Twilight Rituals
2003 release ** "T.A.C. is a group of sonic alchemists who fuse synthetics, strings, acoustic instruments and treatments into a tapestry of psycho/ambient soundscapes filled with hypnotic atmospheres and synthetic incantations. It is surreal, cerebral and unique "cosmic" music of a new sort. T.R. was recorded in the same sessions of "Waiting for the Twilight" and include 14 new exclusive tracks..., a sort of "Waiting..." twin album."Twilight Rituals" is the complementary twin album to "Waiting F…
Waiting For The Twilight
2002 release ** "T.A.C. is a group of sonic alchemists who fuse synthetics, strings, acoustic instruments and treatments into a tapestry of psycho/ambient soundscapes filled with hypnotic atmospheres and synthetic incantations. It is surreal, cerebral and unique "cosmic" music of a new sort. "Waiting for the Twilight" announces the return of T.A.C. after five years from their previous release "Apotropaismo". After a long time of hibernating sleep, this unforgetted experienced italian band is bac…
Enso
2007 release ** "Although the cover art for Enso is strikingly similar to recent 12k releases, there the similarity ends. With Enso, Luigi Turra has conjured up an organic and contemplative three-track epic, that resonates on subsequent listenings. Infused with Japanese sonic architectures and rigorous reductionist principles, this is a deeply meditative world of gently plucked instruments, and faded atmospherics, peppered with closely focussed tinklings and crystalline shards to add texture. Be…
Moraines II
Moraines II is a radical re-working of the limited cdr release Moraines. The original recordings have been augmented, re-worked and newely mixed into an entirely different piece of music. The final result is far heavier and more substantial work that creates a light and dark relationship with the original release and is much more than a simple ‘remix’of Moraines. Andrew Liles also contributes a track that takes elements and unique contributions to twist the work into his own personal sound world…
Robbed
2007 release ** "This new Goem release is a solo work by Roel Meelkop (this time without Frans de Waard and Peter Duimelinks). The source material is an anonymous CD, whose samples are used for these eight tracks. The result is a combination of rhythmic patterns with minimalistic passages, strange loops, repetitive elements. Therefore, an interesting episode into Goem’s production, quite different from early releases of the trio, maybe preluding an evolution in its music."
Cosmic Debris Volume II
CD re-issue of the second installment in the "Cosmic Debris" split ART-LP series set up by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, aka My Cat Is An Alien, on their own Opax Records. The Vol.II sees the two space brothers from Torino, Italy, alongside Californian visual and sound artist Steve Roden. What makes this collaborative release so peculiar is the natural interactive exchange occurred between the artists, and that came out from the concept behind the experience itself. Roden's contribution thus repr…
I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed
Aidan Baker's I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed is a 2-disc compilation of tracks from various out-of-print, limited edition releases spanning the last 10 years of Baker's output, ranging from his very first release to material that was featured on the soundtrack to a book of his poetry. Toronto based composer Aidan Baker works under his own name, under the name Nadja along with bassist Leah Buckareff and also with the trio ARC. Hailing from the Great White North, Baker incorporates guitar, drums, bass…
foolproof betters fools bettering foolproof...
Done by ibitsu, March 2008. Mastered at Piethopraxis, Köln, September 2008. Artwork by Soma, July 2008. A curious and highly fine tuned digital composition emerging from somewhere in Japan. Starting life nearly a decade ago, this piece was refined, restarted, thrown away, though lost and finally adjusted and completed in March of this year. A shimmering sub rumble counters hi-end tweaks, like an acid drenched take on the spirit of early trente oiseaux releases. 'foolproof betters fools bettering…
(Onkyo Ok)
Dutch sound artist Roel Meelkop has been mining the same territory since the early ’80s, when he started the influential sonic art ensemble THU20. This transitional stage had Meelkop formulating and organizing his ideas on sound and contemplating how best to realize them. But it was only during the mid-’90s, through numerous collaborations with fellow electro-acoustic conspirators, such as Frans De Waard and Peter Duimelinks (who, together with Meelkop, form electronic rhythm group GOEM), along …
Basis
'Basis' is based on recordings of acoustic instruments. All sounds were processed and layered into compositions by Steinbrüchel. Through this processing Steinbrüchel revealed hidden structures and melodies and isolated them, creating new melodic and organic textures without losing the soul of the original. These seven tracks reveal a new side in his music. Tonal harmonics have never before played such an important role and each track contains layers of subtle shifting and interweaving melodies, …
11 Easy Pieces
Since 1995, Brisbane resident Leighton Craig has etched out a varied musical existence, from solo keyboard studies to an extensive body of collaborative work. His solo works, which span delicate ambient keyboard excursions through to site specific live documents and most recently song based explorations, have mapped out a focus of tone, duration and 'situations' for sound. On 11 Easy Pieces, his first widely available solo LP, Craig offers an intimate yet robust collection of works recorded on a…
Sparks
2007 release** "«Sparks», like the marconimen who occupied radio stations on ships at the beginning of the twentieth century. And this extraordinary album was essentially born on the radio, in the well-deserving Rai studios of Audiobox in 1995. Brooded over for over ten years, contaminated by subsequent experiences, these sound materials now return on CD, in a sedimented and coherent object, where cultured experimentation goes hand in hand with Central European popular music and new ethnic cross…
Phonorama
A very nice compilation distributed worldwide by Wire and produced by Xing. Fragments of Phonorama were recorded live at Raum, Bologna, in 2006-07 from two collective performances conceived by Riccardo Benassi for Xing. The original recordings were re-shaped and re-composed in Berlin by Valerio Tricoli and Riccardo Benassi. Phonorama is a live electronics happening generated from improvisations by 20 musicians to create a collective soundtrack. One long environmental suite involving some of the …
Love & Lamentation
It must have been quite some years since I last heard music by Simon Wickham-Smith, but there was a time when I played it a lot, especially the various albums he recorded with Richard Youngs. But I guess that's how things go. Interest shifts I assume. To be honest, again, I have no idea when I left off, or why. But its good, as well as strange perhaps to see him back on Pogus Productions. On the cover I read that 'not satisfied with making music, he has also been a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan t…
Audioscope - New Electronic Music From Madrid
Two tracks each by Francisco Lopez, Luis Mesa, Juan P. Monreal, Antonio Garcia, Miguel Ruiz, 1 track each by El Sueno de Hyparco, Markus Breuss, Orfeon Gagarin.
Alloy (Golden 1)
Originally released in 2000. The Golden Research is the name chosen for the complete documentation of previously unpublished works by Charlemagne Palestine starting from the early 1960s to the mid-late 1970s. Such a huge project will include seminal collage and electronic music, Bell Studies, New York and California drones, piano drones as well as more specific compositions. All the recordings will be exclusively available through Alga Marghen. Be ready to change your own opinion about minimalis…
Oto No Hajimari Wo Motomete 5: Tsutomu Kojima Work
The fifth in this superb series covering historical Japanese electronic music from the Nhk studios, the first covering pieces engineered by Tsutomu Kojima (prior volumes dealt in pieces assisted by Shigeru sato and Hirosi Siotani) highlights herein include Jo Kondo’s “never return” (harsh/psychedelic vocal/piano cutups from 1971 !!!), Hifumi Shimoyama’s fumon iv a, and oto no hajimari wo motomete perennial Joji Yuasa’s my blue sky.
1. “Beyond the Clouds” Keiki Okasaka
A work was intentionally…
After Dinner Black Out
2007 release ** Limited edition of 106 hand-numbered copies. "'After Dinner Black Out' is the debut of Italian musician Donato Epiro, is a nearly 20 minute experiment in sound collage. A single track, the composition is made of several pieces of music and found sound, each cut to a reasonable length of no shorter than 30 seconds and up to five minutes. Like Luc Ferrari's compositional musique concrète, the sounds are intimately related, though not necessarily by timbre, tone, or anything else ap…
Pioneers of Electronic Music
In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established…
Schlingen Blängen
Schlingen Blängen is an invaluable addition to the slender but precious discography of Charlemagne Palestine, one of the legendary figures of the amazingly fertile New York and West Coast experimental music/art scene of the sixties and seventies. He is considered to be a seminal figure of early minimalism—as important as his better-documented contemporaries. His performances on the giant bells at St. Thomas Church and his evening-length Bösendorfer shows are still spoken of with awe by those who…