Whiter than white
The title Whiter than white sounds like an advert for soap. Adverts and soap are precisely what Les Belles Noïseuses blame. Or even more precisely what they represent: consumption, conformity, economic liberalism. However, don't expect to get a speech from Les Belles Noïseuses. Only feelings, emotions, dreams and nightmares are conveyed through their refined musical structure. The doom-jazz double-bass reminds the best from Mick Karn. The minimalist guitar scrapes melody to the bone, to the aton…
Big shadow Montana
"After producing their frozen trilogy of intoxicated dronemuzik for the Agency, these Scandinavian gentlemen have ventured into more absurdist territories through fictionalized soundtracks for imagined Mondo films and science fiction serials. It is in this context that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa present the apparitional Big Shadow Montana, an album of slow-motion delirium manifested in occluded smears, nocturnal gasps, and arcane tones from a variety of analogue synthesizers. Amidst the n…
As a Leaf or a Stone
For this release Mathieu Ruhlmann uses a lot of sound sources and per track he lists them. We see listed a coffee grinder, ukelin, e-bow, moss, denture cleaner, bubble wrap, dried plant, cactus, speaker and gate (and that's just the opening track!)... The gain is very much alive here, so there is occasionally some feedback leaking through here. That adds a strange component to the highly acoustic music. Ruhlmann plays his stuff with great care. His music is open, spacious, but also intimate. The…
Modes Réels Collectifs
This album, by virtue of its initial founder characteristic from 1981, shows this concern about participating to the interaction of the energy of the future, to the reciprocal mediation linked to the productive activity of the world. Like Vivenza will say: « By working and through the strengths of work, in the sonorous magma of the industrial society, at the heart of the forges and weirs, of the rolling mills and power stations, reactors and artificial intelligence, nature reveals its dynamic ch…
Phi
First meeting of experimental musicians Keith Rowe & Radu Malfatti in a 3 disc set: one disc of compositions by Jurg Frey and Cornelius Cardew; one disc of their own compositions; and one disc of improvisation. Keith Rowe and Radu Malfatti are two of the most influential experimental musicians in recent decades, each with extensive bodies of highly distinctive work and a combined 80+ years at the forefront of their respective areas of exploration. On Φ, their first meeting ever is documented via…
Post
Post is the solo guise for James Wilkinson, who has gleefully cracked the ground between free jazz and punk in Bucketrider and made sonic cinema with the electro-dub-hip-hop fusion of High Pass Filter. He’s also provided innovative sound design as director for the internationally acclaimed Snuff Puppets, and his adventurous spirit runs free through Post’s pop persona. It’s the same ecstatic abandon shared by the likes of Mouse on Mars, Plaid and Caribou. Post’s playful but stirring sense of comp…
Everything's A Love Letter
Saddleback is the solo project for producer Tony Dupé. In many ways, with its warm and exploratory craft, Everything’s A Love Letter is the culmination of the varying strands in Tony’s musical life.Tony first came to notice in Glovebox, who put an ethereal, ambient twist on the indie-pop scene as far back as the early ‘90s. Glovebox’s swirling sound has been as unhurried as its release schedule, though no matter how spare their output, each album has always found a warm reception. The group were…
From here to there
The Preservation label presents From Here To There, the debut album from San Francisco’s Ben Swire. While From Here To There can sit snugly in the canon of electronica, it’s played out with expansive vision and immediate warmth. Woven together with a deft sense of minimalism and melody using double bass, interlocking guitars and crisp percussion, the use of live instrumentation against densely layered field recordings finds great balance between elasticity and deep ambient underpinnings. The acc…
Asleep, street, pipes, tones (2009)
“Asleep, street, pipes, tones (2009) is an investigation of the sounding properties of pipes and streets interspersed with a duo for bass clarinet and electric guitar. The investigations form ten three-minute episodes, assembled in studio by Pisaro from samples—mostly organ, but also tiny snippets of vocal music and a single piano chord—and field recordings. The instrumental parts, arranged in nine sections, also three minutes each, develop over the course of the 63’40” duration of the pi…
Death by Water
This is a four-handed musique concrète composition by electroacoustic Italian composers Fabio Selvafiorita and Valerio Tricoli. This single-track piece was conceived and realized between Milan and the Giudecca Island, in Venice, which is the location of the field recordings and reel-to-reel tape treatments. The work stresses and questions the dramatic and alchemical potential of a musical landscape marked by water: visceral and metaphysical at the same time, full of narrative suggestions. …
En Form For Bla
Stephen O'Malley (Sunn0))), KTL), Daniel O'Sullivan (Ulver, Mothlite, Guapo), Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver), Steve Noble (N.E.W., Company, etc). En Form For Blå documents the continued evolution of this unlikely collective, a collision of players from various avant, improv, metal, and "other" threads who together make a unique and arresting sound. Documenting three gigs in Oslo recorded in 2010, the music is deep and weird, with liquid sounds juddering around the occasionally identifiable percussion o…
Life coach
‘Life Coach’ is the debut solo album from Phil Manley (of Trans Am, Oneida, The F*cking Champs, Jonas Reinhardt). This instrumental album will certainly appeal to fans of the aforementioned bands as well as those into the classic works of Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia as well as modern Kosmische / ambient music from the likes of Arp, Mountains, The Alps and Type Records. The CD version comes in a four panel mini-LP style gatefold package. (Boomkat)
A Sort Of Radiance
Matthew Mullane is a Chicago multi-instrumentalist performing under the guise of Fabric. Here we have a fine suite of compositions which embark on a voyage through darkness of night and the brightness of day. Washed-out dark colors and static pulses sweep across your stereo painting a portrait of intense yearning and determination. Recorded over the course of a year, Matthew has constructed a multi-dimensional organism of sound that has perplexing depth and astounding detail. The album reveals n…
Super great love
Evil madness has been described as the Traveling Wilburys of Icelandic electronic music. Behind the name stand men like Petur Eyvindsson, Johann Johannsson, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Helgi Thorsson and BJ Nilsen (who is not "quite" Icelandic but was born in a country "very" near Iceland). This album, "Super Great Love", presented by Editions Mego will be their 4th album since the time their formation in 2006. Now for those of you reading who know the music of Evil Madness will know for sure th…
Progression
Featuring members of Pelican & X-Bax. For the new album three single-chord compositions were charted out, one freeform and tone driven, one long-form piece with charts dictating the players' intensity of performance, and one grid-like chart where each players' note continually shifts, though the combination of voices continue to maintain the chord. Six chords were chosen and arranged in a progression that encompasses two separate performances of each of the three compositions. Though the…
The Landscape of a New Zealand Composer
A limited edition 10 CD boxed set of the remarkable radio documentary tracing the life and music of Douglas Lilburn. The set is made available through SOUNZ in collaboration with Radio NZ Concert and the producers Roger Smith and Gareth Watkins. Interviews with the composer, his family, friends, and colleagues both composers and performers make this a comprehensive and remarkable documentation of New Zealand’s most influential composer. The CDs are accompanied by a comprehensive booklet, which i…
Fathom
Saxophonist and composer Ulrich Krieger is already widely respected for having been a part of the incredible Zeitkratzer and having collaborated with Merzbow. However this fifty-minute composition is possibly his most striking to date. A collaborative effort with Alan Licht, Tim Barnes and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, 'Fathom' is a deep, doomy exercise in patience and subtlety. With stark, minimal percussion and a bleak, haunted soundscape punctuated by Krieger's blackened woodwind tones th…
Inhumane Humans
Novi_sad is the guise for Thanasis Kaproulias (b. 1980) who holds a degree from the Economic University of Piraues. He lives and works in Athens, Greece. Influenced by the pioneers of audio assault, he began generating sounds in 2005. No studies, no academic education, no scholarships, just pure learning by doing. Amplified environmental recordings, drone manipulations, structured ambient soundscapes, microtones vs overtones, all come together in a hyper structure of iconoclastic form. Novi_s…
Zephyrus
Squim, aka chris phillips, is an obsessive recordist living in portland, oregon. in the '90s, he was very active in the underground mail art and tape trading scene -- running the circle x label out of salt lake city and releasing several well-received cassettes on the bobby j. label. this album will be his debut on the vinyl format and was chosen as being the standout from among a half dozen other unreleased albums of recent recordings. on zephyrus, squim blends repeating melodic motifs with…
Flashback Repository
Remastered issue of an obscure tape from the mysterious outer limits collective (wingdings / explorers / matrix metals / foxy baby / yoga / 90210 / etc). limited to 425 copies in pro-printed duo-tone sleeves with a 5-page essay booklet.Flashback Repository is a storehouse of collective waste consciousness from all beings of the universe, i.e. all unfiltered myth & material of the human/alien/animal mind, laying dormant in a hidden dimension resembling a disposal area or transfer station somewher…