Biotop
Originally released in 1981 on Günter Körber’s Sky Records, Biotop marked a radical and irreverent turn in the early discography of Asmus Tietchens, offering a body of work that neither conformed to the pop idioms it mimicked nor fully abandoned the experimental rigor of the German electronic underground. Now rightly recognized as one of the most bizarre and subversive releases of the Neue Deutsche Welle era, Biotop channels ironic play, dissonant structures, and noisy artifice into a sonic worl…
Words
Michael Horwoods audio work during his academic period at the University of Buffalo comes from one of the most optimistic periods in American 20th century avant-garde music. The mere spill over of interest in composition from the New York City schools brought state of the art facilities and faculty to UB in 1968 Incidentally new professors Lejarin Hiller, Lukas Foss and poet Robert Creeley were key in developing students keenness into radical new music. In early 1968, Michael obtained permission…
L' apres midi chaud
The only solo album by Armand Mirallès (Heratius leader) recorded in Montpellier between 1984/1985 on a cassette tape
Yoi
'In April 2011 David Vélez invited Simon Whetham to Bogota to run a field recording workshop at the Nacional University as part of the Masters in Fine Arts that Vélez was taking. They also planned to work together outside the workshop, a major part of this exchange being to visit the Colombian Amazonas to record, explore and collaborate - capturing sounds and sharing experiences.
During the trip, they were removed from their comfort zone and endured the rigors of the jungle in different situatio…
Merua
"Merua is a magic place for the Garifunas, and also one of awe. Only those considered as initiated go through this sanctuary. It’s a refuge for the spirits of the Ancestors from the beliefs of this mixed culture that finds its roots both in Africa and South America. It’s a plot of dense jungle, a snakes’ nest, intact despite its small size and the fact that its perimeter is occupied by humans. A perimeter composed of two villages (Triunfo de la Cruz and La Ensenada), the mangrove and the lake at…
Garig Gunak Barlu (AustralOpus 1)
1. breakdawn (birds in the swamp, screeching parrots passing by from time to time and singing tree in the wind on abandoned red beach). 2. Coralreef (snubfin dolphins [orcaella heinsohni] echolocation, crackly decapods and mysterious fishsongs: wood-like-knocking and those difficult to describe and radioactive crackle of uranium). 3. Nocturnabyss (ultrasonic insects sliding across the time-grid meets hypnotic nocturnal chorus sprinkled by sonar of bats and barking geckos). Sheltering from the he…
The Magic Spell Of Mother's Wrath
For all those of you who enjoyed The Great Wall Of China, here is the second Mormos LP at last reissued! Again done in cooperation with Jim Cuomo, who provided two previously unreleased tracks for the bonus EP (which also has the two songs from their second 45), and again a fantastic masterpiece of gently crafted acid folk sounds with jazzy touches that will take you to the same lands The Pentangle or John Martyn have taken you before. The album is sure to appeal not only folk lovers, but …
Product Of Pisces & Capricorn
An even more tuneful set than the first record from OPMC – one that features shorter tunes with a bit more lyrical appeal – and this style of dreamy harmonizing – mostly a mix of acoustic guitar with well-crafted basslines and drums that give things just enough kick – and although the group are Dutch, lyrics are all in English – and pretty captivating too.
Zemsta Plutona
Felix Kubin looks a lot like an alien on the cover of this set – and sounds a fair bit like a space visitor in the music as well! The work\'s got this very cool blend of electronics and playful rhythms – served up in a style that really takes us back to some of our favorite German work of the post-punk years – particularly the music of Der Plan and Pyrolator, both of whom would be a great comparison to Kubin\'s work! The tunes are catchy and playful, but also have this undercurrent of darkness t…
The fauna and flora of the Vatican City
The "fauna and flora of the Vatican City" is the 6th release of Tobias Schmitt’s pet project Suspicion Breeds Confidence. The record is a continuation and development of the eclectic and complex music presented on its predecessors: polyrhythmic beats, abstract electronica, processed field recordings and conventional instruments are blended into a homogeneous and wide-ranging elaborate result. Moments of highly structured music meet flow-of-consciousness like improvisation meet poppy melodies. Th…
Diagonal Flying
1994 CD release, with some incredible early 70 (1973-1975) recording for Cello And Tape Delay (or Trombone and tape delay)... Gehlhaar is a pretty interesting cat ... long Stockhausen’s personal assistant he blossomed into a composer in his own right in the early 70’s and proceeded to experiment with “computer controlled interactive musical environment(s)” and the sort of computer-free tape-delay manipulation studies as featured on this disc ...(Mimaroglu)In this extended composition, veteran av…
Force Fields And Spaces
1994 CD release, recorded Jan/Feb 1981 at Darlington College of the Arts, Totnes, Devon, UK. Fantastic recording of some very repetitive and zonked trombone-fueled electronics from this Phill Niblock affiliate, straddling the devide betwixt Stuart Dempster's cavernous echo patterns and terry riley's horn-tape meditations lyou can hear echoes of the same approach i used on ‘playthroughs’ very clearly on 'part iii'. which is pretty amazing as ive only just discovered this now ... another piece of …
The Slaughterhouse
In rural Alabama, about an hour outside of Birmingham is a slaughterhouse. It’s a family operation where meat is processed one animal at a time by hand. Mostly custom jobs. A man and his son run the place. They handle most aspects of the daily operations from customer relations to animal processing. I first visited on a Friday with my wife. We hung out while they cut and packaged a side of beef. They said I could come back on Monday to record the whole process, which I did. On the day I recorded…
Helgoland
Germany’s only ocean island is a singular place in various ways. Situated 70 kilometers from the coast line, it belonged to the UK for 90 years during the 19th century. During World War II, the first facilities for a huge naval base were erected. The tunnels and bunkers from that time were blown up in 1947. In the following years, the island served as a training area for British bombers. It is not know how the birds have survived this period of destruction. Yet, by the return of people to the de…
Terra Subfonica
As a composer and sound artist often working closely at the nexus of radiophonic art, environmental sound and electroacoustic music, one of my primary interests is in the exploration of relationships between people and the incredibly rich sonorous environments they populate. In particular, the sounds that exist all around us, however that are often out of earshot (or at least not listened to in any conscious manner), as with the sounds beneath us as we tend our daily lives. Terra subfónica is a …
Bug Music
There has been rhythm on this planet for millions of years longer than humans have opened their mouths to sing. Long before birds, long before whales, insects have been thrumming, scraping, and drumming complex beats out into the world.
David Rothenberg decided to investigate the resounding beats of cicadas, crickets, katydids, leafhoppers and water bugs in his unusual third foray into music made with and out of the animal world. After working with birds and whales, he now tackles the minute …
East Music for Wax Cylinders
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an „armchair ethnologist“. Due to his bad health the musicologist was unable to travel to faraway countries. Instead he sat at his desk in the Dorotheenstraße in Berlin and received the world through his phonograph. On from 1900 the world’s music arrived at his office in the form of more than 16.000 wax-cylinder recordings from all over the planet. Due to an edict by the Prussian Emperor all German trading as well as scientific expeditors were bound to travel with…
Morne diablotins
What did the Caribbean islands – acoustically- look like before the arrival of Columbus? With this question in mind I took a short trip to the National Park of Guadeloupe and to Dominica, one of the most preserved island of the Lesser Antilles, which still retains some of its primary forest on the slopes of its volcanic peaks. I crossed the paths of the ‘Jaco’ and ‘Sisserou’ (the endemic species of parrots), met some local insects and tree frogs, but unfortunately failed to find any ‘Mountain Ch…
Terra Prosodia
- Currently about 6000 languages are spoken on the world. Most of them will disappear soon – and together with them a meldodic richness of human expressivness. However, the fact, that dialects and disappearing languages are only spoken by a few people has one advantage: only if one does not understand the contents it is possible to really listen tot he sound, saying far away from their homeland these languages unfold their musical enchantment (charme?). What you find are melodies that nobody …