich ..." but this particular collection, specifically including the otherwise unavailable early tape-music piece "Nightmare Music" (1961), gets into an area of his work that veers straight into the same text-and-electronic-sound miasma as such C.P. clas…

Mary Jane Leach (b 1949) explores the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. The use of sound phenomena, however, is only a means to an end, the ultimate goal being musicality. Early music, with its imitative polyphony and modal harmonies, is the primary source of inspiration for the compositions on this disc, four of which are part of an ongoing project focusing on the myth of Ariadne－Ariadne’s Lam…

“I am finally able to say that I write for orchestra— even if I have to make the orchestra myself.” — Robert Ashley Robert Ashley is known primarily for his theater-based pieces and television operas. This new release presents the world premiere recordings of two of his “orchestral” pieces, Superior Seven (concerto for flute), and Tract (for orchestra and voice), where the orchestra is provided by a MIDI synthesizer. In Superior Seven, the flute floats freely in and out of an atmospheric electro…