In The Pendulum's Embrace
Oren Ambarchi continues his otherworldly investigations with 'In The Pendulum's Embrace', a dark twin to his landmark 2004 album 'Grapes From The Estate' [Touch # TO:61]. Returning again to the hallowed halls of BJB Studios in Sydney, Ambarchi expands the scope and range of his unique musical language, incorporating an even broader pallette of instrumentsand sensibilities. Despite the use of glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, percussion and guitars, it's startling that the world created is …
Fluxus & Happening Friends
Fluxus & Happening Friends was presented at L'Autre Caserne on the evening of October 21st 1998 in Limoilou, Quebec. The selection of artists and the choice of fluxus scores had been entrusted to Larry Miller, who also served as Master of Ceremony on that occasion. The actual documentation is an historic testimony of the Action Art as conceived and performed by fluxus. Alos, Dick Higgins made his last public appearence that night since he died shortly after. Scores by: Ay-O, Georges brecht, Al H…
Midnight Crossroads Tape Recorder Blues
Bruce Russell : acoustic guitar, vocal, analogue Tape treatments, mixing and composition. Ralf Wehowsky : sitar, digital sound processing. Recorded 2003-05, Lyttelton, New Zealand and Eggenstein, Germany. Digital mastering at the Temple of Music. “It is Midnight during the summer of 1951, the scene is a rural Crossroads somewhere outside Paris. A man called Pierre Schaeffer is sitting in the grass by the side of the road. As the village clock strikes the hour he invokes Eleggua, the Yoruba god o…
Marie-Antoinette is not dead
Crystal transparent 7' vinyl encrusted with white sprayings, numbered and stamped edition limited to 470 copies. Stunning collaboration between four entities who all left an indelible track in various spheres and in different eras, such as Jac berrocal, a mythical figure, improvisator in his music and his encounters, a visionary poet and avant garde trumpeter who went against the grain in jazz and punk, amongst others, and his associate Jack Belsen, a virtuoso with the machines, guitarist and in…
Koitsukara usetaitameno hakarigoto
New solo hurdy-gurdy disk - the first solo Haino release in over two years. Third album of devastating solo electric hurdy-gurdy for Haino, following on from The 21st Century Hard-Y-Guide-Y Man (1996) on PSF, and Even Now, Still I Think (1998). The hand-cranked medieval instrument provides the perfect tool for Haino to display his genre-collapsing originality, allowing multiple dimensions of rhythm, noise, drone, harmony and melody to co-exist, majicked from the invisible interstices of the anci…
Vertical
Nikos veliotis and Anastasis Grivas have quite a long history of dealing with drones, improvisation, electroacoustic composition and experimental sounds. In this release, Ôvertical', veliotis' strings and Grivas' custom made guitars create a harmonically dense landscape that murmurs, howls, shrieks, sometimes even sings or just rests in silence. The key here is the experience of time, as the music brings a state of suspension and the frequency spectrum dissolves into a frozen uniform mass of pur…
Mexico Electroacustico 1960-2007
3 CDs and a booklet of 70 pages (English and Spanish) for an anthology of the Mexican Electroacoustic Music from 1960 to 2007 under the direction of Manuel Rocha Iturbide. Composers from the first generation: Carlos Jiménez Mabarak, Manuel Enríquez, Manuel de Elías, Mario Lavista, Julio Estrada, Francisco Núñez, Héctor Quintanar. Composers from the second generation: Javier Álvarez, Roberto Morales Manzanares, Vicente Rojo Cama, Antonio Russek, Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Guillermo Galindo, Antonio F…
Dolphin Sonar
Author, activist, painter and sound artist Masami Akita had been at the foreground of experimental music for over 25 years. Inspired by psycedelic rock, free jazz, early electronic composition as well the physical arts, especial Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, Masami Akita has created a musical language all his own. Dolphin Sonar is Merzbow's full length protest album against the annual brutal slaughtering of some 2,500 dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture Japan. This is an angry album full of beats…
Charlotte Corday And The Lament Of Louis XVI / Passades
Featured pieces: "Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI" (1989, for electronics, voices); "Passades -- Volume I" (2002/3, for electronis, transformed voices). Peformed by: Roger Doyle (electronics); Olwen Fouere, Paavo Evans-Doyle, Kathy Kennedy, Paul Dutton, Roger Doyle (voices). Produced and composed by Roger Doyle.
Konrad BoehmerPosition - Il Combattimento - Ouroboros
All compositions by Konrad Boehmer. "'Position' (1961-1962) for 4-track tape, voices and orchestra, (performed by Radio Symphony Orchestra of the WDR, Cologne, Bruno Maderna - conductor). The basic notation for 'Position' is one of 'open' form which does not consist of the exchangeability of its parts but in the idiomatic structure of the composition. 'Il Combattimento' (1989) for orchestra with solo violin and solo cello. "Il Combattimento' is a dramatic concert piece for orchestra that include…
Baby Grand
Roger Doyle (solo piano); Produced and composed by Roger Doyle. "Among my first piano compositions was Six Pieces for Pupils who Don't Like Exams. Baby Grand is the sixth of these and is composed for four hands (in this version I multitracked myself and used some double-speed recording techniques). ... Then in the 1980s I received two once-in-a-lifetime commissions ... The first was to compose music for a film by Irish film-maker Bob Quinn, called Budawanny. The music (which had to be piano musi…
Dmaathen - Eonta - Epei - Herma - Palimpsest - Evryali
A collection of early period works, recorded in the presence of the composer Iannis Xenakis; in Rotterdam, 1977 & Amsterdam 1986. Works featured are: DMAATHEN (1976, for oboe, percussion); EONTA (1963, for piano, trumpet, trombone, with Peter Eötvös, conductor); EPEÏ (1976, for oboe, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, double bass); HERMA (1960-61, for piano); PALIMPSEST (1979, for oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, violoncello, double bass, piano, percussion, w/ Huub Kerstens - co…
The Early Years
This collection has been released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding, by composer Roger Doyle and performer Olwen Fouere, of the music-theatre company Operating Theatre. Operating Theatre has been active in two phases: the first from 1981 to 1988, and the second from 1998 to the present. This double CD celebrates the first phase, during which the company operated as both a theatre company, integrating music as an equal partner in the theatrical environment, and as a band releasing…
Xenakis
Late 2007 / early 2008 release from bhvaast; a new recital disc from the xenakis ensemble, featuring elisabeth chojnacka (known for the “clavecin 2000” lp on the philips prospective 21e siècle series ... esp. her virtuosic performance of ligeti’s “continuum”), tsuji mifune, marco blaauw, and of course conductor diego masson. two xenakis pieces, one by willem breuker, and one by david del puerto ...
Two Bows
The sound of Frances-Marie Uitti’s cello resonates in the bloodstream. Griffiths, Welsh-born, a sometime music critic and the author of some excellent writing on new music, has a voice that sounds like Uitti’s cello... and he uses it the way she plays: intense, throbbing, now and then breaking off and darting in some unexpected direction. His poetry is darkly tinged with memory — “There it was, and it was, and it is gone.” Single words and phrases seem to dissolve into cello sound, and just as o…
The Busy Drone
1996 release ** "Reedist Willem Breuker has a fascination with the mechanical organ, particularly instruments like the European street organ. The mechanical organ works like a player piano, and on these recordings is controlled by either Ben Uijtiens or Chris Weeda. His previous Bvhaast album, Lunchconcert for three Amsterdam streetorgans recorded from 1967-1969 is an unusual album of organ work that takes the instrument is lesser known territories, and included a tribute piece to John Coltrane.…
Vito Acconci / New Humans / C. Spencer Yeh
Noise surrounds and permeates us, and no one is more responsible than the New Humans from that loudest and noisiest of metropolises: New York. From installation art to ear splitting live concerts, this infernal power trio lead by artist Mika Tajima eschews no collaboration, no matter how insane. Guitarist and artistic leader Tajimi is supported by electronics specialist and voice acrobat Howie Chen, drummer Eric Tsai, as well as a large number of guest musicians. The New Humans like nothing more…
A l’improviste
Two improvising string basses, masters Joelle Leandre and Barre Phillips in an aural experiment that is beyond our conventional definitions musical form and manner, an insighful conversationbetween two kindred souls and old friends who never documented their collaborations in a duet format.
Raymond & Marie
Mersault's album, Raymond and Marie, works by undermining expectations, shifting the foreground to the background and back again. A nominally placid passage contains a busy roughness that, without any overt moment of transition, characterizes the moment in question. Similarly, passages of resonant double bass emerge from rough, bracing chunks of sound, dropping after a while into parallel coexistence with electronic drone and muted percussion.
Withers In The Waking
This is the eighth release in the Touch Sevens 7" vinyl-only limited edition series. Both songs are the result of the WFMU podcast series "Codpaste," in which Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) & Ergo Phizmiz publicly composed a series of collage compositions and did a live soundtrack to Christian Marclay's ScreenPlay. This resulted in the online-only album Rhapsody In Glue, from which these two songs are alternative versions, with re-tooled guitars, and vocals added to a Prokofiev melody.