Masahide Tokunaga
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Masahide Tokunaga is a Tokyo-based alto sax player/improviser who carries out extremely distinctive performances comprised mainly of long tones. On the Hitorri label he has released the improvised performance CDs "Alto Saxophone 2" (2015) and "Bwoouunn: Fleeting Excitement" (2017), as well as "while your master is sleeping" (2020), on which he performs a composition by Taku Sugimoto. With the exception of that composition recording, "Masahide Tokunaga" is…
Cold Light In Warm Blue
*200 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based pianist Fumi Endo has been performing since 2017, playing mainly jazz and improvised music. Her distinctive, minimalistic performances have garnered a great deal of attention. Endo has performed frequently at Ftarri since September 2020.
While she participated in two 2022 Ftarri CD releases—Takumi Ikeda’s "Musical Procedure" (Ftarri Classical, ftarricl-663), and the eponymous "Masahide Tokunaga" (Hitorri, hitorri-970)—Endo had no previous releases on Ftar…
Engines In Unity
A main architect of one of the most exciting and innovative groups of the last decade, Guerilla Toss, Arian Shafiee has recorded for labels as varied and iconic as Sub Pop, DFA and Tzadik. Engines in Unity is the brilliant follow up to his 2018 VDSQ debut solo album, A Scarlet Fail. The record presents a retrospective of Shafiee's singular relationship with the guitar thus far, reconciling his interest in slow, languorous music and deep sound design. Vivid and often destroyed, the pieces on Engi…
Vocal Studies #22
*50 coipes limited edition* Econore presents Vocal Studies #22 by The Oval Language. Recorded in Leipzig.
Smelt
Bent Window presents Tim Olive's new release "Smelt", a buzzing conveyance of sound manipulation made from the leftovers of our mechanical world. Hum, crash and crackle combine for a unique journey into electronic disaster. Magnetic pickups, analog electronics, radio signals and consumer detritus (springs, styrofoam, metal sheets, motors, magnetic tape, wood, dental floss) to generate sound-textures which evolve, shift and mutate. Born in Canada, currently residing in Kobe, his discography inclu…
Some Kind of Telling
Providing the simple text 'Blowing into playback remembrances. Rescription. Some kind of telling.' Banana seem to improvise in space, with considered timing, to-hand objects and bursts of feedback, voice and hidden instrumentation. The tape rings of previous releases of theirs such as MP Hopkins solo LP 'Blue-Lie Half Breath' on Penultimate Press or Alexandra Spence's 'a veil, the sea'. I hear nods to the 'Onkyo' scene in the whistling feedback and stark spaces. Comparisons to works by Akio Suzu…
Abstand
*200 copies limited edition* "Abstand" was conceived to enhance the particularities of the combination of accordion and melodica, both wind instruments, one played with movement and the other by blowing. This dichotomy of difference and similarity resulted in intricate textures, not only thanks to the instruments’ particular timbres, but also through the natural microtonal distances in their fixed tunings, especially when it comes to old and worn out instruments like the ones used here.
These mi…
Tayutauta
Tip! *200 copies limited edition* While continuously engaged in the field of traditional Japanese music, female-school gidayu shamisen player Yumiko Tanaka has since the 1990s been carrying out multifaceted musical activities including contemporary classical music, improvisation (in 1996-97 she was a member of Otomo Yoshihide’s band Ground-Zero), experimental music, and theater performance/composition, performing and exchanging ideas with many musicians from Japan and other countries. While Tana…
The Pit
*200 copies limited edition* Born in 1943, Lance Austin Olsen is a Canadian artist and composer. He started painting in his youth and has continued his work as an artist up to the present. In the late 1990s, Olsen became fascinated by experimental music. He has released numerous CDs and digital recordings of both solo performances and collaborations with other musicians. In his creative process, composition and painting are closely related and draw inspiration from one another.
Olsen released a …
Ondskans Frö
The seed of evil has been sown and all the trees have been infected. The trees infect the water, the animals, the air and the children. The fragmentation is becoming more and more apparent. Have the one you trusted the most turned its back on you? All of a sudden you are all alone. Can you drink the water? Dead fish float to the surface. The sky is slowly fading away. What do you do when the last day is here?
Ondskans Frö ('The Seed Of Evil') is an album about the last day of the earth, when the…
A Wayside Shrine
*300 copies limited release* "In early 2000s New Zealand, Little Skull started as a small project. Smallness was perhaps the defining characteristic. Lathe cut 7”s in vanishingly small editions, the intricate, fiddly covers hand- crafted with what one would have to assume were very small hands. Or just with the aid of tweezers perhaps. The labels of these records provided no information beyond an illustration of a small – little even – skull. The music was also mysterious and miniaturized but al…
Odd Jobs Are the High Road of Work
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* This is one in a trilogy of live recordings made at Ftarri, Tokyo, documenting some of guitarist/improviser Tetuzi Akiyama's outstanding performances of 2021. The CD releases feature covers drawn by artist Shigeo Mizuta. The two tracks here (31 and 39 minutes respectively) were recorded at Akiyama's duo concert with percussionist Ryotaro Miyasaka at Ftarri on February 8, 2021. Born in 1995, percussionist Ryotaro Miyasaka lives in Tokyo. In this concert he…
Phase to Phase
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Katie and Lucio met over the internet almost every Tuesday for one year, composing two pieces, rehearsing, talking about their lives, and recording. The desire to play together began after exchanging work and perceiving a deeply common approach to bass clarinet playing, to sound, and to music. The two pieces offered here are based in a very distinctive but still strictly coherent approach in relation to the work they intend to do.
Phase to Phase 1 is a ce…
Duo-1
*2023 stock. 400 copies limited edition* Improviser Junji Hirose is not just a sax player; in the 1980s he started playing the SSI (self-made sound instrument), which he created by combining numerous devices and everyday objects from which noise sounds are produced in a scattered way. In 1989, Hirose recorded the SSI/turntables duo album "Silanganan Ingay" with Otomo Yoshihide and released it independently as an LP. Three decades later, in 2022, a new SSI/turntables duo album by Hirose and Otomo…
Coïncidence
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Born in 1943, Lance Austin Olsen is a Canadian artist and composer. He started painting in his youth and has since continued developing his work as an artist. In 1997, Olsen met sound and visual artist Jamie Drouin and became interested in experimental music. In Olsen’s creative process, composition and painting are closely related and inspired by each other. French musician Bruno Duplant is an energetic and acclaimed creator on the contemporary experimen…
Live At Ftarri
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Yoshiki Ichihara (synthesizer) and Naoki Nomoto (computer, synthesizer) are musicians based in Tokyo. Ichihara first performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, in February of 2021, and the following November he invited Nomoto to play a duo concert there. The performance was so terrific that the two agreed to collaborate again soon, and gave another duo concert at Ftarri on January 23, 2022. This CD includes two 30-minute pieces performed at that second concert. What mak…
Tierceron
Other Minds is proud to present Tierceron, the first collaborative release between Senso di Voce (Esin Gunduz, voice, harmonium, composer, and Megan Kyle, oboe, English horn) and multi-instrumentalist Henry Birdsey.
To Live
American indie label File 13 Records released what was already Martin Rev's sixth solo album in the autumn of 2003. The previous year, Rev and his musical partner Alan Vega had struck out in a new direction on their "American Supreme" album and Rev's solo works continued in a similar vein. If "Strangeworld" from the year 2000 actually felt more like a timeless abstract of Martin Rev's entire spectrum of musical influences, "To Live", three years later, introduces more contemporary elements, incl…
Dinosaur and Gems
Atsuko Hatano plays viola, violin and cello; she also uses electronics. She has released numerous albums and attracted a great deal of attention both inside and outside Japan. Hatano also creates music for movies, TV dramas and commercials. She frequently collaborates with other musicians and artists, including Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi. Ryotaro Miyasaka, a percussionist active in genres ranging from pop to experimental music, has been extremely busy of late. In 2022, he released the CD "O…