Sound Art / All styles

Tip! During one of the most collectively challenging years in living memory, Lawrence English’s Room40 has managed to beat the odds and consistently deliver rays of light through the darkness, reminding us of what great art is all about and its importance in times like this. 2020 has already seen the label drop incredible albums by Werner Dafeldecker, Rafael Toral, David Toop, Phill Niblock, Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Merzbow, Beatriz Ferreyra, and handful of others. Now they’re at it again w…

Edition of 50. A selection of some messages from an anonymous incoming message cassette found in a answering machine. It includes only messages sent by Doriano’s father. This recording is the conversation between a man and a magnetic tape. It highlights our tendency to store our burdens inside small machines.  Found and edited by Federico Lupo Federico Lupo (Palermo, 1984) over the last few years has worked sampling texts, images and sounds, notes in the margins of study models. From 2005 to 201…

The Weaver is the debut solo album by the multidisciplinary artist and Discipula collective member Marco Paltrinieri.  Merging spoken words with field recordings, electro-acoustic textures and relics of found melodies, The Weaver brings to life, across 6 movements, the memories and thoughts of a creature living in a world in which the distinction between reality and simulation, as well as between psychic space and external environment seems to have definitely collapsed. The album stems from Palt…

Limited Edition of 50 numbered copies. Fuori is a creation by Giuseppe Chiari, the world renowned Fluxus artist, dated 1965, that is usually performed (even if performances are quite rare) in concert situations or happenings. It is a verbal score: there is no music notation, only instructions; there are no directions about time duration. The performer has to describe the sounds he listens in that very moment.  Francesco Michi and Mechi Cena conceived "Variazioni su FUORI" as a new piece, a non-c…

**Limited edition** Much about ‘Beat Bop’ is shrouded in mystery. Who really produced it? Why was Jean-Michel Basquiat relegated from rapper on the track to drawing the cover and labels? What are they actually rapping about for most of the ten-minute length?  These questions, however, are all part of the enigma and rich legend surrounding a song that is an undisputed piece of true hip-hop genius. The combination of graffiti artist Rammellzee and rapper K-Rob is a potent one, with each MC adoptin…

In process of stocking **Limited edition of 300 copies with an etching in the run-out groove.** His own mix is unique: hilarity, intellectual elitism, biology, punk primitive, beer, and a schlager singer in the red.  He deejayed at many a wedding party, the Tour de France, every discotheque between Eupen and Ekeren Bos, the annual Serge Gainsbourg or Quatorze Juillet nights, and was the first in Belgium to ever play an acid house  record. His weekly ‘magazine’ Radio Ventraal, broadcast via the l…

*Last copies. Reduced price* Besom presse announces the release of Ellen Fullman’s Music for the Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom. Known prominently for her sculptural Long String Instrument (LSI), these musique concrete pieces showcase an underrecognized side of Fullman’s sound investigations. In two expansive works, Fullman voyages through the comic, the menacing and the blissful all while evoking the unique kinetic and timbral aesthetic for which she is widely praised. Composed between 1987-1989…

A rare pearl of Hungarian experimental music, Tibor Szemzo’s sublime debut album Snapshot From The Island [1987] is widely regarded as one of the best ambient & minimalist music of the time. Remastered from the original tapes, limited edition

Beginning in 1975, Eberhard performed Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate over a hundred times (though he did not, as was incorrectly stated in an obituary that appeared in a Berlin newspaper [6], give the premiere). In addition to his work as a musician and vocal performer, Eberhard mastered the art of designing intelligently thought-through concert programs—“Positions of the modern” (1988), “Stations of musical modernism” (1989), “Stefan Wolpe and the musical avant-garde” (1990), “With other ears” (199…

**Edition of 200. Triangular cover** While often laying unobserved below a landscape of the seemingly unfamiliar, experimental music is the imagining of the future, embedded in a quest for fundamental truth. It is a music that attempts to speak of who we are, fueled by curiosity and formed into creative languages that seek new relationships to meaning and communication through organizations of sound. New Mexico based performer, improvisor, composer, and sound artist Raven Chacon’s latest LP, An …

Born and raised in Argentina, Morita Vargas is an experimental artist and producer based in Buenos Aires. She manipulates her voice through reverbs, delays and whispers, singing in a self-invented 'language'. The sound of Morita’s voice is a portal into her thriving, dreamlike world brimming, shimmering and beating with unrefined natural sensations which stimulate something primordial yet strangely contemporary. As far back as 2014 she began work on her first productions - early sketches which l…

**Edition of 30 copies** Untitled Noise, Michele Lombardelli and Luca Scarabelli's debut tape release. Michele Lombardelli and Luca Scarabelli are two respected visual artists who have been active in the Italian contemporary art scene for many years. While joint their project, Untitled Noise, is positioned outside of sonic manifestations of visual, artistic, conceptual terms, it cannot be entirely dislocated from this spectrum of thought.

* Edition of 300. CD + 8" 24-page booklet + poster * Marit Wolters is a Viennese artist who creates sculptures that speak. They generate their own world of micro-sounds. Rod Modell is a sound designer operating primarily from Detroit (with an EU home-base in Amsterdam). Here, he moulded the sounds of Marit's works in the same way that she works her materials, creating a generative soundscape designed for museum playback during Marit’s exhibitions, constructed with sounds of Marit’s sculptures, d…

Somewhere between the buzzing Cyborg bugs and the whistling of extinct birds. Welcome to the hybrid zoo built on the ruins of the biotic crisis. You can explore the chirping, singing and trilling of birds and insects, which you know from pictures of cryptozoological encyclopedias or go straight to synthetic ornithology, where you can listen to mutated biorhythms. Everyone knows Mockingjay call, but who heard the voice of the Double-headed emu or the rustle of invisible community living in the cr…

The overlap between the organic and the synthetic is Vlad Dobrovolski’s stomping ground. Digitally organised sounds melt into squalling melodies that grow and stretch over and under each other like the fractal leaves of a fern, spiraling inwards and outwards into a tesseract of connective tissue. “The more carefully you listen, the more you hear,” explains the Russian-born sound artist. “No two moments are exactly alike in nature. The song is always changing. I find myself listening in ways I ne…

** Edition of 250. Comes with 12-page pamphlet of scores and an essay by Corner ** Voice recordings from a small performance in Italy, early in 2020 -- Homages to/from George Maciunas (1931-1978). Philip Corner's piano meditative playthroughs of Couperin's The Mysterious Barricades (1717), from 1989 and 1992. These two elements (voice and piano) superimposed by Sean McCann, edited during the first month of the pandemic. Manic exaltation, distorted harmony things. Album cover is a few PC scores s…

**Limited edition of 100. Includes 20-page color booklet with photos. Numbered** Jubilee is an album of selections from the last five years of multifarious output by the art collective FPBJPC, including Jonathan Gean, Michael Pollard, Ben Schumacher, and Peter Friel. Including 8-hand piano arrangements of Schiller’s “An Die Freude,” helpful techno, free guitar quartets, music from their film The China Chalet Group, and more, Jubilee is an incomplete picture of FPBJPC’s life-long research into wa…

**Edition of 300. It comes with a 20-page booklet, with program notes, scores, and an interview between Morrow & McCann** America Lament is a panoramic musical survey of legendary experimental composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow’s eclectic works. At just over 40-minutes, America Lament is mysterious, beguiling, and jubilant, comprised of pieces employing everything from hand-made electronics to Irish lap pipes, ecstatic jazz to Schubert recompositions, ambient flutes, and a string quartet. Charl…

**Limited edition of 100. Includes 12-page booklet** De ossibus 20 is the debut LP by sound artist and poet Kiera Mulhern (b.1992).  Bridging classic sound poetry elements with micro studies of the artist’s body and environment.  Burying a microphone in a book, this LP picks up fragments of words and memories, humming the rustles of parchment.  It reminds me of Henri Chopin at times, busy mouth clusters bang against the air.  Kiera made this album as a means of organizing loss after her mother’s…

Music for Krügerrand is a quartet piece written for eight gold bullion coins and eight oscillators, in which the materiality of bullion gold coins and the sonic properties of gold are investigated.  The quartet piece was commissioned by the G((o))ng Tomorrow festival and was premiered at Copenhagen Contemporary on November 7th, 2018. Music for Krügerrand was performed by an ensemble which featured Danish billionaire Lars Seier Christensen alongside Ying-Hsueh Chen, Jaleh Negari and the composer …

**Edition of 100 copies. 7x7" vinyl box in heavy box set. Packaged in numbered limited edition box** Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard's Sound x Sound is a series of works where each piece is an exploration of one single instrument that is multiplied. Løkkegaard’s aim is to get the instruments to exceed their own familiar sound, and multiplying does exactly that. The sound of the individual music instrument and the individual musician is dissolved and the sound reappears in a new form. A sonic as well as h…

**Edition of 100 copies** Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard's The Anthology of Sound inhabits multiple states at the same time - as the sounds described in text are in constant fluctuation between alphabet, word, language and meaning - & between the state of a book, a score, written text and imaginary music. 463 pages all in all.  A fluctuation very similar to that of the superpostion found in quantum mechanics.  Just as warm plasma within a supercollider would burn and collapse if it ever were to leave th…

A manifesto for possible future music. "This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as “music” is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But …

Goat Music is the documentation for David Shrigley’s film, Laughterhouse, about goats whose cries sound like humans. Contrasting the limits of comedy to the unlimited appetite of goats, this artist’s edition is a prime example of Shrigley’s biting humor. Comprising a picture disc and an artist’s book, Goat Music includes recordings of the goats in the film as well as the soundtrack Shrigley composed to accompany the opening performance in Hydra. Shrigley’s project for Deste’s renovated former sl…

Limited edition of 150 copies  An art zine containing over 40 pages of riso-printed, silk-screened and lino-cut works by various artists, coming with a compilation cassette.     Artwork – Evil Moisture, Lee Ranaldo, Ludo Mich

Art & Vinyl is an exhilarating new look into the history of the vinyl record as a medium for modern and contemporary visual art. This beautifully designed and printed publication is the first book to focus in-depth on works of art created specifically for an album, composer or musician. With reproductions of more than 200 LPs from the mid-20th century to the present, Art & Vinyl traces the trajectory of how the record album has been considered by artists as material for a work of art. The book b…

**Original edition of 55. 3-color linocut pack with riso-printed insert. linocut by Mayhem ** Recorded live at the Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson St. London on the 25th of May 2012 by Seymour Milton

**400 copies** Bill Nace and Graham Lambkin first played together in Fall 2018, in Kentucky, behind plastic. In that performance, they sometimes played the same instrument at the same time. Time passed, then they recorded this album in Fall 2019, in London. I was told that an acoustic guitar, a cymbal and tapes were used in the recording and I have no reason to doubt that. There are also voices, birds, a room, the outside world...; a bow is used. Bill & Graham both deal in different kinds of ten…

**2020 stock** This album is a compilation of avant-garde art music performed by Son of Lion, an American Gamelan Orchestra that uses traditional Indonesian instruments as well as found objects (hubcaps, foodcans) in its music. The liner notes feature diagrams and/or descriptions of each piece that explain the nature of its unique composition. For example, Elena Carey describes the four nitrogen bases of D.N.A. and an analysis of the relationship between this raw genetic material her Gamelan mus…

**2020 stock** Gamelan in the New World: Vol. 2, released in 1982, is a teaching album, providing the listener with lyrics, scales, and a history of Indonesian music culture. Gamelan Son of Lion play keyed instruments that are constructed in the Javanese style. The group uses both the pelog and slendro tuning systems, sometimes in conjunction with one another within a single composition. The group is composed of ethnomusicologists and instrumentalists who are dedicated to playing and preserving …

Second Editions presents Both by claire rousay. Claire Rousay has been exploring the sensitivities of sound always in relation to "the self" and "the other", equally. Her work is always seen as a contribution, as engagement. Recording, collaging and composing become acts of considering, remembering, giving. Therefore music becomes a context, or more precisely, a habitat. But what does it say about this music when the artistic choice goes deeper, when it is not only an urge to express but to find…

Danish musician/composer Mads Emil Nielsen continues his Framework series; a collection of open, hand-drawn graphic scores and recordings. Framework 3 is the latest instalment in Nielsen’s sequence of graphic scores and recordings. The series includes the Danish composer’s own subjective translations of visual materials and sound pieces accompanied by visual notations. On this release he collaborates with Katja Gretzinger and Nicola Ratti. Published as a limited edition art print folder, Frame…

Limited edition of 150. Includes 16-page color pamphlet of artwork & text by Baron. Derek Baron is a composer, musician, and artist. Curtain is a diary. Both in musical and non-musical situations, they attribute a filmic quality to their journal-like aural self-documentation. Dreams turn real then dissolve. Single phrases and events arrive and leave, abruptly. Yet, the overall sense of place that Baron creates is understood. Opening Curtain is the eponymous piece. A 21-minute live chamber work f…

**Edition of 75 copies, wrapped in printed Schmid drawing, sealed with black rubberband** Visual and sound artist Eric Schmid improvising for an hour on an electronic piano. Schmid’s trampled notes and chords leak out of a big broken faucet on Dedicated to Dieter Roth. Relentlessly dripping and dancing down the drain, indifferent to anyone observing. Colloquial themes, “Chopsticks” and “Fur Elise” are discovered in the mist of his wandering, along with something he told me was an Idea Fire Compa…

CD Edition. The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital.  Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form.  “We were like children playing with new toys,” Daniel recalls of the early days of American Gamelan music.  “Though, as we moved into the 1980s, I moved away from Javanese traditional formalism compl…

**Edition of 100 copies, signed & stamped by Wolfgang Müller** "Music lessons from the Walther-von-Goethe-Foundation: with nightingale and frog songs, calls from the crane, a fantasy song by Ahmad Hamad, a song by Tabea Blumenschein, a music box and a dancing vibrator from The Deadly Doris (German/English Edition).“

111 cyclists reach famed opera house Teatro Colón to welcome Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), one of the great composers of the 20th Century, who was born in Argentina, but left the country and settled in Germany in 1957. However, his adventurous music remained an inspiration to a number of forward-thinking Argentinean musicians, and in 2006 he returned to Buenos Aires for a Kagel festival, where he was to direct a major concert by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, but also worked with a group of young …

Mark Harwood's A Perfect Punctual Paradise Under My Own Name is a two part audio drama that charts the life of a middle-aged Australian man in the throes of an existential crisis, brought about through a series of unforeseen circumstances that collectively threaten to undermine the fundamentals of his existence. It’s a work that explores the sound of a mind collapsing under pressure, where lucidity is traded for mania, and eloquence reduced to a scattershot of primal rambling and abstract self-r…

Edition of 300. New York, 1978, kindred composers Philip Corner and Carles Santos meet at the Bösendorfer piano of Charlemagne Palestine to record four-hand piano versions of Corner’s pieces “Chord” and “Gong!”.  The result is a long-flowing distillation of the source of the two composers’ affinity: avant-garde practice of austere artistic devotion at play with perfect imperfections of the uncontainable human spirit.A small cassette edition appeared  in the late 1980’s and is now presented in a …

This is a brilliantly weird and hypnotic record, featuring pretty much nothing but the voice of conceptual artist Hanne Lippard reading a variety of texts typical of our digital age - things like autoresponders, FAQ’s, social media posts, bot-generated spam mail etc (or as she calls it ‘degenerate, or “b-language”) as a continuation of her ongoing investigation of the differences between the spoken and the written word. The result is entrancing, funny/sad in an almost Larkinian way and highly th…