The Sound of Defekt Skulls and Intense Cranium Contact (Feedback
The Year of the Skull. The Skull Defekts, represented by Henrik Rylander and Joachim Nordwall, were invited in late September 2006 by the Chicago non-profit organization Lampo to make their U.S. debut. With them they brought recorded sounds from their home on the Swedish west-coast Gothenburg. A city breathing culture, it is also Sweden's most important export harbor. While spending close to a week in Chicago, Rylander and Nordwall carefully prepared a piece to be presented on the Lampo event on…
Hhhh
Cor Fuhler has brought together a quartet of unique and unconventional improvisers that explore worlds of complex sonic textures with ensemble playing of the highest order. The sound world that is conjured on this CD owes as much to electronic music as to the free improvised music styles from which the musicians hail from, and although three of the four instruments are purely acoustic, it is the aesthetics of electronic music which have had a clear influence on their sound. Textures reminiscent …
Rotterdam 1
Recorded at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2005, this explosive piece from Text Of Light typifies their abilities as a vivid freeform improvisational unit. Ranaldo and Licht’s measured guitar work sets a basis on which Kreiger’s blaring saxtronics, Barnes’ percussive explorations and DJ Olive’s swirling turntable incursions can intertwine and augment one another. This piece ebbs and flows, each of the players listening intently and guiding the proceedings with disarmingly s…
Futuro
In early 2003, AKIYAMA (guitar) and BARNES (percussion(s) began a tour that took them from Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo in Japan, to New York, North Hampton, and Boston. Along the way, they picked up many friends (Ami Yoshida, Matt Valentine, Sean Meehan, Toshimaru Nakamura) to perform with them as trios. One night in particular, a below freezing evening in Osaka, AKIYAMA and BARNES were joined by one of the most exciting trumpet players to emerge from Japan in the last 20 years -- Masafumi EZAKI. Pro…
Field Tracker
Field Tracker was recorded at the Institute for Electronic Art, Alfred NY during the Winter of 2000. Inoue, utilizing his digital sound processing systems in combination with bells, guitar, and other odd sound making objects, constructed tiny improvisational sound moments each one having a shape and gesture of their own. These micro compositions were at times highly abstract and noisy and at other times extremely melodic and calm. Many of these micro compositions were used in the production of h…
Listening garden
Line boss Taylor Deupree teams up with Christopher Willits, who himself is also a big shot in the world of ambient glitch or whatever one calls it, for a work which they composed for two 'quiet indoor/tea spaces installed at the Yamaguchi Center For Arts and Media in Japan in June of 2004. This is ambient music in the sense that Eno intended it to be when he first thought of it. Music that wouldn't be really present but fill the ambiance in a nice way. Deupree and Willits recommend the listener …
The immediate past is of no interest to us - 10 years of continu
2002 release ** The 10 year anniversary full-length CD from the trio Stilluppsteypa with all new music, the last album recorded with Heimir Bjorgulfsson who has left the group. The most melodic and rhythmic Stilluppsteypa ever! Contains a 20-page booklet with texts on the history of the band by people such as Andrew McKenzie, Jim Haynes and Frans De Waard.
Translations & articulations
Catalogue of the exhibition "Translations & Articulations" Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. published in an edition of 2000 copies. This special edition of 966 copies contain the compact disc of space enclosed by planes or surfaces.
Speak no more about the leaves
This cd contains 3 pieces inspired by Arnold Schönberg's 'The Book of the Hanging Gardens' and in particular the poems by Stefan George that Schönberg used as lyrics. Track one uses Steve Roden's voice reading/singing part of the text as the only sound material. Track two uses the vowel structure from the text as a score for striking five tones on a small chime. Track three uses samples from the Schönberg work as well as Roden's voice singing the same text as track one.
Schindler house
This cd documents a series of 3 sound installations originally presented at the Schindler house / MAK center for art and architecture Los Angeles in 2001. Garden was placed near the back of the lot facing the house in a bamboo grove via 8 small speakers. A quiet flexible background for a harmonious life was placed in a small hallway of the house on headphones. Pathway was placed along the front path to the house on 4 larger speakers. The outdoor works were set to relatively low volume lev…
Airforms
Airforms was first presented at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [Scottsdale, Arizona] in April of 2004. The work was inspired by a group of experimental houses designed by Wallace Neff in the 1940s using a process he called airform construction. The houses were built by spraying concrete over an inflated balloon structure. Inspired by the nautilus sea shell, the houses were an investigation into the aesthetic possibilities of structures formed by air, and the psychological effects of l…
View
View was first presented as part of a solo exhibition at the jennjoy gallery in san francisco. the show also included paintings, drawings, and a silent video work. for the installation, i asked jenn to record for me the sounds of the View from one of the gallery windows. "sounds were recorded from ledge just above radiator on various days and times in april" sometimes the window was open, somethimes closed. i used fragments of these recordings as both a compositional cue as well as the entire so…
The sad mac
4-panel V-fold hard cardboard with Japanese OBI strip, softer insert for CD and a 4-page fold-out booklet in English and Japanese. Lucky restock, few copies available. Stephan Mathieu's original Japanese edition copies of his lost classic, recorded and produced between Summer 2001 and 2004 and originally released on the Headz label from Tokyo in the Winter of 2004. All the factors that make Mathieu's trademark sound today are already in full play here, the spectral drones, early instruments an…
Opaque (+ re)
In spring 2003 Steinbrüchel received an invitation from the Swiss music festival 'Taktlos' in Berne to contribute a track for their listening room equipped with a surround 5.1 sound system. During the two-day festival in November 2003 Steinbrüchel's track 'Opaque' was played back in cycle mode (among tracks from various other artists). The listening room focused on the experience of being able to listen to music in a very quiet and large environment - unlikely to most home listening situations. …
Stage
Stage is Steinbrüchel’s second full-length solo release on LINE. The album contains 10 scenes that move between warm organic and melodic digitalised sounds and cold crystalline-like sparks. The sounds and compositions are even more detailed and have a more melodic approach then previous recordings by Steinbrüchel. Single isolated and stretched tones are structured together with smaller loops and particles of clicks and noises into dense atmospheres. Parts of the sounds used in several scenes are…
Iris
2005 release ** "During the seven-million years of the Cyclops' sleep, the rutile mountain became a flower. The ocean-cloud has crossed the Pangaea, transformed to the rainbow dewdrop of a petal. Spiracle: An aperture for breathing, such as a whale's blowhole, the opening behind the eye of sharks, rays, and skates, or the tracheal openings on the sides of the bodies of certain insects and spiders."
Sonopsys N° 2/3
Realized at and commissioned by Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). Premiered April 25, 2004, salle Olivier Messiaen, Maison de la Radio (Paris, France). Comes within 108-page book with original texts in French translated in English including interview/discussion between Alexandre Yterce, Florence Gonot & Jacques Lejeune; also including is a full list of works by the composer.
The Cahiers Sonopsys will question some composers of this Musique Concrète / Acousmatique which, since 1948, the year…
A little lost
Icelandic musician (now based in Hannover, Germany) Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson has been a longtime member of the band Stilluppsteypa. Since some time he has been releasing solo works as well, with albums on Trente Oiseaux, ERS and Fire Inc. This is his new solo album, and the best example of the variety of his musical talent. A Little Lost contains three lengthy tracks, one beautiful piece that gets close in spirit to ambient, one collage piece using amongst else spoken word and a third track wh…
List
Is there beauty in what is threatening? With List, Senking introduces 40 minutes of the darkest matter and reckons, yes. He varies and experiments with a -- for Raster-Noton -- frightening diversity of sounds. He reveals the pieces as sound-collages, as quotes, which seem to refer to splatter movies and film noir. Following the tremendous plot of his endtime-subject, he persistently welds together sound spaces in order to compress them later into overwhelming drone-sounds. These as such, then go…