An Episode Of Improvisational Smoke Recorded Upon The Cold Stone Of Sacred Ground
2025 stock 1992 release. Frank-O-Fest is a loose grouping of Milwaukee old-timers led & directed by John Frankovic, who recorded this in one cloudy session in a church in 1992. Utilizing percussion, sitar, bouzouki, trombone, pipe organ, jews harp, didgeridoo, bass, cello, bamboo & clay flutes & more, this is a long, form-defying floatation exercise in space-out improvisation.
Le Città di Pianura
After ‘Requiescat In Plavem’ and ‘Lentius Profundius Suavius’, Krano returns with another curveball in his discography, a kolossal double-album and his first original soundtrack for the movie ‘Le Città di Pianura’ (The Last One For The Road), directed by Francesco Sossai and presented at the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), a rollicking, bittersweet journey through the Venetian countryside, where memory and mischief ride shotgun, a road-movie through a territory undergoing great transfo…
You Can't See Speed
You Can’t See Speed is a limited-edition vinyl accompanying the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Attending to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision, You Can’t See Speed features vocal resonances and spoken descriptions written and recorded in collaboration with participants from Stefanou’s film works, alongside music composed by the artist. A cacophony of lived experience, oral storytelling, and vocality.
The B-side cent…
A thousand tiny mutinies live
Bassist and composer Joseph Franklin returns to NM for a wildstyle heat exchange, actioned live in collaboration with synthesist, composer and improviser Ben Carey. Modestly, this one does what it says on the box, however ‘a thousand tiny mutinies live’ revises motifs and prompts from Franklin’s solo bass and extended technique LP for NM in 2024 with spectacular license, captured in stunning high resolution audio.
Surrounded by an encircling audience, Franklin’s fragmented acoustic cycles issued…
Aura
Sound images collected in abstract tales: this is perhaps the aspect that emerges from the explorations of “Aura”, a research in which the continuous recoding of signs is drawn at the same time from the temptation of unlimited semiosis and the structural coherence of musical composition. These pieces reflect a working method that always starts from field recordings and concrete sounds. They may have been recorded in closed or open spaces, in cities or in natural places. Their subsequent digital …
A/Version
P'derrigerreo is a project by G Patrick Foley and Pierre Plantevin, who live in the United States. Although they look mysterious because they have released few works, they create very interesting sound collages with their unique sense. This work has the texture of a collage that seems to have been made using tape manipulation, and it reminds us the some eerie works of Nurse With Wound while changing their style from sound collage to noise acoustic, the precision of the electroacoustic compositio…
Culmus
Culmus (Latin for "stalk") marks the latest chapter in an ongoing collaboration that began in September 2023 and continues to evolve. As co-inhabitants of a shared ecological and mental space, Franki Wals and Chang Deng-yao navigate a sonic continuum that bridges the human and the non-human, creating a piece where electroacoustic improvisation productively meets the indeterminate resonances of wind-activated plant matter. These materials intertwine and form a subtly layered aural tapestry, where…
Fractured Landscape Vessels
Fractured Landscape Vessels is a collection of deconstructed sonic ceramics. Each of the four pieces is a vessel containing interconnected vignettes of space and place. Inspired by local Cornish landscapes and the drift and drag of everyday life, the work fractures field recordings of various terrain through manipulated gestures and performance. In doing so the process has created an exhibition of partial scenes, obscured photographs and fragmented pieces put back together.
Heavy Cloud is a pro…
Glaciers
Thorsten Soltau is a Germany-based artist who has been working since 2009. Until now his works were released on labels focusing on noise/soundscape such as Auf Abwegen, Gerauschmanufaktur, Chondritic Sound, Sentimental Productions, and so on. Glaciers, dedicated to his lost friend, is a 31.5 minutes long piece and it is filled with ambience and electronic drone. The tones are sometimes gentle and warm, and sometimes melancholy. There are sounds of objects, voices, electronic sounds, and various …
All Bliss, Every Tree
*50 copies limited edition. All revenue from these tapes placed towards families in Gaza via mutual aid organisation Art Saves Collective, hand-marbled, each one goes different* Leaving label boss/producer/composer Matthewdavid presents a long-form cut from the Los Angeles trio of Aaron Shaw, Carlos Niño, and himself. The deep listening collage of zither, saxophone, and percussion was constructed through a process of re-sampling source material from the trio’s archive of live LA community concer…
An Account Of My Hut
Duo improvisations for shakuhachi and ney recorded in Ealing, west London, July and October 2007. Clive Bell (shakuhachi) and Bechir Saade (ney) - two deeply committed improvisers working at the intersection of traditional practice and contemporary exploration - unite for their first recording as a duo. An entirely acoustic affair. Both instruments are made of plants from the same grass family - the shakuhachi from bamboo, the ney from reeds - and share fundamental similarities in timbre, breath…
Batu Malablab: Suite for Prepared Piano, Flute and Electronics
Based in Baltimore, M.C. Schmidt is one half of the acclaimed electronic duo Matmos. As half of Matmos, Schmidt has worked with Terry Riley, Björk, Kronos Quartet, Peter Rehberg, INA-GRM, Rrose, Marshall Allen, Horse Lords, People Like Us, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Antony Hegarty, William Basinski, and many more. Batu Malablab, his first solo album, works a dislocating magic, indulging in a tradition of western fantasy of non-western music. Recalling gamelan-inspired experimental classics such…
415 Steppsss to DingggDonggg Paradise
Huuuuge Tip! CD Edition. Where the bells begin, everything else follows. Long before Charlemagne Palestine discovered the thick molasses sonority of the Bösendorfer piano, before the strumming technique that would define his maximalist-minimalist vision, there were bells. Colossal carillon bells in the tower of St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, where a teenage Palestine hammered hymns into the Manhattan sky before spending hours lost in spectral improvisations that drew Moondog, Ton…
Mako Sica Plays "Invocation"
"Pretty sure this amazing Chicago trio was first introduced to us when Jim McCardle insisted we buy one of their albums at a record fair in the Windy City. Not sure which one it was, but it blew us away. Surprisingly, over the damn-near-a-decade since they started recording, Mako Sica has managed to keep itself well out of the limelight. Even though their first LP, Mayday At Strobe (2009), was released by one of Chicago's pre-eminent vanguard labels -- Permanent -- it was not easy to locate peop…
All Is Ablaze
Recently we touched base with the New Zealand ex-pat guitarist Dean Roberts. He's living in Berlin these days, teaching, playing and staying out late. When asked if there were any interesting, unheralded players we should know about he immediately mentioned Julia Reidy. Julia is also a guitarist currently based in Berlin, but the city from which she's apart is Sydney, NSW. While there she was embroiled in the Australian improv scene, and played with the likes of Jon Rose et al. She was focused e…
Melle-Aan-Zee
Melle-Aan-Zee is the latest lo-fi recorded collection of improvised pieces by Ghent-based occasional psych folk, kraut infused jam collective De Regering Van Treffelijke Zaken, which seems to continue to give birth to compositions that defy convention and exceed expectations. Just as their sporadic meet-ups seemingly cannot be planned, their enigmatic worlds of sound unfold through pure improvisation, sense of experimentation, a confluence of coincidences and reasoned skits. There's a special ki…
Give Me Shelter
Although it was the lead track on the Stones's eighth studio LP, Let it Bleed, the song 'Gimmie Shelter' was not released as a single. Indeed, the single 'from' that album was the countrified non-LP track, 'HonkyTonk Women' backed with the corny chorale sluice of 'You Can't Always Get What You Want.' It was as though the Stones, knowing they would soon be pilloried on the cross of Altamont, wanted to have a way to try and dodge those nails by being able to claim they weren't even a rock band. We…
Pantheon Of Fuckery
A long time in the making but good things always come to astral travelers as transatlantic soul mates Dead Sea Apes and The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol are joined together on black vinyl for the first time. Two artists that for over the last ten years (and longer) have spent their lives creating music that defies easy categorizations -- psych rock/kraut rock/minimal/maximal/avant/free are phrases that only give you fleeting glimpses of what each artist represents. What we do know is that via a s…
Afternoon-Dusk
Ned Collette's last album, the 2LP set Old Chestnut (FTR 362-2LP), was hailed as a masterpiece by 'most everyone who heard it. Part of this was due to the darkly delicate lyrics and vocals of Ned himself (akin to the work of Graeme Jefferies, ca. This Kind of Punishment), but much was also due to the elegant lyricism of the music, which had a fantastic prog/folk heft as impossible to peg as it was to ignore. With this new LP, Collette (an Australian ex-pat, now based in Berlin) goes all-instrume…
Orphic Resonance
Near the end of his days, John Fahey told me he was sick and tired of solo guitar records. This statement was partly designed to take me aback (as was often his tact), but it was also true. He seemed genuinely bored by most guitar players, especially those who were traveling in the shoes he'd first worn on his own early records. That said, I'm pretty sure he would have loved Eric Arn's Orphic Resonance. The first time I ever saw Eric play was as part of the classic second line-up of Crystalized …