Pin Down the Dust
*Limited edition tape* “Pin Down The Dust'' is the first meeting of Nighte - Christina Carter (Charalambides) and Mari Maurice (more eaze) - and it feels both automatic and natural. The collaboration stems from a spontaneous decision by the duo to start playing together weekly. “That's how this music was made,” explains Carter, “with gut feeling as the guiding principle. Mari understands the music I've made on such a deep level that playing with her feels so natural.”
By its very nature, intui…
Borderland Melodies
Three wonderful recent compositions by acclaimed Swiss composer Jürg Frey - ‘Movement, Ground, Fragility’, ‘L’état de simplicité’ and ‘Borderland Melodies’. All beautifully played by Apartment House"The original idea had been for a CD of pieces that use both clarinet and bass clarinet, which would have given me the opportunity to play alongside Heather Roche, Apartment House’s regular clarinetist. However, the pandemic intervened and limited my activities as a player. Then I was seriously ill fo…
Naiads
A series of five haunting chamber works by UK-based composer Martin Iddon. The titles of the pieces are taken from different kinds of water nymphs in Greek mythology. Apartment House perform a set of five evocative and enigmatic chamber pieces by Leeds-based Martin Iddon, whose last CD ‘Sapindales’ sold out earlier this year."The naiads are freshwater nymphs from Greek myth. There were five different sorts of naiads, each one of which provides the name for one of the pieces in my cycle, Naiads: …
L'art de toucher
First, long over-due, Another Timbre disc of the US composer Evan Johnson. Five works from his unique, whispering soundworld. Three pieces in the ‘L’art de toucher le clavecin’ series, with ‘thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg’ for cello and voice, and ‘Plan and section of the same reservoir’ played by Trio Accanto. Note that the CD version of this album includes a fifth track, 'Plan and section of the same reservoir', which can't be included as part of the Bandcamp download for copyright reasons.…
Other Galaxies
"The great pianist Agusti Fernandez and I have had a strong musical connection and friendship for many years. We first worked together on a recording project led by the drummer Ramon Lopez in Valencia, Spain. After that we corresponded and eventually began our performances together during a residency of mine at The Stone in New York—the first of what is now, many other performances here and in Spain. We share many interests in music" - Joe Morris
Double Action
Twin Cosmos is not only the name of the musical output of fraternal twins Morihito & Yasuhito Ito, but more philosophically, an album that encapsulates, “the universe of twins”.
The pair were born 1953 in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture. A port city 50 kilometres west of Nagoya, famous for its chemical plants. Despite their surroundings, they grew up in an environment that fostered learning and self-expression. From an early age, they began to carve out their own paths.
Morihito was fascinated with sc…
Black Box 3
* Edition of 500 * Arbitrary presents the third in the Black Box series of releases by Mads Emil Nielsen. The release, which showcases a more sample- and grid-based side of the Danish musician/composer’s work, is part of a sequence of publications with music and audio originally made for theatre, radio soundtracks and more.
Black Box 3 is based on sound pieces produced for Sprækker (Cracks), a dance performance & installation in Denmark, 2021. The starting points for these pieces are improvisati…
Wat Dong Moon Lek
Carl Stone continues his late career prolific renaissance with a new album of sculpted, tuneful MAX/MSP fantasias. Stone “plays” his source material the way Terry Riley’s In C “plays” an ensemble – with a loose, freewheeling charm connected to the ancient human impulse to make sound, melody, and rhythm from anything. Stone’s unique technique simultaneously focuses and sprays sound like a symphony of uncapped fire hydrants. Is this techno, avant-garde, sound art? It’s simply (or rather fantastica…
You Tourned the Tables on Me (Book)
Tip! Photographs by Roberto Masotti, texts by Carlo Maria Cella, Silvia Lelli, Luca Scarlini. You tourned the tables on me, one hundred and fifteen contemporary musicians and composers portrayed by Roberto Masotti between 1974 and 1981 with the constant (but always variable) presence of a table as a prop that always travels with the photographer. Including, among others, Robert Ashley, Derek Bailey, David Behrman, Han Bennink, Steve Beresford, Luciano Berio, Carla Bley, Lester Bowie, Anthony Bra…
Frost
Reissue of an obscure Italian minimal album from the 80s. Recorded in Northern Italy in 1989 by Michele Tadini, this release effortlessly fuses ambient and library overtones with the influence of early digital electronic music, underlined by an ethereal atmosphere eerily reminiscent of the best soundtracks by John Carpenter. Seemingly unplaceable in time and space, it is both Italian and world-spanning.
A young, free-reined musician with a rich music vocabulary and avant-garde sensibilities pour…
Dress
* Edition of 500 + 16-page booklet *By the mid-1990s, there was a quietly thriving underground in Wellington, New Zealand, made up of a number of loosely aligned operatives - Surface of The Earth and their World Resources imprint; Fever Hospital and 8 Dec, and the music made by the members of The Garbage & the Flowers after that group temporarily dissolved in 1992..." One of those rather short-lived groups was Dress, who on record consisted of Yuri Frusin and Helen Johnstone from The Garbage & t…
Le Macerie Di Babilonia
* Limited edition of 300 copies * sferic mark 5 years of influential operations with a special deep dive into ancient/modern Mediteranean culture by Giovanni Napolano, who’s usually known for crankier industro-dancehall output as NPLGNN (Reel Torque, Youth) and programming the wonderful MBE label - a proper RIYL Jay Glass Dubs, Christos Chondropoulos, Alan Lomax, DJ Screw, Coda Lunga.Taking his native Naples, Italy as a locus of Med culture, Napolano plunges the port city’s palimpsest of energie…
Swarm Structure
*In process of stocking.* Swarm Structure is the fifth LP since Thought Broadcast began over a decade ago in New York City. This release is the first LP in several years after a steady stream of instantly gone tapes such as Extinction Circle, released just at the start of the pandemic. Swarm Structure is the next step for project's vision of urban nocturne and apocalyptic concrète; it is a raw demonstration in covert and lysergic minimal electronics and industrial rhythm, all rendered in TB's si…
Undone Shal
Brooding psychedelic revelations from the Stavangerian outsidercore. The uncanny is never out of bounds in the debut release by shadowy Norwegian duo Firmaet Forvoksen. Gaute Granli and Thore Warland, two archetypes of the Stavanger experimental scene long active through solo work (Gaute Granli’s recent Ultra Eczema notoriety, for one) and other collaborative projects (Thore Warland’s ongoing drum devolutions with Golden Oriole, for another), have joined forces under multiple configurations over…
Darling
*2022 stock.* Adrien Kessler, former bass player and singer of the band "Goz of Kermeur" who toured their three albums between 1992 and 2000, comes back full of fantastic strenght with this new super-power band and their first CD release. Darling is what you need ! A rabid pop mood, hypnotic, violent and grinding, somewhere between the young Bowie's glam rock, the obscure violence of Birthday Party, the craziness of Pere Ubu or Beefheart and this unique little touch, free and indescribable that …
Landscape Man
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Robert Desnos dreamed: I saw Davey Williams and Johnny Shines playing dice with Fred Lane; Isaiah Owens and Andrei Tarkovsky witnessing to a UAB anthropology graduate student; at one point Diogenes the Cynic leaned his head in the door, then moved on. Fred Shuttlesworth, trumpet in hand, kept shouting, “Where’s the one? Where’s the one” Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Cherry, dressed in immaculate white Sufi gowns, whirling and whirling and whirling. …
Excavation
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 300 copies.* This release from Astral Editions, the rock offshoot of Astral Spirits, promises a lot of gems and this collaboration from Chris Cochrane (No Safety, Weird Little Boy) and John Thayer (Drunken Sufis, YAI) sits high atop the pile. Cochrane’s guitars crumple and crush, they squelch against Thayer’s rhythms with a gleeful sickness. “Zinc” chews through layers of tin and turbulence until Stan Zenkov’s sax enters the scene, throwing notes like …
Outside
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Sturdily rooted in Michigan but at home anywhere she steps, Shelley Salant is a wearer of many hats. Anyone who's worked in even the outer reaches of underground music and D.I.Y. culture in the last ten years has probably run into Shelley, maybe when she booked their band a show, or had them by the radio show she's done tirelessly for almost a decade or possibly when she passed through town playing with Tyvek, Chain & The Gang, The Vitas, Swimsuit or one of the m…
Froggy’s
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Pleased to announce that after two years as a digital only release Little Wings' Froggy's is now available on vinyl!! We've been fans of Little Wings for 20 years now so to be able to release a new record from the brilliantly prolific Kyle Field is a dream come true! Not to mention Froggy's is one of the weirder and most amazing Little Wings albums we've heard and we're thrilled to have it here on Astral Editions. Based on a now defunct res…
Nemo Point Soundmap for Terrestrial Melanoheliophobics
Representing Ahad's Flux Worlds 1, the lengthily titled 'Nemo Point Soundmap...' album is the very latest solo offering from this Hungarian sonic traveller now based in Berlin, Zsolt Sőrés. Spread over the two discs are seven pieces that take a combination of viola, bass, piano strings, voice, mellotron, dictaphone, percussion and all manner of other instrumentation and objects into a realm where inner space folds in on itself and unwittingly assumes the guise of multitudinous journeys to those …