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."
Muddy speaking Ghosts through my Machines
2006 release ** Muddy Speaking Ghosts Through My Machines' is the brand new album released together by Fabio Orsi and Gianluca Becuzzi. This album will be certainly followed by other cooperations, considering the big friendly artistic sodality between them. Fabio e Gianluca are a strange duo, considering the big differences of their artistic back-ground. Fabio Orsi is a young and unexpected talent. After his first album, "Osci" (LP, SmallVoices 2005), produced by Gianluca Becuzzi, he got a lot o…
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…
Airland - Studie I
Airland is an electronic music suite freely inspired by, and dedicated to, the studies on the graphical representation of air by Bruno Munari. A skilled ambient and a maniacal care of the sound.
Quattordicidodicizerodue
Chaos is an open project for improvisation. Open to such an extent to take the liberty, as in this event, to have, as guests, musicians met the very same evening. Quattordicidodicizerodue distils - in a unique uninterrupted set - sound alchemies created with electric guitars, computer, synths and electric/acoustic percussions.
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.
Calcutta Gas Chamber
John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber has long been hailed as one of the minor masterpieces of post-industrial sound art, this is the very first edition on N D label. Back in 1990, this German born sound artist had traveled to Calcutta where he stumbled upon a gas chamber that had been closed down just a few years earlier. Watermann explains in the liner notes that the Indian government had numerous policies, both official and clandestine, aimed at population control; and the gas chamber was one…
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…
Wind Shadows
The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never “explanatory” (the goal of science) but, like all art, “revelatory.” This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in …
Centre Bridge: Electroacoustic Works
Much of Frances White's music is inspired by her love of nature, and her electronic works frequently include natural sound recorded near her home in central New Jersey. This is the first complete disc of White's electroacoustic works, both with or without instruments. This disc is titled Centre Bridge because it has inspired two of the works contained on it. But beyond this, it is because the role that the bridge has played in White's work is so characteristic of her music. Her music is about li…