** Limited edition of 60. It comes with a nice insert * A 90 minute very spirited and informal reading at the Tagine Restaurant, NYC by Ira with musical accompinament, sitars and the like. Ira Cohen (February 3, 1935 – April 25, 2011) was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker. Ira Cohen was born to deaf parents and instead of just developing speech, began developing his vision early, learning to spell with his fingers. In 1961 he took a Yugoslavian freighter to Tangiers where h…
New tape from Michael Mørkholt, made during his winter residency at Polychrome. "Naturspil, Automatmusik, Syngeskål". The pieces are performed on an acoustic singing bowl and a self-invented digital system, an electroacoustic composition principle for triads and rhythm in pure atmosphere. The principle is that the tonal relationships are mirrored in the rhythmic. A computer program with an amplitude-controlled trigger records a sound clip each time the singing bowl is struck. The sound clip is d…
Tip! 'Frijazz mot rasisme' or ‘Free Jazz Against Racism’, as you may have guessed, is a compilation of Norwegian contemporary and outsider music. There’s plenty to get your teeth stuck into here. Highlights include Sanskriti Shrestha & Andreas Wildhagen cut a percussive groove, there’s the strange processed sounds of Propan and the subversive Agnes Hvizdalek.
Stitched and compiled by Anja Lauvdal and Tine Hvidsten, the set features 18 outsider Jazz burners centered around a varied and diverse ca…
Australian born, Sweden based artist John Chantler returns to Room40 with his fifth solo edition. Tomorrow Is Too Late was commissioned by INA GRM for their Présences Électronique festival in 2018 and sees Chantler significantly expand the horizons of his acoustic palette. Moving from subtle microtonal movements to passages of intense harmonic saturation, Tomorrow Is Too Late is his most dynamic work to date. A powerhouse of reductive intensity that bares witness to Chantler’s uncompromising son…
*300 copies limited edition* SOL OP is based on a collective composition for unconventional pipe organs made by the three Danish composers and musicians Jonas Olesen, Anders Lauge Meldgaard and Sandra Boss. On three mobile, midified and modified pipe organs,the trio has constructed a musical universe inhabited by animals, humans and machines. SOL OP is based upon an exploration of the organs' more alternative sonic features. Incorporating the full instrument in the compositions – including the a…
Tip! If there is a single feature that makes the context of experimental music so exciting, it is arguably the willingness of artists to freely converse and collaborate. This is made all that much more thrilling when it transpires across the generations. The first LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch is one such case - two heavyweights, often occupying very different positions in the musical landscape, with births separated by decades, finding common ground and voice. Neither Sarah Davachi or Ariel …
Castles in Space is thrilled to present a timely new album from Keith Seatman - his first “extraordinary adventure” since 2020’s “Time To Dream But Never Seen”. “Sad Old Tatty Bunting” is another multi layered, deeply psychedelic construction which contains collaborations with Jim Jupp (Ghost Box, Belbury Poly) and Douglas E. Powell (Broken Folk).
Tip! Objetos Musicais is a collection of 13 sound pieces created by artists from South America and Switzerland, who work in an intermediate zone among the craft of luthiers, visual arts and experimental music. Their works evoke the visionary ideas of Walter Smetak, a Swiss composer who lived in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil). Smetak was a pioneer of musical experimentation in that country and developed, in the 60s and 70s, a musical poetics that was captured in two seminal albums, Smetak (1974) and In…
** Edition of 300 copies ** Since a few years Alessandro Bosetti has been collecting voices that become part of the Plane/Talea archive. The creation of the archive stems from dozens of individual meetings and recording sessions, in which each voice is detached from its owner or originator and anonymized. With each new iteration and performance, Bosetti plays the archive as if it were an instrument. He searches for hidden details and correspondences through exploration, immersion and contemplati…
The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks…
Richard Fearless follows his critically acclaimed psycho-geographical techno masterpiece ‘Deep Rave Memory’ with its companion album ‘Future Rave Memory’. Across titanium kosmische, industrial ambience, weightless acid and dark drone, this new record is an instrument of evocative wonder and heavy emotion. A dystopian ambient album and work of modernist meditation set firmly in an era when humanity is reckoning with its outsized place in the natural world, a process which may evoke humility, defi…
Following the odd album of the century, "Let me tell you all about Abayo!" 2 CDs of unreleased material by Koichiro Watanabe from 1977 and the early 1980s!
Francesco Messina is perhaps best known for his collaboration with fellow composer Raul Lovisoni on the album Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, originally released on seminal Italian label Cramps in 1979. Along with contemporaries Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca and Giusto Pio, Messina would help reshape the world of modern composition with an organic rawness and haunting beauty.In 1979, Messina was asked to perform at the Teatro Quartiere in Milan. As the composer writes in the liner notes, "Due…
From the meeting of the legendary Tsugaru Jamisen maestro Chisato Yamada with volcanic mind of the composer Tasheshi Terauchi and his Oriental Fantastic Orchestra, a collaboration and a unique record, a conceptual work, is born in which innovative songs transcend the boundaries of traditional music by mixing modernity, rural and electronic atmospheres, local arias and contemporary music. A record with strongly evocative and cinematic sounds. Comes with obi and a two-panel fold out sheet with ori…
Fernweh is the new tape by Danilo Ligato. Danilo Ligato is an Italian sound artist, musician and composer
Fernweh it’s passing musicFernweh it’s passing musicFernweh it’s walking musicFernweh it’s the noise of my memories Fernweh it’s the flaking of surfacesFernweh it’s a mysterious distant light Fernweh it’s the search for an intimate stillness Fernweh it’s a long nocturnal hugFernweh is it the nostalgia of the distance Fernweh it’s a fight in defense of silenceFernweh it’s a deep and shared sl…
Hannah Zhalih Mickunas is a multidisciplinary artist currently living on the Northern California coast. After a first album recorded for eilean rec. in 2018, she comes back 3 years later on Laaps with her second LP, "They Call".
"It’s not my normal Sunday morning post-liturgy music, but there is a gloriously horrendous feel to it, marking in some way, a societal collapse we all seem to be witnessing worldwide." - Music You Need To Hear
Overview 'On Zone 7 New York artist Christina Giannone creates sound worlds that act as portals to the interiority of our lived experiences. These portals appear like shimmering nebula, distant but compelling, calling our attention and sparking us to reach out towards them. Through a series of drifting passages her record maps out a possible trajectory into the recesses of our often under explored subconscious. This is not a didactic music, rather it is invitational and maintains a constant flow…
Notes from Steve Roden on Oionos :'Oionos was created for the exhibition The Grand Promenade, in Athens, Greece. The exhibition took place in various archaeological and historical sites in central Athens, creating a situation for contemporary site specific works to be in dialogue with their historical surroundings. While it was not originally offered as a possible site, I pleaded with the curator to allow me to work with architect Dimitris Pikionis’s Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis, abo…
Melbourne based percussionist and composer Maria Moles charts out an electro-acoustic familial history with 'For Leolanda’. Drawing on family roots in The Philippines, she extrapolates rhythm and timbre from the diverse musics of that country and interweaves them with percussion, synthesizer and singing bowls. Her sonic meditations are open and generous, and they chart out the shape and pulse of memory; both real and imagined. Each piece tests for the relationships between frequency and harmony,…
Despite the Covid-19 outbreak disrupting promotional and concert plans of the band Błoto, the three pressings of the debut album ‘Erozje’ have quickly sold out. Instead of leaving fans with old (recorded in 2018) material, the quartet decided to build the momentum and release the second album in 2020, entitled ‘Kwiatostan’ (‘Inflorescence’).
Spunky wave kraut from early ‘80s Germany, portraying the sound of the country’s first proper youth movement, with Conrad Schnitzler, Der Plan, Palais Schaumburg, Asmus Tietchens, Holger Hiller, Populäre Mechanik and many more
"I made the basic recordings of Tim Goss's voice during a recent return trip to England. Despite some initial reservations Tim ended up giving an animated and robust reading, drawn exclusively from work of his own creation. These tapes were then transported back to Poughkeepsie, NY, where the project was teased to completion." (Original LP sleeve notes)
A study in anticipation, Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye, 2009) repurposes the expectant rumblings of an audience-in-waiting, lifted by Graham Lambkin from various concert recordings of the German kosmische band Tangerine Dream. These bootlegged clips provide a skeleton for various sonic scraps and interludes—including distorted and abandoned fragments from Lambkin’s archive, new recordings on guitar and violin by Austin Argentieri and Samara Lubelski, respectively—that, together, form a compositio…
Al Doum and the Faryds continue their journey toward a New Direction. Now, they live in a futuristic Garden of Delights, inhabited by strange bright bubbles, golden wheels, water secrets and mysterious plants. From their home of Love & Nature, they set out to travel the Universe to forge a new Being together. Their typical blend of Spiritual-Jazz, Psychedelia and Afro-Latin Rock remains on the same wave, accentuating the collective rite of liberation and expansion of the spirit. There's certainl…
**Natural vinyl with exclusive RISO reproductions of Pamela Z posters from the 1980s / 1990s. Print set includes four 8.5x11" prints in a stamped envelope, hand-assembled in Brooklyn** "Echolocation is the debut album by Pamela Z, the pioneering Bay Area intermedia composer and performance artist. Written and recorded over three years, and self-released and distributed on cassette in 1988, Echolocation is a genre-defying document of Z’s earliest experiments with live voice and delay, and the imp…
* Edition of 300, hand-humbered + Obi * I've Had It up to Hear with Fish & Chips by Ben Ellul-Knight and Tom White is a hörspiel about 'care work' of all kinds. In part it is auto-ethnographic, as it draws on Ben's experience working as a play worker, social worker and as a volunteer with refugee and asylum-seeker support services. More personal reflections are mixed with conversations Ben had with support workers, social workers, play workers and mental health nurses to form a script. Different…
New album by the the Hague-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Lyckle de Jong "This album is titled Os. When I look at the shape of these two letters, O and S, I realize that they are a rotation and an oscillation. Os is Dutch for Ox. An ox is a castrated male bull. The primary benefit of castrating bull calves is to temper their tempers, making it easier and cheaper for people to handle them. Os is also an abbreviation of oscillation, -cillation being castrated off. Oscillation means a …
* Limited edition 160-gram *Adobe Dust* color vinyl LP (pressed by Smashed Plastic in Chicago) in a heavyweight matte jacket with IARC obi strip and dome-patterned inner-sleeve * Songs of resistance and gratitude in a Latin pop mode from Chicago’s Dos Santos, one of the longest running groups on International Anthem Recording Company. Vintage-sounding, but polished to modern tastes, ‘City Of Mirrors’ feature the septet playing to their latin heritage in a style that will appeal to all members o…
Originally created in 1977 as a single handmade copy, Dara Birnbaum’s Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With) gathers writings, working drawings, photographic documentation, and ephemera from the artist’s earliest video and installation works. The publication was originally produced by Birnbaum and exhibited in Notebooks, Workbooks, Scripts, and Scores at Franklin Furnace in 1977. The book’s vinyl cover and section dividers, hand-folded pages, and color images have…
Uman’s Chaleur Humaine, the debut album from the French duo of musicians and siblings Danielle and Didier Jean, resurfaces for the first time since its original release in 1992. While history, both private and public, is scattered with creative relationships between siblings that simply “did not work,” Uman’s story is uniquely different and defined by this bond, and a shared journey impressing footprints along an adventurous musical terrain. Prior to Chaleur Humaine, Danielle and Didier recorde…
Edition of 200 copies. Screen-printed sleeve. Borrowing its title from a verse contained in the Man'yōshū poems, Mani Mani is the recording of the performance held by Pierre Berthet and Rie Nakajima under their collaborative project Dead Plants and Living Objects at Seanaps Festival 2020 in Leipzig. Water dripping in resonant buckets, riverberating rocks, small bowls, self-crafted engines and mobiles: the acoustic gestures of Berthet and Nakajima set into motion an heterogeneous ensemble of soun…
* Hardcover 16,5 x 23 cm 288 pages 67 color and b/w illustrations. German & French * The publication accompanying the eponymous exhibition brings together works by more than 20 international artists that focus on the encounter of multiple voices and sounds. Polyphone deals with perceptual aspects, as well as with the socio-cultural and political dimensions of polyphony. Here, polyphony refers to both the musical term and the linguistic definition according to Mikhail Bakhtin, who points to the a…
* Edition of 70 copies * Blending several musical traditions as western music, Chinese classical music, Finnish folk music, Carnatic music and much more Li Daiguo creates an extended sound world with a variety of instruments as pipa, erhu, ethnic flutes, shona mbira, violin, viola, cello, overtone singing and lots more pushing their sonic capabilities into uncharted territory
**100 copies** in Pat Murano's words: in 2014, I lost my way. The path that I confidently strode my entire adult life was abruptly lost to a chaotic bramble of sadness, doubt and loss. After a few years of being truly unable to engage with my music, I began a new practice. The idea was to immerse myself in the surrounding incidental environmental sounds, beginning my music there. In retrospect, I can now fully appreciate why this appealed to me so deeply. This ritual was an attempt to attune mys…
* Edition of 100. Housed in High Quality folded card stock silk screened * The Obelisk I imagined a movie. The movie, made in 2029, begins as Two Lovers drive through an unending forest — already we are disoriented — Germany? Russia? The Ozarks? And then a crash. They find their way to The Obelisk — a walled asylum built on the edge of the Black Sun. The doctors here are in fact Psychotronic Biologists; the inmates are tunnels to the edge-of-the-cosmos source of witchcraft, despair, and power. T…
** Small repress **Live and direct from Balombo City, capital of Bolombia, a land of milk and honey in between the scorching stomping South and the glacial abstract North: Maistah Aphrica are back on track! The word has spread in the Bolombian nation: everyone who knows they are returned is shouting De balombo!” (so cool), “El secondo xe Meow!” (the 2nd is better), they answer back. Maistah Aphrica (never been to Aphrica, in their own Bolombian slang) celebrate again Cultura de Bolombia: the nat…
Last copies The soundtrack for Aki Onda's the first major solo exhibition "A Letter from Souls of The Dead" at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) from July 10 – September 4, 2021. Commissioned by PICA and curated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art, this exhibition will feature collections of found objects such as bells, surplus electronics, photographs, and old-fashioned slide projections.
The soundtrack for this exhibition was composed by Onda in collab…
* Matte laminated and embossed CD with insert card plus extensive book featuring an in conversation between Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, plus scores, documentation and photographs. * ctive action has incorporated itself into an imagining of how we might reshape our understanding of community.” The translation of the visual into the acoustic is a powerfully esoteric practice. For Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, this nexus of sensory curiosity has provided a perfect point from which they have maint…
* Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, printed in monochrome with a full colour artist edition fold out poster featuring the photographic work of Joel Westendorf * On Jubilee, Los Angeles based artist Robert Takahashi Crouch conjures a profoundly personal vibrational landscape. The edition, which is a mediation on, and suture for experiences of conflict and violence, Jubilee merges longform low-frequency drone work against a reductive sense of harmony. It is a record of hushed intensity, punctu…