Electronic Works 3
Until Spring was first conceived in 1975 on the Buchla synthesizer using only analog techniques. “It was about 10 years from Silver Apples to Until Spring,” Subotnick explains, “and I’d evolved a whole concept and a technique, but I had gone as far as I could go with it. I could do everything I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do it in real time.” As computers and software developed in the coming decades, Morton Subotnick created a software-based instrument that he felt could allow him to compl…
GYU
Gatefold double LP version. Tujiko Noriko returns to Editions Mego after a period of relative silence, this time in collaboration with Tyme. (aka Tatsuya Yamada, member of MAS). This album was developed from songs that the duo made once a year at the end and beginning of the new year, for a period of six years. These were sent to friends and people who asked. After six years, there were six tracks and they added five more tracks based on the illustrations of Kimura Toshiko to complete the a…
Strange And Secret Things
Robert Haigh should be a name familiar to more intrepid record buyers of the 1980's. I discovered his EPs on L.A.Y.L.A.H. Anti-Records in the bins of Tower Records, where the label name associated his music with purveyors of sonic perversity such as Nurse With Wound, Organum, Current 93, Coil, and The Hafler Trio. In fact it was in their company that I first heard his music tucked between those very artists on "The Fight Is On" compilation, oddly enough with a solo piano piece. It seemed out …
Ghost of Nakhodka
Here's the cd reissue of a 2009 cassette from the emissary of British dronemusik, Andrew Chalk. That cassette, like this cd version, had been released by the Japanese imprint Siren Records, although it seems that Chalk himself did all of the printing as with all of his Faraway Press productions. So, it certainly looks as lovely as it sounds. The album opens with a 22 minute abstraction of piano tones, smeared, stretched, and warbled by a process that seems more attuned to tape decay techniques t…
Lustwandel
180 gram LP version. The third studio album by Hans-Joachim Roedelius, originally released by Sky Records in 1981, fulfilled a dream he had long cherished. A series of chamber music pieces, with grand piano solos taking center stage in some places, archaised percussion patterns in others. Lustwandel represents a logical progression, following on from Jardin Au Fou (re-released on Bureau B in 2009). Both albums were recorded at Paragon Studios in 1979 and produced by Peter Baumann (Tangerine Drea…
Anchors
Electro-hypnotic levitation, dense and dark perspective that mutate into harsh electronic outbursts by Matteo Castro. A must for fan of Whitehouse and Come, T.G., Monte Cazazza, Metabolists, Conrad Schnitzler
Untitled
Over the past year-and-a-half, the duo of Dexter Brightman and Jair Espinoza have explored abstract electronics in increasingly new and interesting ways. Over the course of numerous tapes on labels such as Avant Archive, Neon Blossom, and others, the duo has combined the ideas of repetition and sound art and continually mutated them into something that is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down. With the recent “Tek No Muzik” 12” on Crazy Iris, mechanized acid was introduced in the mix. It i…
Paper Fault Line
James Rushford and Joe Talia are two of the most exciting musicians active in the Australian experimental scene, engaged in major collaborative projects with figures such as Jon Rose and Oren Ambarchi. On Paper Fault Line, they use strategies from contemporary composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics to create a sensuous and approachable, yet subtly disturbing, 30-minute suite. Eschewing the homogenized sound palette and dynamic conventions of post-GRM musique concrete, the record is str…
L'Enfant Sauvage
Felicia Atkinson is having a very productive 2011. She has released tapes and cd's under her own name and the moniker Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. Currently based in Brussels, Félicia is a French musician, artist & writer who is making an increasing impact in experimental music circles as of late. Her music pieces and drawings are often improvised and inspired by her travels and her night visions. Fans of Grouper, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, and other forestdroners should definitely ch…
Equinox
A warm, filled with rich tones, re-issue of one of the earliest tapes of Charlatan. After the Triangles Lp on his own Digitalis label this is Brad Rose’s second vinyl release under his new solo project moniker. Synthclouds and starchords on a carpet of white hiss. Brad Rose is one of the most active personas in the current adventurous contemporary music scene. As label honcho of Digitalis records / limited and online magazine Foxy Digitalis he’s constantly in search of exciting new gro…
Crystal Anniversary
*Limited to 300 copies. 2022 stock* This split lp sees the man/wife duo of Grant and Rachel Evans performing under their own solo projects. In the past two years they have released a bunch of awesome tapes and cd-rs on their label “Hooker Vision”. They also record and perform as droneduo Quiet Evenings. This record was created to celebrate the crystal anniversary of the couple. And indeed, on both sides Grant and Rachel create sounds which sound like the perfect marriage.
Narrow
Steinbrüchel’s Narrow is an album of reduction and transformation. Like much of Steinbrüchel’s recorded work, the genesis of Narrow stems from a singular idea concerned with the notion of ‘static development’. Working with a limited palette of source material Narrow’s elegance is in its varying perspectives on related sonic materials. The title track is the nexus here - a somewhat more organic sound palette than heard previously in Steinbrüchel’s work - Narrow is a subharmonic oceanic-like compo…
The Oansome Orbit
The Oansome Orbit is the latest work from Australia’s electronic godfather Pimmon (known to friends as Paul Gough). Over the past decade and a half, Pimmon has carved out a unique space for himself amidst through producing a series of masterfully executed excursions into abstract electronic sound. With this new edition, he strikes out at some of his most harmonic territory to date, merging washes of rich tone against irregular grids of texture. The results are wholly individual and utte…
Resolution
Olivia Block makes her label debut, paired with Greg Kelley in his first appearance on Erstwhile since "Forlorn Green", although the overall cast of the session seems more firmly located in her neck of the woods, which is to say very thick and richly layered, possessing a massiveness and spatial volume. She plays a bit of piano here and there (once unfurling a couple of strikingly Tilbury-esque arpeggios, elsewhere within the piano's string-bed) but it's her electronics that predominate, …
Sound non sound 1
"Sound non sound" is a 15 minutes long session of samples, toy beats and synthetic waves that travels back in time to investigate some of the unexplainable mysteries of the recent Italian past, made of disappearing aeroplanes and exploding train stations by the hand of no one.A deeply describing music that manages to stimulate undefined images and shapes to the mind of the listener.
Rufen
Rufen is the second installment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the Fragen (BB 076CD/LP) studio album. In four impressive live recordings, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Onnen Bock unfold aural panoramas which can only be described, in the truest sense of the word, as fantastic. Had Claude Debussy not already composed 'Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun,' then Qluster would have been ideally placed to do so, their transparency and polymorphism so reminiscent of his high Impression…
Emergency Room
"A few new developments for electronic production duo Games. The pair comprised of Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin and Tiger City's Joel Ford are no longer calling themselves Games -- instead, they now go by the very Italo disco-sounding Ford & Lopatin. First order of business for F&L: running a new offshoot of Brooklyn label Mexican Summer, appropriately titled Software." -- Cribbing from Pitchfork."To precede the release of Channel Pressure, Ford & Lopatin will be releasing an Emergency…
Anahata (1984-86)
Subtitled: Primordial Vibration / Sound ceremonial with a contemplative character. Composed in 1983-1986. Sound ceremonial with a contemplative character for two voices of Japanese Buddhist monks (traditional Shômyô techniques - traditional temple chanting - in a larger, modern and creative form), three Japanese Gagaku instrumentalists (traditional court music in a modern and creative form), one percussionist (with a percussion instrument orchestra) and electro-acoustic (fixed interactive sounds…
Terrestreality
RESTOCKED Hans Dens second vinyl offering on Aguirre with more synthcrapings and zonked adventures in lo-fi music. Following up his 7 inch on NNA tapes and an LP on Release The Bats Hans continues to search and destroy. Loads of damaged audio and otherworldy synth bubblles spread over 11 tracks. No need to look at your watch, time has become infinitive.