Cumino in Mia Cucina
** Edition of 300 ** Acoustic nylon strung guitar is not something I usually play but a visit by Duck Baker to our home in Rome inspired me to dig out my Brazilian version. I met Duck at Stefan Grossman’s house in the late seventies and embarrassed myself by replying to his question about what did i play by answering "you probably wouldn't understand", assuming he only played folk music. He produced from his bag and gave me a copy of a record with him, Henry Kaiser, Eugene Chadbourne, Owen Maerc…
A Thousand Sacred Steps
We owe this session to a touch of happenstance and a measure of forethought. Chris Abrahams was in London with The Necks for a residency at Café Oto, the capital's enterprising and valuable haven for adventurous music. Mark Wastell asked him whether, if he had any spare time whilst in the city, he’d be interested in doing a studio session as a duo.
The two have met a number of times over the years (including once in Berlin when Chris came to hear The Sealed Knot, the trio which Mark inhabits wit…
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…
Jar'a
Jar’a is a surprising album in which the prepared Sardinian guitar, without any overdubs, achieves the tonal range and sonic pressure of a post-rock ensemble. The suite in six movements brings together avant-garde and ancient traditional singing rituals, evoking wide open spaces, combining underground worlds and the most ancestral Sardinia. Jar’a is a concept album, with three-dimensional sound, in which Paolo Angeli expresses an innovative contemporary language, inlaying it with fragile, emot…
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…
Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire
Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…
Mémoire Magnétique, Vol. 2
Transversales is very glad to announce the release of Mémoire Magnétique Vol. 2 spanning 1966-1993, revelatory collection of short and secret music by electronic music pioneer Bernard Parmegiani. Since the late '50s, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some eighty two concerts music. From the start, Parmegiani’s work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, animation films but also music…
Memoire Magnetique, Vol. 1 (1966 – 1990) LP
**2021 Repress** Transversales is very glad to announce the release of Mémoire Magnétique, vol.1 spanning 1966-1990, revelatory collection of commercial and secret music by electronic music pionneer Bernard Parmegiani. Since the late 50's, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some sixty concert music. From the start, Parmegiani’s work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, animation fil…
Skamielina
** Edition of 50. Cassette With Skeleton Doggo Insert ** Skamielina means fossil and there is an excavated feel about this pretty piece of pastoral horror. Like something has been dug up and now stalks the cloying, humid summer, alive again in the warm rain with the incessant mosquito-buzz of tape, the ever-present tape-buzz of mosquitos. Samutek’s has over 30 releases, none of which have any details apart from titles that are in varied German, Polish and English. The cover photography is murky-…
Tomiris
** Edition of 50 ** It begins violently and gets worse. Rattled barely-percussive scrapings, peppered with audio documents at the edge of perception lead to an unignorably painful and persistent crying baby. Eventually she is sped up, synths slide in and it’s over. Tomiris is being born. Club-concrete producer Ratkiller’s Tomiris is a conceptual reworking of the soundtrack to the 2019 Kazakstani film of the same name and it occupies a similar weird mythic space. Tomiris the film is a piece of na…
Electric Fauna
Leif Elggren and Kent Tankred, 3 September 1999, Fylkingen, Stockholm – a small chamber play where The Sons put the small animals on pasture and let them live their own lives, but under strict supervision and with a fixed eye so that no accidents may happen, so that no one is injured, so that no one is ill-informed, or how it might be if not everything is organized and supervised in a well-structured society.
"You can't just let things be without direction, then there would be nothing at all (or…
ZA87
** Edition of 100 ** The dusty streets of apartheid-era Soweto, 27 July 1987. The politically charged funeral of a young activist who fled South Africa to became a commander in the military wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Police await in armoured cars. The funeral is restricted by specific government decree. "The man being buried is Peter Motau, assassinated in neighbouring Swaziland on the orders of South Africa's most notorious government-sanctioned killer, Eugene de Kock, …
Of The Shapes of Hearts and Humans
** Edition of 100 ** These recordings capture a meeting between Patrick Shiroishi and Paul Zachary, a few days before Zachary left Los Angeles and embarked on a journey across the country. The sounds of Garfield Park echoed while the San Gabriel mountains burned, and Patrick and Zachary intoned a prayer for our shared futures. Recorded on 9 September 2020 at Garfield Park, Pasadena. This shapely tape is a product of The Tapeworm – “…we decided to leave when we got thrown out”.
Four Walls Full of Sound
** CD / 4 Pages Digipack + Booklet ** Four Walls Full of Sound is an electronic interpretation of the works of Phill Niblock by the Prague-based group Opening Performance Orchestra. This studio version, recorded at the re-set studio, was preceded by a live performance at the 2017 Ostrava Days Festival of New and Experimental Music. The cover was designed by Jaroslav Buzek and the booklet includes essays by Kurt Gottschalk and Petr Ferenc. Sound designer Stephan Mathieu took part in shaping the r…
Plux Quba
One of the greatest sonic masterpieces of the '80s - long championed by Jim O'Rourke and foreshadowing the work of an entire generation of experimental electronic music that emerged during the 1990s - Christian Fennesz, Oval, Mouse on Mars, Microstoria, C-Schulz, Mountains, and Oren Ambarchi - we're thrilled to offer an essential repress of Nuno Canavarro's visionary LP, Plux Quba, via the venerable Drag City. Originally appearing from the shadows of the mysterious vanguard of Portuguese music i…