La preuve
La preuve is a rearguard action. Most of the people who inspired it are dead or retired. Old teenagers flay their former loves. They bear witness to a bygone era, but happily embraced, digested and spat out. Everything was still possible. Or possible at last. Psychedelia opened the doors of perception. Romanticism wasn't relegated to a dull formatting, a cheese without a rind. The group Poudingue, which started out ten years ago, has some fine leftovers. These are the crumbs from purgatory. The …
Whiplash
*200 copies limited edition* Recital is thrilled to present the first full-length vinyl LP by sound artist Asha Sheshadri. Whiplash combines elements of sound poetry, diary-like narration, and delicate incidental music. Sheshadri has crafted a unique and marvelous album here:
"This record is an alternate approach to the autobiographical 'confessional' – I wanted to stitch together some pivotal sketches in self-understanding and forgiveness. While their designs may seem affectively disparate, the…
Immediate Music III
Olavi Louhivuori Presents "Immediate Music III" - A Boundary-Pushing Musical Triumph with drummers Glenn Kotche and Tony Buck
Be Quiet!!!
Sax player Junji Hirose and guitarist Kazuo Imai, both Tokyo residents born in 1955, are renowned Japanese improvisers who have long propelled the country’s improvised music scene. Australian drummer Darren Moore, who is currently based in Singapore, carries on his performance activity while also teaching at Lasalle College of the Arts.
Darren Moore lived in Tokyo for several years in the mid-2010s. Since then he has often visited the country and performed with Japanese musicians. In 2022 he cam…
Kinetic Vision
Composer Masamichi Kinoshita, cellist Tomoki Tai, and composer/computer musician Takumi Ikeda perform on electrical equipment and electronics in the electric noise project Electric Powered Music. Kinoshita and Tai started playing sessions together around 2008 and were joined by Ikeda soon thereafter. This album includes two live improvised performances presented at Ftarri, Tokyo. The performance on track 1 (42 minutes) took place on February 26, 2023; the track 2 performance (31 minutes), on Oct…
A Right to Silence
On the impulse of Jacques Demierre, DDK trio was created in 2014 at the Festival Météo Mulhouse, France. Made up of three major figures on the international music scene, this trio plays music that is totally oriented towards the present moment. It continues the tradition of "instant composition" - going back to Lennie Tristano and passing through the legendary Jimmy Giuffre trio - and deploys an expressive palette ranging from silence to massive acoustic eruptions, while paying particular attent…
There is only love and fear
Berlin-based British composer, percussionist, and instrument maker Bex Burch was invited to spend a month in the US by International Anthem in Summer 2022. Burch immersed herself in the label's creative community and listened to what it gave her, making field recordings and allowing There Is Only Love and Fear to emerge from the collaborations and environments she encountered. Sessions for the album spanned multiple non-traditional recording spaces including a storefront in Bridgeport, Chicago a…
To Listen To As Far As Possible
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* Seijiro Murayama is a drummer/percussionist and improviser/composer who lives in Paris. His first CDs on Ftarri's three labels (Hitorri, Ftarri and Meenna) came out in 2009, and he has since released a total of 12 solo, duo, trio and quartet albums on Ftarri labels. Of the solo albums, the first was "Downdate" (2017), followed by "The Empire of Slip of the Tongue" (2018) and "mi-tai" (2020). While "Downdate" and "The Empire of Slip of the Tongue" are elec…
CTX1
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Masahiko Okura is a Tokyo-based reed player (clarinet, alto sax, etc.), improviser and composer. Apart from his performances on reed instruments, he is energetically engaged in performance activities with his solo project Active Recovering Music. Okura is also a member of the experimental music group Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble.
In 2004, Okura released the solo album "Time Service" on the Improvised Music from Japan label. The highly original performance …
Yagateyamu
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Misaki Motofuji plays baritone sax in all types of free jazz settings. She also carries out performances focusing on acoustic phenomena, based on sound-art-like concepts and incorporating field recordings. But she says her background is in neither jazz nor art—that she actually studied classical music as a music university student. In the bands she leads, Motofuji creates a wide variety of original compositions, from chamber-music-style pop, jazz and mini…
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…