Sonance for the Precession
The electroacoustic composition Sonance for the Precession was commissioned by Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The piece furthers Neil Leonard's practice in large scale sound installation, with recent commissions by documenta, Venice Biennale, and Fujiko Nakaya of Experiments in Art at Technology. The original composition, created for the quad adjacent to WCMA, played from the dome of the historic Hopkins Observatory, the oldest working astronomical observatory in the United States. The …
Zomianscape I & II
Kink Gong works with what is unknown to him, as an artist who’s attracted by beauty and strangeness. Like a stranger, he has been deeply curious about recording ethnic minority music isolated from dominating cultures within South-east Asia, thus working with musicians taking part in specific cultural communities to make almost 200 albums. Like an artist, he has been leaning towards strange marriages, building on these raw materials. They are lived moments that combine space, people and music, as…
All the Way
** 2023 Stock ** All the Way is a collection of radical re-workings of traditional and jazz standards such as “All the Way”, “You Don't Know What Love Is”, and “The Thrill Is Gone” (made famous by Chet Baker). It also includes a solo piano interpretation of Thelonious Monk's “Round Midnight”, and live voice and piano interpretations of the American traditional “O Death” and the country song, “Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill”. The album includes both electric live performances (recorded in Par…
Work Ethics
White Centipede Noise presents Work Ethics by Altar of Flies. A new album recorded in summer of 2020, marking a fresh phase of creativity and passion from this virtuosic artist. An eclectic assortment of bumping, scratching, fluttering sounds blend seamlessly together with his signature heavy tape manipulations. The melancholic and emotionally charged elements found on many Altar of Flies releases are less present here, creating a more ambiguous dry atmosphere, as if sitting wide awake in the ey…
Innéisme
Tip! *Limited vinyl with uncoated sleeve, printed inner and download card (300 only)* Inspired by Noam Chosmky's "universal grammar", it refers to man's innate ability to develop language. It is that English, Occitan, French patois, Hindi, Pygmy or French cohabit on this record, juxtaposing on rhythms and beats that appear as a fantasized primordial tradition. If My Jazzy Child aka Damien Mingus, questions languages about Innéisme, he also questions musical languages, mixing Asian rites and free…
Maza Gusu
Tip! *Limited vinyl with uncoated sleeve, printed inner and download card (300 only)* On Maza Gusu, Mikado Koko transforms into Mother Goose, hissing Charles Perrault's fairy tales from her native tongue in your ears. Her unsettling, regressive voice is backed up by a subtle and chilling electronic soundscape sprinkled with traditional Japanese instruments, creating a realm of sound that feels both weirdly familiar and deeply unknown. Mother Koko hurls you deep down the rabbit hole, back to your…
Aestum
** Limited Purple Vinyl. Wide front-back artwork and inlay print by Emma Pryde ** Aestum’s self-titled debut album is an in-depth journey into supreme and tranceformative soundscapes. Oscillating around the apex of spacious power ambient and drone, the compositions recorded during 2020 combine monolithic electronica with decaying fantasies and slow-motion euphoria. The imagination for the album was inspired by the idea of panortosia (universal reform) as described in old scholar books devoted to…
Antiphonals
Canadian-in-LA electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi has rediscovered her muse since releasing work on her own label, Late Music. Having explored hitherto unheard realms of enchanting melodic organ and electronics drones on her 2020 album Cactus, Descant, Antiphonals further explores these ideas using a sound palette of Mellotron, electric organ, piano, and synthesizer. Referring to church music sung or recited alternately by two groups in its title — Antiphonal is a studied solo affair in whi…
Kagiroi
I met Sugai Ken a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San…
Concrete Feather
David Lynch protégé and Twin Peaks sound designer Dean Hurley coaxes an incredible puzzlebox of atmospheres and mood pieces on this killer contribution to our Documenting Sound series, now remastered and pressed on vinyl for what is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most cinematic and neon-lit instalment in the series. Like a smudged and overdubbed copy of the BoC Maxima tape, with added iridescence.
Fahon
**Edition of 80** New live recordings, oriented with only two instruments, viola and frame drums. The album was recorded during a period of many live sessions between 2019 and 2020 with just a Rode nt4 stereo microphone and one of the very first Sony mz md. The sessions were amplified. Frédéric Charlot - Viola. Olivier Charlot - Frame drums.
Cymbalom Solos
There are constellations within the grooves of Cymbalom Solos. Innumerable points of light, rendered audible in glowing, radiant sound. There are entire worlds too - undiscovered, yet familiar -- both terrestrial and celestial. There are moments of quiet comfort and exultant discovery. And all of it conjured by one man with a handful of ancient and invented instruments, recorded mostly-live, with precious few overdubs. Michael Masley has been a fixture of Berkley, California, since he arrived fr…
Schism
** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…
Loops & Pieces
** Edition of 100 ** Dauw welcome Spanish based artist Jason Kolàr to the label with his new work Loops & Pieces (2017-2020). It’s a prelude to his new full-length album coming in October 2021 through Dauw. Three years after Stroom TV released his debut album Modified Perspectives, Kolàr now offers a documentation of sounds he has been working on in the period 2017-2020. According to Kolàr, this tape is full of vaporous drafts transforming into solid forms with the help of time and distance. Com…
The Veiled Sea
I sometimes think of Ben Chasny as an occultist of the old school. For all the searing acetylene fire and noise that courses through his work as Six Organs of Admittance, there is something curiously late Victorian about the way his mind operates. For Chasny belongs to the lineage of seekers who, in the face of the fragmenting forms of knowledge in the modern world, held out the last hopes of synthesis: that art might not be parted from religion, nor religion from science—and that science, in so…
A More Attractive Way
** Edition of 500 + 20 pages booklet ** A More Attractive Way is a comprehensive study of live performances made by IST between 1996 and 2000. This set begins at the very outset of the group's career and features their debut concert at Club Orange in London and charts its way through further gigs in London, Billericay, Norwich and Cambridge. “A completely different intensity, but an intensity nonetheless,” Jo Fell reflects in notes accompanying A More Attractive Way. Her husband Simon, to whose …
Sale Quanto Basta
Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…
Animast
** Edition of 200 ** Ferns Recordings proudly presents Animast by Francisco López. Few albums would be as fitted for vinyl release as this one. Drawing on both analog-material and digital-immaterial undisclosed sources, “Animast” plays with the sonic textures and responses most suited for the characteristics of this particular analog medium: noisy crispness, compositional ‘loopiness’, contrasting sharp-and-thick textures and cycling dynamics. A must for experimental heads and adventurous DJs ali…
Drumming in the Dark
Neuma presents Drumming in the Dark by Steven Schick. Engineer, Josef Kucera. Production assistance: Roger Reynolds and Terry Longshore. "In 1938 when John Cage formulated his famous dictum, "Percussion is revolution," I doubt that he had my mother in mind..." - Steven Schick
Pocket Music
James Caldwell’s creative life is the embodiment of the principle, Start at Home. In his case that is not only Macomb, Illinois, but even more precisely, in his pockets. Whereas some might consider music to be a soundtrack to their lives, an add-on, Caldwell reaches deep into the spaces around him for sonic potential and helps it emerge. For more than twenty years I have pursued a sporadic project of making small musique concrète pieces. The original set used sounds I made with things I found in…