String Quartets
String Quartet 1, 2 et 3 composed by Reinhold Friedl (Zeitkratzer) and performed by Quatuor Diotima.Reinhold Friedl’s string quartets do not pretend to be string quartets, they are anti-Goethe. There is no sophisticated conversation of four elder gentlemen, sitting in armchairs. The music is physical work for the performers and intended to be physical pleasure for the listeners. All three quartets are based on the same idea: smooth transformations from a given texture into another one. The rando…
Momentary Encounters
Momentary Encounters, the debut portrait album from Canadian composer Alex Jang, distills transience and intimacy into four quietly radical works, realized by members of Apartment House. Jang calls forth an aesthetic of close listening, where gestures - sometimes just a single sustained note or harmonics, sometimes glimmering melodic fragments - reflect on the boundary between event and non-event. The ensemble traverses clarinet, piano, violin, and cello, moving in and out of tone with pauses as…
O Zomer!
In O Zomer!, Canadian composer Cassandra Miller brings together two ensemble pieces and two solo works, each realized with her trademark blend of warmth and radiance. The title track, performed by Apartment House, captures moments of gentle humor and whimsical lyricism, echoing Toon Tellegen’s writing—which Miller cites as an inspiration for its “simple and plain” style. From the first bars, Miller’s music sidesteps abstraction in favor of direct communicative ease: phrases loop, refrains echo, …
Molecules
Limited edition of 400. This masterful performance was born of the meeting of two master improvisers, Kazuo Imai from Japan and Roger Turner from the UK. Imai, who studied with Masayuki Takayanagi and Takehisa Kosugi, is one of Japan's leading improvisers and guitarists. Turner is a drummer and percussionist who has been actively performing throughout the world since the beginning of the 1970s. His Japan tour in October 2017 included concerts with Japanese musicians in various locations, includi…
Musique pour le lever du jour
**Co-produced by David Sylvian and Yuko Zama, artwork by David Sylvian** Melaine Dalibert (born 1979), a French composer/pianist, has been increasingly recognized for his compositional piano works as well as his interpretations of works by Gérard Pesson, Giuliano D’Angiolini, Tom Johnson, Peter Garland and many others. Trained as a classical pianist in Rennes (where he teaches now), Dalibert studied a large repertoire of contemporary composers’ works at the Paris Conservatories. Being involved w…
Drop By Drop, Suddenly
XI Records releases Drop By Drop, Suddenly, a two-CD set of eleven compositions for bassoon composed and performed by Leslie Ross. Ross is not only an internationally renowned instrument builder but is also an uncompromising creative musician. The first disc starts with a series of short seed pieces that play primarily with the timbral and microtonal differences highlighted between tone-holes, forming a layered effect while playing with only one fingering, single note or multiphonic. They range …
Good Morning Universe
Recorded at Levontin7, Tel-Aviv, Israel on the 17th February, 2017. Edition of 300. Tel Aviv based bassist and composer, Shay Hazan. Started playing the electric bass at age 12. In 2007 his musical path has changed radically when he took on himself the work of studying the double bass. While studying at the Jerusalem Academy for Music & Dance Shay was preforming original and improvised music in different settings around the country. Soon after graduation Mr. Hazan started playing in the New Albe…
Ode to Marilyn
Black vinyl, 500 copies. This collection of experimental recordings was originally released on Scandia, one of Finland’s largest labels, which shows how open the mood of the mid-seventies was for new things, even in large-scale record companies. Ode to Marilyn, based on a group of recordings from 1973, is a sophisticated gem of experimental music. The recording sessions resulted in the material on the album, which is a coherent and balanced package and is a combination of avant-garde, improvisat…
GNz-11 The First Five Singles 1979-1984
Here is DDAA’s Holy Grail: the first five single reissued for the first time on CD! “GNz-11” traces the beginnings of the band that had never really been revisited before: the first five years 1979-1984 in term of record productions! But more precisely the origins of the band are still older: DDAA was founded in April/May 1977 (and not in 1979, as we can read on a well-known music database site: this information is wrong!). DDAA with Die Form (Philippe Fichot) are two crucial bands, two pioneers…
Poke It With a Stick
“You knew you were in the presence of something powerful whenever they played. Their sound was open and catatonic. Cathartic. You recognized it right away." — Britt Walford (Slint drummer), remembering Louisville art-punks Your Food back when played out, in 1982–83. LP back in print for the first time in 35 years! Plus, first time in digital waves.
Abacus Incognito
**Edition of 200 (numbered)** New primitive-suburban-folk music from Temple City and Pasadena, CA, circa 1973-4. This new edition is culled from the original unissued Smegma tape vaults of Ju Suk Reet Meate and represents the most pure expression of the insular sound-world that was spontaneously discovered as a group. Unlike 2017's Look'n For Ya (TES 154LP) no song forms are ever used, instead fearless group improvisational vocals take you on a strange shape-shifting journey through operatic sho…
Programmed
** Edition of 200 copies in full-colour sleeve ** Matt Middleton (Crude, The Aesthetics, Dirtlove): "The Futurians are a band that have soul. Their music, a pulsating, minimalist, primitivist, machinistic monster of a thing is at once fiction and fantasy, at once politics and hyper-reality. Theirs is an approach synthesizing elements of no-wave, new-wave, synth-rock, drone rock, doom rock, kraut-rock, Dunedin dirge, robot rock, riot grrllism, and calculator punk." Brad Rose: "Clayton Noone and h…
Sido Not Dead
On Sido Not Dead, CJA unleashes a torrent of lo-fi improvisation and fractured song forms, channeling the wild spirit of New Zealand’s underground into a raw, unpredictable listening experience.
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 5
"With Earle Brown -- A Life in Music -- Volume 5, Wergo has once again dug up treasures of contemporary music from the 1960s and 1970s. The 3-CD set not only contains one of the first recordings of Charles Ives's 'Concord Sonata by Aloys Kontarsky but is also a testimony to the virtuosity of Severino Gazzelloni who is, without doubt, one of the greatest flutists of the 20th century. In addition, it contains music from the group Sonic Arts Union with the four pioneers of electronic music: David B…
Homotopy To Marie
**Silver & black and silver & white vinyl edition of 300** 'Homotopy To Marie' is the fifth album by Nurse With Wound, originally released on United Dairies in 1982. The album is a step on from the Dadaist rock of 'Merzbild Schwet', with much use of tape manipulation and classical avant-garde techniques, using keywords including unsettling, volatile, eerie and nocturnal to describe the feel of the album which combined tape edits with resonating gong tones and disembodied children's voices to cre…
Malophòros / Mondi Di Pietra
Backwards Records presents the new Lay Llamas release: the new 7" in gold-coloured vinyl by Lay Llamas, moniker behind which the Sicilian musician and composer Nicola Giunta is hidden. The single will contain two tracks: on Side A Malophòros composed together with the shaman singer Alfio Antico - former collaborator of Fabrizio De Andrè, Tullio de Piscopo and Vinicio Capossela - at frame drum and voice. The piece sounds like an improbable mixture between the Nuova Compagnia Di Canto Popolare and…
The Maadi Sessions
Limited edition of 200 copies on black vinyl. "I visited Egypt for the first time in October 2016, spending a week there, and I went back for a longer period the next February. Both times I stayed at Sara and Alberto’s place, a couple of friends who have been living in the Maadi district of Cairo for about a year. The first impact with the city and its inhabitants was definitely strong: I had trouble in defining the energy which pervades the streets 24 hours a day and the feeling of perpetual mo…
Fun House Mirrors
Fun House Mirrors is the 4th album by Almagest!, the 2nd under the Almagest! moniker being the first 2 releases credited to founding members Palumbo/Tomasini. After four years the band comes back with a new sound far from the piano driven pieces of the previous Messier Objects (Tourette Records 2013) and manifesting itself into 5 long electric richly textured and arranged, as the title suggests conceptually and sonically distorted cinematic compositions made of the fabric of sensual and disturbi…
Broken Blues
**Edition of 192 hand-stamped numbered copies ** Reissue of an ultra-limited cdr that popped out quietly on absurd in 2007, this record finds Tetuzi Akiyama and Michel Henritzi joining strengths for a singular set of guitar music recorded at the Alchemy Music Store in Osaka.Captured during the heyday of stylised and pensive improvisation, the music here breaks protocol by avoiding some of the more polite mannerisms of the genre. What starts as a coarse yet beautiful duet of sparse melodic fragme…
Livebatts!
Livebatts! is the result of the eclectic approach to music and sound of John White, the experimental composer better known for his early work with Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra and for his formidable output of piano sonatas (now counting almost to 200).Everything started out from his passion for those cheap battery driven keyboards which appeared on the market of musical instruments in the 80s. Much more similar to toys than to proper instruments, these did interested so much Mr. Wh…