String Quartet
"'String Quartet Describing The Motions of Large Real Bodies' was composed as the potential orchestra for a Robert Ashley opera based on the text of 'In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men And Women'. When the work was composed, in 1972, it was clear that a huge change in electronic instrumentation was just beginning, a change that would involve computers and sound producing devices as yet undreamed of. The piece consists of an electronic orchestra of 42 sound producing modules. T…
Music for shattered light box and 7 posters
Getting a grip on the chaos that surrounds us: for American artist and trumpet/cornet player Rob Mazurek the time has come to make a statement. Every right-minded lover of modern music knows his jazz and post-rock explorations with bands such as Chicago underground duo Isotope 217 and Tortoise. Nevertheless, inside this vintage improviser there also lurks a passionate multimedia artist who likes to speak his mind, especially in a time when his home country is starting to reveal the darkest and m…
Natural Selection
Tip! 2000 release After Paradigm Discs released the 1976 LP by Anal Magic and Rev. Dwight Frizzell, the true scope and diversity of this man's activities became more apparent. First, there were the countless unused remnants from the original LP recording sessions, then the many films and their soundtracks, the regular radio shows, the dreamlanddiaries web page, the large scale Intermedia events, performing weddings and leading the live group Black Crack Review. For 25 years there has been a dyna…
passt
Peter Rehberg (aka Pita) and Ramon Bauer completed their trilogy for the label Touch with the 2001 CD Passt. This album, short at 33 minutes, maintains an uncomfortable relationship with glitch electronica. Rehberg & Bauer's first CDs pioneered the genre, which quickly went through an ossification process. Closing their series, the artists try to distance themselves from the glitch culture, bringing a humorous and critical touch to the music. But meta-music this is not; we remain in glitch terri…
Schulterblatt
Rechenzentrum's John Peel sessions- cd release was generally received as a very fine recording. The delicate interaction between sharp rhythmical elements and noises or fieldrecordings, makes their sound mysterious but still transparent. It consists of several layers, interacting on different levels of musicality, shifting between traditional obviousness and hard to define abstractness in sound. They succeed very well in bridging between the more accessable underground music and noise, to use a …
Majaap
Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, voice. Jaap Blonk, voice. 18 duo improvisations. Recorded in Amsterdam, 2001 and Oslo, 2002.
Sights
Back in stock. Take two collaborators, one a German sound artist noted for his painstaking micro-engineered computer compositions, the other a New Zealand noise terrorist with a reputation for making albums over his morning tea breaks. Put them in a basement studio in Karlsruhe for three days in February 2003, feed them on coffee and apple juice and let them out to walk in the woods once a day. What do you get? Sights, a dramatic collision of two very different but complementary approaches to th…
Violence of discovery and calm of acceptance
This is his first album for touch. The highly evocative intricate and subtle guitar drones are captured in the beautiful photography of Heitor Alvelos, a Portuguese artist, and in the artwork of Jon Wozencroft. The background noise on track 10 is a recording of silence during a Space Shuttle mission real time webcast. All other sounds were released by electric guitars. The album was recorded between 1993 and 2000 and mastered at Noise Precision, Lisbon.
Futatsu
Vienna resident Radu Malfatti, who turns 60 in December, is a trombonist and composer with a long and impressive career. In the nineties he established the unique compositional/improvisational style, using very few sounds, that he continues to develop. Thirty-something guitarist Taku Sugimoto has since the late nineties followed a similar path, pursuing a playing style marked by extreme sonic spareness. His work has received critical acclaim in Japan and abroad and has greatly influenced many yo…
Going fragile
Mattin: gnu-linux computer feedback. Radu Malfatti: trombone. Recorded in 2005. Going fragile is the latest collaboration between Radu Malfatti and Mattin, following 2004's critically lauded "Whitenoise". This album sees them refining their approach; they string incidents of sound along a long axis of time, creating distinct events against a stark backdrop. The cumulative effect is the creation of an enormous scale, small moments building to coherent wholes. This album is a vibrant act of music-…
En Concert À La Salle Des Fêtes
QuintetAvant is comprised of members Lionel Marchetti, Jérome Noetinger, Jean Pallandre, Marc Pichelin and Laurent Sassi, five leading lights of the French improvised, electronic, electroacoustic scene. This recording sees them combine electronic tape, analogue synths and a united love for strange sonorities. Like its predecessor, the vinyl-only release Floppy Nails on Mego, this is an exciting display of concrete improvisation. Taken from a live session at the Musique Action Festival, and maste…
Angel gate
Superb acoustic string quartet improvisations recorded in the studio and in concert by TONY WREN (double bass), PHIL DURRANT (violin), CHARLOTTE HUG (viola) & MARK WASTELL. Also contains three short bass solos. 78 minutes.
Wrapped islands
The predominantly Viennese quartet Polwechsel have exhaustively explored the grey areas between composition and improvisation, electronic and acoustic, jazz and classical for much of the past decade. Austrian Christian Fennesz, while initially a guitarist, is primarily known for his abrasive yet melodic laptop explorations on labels such as Mego and Touch. Wrapped Islands documents the much-anticipated first meeting of these two driving forces of contemporary music.
Bassist Werner Dafeldecker an…
Plays Brötzmann
How to improvise on an existing work of improvisation? American outfit Pillow took the plunge by carefully placing European free jazz legend Peter Brötzmann’s group improvisation piece Images on the rack. Don’t expect any tortured notes or twisted chords, though, as Pillow respectfully and patiently square up to Brötzmann’s music. Written especially for his Tentet and released on Okkadisk, Images is one of Brötzmann’s most meditative collective works of improvisation. Tentet member and cellist F…
Les Premières Machines 1968 - 1988
Manipulating and experimenting in all directions, Pierre Bastien gets help from a lot of human-being (Percussions, piano, cello & accordion) but also from machines: toy robots play percussion, xylophone or even the guitar. The result is surprising, varied, funny, crazy but always very interesting. Part of the now famous collection Les Zut-O-Pistes, 'Les Premières machines - 1968-1988' includes the artist's debut works. Starting with the simple 'Sans Titre', recorded in May 1968 during his school…
YPGPN
"YPGPN (Young Person's Guide to Phill Niblock) is the long-awaited re-release of a 2 CD-set that was a joint production by the UK based Blast First label and The Wire magazine in 1995. It includes the following works: Held Tones (1982-94) Barbara Held, flute; Didjeridoos and Don'ts (1992) Ulrich Krieger, didjeridu; Ten Auras (1994) Ulrich Krieger, tenor saxophone; Ten Auras Live (1994) Ulrich Krieger, tenor saxophone; A Trombone Piece (1978-94) James Fulkerson, trombone; A Third Trombone (1979-9…
The movement of people working
New version (with slightly revised visuals, same video and audio content) of this classic Niblock DVD release, originally from 2003. Double-sided DVD; Total time: 3 hours, 28 min. Features 6 short movies (25 to 70 minutes each), plus separate 5.1 DVD-Audio tracks. "This DVD collects a number of Niblock's documentary films analyzing the dynamics of motion involved in manual labor. The images on the disc are all accompanied by Niblock's own minimalist approach to soundtracking. Niblock started mak…
G2, 44+/x2
"Yep, in this day and age, there's money in this minimalism thing. Which is nice for a fellow like Phill Niblock, a man who's been out in the field for over thirty years. While some may be happy to dabble in approximate music, or that only hinted at in whispered tones by those who still subscribe to the idea of the 'tonal auteur,' Phill Niblock makes the very stuff around which this particular world of music revolves. Thusly (and finally and thankfully), a finished record, to add to the handful …
Unheard spaces
'Absence and Presence (2006). Absence and Presence was originally written for five musicians and four loudspeakers positioned throughout the site of performance in order to explore the traction between amplified and acoustic space. The performance was predicated on a set of directions that determined the combination of musicians at specific times and the duration of their performance. Within these structural parameters the musicians chose what they played and how they responded to one another. T…