n 2018 Mikroton Mikroten Festival offered a special occasion to record five important musicians from the Swiss experimental music scene.
Joke Lanz was born in Basel in 1965 and now lives in Berlin. He is a pioneer of the electronic independent scene and a crossover artist whose work spans improvised and experimental music, noise and turntablism, performance art and musique concrète. In addition to theatre and film music, radio works, installations and objects, there are two constants in his work…
It took 15 years since its foundation to release their first album. Sink was formed in Berlin in 2004. Though their music is improvised, Sink play, perform, sound and feel as a band with a distinct band sound. Their sound ranges from typically Berlin Echtzeitmusik related mixed electroacoustic and acoustic soundscapes which can, but need not, result in a minimalistic groove. Sink already appeared on “Echtzeitmusik Berlin” compilation we produced in 2012.
Andrea Ermke is a sound artist from the s…
The story of the making of the album was complicated, almost mythological. Instead of retelling the original story we give a word to Federsel, the initiator of the project:
It all began in 2002, or it might have been also in 2001, I don’t remember anymore. For whatever reason, I had an idea to remix songs of Czech country hero Wabi Daněk, who’s music I remembered from my childhood, from singing around the fireplace. I thought this will be some sort of funny game for me, with which I will spend f…
The science fiction yearning for utopia sometimes falls into dystopian space. Kurt Liedwart with Ken Ganfield and Petr Vrba tried to follow the impulse of getting to the ideal world but their most powerful and fearful predictions and prophesies came to the fore and “Something Wrong There” happened all the time. Liedwart recently became dissatisfied with the improvisation’s disability to create sonically fresh sound worlds and completely remixed the studio recordings. Did it prevent him from maki…
Petr Vrba explores non-idiomatic improvisation using trumpets, clarinets, vibrating speakers and other electronics which made him one of the most active experimental musicians in Prague. He works with a lot of projects like Prague Improvisation Orchestra, Poisonous Frequencies, NOIZ, Doppeltrio, Rouilleux and Junk & The Beast. “Punkt” is his second release on Mikroton following “Trailer” with Veronika Mayer released in 2017.
Kurt Liedwart, a Moscow-based musician and curator of Mikroton Recordin…
On their new album Third Issue Trio Sowari continues its musical investigation of asymmetric structures and multilayered ambiguities. Gravitation, Suspension, Exploration and finally Levitation, the four tracks on this CD present different fields of interactive possibilities. No signs of dystopianism or retrotopianism here, but undaunted and spirited ways of facing a complex and bewildering present. Bertrand Denzler on tenor saxophone, Burkhard Beins on percussion with Phil Durrant now also invo…
Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler have been known for building their sonic worlds for 17 years since their first album Bart. After 6 years of studio silence, here comes Neue Bilder. Their 5th allbum is a constant flux of musical juxtapositions, collisions and balance of their tour de force with analogue synth and computer. The album features two tracks created from two concentrated performances in Münster and Wels, both being magnificently reworked stereo versions of their quadrophonic live conc…
The second appearance of Alfredo Costa Monteiro after critically acclaimed Contour with Keith Rowe, Kurt Liedwart and Ilia Belorukov, and the first physical release of Miguel A. Garcia after Uropygi with Kurt Liedwart, Ilia Belorukov and Dmitry Krotevich on Mikroton Digital.
The album is titled after “Aq’ab’al”, the Mayan Astrology Sign about polar opposites — dawn and dusk, hot and cold, black and white which represents renewal, change, the end of boredom or new beginnings. The album takes off …
In October of 2014 Fracture Mechanics traveled to Ljubljana to play and record. The recording at Radio Student involved the transubstantiation of base liquids into nectar and thence by an alchemical process into music.
Fracture Mechanics, the scientific study of cracks in any form of material, is a well-chosen metaphor for the examination of music, sounds, shapes and their breaking points. The fact that this has given the word "fracture" a slight semantic degrading is of particular importance. E…
The Holy Quintet is a new group in Mikroton family with only one artist, namely Johnny Chang, appearing before on Echtzeitmusik Berlin compilation in 2012.
Borough documents the singular meeting of Johnny Chang, Jamie Drouin, Dominic Lash, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, and David Ryan. The group was assembled by Simon Reynell for a one-off recording session at the Borough Welsh Congregational Chapel on February 15, 2013, taking advantage of Chang and Drouin simultaneously being in London for an i…
Mikroton Recordings is proud to present a full length release from three masters of quiet sound. Martin Taxt is a Norwegian musican who plays tuba and runs Sofa label, Andrey Popovskiy hails from Saint Petersburg and plays violin with objects, Kurt Liedwart plays ppooll using mostly sinewaves and quiet noises and one can notice his current transition to a more noise oriented sound.
"Hjem" is a joint adventure of constructing the soundscapes of mysterious clouds of harmonic and microtonal sounds.…
Their music generates a hypnotic atmosphere out of musical atoms: sine waves, noise and clicks. Very pure, very fragile, beautifully restrained, creating abstract spaces and voids of many dimensions. Both perform on ppooll, a freeware-project driven by Klaus Filip with contributions from various users, including Noid. The instruments they use for Ease are very much tailored to their needs, but freely available to anyone.
Klaus Filip's sine wave synth and 2D interface is a result of a more that 2…
Jason Kahn, Günter Müller and Norbert Möslang, all from Switzerland, comprise MKM trio, spontaneously founded in 2006 in Tokyo during their Japanese tour. They immediately achieved very fine results and collaborate since then. Their sound hovers between the at times harsh rhythmic noise of Norbert Möslang’s cracked everyday electronics and the rich sonorities of Günter Müller’s percussion-based samples and electronics. Jason Kahn’s work on analog synthesizer bridges these two worlds, adding high…
The Splitter Orchester is a Berlin-based collection of internationally respected Composer-Performers which draws inspiration from many genres and is most comfortable in the creative borderland between composed and improvised music. It is a defiant musical organism that has developed an extraordinary artistic profile - uniting across continents, generations and aesthetics. Utilising a broad variety of extended techniques on traditional, electronic, and especially constructed and tailored instrume…
“…for it feels like being overwhelmed by an external force, entering an alien world, but full of glorioles, and this doesn’t happen anytime but dependent on specific preconditions, and it takes a special nature glowing from inside, that’s that. A strange occurrence breaking off the everyday chest, and it is a copulation of mind, an excess, a secret…” - Friederike Mayröcker. Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling.
A veritable mind excitement is taking place when Tamara Wilhelm, Kazuhisa Uchihashi and …
Can you say something about a quartet for guitars?
Hmm. Where to start?
Well let’s start with why “Affetuoso e sostenuto”? And what about those track tittles: “Ineptitude”, “Awkward”, “Gaucheness”, “Underwhelm” and “Failing”?
Google “Affetuoso e sostenuto” and probably a reference to Haydn will appear on the screen, a nine minute section from his String Quartet Op. 20. No. 1 ( the third movement). For the musicians on this recording after an examination of the score their very first instruction …
The first Mikroton release featuring Russian musicians Ilia Belorukov, a saxophonist from Saint-Petersburg, and Kurt Liedwart, an electronic and computer musician from Moscow who also runs the label. It’s their second longplaying work following Obwod which was released on Copy For Your Records. On the new CD the duo goes even further into the realm of unknown contriving to work with silence, space and chance with their traditional means like sinewaves and saxophone’s long tones. Saxophone prepar…
Ten years ago, a week before Christmas in 2002, Teruto Soejima, a Japanese experimental/avant-garde music critic, organized a festival at a small live venue called Knuttel House, located in the east side of Tokyo. Named as “Independent Underground Music Festival”, it was held with the following message by Mr. Soejima:
“Today in the advanced improvised music scene, new artists keep coming up one after another. In there, free jazz, contemporary music, techno, prog, traditional music, experimental …
Over three decades Jason Kahn developed his unique sonic language, now exploring the interaction between sound and space using a compact setup of percussion and analog synthesizer. He has performed and recorded albums with Günter Müller, Norbert Möslang, Kim Cascone, Arnold Dreyblatt, Steve Roden, Dieb13, Richard Francis, Ryu Hankil, Jon Mueller and many others. He ran his own Cut label from 1997 to 2008, releasing 25 albums.
Asher is one the most interesting new composers in the United States, …
* Edition of 300 * Dark Ballads is the obvious title of this LP, as if this music pre-existed the duo that, without any other choice, was formed around it. Since then, Giotis Damianidis and Audrey Lauro have continued to advance along this straight line that runs through their inner landscapes.
Their music creates a "stretched" emotional space, which evolves in slow motion and captures the fragility of the tone, the tension of the path. Each stage of the record is a mineral evocation of the inti…
* LP on black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty tip-on Stoughton jacket, with insert. * In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians …
* LP in black vinyl, includes a duotone printed insert and set of three postcards * Faraway Press, presents Skagafjörður by Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk. Soundtrack to the silent film ‘Skagafjörður’ by Peter Hutton. Originally released on cassette by B.A.A.D.M. Recorded as part of ‘Night of Experimental Film’ event in Ghent, Belgium, 2018 that also saw screenings of Derek Jarman’s ‘The Angelic Conversation’ and performance by Tom James Scott, the recording captures the quintessence of Chalk and…
Azumah was the coming together of a group of talented young dancer-musicians from Soweto (South Africa) with musician and instrument-maker Smiles Mandla Makama of eSwatini (formerly Swaziland). Long Time Ago is the surprising and enticing, resultant album from 1985, recorded in the house of theatre stalwarts Des and Dawn Lindberg in Johannesburg. Produced by David Marks (3rd Ear Music, Hidden Years Music Archive Project), Des Lindberg and Smiles Makama, this album takes us back to a priceless mu…
* 2021 Stock * Musician, composer and one of the most revered figures for today’s younger generation of experimental and alternative Arabic music-scenes, Kamilya Jubran (text, oud & vocals, collaborates with long standing musical partner, composer, accomplished trumpet player and seasoned electronic musician Werner Hasler (trumpet & electronics).
In Wa (Arabic for and), their third album together as a duo, Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler continue to interrogate their listening and their express…
* Blue Version * Growing up in deindustrialized Providence, Rhode Island of the 1970s and 1980s provided NYC-based composer and interdisciplinary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom access to derelict subterranean spaces including the mile-long East Side Rail Tunnel. The tunnel's reverberant darkness would produce distinctive sensory effects and host Russom's formative experiences of interpersonal connectedness, liminality, transgender identity, anti-capitalist desire and state repression.Secret Passage…
Studio Mule open the roster towards sophisticated spiritual sounds on the crossroads of electrified jazz, oriental fourth-world spheres and deeply composed experimental sounds. This time, the label welcomes Japanese artist Ya-Sukazu Sato, aka Yas-Kaz, a university-trained percussionist, that gained global success as a composer for the internationally known Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku which has toured the world since 1975. His infrequent musical amalgamation of ancient Eastern genres, airy sou…
Much needed repress. **Never-before released document of Don Cherry blowing cool fire in Rome, 1976. First official release. Mastered from the original master tapes. CD version** An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical bel…
300 copies. NoBusiness presents Irvin's Comet, a new set of solo bass recordings by Barry Guy, recorded 29th October, 2019 during Improdimensija (Improdimension) concert series dedicated to improvised music, located at MAMAstudios, Vilnius, Lithuania. Sound Engineer - Arūnas Zujus. Mixed and mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Original artwork - Albert Irvin, Comet, 1988 / Screenprint with woodblock, edition of 75, Advanced Graphics, London. Design by Oskaras Anosovas.
* German Edition. 2020 Stock * Radio, which developed over the course of the 20th century into a crucial form of communication, is currently undergoing processes of fundamental reorganization under the general heading »digitalization.« When considered under the older term »radiophonics,« these processes unleash conceptual possibilities that surpass the simple scheme of economization or the acceleration of production- or broadcasting-forms. These conceptual possibilities are addressed by the exhi…
* Edition of 100. Housed in high quality folded card stock Silk Screened. * Spit-tested veterans of frontal-lobe extermination, Key of Shame’s Pat Murano (Decimus, NNCK) and Mark Morgan (Sightings) discharge focused algorithms of unease and decay in split-second intervals on their third LP, Threnody for Judas Iscariot. A sly codicil of dim textures and gestalt arpeggios, Judas Iscariot shudders itself open and stays gaping, bum notes skittering and splitting out of the electronic backwash like e…
Wayfinding is Christopher Bissonnette's sixth solo studio release and his first, of hopefully many, for 12k. The album embodies an evolution of Bissonnette's work, moving from an exclusively synth-based series of explorations to an amalgam of electronics and acoustic methods. Each track seeks to find grandeur on a diminutive scale. Bissonnette's focus has shifted from sweeping pastoral drones to introspective passages with delicate melody and elusive harmonies interlaced with studio and field re…
Limited 2 LP edition. "Alter-" is Automatisme's reaction to altermodernism in sound art. "For the Automatisme - Alter- album. I am inspired by how the art historian Nicolas Bourriaud defines the Altermodernism. Bourriaud understands the term "Alter" as a way to mean "other". The altermodernism would be another modernity that is different from the avant-garde modernism and post-modernism. More precisely, this is a new paradigm from the XXIe century with alternative ways to motivate artists to be…
The nine-track Plus comes just 12 days after Sean Booth and Rob Brown released Sign, their first "traditional"-format album since 2013's Exai. This is the second of two new albums that Autechre teased in their lockdown live-stream sessions on Mixlr earlier this year, in addition to their latest batch of live recordings. You might call Sign Autechre's ambient album. The percussive sounds are few and far between, and they create rhythms that are even less legible than the norm for recent Autechre—…
**Edition of 200 copies** Pentiments is honored to present the first vinyl-format offering of the work of long-time film, theater and sound art figure Arsenije Jovanović, born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1932, has been working in experimental media since the 1960s, beginning his career as a producer and director of theater and TV and eventually going on to produce several award-winning radio dramas in the 1970s whose approach to the use of sound as experiential narrative material has since become a …
** Limited Blue Translucent Vinyl ** Ned Lagin's Seastones is a pioneering electronic composition interweaving metaphors from nature, science, art and music and the origins of music. Reflecting the technology, science, modern art, new ecological awareness and optimism of the times and culture, Seastones embodies the history of electronic music by taking full advantage of tape music, analog synthesizers, and computer technology to create pieces that are dynamic, rich, and deep.
Originally release…
Videosphere, the debut album by Kompakt’s latest signing, the London-based artist Lake Turner (aka Andrew Halford), swoons into focus with “The Sunbird”, a teasing drift of lilting, ambient tones, riding out a submerged piston-pulse rhythm. Across its brief 109 seconds, it manages to traverse evocative terrain – something mythopoetic, something both humble and grandiose, a glimpse of the other behind the sky’s curtain. “I wanted to conjure up something resembling an ancient ceremony or death pro…
* White-marbled Vinyl * Retro future past explorer. Ultraromance, hazy desire, a whiff of nostalgia. Excitement, confusion, and disenchantment. Internalization leads to alienation. And the cognition that everything can turn into a straight up joke after a while. So relax and implode… The second full-length album of Berlin musician and futurologist André Uhl invites the listener to a sonic adventure with high emotional impact. Eleven songs are carefully crafted like sculptures in a swampy landsca…
A unique collaboration, Just a Little Piece of Me / Dream Journal (for Udo) unites Swiss analog explorer Papiro and legendary psych innovator Sonic Boom for a mesmerizing 7" of dreamy textures and experimental pop.
Sergio Zevallos, a Peruvian artist based in Berlin, has been active since the 1980s, when he was a member of the Chaclacayo Group, one of the most radical artist collectives in Peru, dedicated to performance art. Since then, Zevallos has been interested in composing his own soundtracks, writing scores with invented notation, working with recitation of texts and recordings of people talking, elements that he later used as raw material for his compositions.
Zevallos' work has been developed in a m…
In support of their forthcoming Bob Moog documentary Electronic Voyager, Waveshaper Media have produced a compilation LP of Moog recordings from the 1960s. The first compilation of its kind, Electronic Voyages: Early Moog recordings 1964-1969 contains tracks by Robert Arthur Moog, Herbert Deutsch, Joel Chadabe, Lothar and the Hand People, Intersystems, Ruth White, Max Brand, and Paul Earls. All of these tracks, released here on vinyl in an edition of 1000 copies, have been scarcely heard and dif…