Maggot Brain #20 (Spring 2025)
"On the cover: Devo -- a comprehensive feature by Autin, TX-based music writer Joe Gross on why DEVO matters -- today more than ever, as cultural, political, and spiritual devolution seems to be the way of the world. The piece is perfectly illustrated with ephemera, buttons, t-shirts, and more. A conversation with Irvin Weathersby, Jr. by Sonya Lea on the occasion of the publication of his book In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art & Public Space. Sydney Salk talks to Horsegirl ab…
Chênes
Huge Tip! *300 copies limited edition* With Chênes, Roxane Métayer invites us into a world where the boundaries between the natural and the imagined dissolve, and every song becomes a living tableau. Composed over two to three years, the album gathers a suite of narrative pieces—each a vivid snapshot of life among forests, city corners, and mountain paths, but always told through the voices of animals and plants. Here, insects, amphibians, birds, and mammals are not just subjects but protagonist…
Brass Orchids
300 copies. Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears -- maybe paracusia? Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie's second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist's grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing o…
Still Lives
300 copies * “Still Lives” is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surpris…
Shiroyama
SUDA Seishu (1947–) is a master of the Satsuma-biwa and Heike-biwa, traditional Japanese instruments. He was born in Tokyo and studied Satsuma-biwa with Tsuji Seigo and Heike-biwa with Kindaichi Haruhiko. In 1970, he won the Biwa Music Competition and has been a leading performer in the biwa world for over 50 years.
The biwa is a Japanese string instrument with a long history. It came to Japan during the Nara period (710–784 AD) and is thought to have originated in Iran. It is related to instrum…
Monooto
Monooto represents a genuine encounter with objects. The whispers of countless items draw us into an unfamiliar realm, directing our ears toward the shadows where they reside. This is the emerging music genre known as “monooto”. Interestingly, the Japanese term “mono” (もの), meaning “thing” or “object,” carries a subtle eeriness. According to the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, “mono” can also denote deities, spirits, or objects of fear and reverence, including ghosts and vengeful spirits. Terms like "mon…
Unaesthetic Harmony
Yengo is an artist recognized for creating experimental sound pieces, including live performances that arrange sound in an installation-like fashion and compositions that heavily feature the repetition of a single motif. Yengo's debut release on ato.archives, titled Unaesthetic Harmony, is accompanied by the artist's own commentary included with the tape for those seeking a deeper understanding. This work, influenced by Vaporwave, internet culture, and similar methodologies and aesthetics, explo…
Revolving Lantern
a0n0 is an electronic musician and a member of the fluid collective "時の崖_tokinogake". His music blends sharp, provocative noise that pushes the limits of audio equipment and hearing, with sequences of sound that are both mellow and lyrical, creating a fresh and stimulating auditory experience. This latest piece is rooted in an improvised performance on a modular synthesizer. It stands out as a unique work, featuring a simple yet multi-layered soundscape where different moments of improvisation i…
しるしまみれ / Shirushi - Mamire
Masahiro Sugaya began his career in the 1980s, working alongside the environmental music scene of that era while also making a significant impact in stage music through his involvement with Pappa TARAHUMARA.
Over the past 20 years, Sugaya has shifted from traditional composition using instrumental music to creating works for 8-channel multi-speaker systems, incorporating environmental sounds and field recordings. His latest album continues this evolution, featuring collages of environmental soun…
A Mechanical Joey
Bill Orcutt’s "A Mechanical Joey" is a radical, hypnotic experiment in repetition and punk minimalism. Across two long tracks, Joey Ramone’s iconic “1,2,3,4” chant loops endlessly, creating a trance-like, provocative listening experience that challenges and fascinates
Lost Bird
Lost Bird is a book about abandonment. Photos thrown in the trash, postcards from baskets at flea markets, pages from books, mostly encyclopedias piled up in antique shops and texts from torn pages. It is a collection of images, drawings and writings, which once gave us light, if only for a while, and then plunged into darkness. It is a mutual relationship that changes at the same time, an association of the old to the new that speaks of injustice and oppression, of lost beauty, our lost nature.…
Mondo Vision: A Pictorial Survey of Mondo 2000
"Mondo imagined a future more far-out than any of its time. In its pages, readers glimpsed a hyper-accelerationist consumer dream of cyberspace made all more frighteningly real – then and now – by its prophetic synthesis of capitalism, psychedelic culture, and the computer age." - Dr. J. Christian Greer
Mondo Vision is an exploration of the visual culture of Mondo 2000, the iconic cyberculture magazine published 1984-1998, edited by R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu. Under the art direction of Bart Nagel…
Settlers
*2025 stock* Settlers, the latest release from sound artist & researcher Sergey Kostyrko, explores the social landscape of Murmansk – the largest settlement above the Arctic circle. Side A, Murmansk Soundscape, provides an uninterrupted window onto the city at work, a field recording cherry-picked from extensive research trips around the area. Meanwhile, Sounds of Migration on Side B presents a curiously dynamic noise composition – curious because it’s an automated sonification: one unedited tak…
Reise der Schatten
Reise der Schatten(»Journey of Shadows«) is the soundtrack to the eponymous debut feature-length animation film by Swiss artist Yves Netzhammer. Composed by Anthony Pateras and released as a stand- alone album through Hallow Ground, the 29 pieces are based on »weird folk melodies ornamented with electro-acoustics to give the film a more fantastical, fairy-tale feeling,« as the composer puts it. His extensive international recording sessions with a slew of guest musicians results in a record imbu…
anima-bundle
This bundle includes the following Alga Marghen releases:- Anima "Anima Trip: Baummusik" (LP)- Anima "Underground Altena" (LP)Anima "Anima Trip: Baummusik" (LP)Over their decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has illuminated a near countless number of historical artefacts within the field of experimental sound. During the years, often working closely with the artists at hand, they’ve helped entirely reconfiguring our understandings of the occurrences of radical sound over time.…
Anima Trip: Baummusik
Furthering their explorations to the astoundingly singular creative sound world of Anima - the duo of Limpe and Paul Fuchs - Alga Marghen returns with “Anima Trip: Baummusik”, a never before released body of archival recordings made by the pair in the municipal gallery in the Bavarian city of Rosenheim. Joining a body of work that comprises some of the most incredible creations to emerge from Germany between the late 1960 and the 1980s, this much needed addition to Anima’s catalog is a rigorous …
untitled (2021-2022)
Tip! *100 copies limited edition* Created in 2021-2022 at ‘mobile messor’ (Bologna, Tenerife, Dalvik, Den Haag, Bangkok), ‘Dune Studio’ (Loosduinen), and ‘Hundred Islands Studios’ (Rosclave enclave). Pieces created with original environmental sound matter recorded in: - untitled #398: Macizo de Teno and Macizo de Anaga (Tenerife, Spain), 2020. - untitled #412: Mlawula Nature Reserve (Eswatini - former Swaziland), 2011. - untitled #411: Negev Desert, Dead Sea and Golan Heights (Israel), 2008-2009…
Sediment
Sediment is an assemblage of field recordings made in the Swiss canton of Jura on a single day in August 2022. Jura's rock and limestone formations create a complex topology which hosts a diversity of sound spaces; human, more-than-human, geophonic, subterranean and extra-terrestrial. By walking and driving through this landscape curious pockets of activity are revealed to the listener. The layers of strata that make up Jura; earth, rock, forest, cables, pipes, factories, planes and radio towers…
Acusmatica (Book)
*OBS!!! book in Italian language* In questo approfondito lavoro, l’Autore, da lungo tempo attivo sulla scena della ricerca musicale, ripercorre gli sviluppi delle sperimentazioni fonografiche e l’esperienza dei “padri fondatori” della Musica Concreta e della Musica Elettronica – da Pierre Schaeffer e Pierre Henry a Karlheinz Stockhausen e Iannis Xenakis – fino alle tendenze attuali, per la definizione di una nuova arte sonora: l’Acusmatica.