Sound Art / All styles

Black Truffle present the first ever vinyl reissue of legendary performance and sound artist John Duncan's forgotten gem Klaar, originally released by Extreme in 1991 and partly created in collaboration with Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio). Duncan is perhaps most well-known for his notorious early performances pieces, which explored violence, self-denial, and the establishment of extreme psychological and physical states in both artist and audience. Alongside these transgressive experiments, D…

"The main purpose of this work is to explore the context in which freelance artists are working today while addressing the growing importance of the economic aspect within the artistic field, the imperative for freelance artists to become self-entrepreneurs and the mechanisms of their subjectivation. Furthermore, this text tries to investigate the possibility of alternatives and the different forms of ambivalence resulting from it. The work will tackle these topics by trying to realise a …

In the archive of the Janacek memorial in Brno, lies a somehow odd treasure: a series of very tiny notebooks where composer Leoš Janáček used to annotate scraps of spoken language he would hear during his daily life in musical notation. Each one of those speech-melodies, as we call them today, taken roughly from 1904 till 1928, is a small sound photograph of a mundane and ephemeral situation, a fragment that let us blink into an acoustic reality long gone. Janacek practice and obsession re…

**7xtapes in wooden box, comes with several zines + poster, limited to 80 copies - no repress** No words can capture the seminal importance of Stefan Weisser later known as Z’EV. He is an artist without equivalent or parallel - entirely singular within the history of 20th century music, bridging and creating a diverse number of creative and musical fields, sculpting a body of work which resembles nothing before or since. Forever dedicated to pluming unknown depths, Z’EV’s rigorous independe…

Limited edition of 300 copies. The Vinyl Factory has collaborated with legendary creative director and British artist Scott King to release his first record, an art-world send up and celebrity satire called ‘You’re My Favorite Artist’. Invited to make a record by The Vinyl Factory, Scott King recruited old friend James Fry (Earl Brutus), producer Tim Larcombe and singer Polly Martyn to create a song based on a real experience King had in New York.‘You’re My Favorite Artist’ is a dance track with…

To coincide with the opening of his major forthcoming UK solo exhibition at BALTIC (17 March – 11 June 2017), The Vinyl Factory presents a new album of music by the acclaimed Canadian artist Rodney Graham and his band. Gondoliers will be released on vinyl and digitally by on 17 March, featuring nine new tracks of lyrical rock and roll. Gondoliers follows the release of Graham’s 2016 album, Good Hand, Bad Hand, also released by The Vinyl Factory and can be seen as the second half of a pairing. Ta…

Limited to 200 copies, hand-signed by John Giorno. First release of Giorno’s sound compositions. By the end of the 70s, Giorno had expanded his sound compositions into the world of music, live performance and created his own record label called “Giorno Poetry Systems Recordings” –a platform where vinyl, video works, CD’s, tape compilations, radio broadcasting and telephones could be used as a tools to extend the boundary of poetry and literature. In 1981, when Giorno felt he had done every thing…

Killer 1988 “art-gallery” edition - each copy of the original LP was hand-painted by the composer in a loose, water-colour smear / drip style beautifully reproduced here, albeit utilizing the same image for each replica - covering a pair of beautiful, drifting piano pieces composed & executed by Giuseppe Morrocchi in 1980 & 1984.Seemingly influenced by Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music” approach - coupled perhaps with Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Continuous Mode” - the slow rise from decisive…

Glitter in my tears’ marks the 20th anniversary of Janek Schaefer’s career as a recording artist, having now released 30 albums. His music is best comprehended through examining his time as an architect, and how that forged his innate sense for constructing tactile atmospheres, that navigate through unknown structures and forgotten spaces, creating profound new places. Over his career he has placed focus on the relationship between body, medium, and sound, creating a field of work that defies ea…

Typically enchanting electro-acoustic enigma from Philip Jeck, forming a richly abstract narrative from the reactive fizz and and timbral thizz of smeared shellac textures and their keening, dissonant harmonics Philip Jeck studied visual arts at Dartington College of Arts in the 1970's and has been creating sound with record-players since the early 80's. He has worked with many dance and theatre companies and played with muscians/composers such as Jah Wobble, Steve Lacy, Gavin Bryars, Jak…

**In process of restock** "Pentiments continues its collaboration with the legendarily enigmatic American sound art pioneer Leif Brush, this time with an extensive double LP release representing the most comprehensive collection of his recorded work to date. In plumbing the depths of his archives, weve unearthed and gathered a great breadth of his decades-long sonic research, spanning from his early work as a grad student to various lecture documents from his eventual tenure at UMD, with many cu…

Destroy All Monsters are known by some for their role as a bastion of resistance of Detroit's rock; for being, during their second period, the band in which Ron Asheton would reappear. For others, they are a pivotal reference point in the copious but relatively unknown avant-garde underground from the same city, after Thurston Moore and Byron Coley dug up their first recordings in 1996 and the original line-up reunited. Destroy All Monsters comprises two complementary and interconnected poles th…

The long-delayed second LP from Canada's Nihilist Spasm Band, drawn from a 1978 concert at Toronto's Music Gallery and first issued in 1979. A decade on from No Record, the homemade-instrument free-for-all is undimmed: free-rap manifestos against Canada and stupidity dissolving into glorious din.

The 1968 debut of London, Ontario's Nihilist Spasm Band, widely cited as the first noise band ever recorded. Eight artists improvising on homemade instruments, kazoos and the Pratt-a-various, bellowing about stupidity and Canada. A proto-dada howl of terrifying beauty, reissued via Jojo Hiroshige's Alchemy.

2014 Release. * Limited edition of 100 copies worldwide. Hand signed and numbered by Marina Abramovic * 512 Hours is the first major performance by Marina Abramović since her monumental piece The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010, in which visitors were invited to sit in silence opposite the artist and gaze into her eyes for an unspecified amount of time. Abramović performed this work every day for three months. In a unique work created for the Serpentine, Abra…

2016 release. When David Greenberger first embarked on what has become a life-long journey, drummer Chris Corsano was not yet five years old! In 1979, after graduating from art school in Boston, Greenberger took the job of activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home, an all-male elder care facility in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and began collecting the stories, poems and music reviews of its aged patients for what became his Duplex Planet project, an undertaking that would eventually…

2013 release. Boris Hegenbart takes a dub-like approach to musique concrète. Rich contrasts, drawn between synthetic and recorded sounds, allow texture and space to flourish in place of melody. First / Dewbranches away from the very beginnings of Hegenbart's [#/TAU] series. It takes his debut album, Hikuioto (a self-published CD released in 1996), and reimagines it on vinyl.

Sound artist Akio Suzuki crisscrosses the world with his self-made instruments. British tenor/soprano sax player John Butcher is a leading figure in improvised music. These two musicians have been carrying out duo performances since 2002. The six tracks on this CD are recordings of their duos in Scotland in 2006 and Tokyo in 2015. In June 2006, an event was held in which Suzuki and Butcher visited and performed in places around Scotland that have highly distinctive acoustic characteristics. Butc…

"Attempt No. 6 is the result of a cooperation between Swedish organist Hampus Lindwall and the Stockholm-based artists Joakim Forsgren and Leif Elggren with the Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. in Halle (Saale), Germany. Upon the invitation of curator Martin Hartung, the audio-visual performance Attempt No. 6 formed the core of the Werkleitz Festival 2016, titled Trans-Positionen, which was addressed to the power of the imagination associated with radio broadcasting. In conjunction with the internati…

Spectral Arrows is an ongoing series of long-duration performances for guitar and electronics by Marco Fusinato. In Spectral Arrows, Fusinato arrives at the venue when it opens for business, sets up his equipment facing a wall and proceeds to play for the whole day until the end of business hours. Fusinato presents himself here in the guise of a worker, clocking on and unceremoniously clocking off at the end of his 8-hour day, refusing to allow the behind-the-scenes mystery of rehearsals and pre…

Original copies, few in stock, long out of print. Larry Wendt is an extraordinary but very little known pioneer of live computer electronics and text-sound, while Nicolas Collins is here with the legendary 'Devil Music'. Devil’s Music is a performance piece about global media, local culture and individual interference. It developed in 1985 out of the confluence of Collin's fascination with early Hip Hop DJs, a Cagean love of the splendor of radio, the introduction of the first affordable, portab…

Original copies, few in stock, long out of print. Gordon Mumma is best known for his pioneering role in the development and evolution of electronic and live-electronic, and this selection is truly important, as it contains pieces that are only available here, as Schoolwork (1970) recorded with the help of David Behrman and Katherine Morton

Tapes 1 represents the first ever sound recordings to be released from the archive of cult Dutch film director Frans Zwartjes. The sound is unlike anything you may have heard -- dream-like, disjointed, disturbing, peculiar, sexy, unexpected, and totally unique. Frans Zwartjes is famous for his art-house films. A Dutch underground auteur, his prolific output dates from 1968. A unique talent, Zwartjes produced, directed, and edited his own films, but more importantly he created and improvised the …

Recital present a reissue of Dick Higgins's Poems And Metapoems, originally released on cassette by New Wilderness Audiographics in 1982. Label head Sean McCann on the reissue: "Since the beginning of Recital, I have been trying to publish the work of Dick Higgins. He is a chief figure in my artistic world, a hero of mine. And now, with the assistance of Charlie Morrow, it has finally happened. The first vinyl album ever published of Higgins! Many know Dick Higgins as the father of intermedi…

This rare & highly collectible original 7" single from 1971 introduced electronic voice phenomena (EVP) to the wider British public. Recorded by Konstantin Raudive & issued to accompany the publication of his seminal book 'Breakthrough - an amazing experiment in electronic communication with the Dead'. Grab yourself a copy in its original sleeve still with the orginal erratum insert plus new sleeve notes from the publisher explaining the origins of this remarkable & highly influential recording.…

Katharina Klement was born in Graz, Austria, and is a ‘composer-performer’ in the field of notated and improvised, instrumental and electronic music.  She has participated in numerous crossover projects in the areas music-text-video-performance, several works for mechanically and electronically customised piano, sound installations, and is the founder or a member of many ensembles for improvised and composed music. "In 2014, I spent nine weeks in Belgrade, focusing on the questio…

Magazine is the inaugural issue of Blank Forms' journal, bringing together a combination of never-before published, lost, and new materials that supplement the non-profit's live programs. It is envisioned as a platform for critical reflection and extended dialogue between scholars, artists, and other figures working within the world of experimental music and art. Following "Let Freedom Fry" -- a short statement by Joe McPhee drawing out the contemporary political climate in relation to his pract…

Henry Andersen is a Brussels-based visual artist and composer. Trained as a minimal and reductionist composer under the wings of Peter Ablinger, he moved from music into visual art, writing and sound performances. His debut vinyl is a recording of the longrunning piece ‘Stanzas’ or ‘the Law of the Good Neighbour’. On each side, a pair of his friends reads simultaneously from a list of words. The list is an unfinished result of a word game Andersen has been playing for several years. Stanzas… see…

Thomas Müller (b. 1970 in Munich) is a Berlin-based video artist, experimental musician, painter, and photographer. For an exhibition in 2005, he burned three of his oil paintings and displayed the resulting pile of ashes as a sculpture entitled "three of my favourite pictures". These particular ashes were reused in new paintings, some of which have again been burned to produce further ashes for further paintings. Thus began a cycle of ash-based works entitled "not a bird", ranging from large ca…

Yasunao Tone on AI Deviation #1, #2: "I have had an idea if I apply the neural network to create my sound work for long time. When I had a performance at Centre Pompidou with Peter Rehberg and other friends I tried to talk about the idea with a French guy from IRCAM. But, he couldn't understand my idea, which by using neural network the sound I create would never have any repetitions. That was 2002 and I had to wait until 2015 when I had a grant from New York State Council on the Arts through IS…

What you hear on Fly is Yoko Ono's disarming combination of opacity and visceral, personal transparency in full bloom. It's one of the most unbridled, most captivating soul albums ever made. And that's right where she wants you: vulnerable, wide open to any-and-everything, ready to have your world tipped onto its head. She's a master of spinning your head around. First, you get the Bar Band from Hell of "Midsummer New York" to kick things off. It's about the last thing you'd expect from O…

If you've listened to Feeling The Space, Yoko Ono's personal-is-political 1973 album, it should come as no surprise that the once-reviled artist is inspiring a new generation of activists in 2017. On such songs as the righteous chant "Woman Power," the empathetic ballad "Angry Young Woman," the hilarious proto-grrrl "Potbelly Rocker," and the satirical "Men Men Men," Yoko sings in surprisingly straightforward fashion about the burdens carried by women and the mandate for feminism. Support…

There's a fury at the core of Yoko Ono's 1973 rock opus Approximately Infinite Universe that was not apparent on previously recorded efforts. Ono has always been a master of turning pain and sadness into art, but here, there's a clenched-fist intensity that sets it apart in her deep, unparalleled catalogue. Ono is angry. She proved that one can carry a boundless love for humanity and still be furious – furious at male/female relationships, at war, at your partner. Meanwhile, on a sonic leve…

Gerwald Rockenschaub is one of the most wellknown visual artists, currently living in Berlin. Apart from making art he has been deeply involved with music from the start, playing in bands, DJ-ing, organising parties in his former hometown Vienna and occasionally composing music which got released mostly through his own Definitely Something label. Private Pleasures is his first album in more then 5 years, a perfect showcase of his weird and very personal hybrid of half-defunct techno rhythms with…

Hermann Nitsch playing the church organ in the Jesuit church of Vienna, November 20th, 2013. Four heavy drone pieces, mastered by Martin Siewert. Double LP version comes with an eight-page booklet with artwork and an essay by Nitsch about music (in German). These four tracks of Nitsch performing solo on organ are made of sustained drones that are soothing and intense. Music is beautiful and meditative, as it slowly evolves and transforms, full trills that shimmer with celestial light and glide s…

book, 44 pages, color photos, 100 copies. A photographic survey of Ohta's wonderfully minimal installations. Takamitsu Ohta is a contemporary artist, Born in Osaka, Japan. He is using material from the exact place and builds his own works. By a process of transformation, he makes things visible that everyone knows of, but doesn’t pay particular attention to in daily life. He features sound recordings and cassette loops.

More than a half century into its development, free improvisation remains nearly impossible to define. Of course there are concrete definitions, canons, and well trod paths - familiar idioms, structures, relationships, textures, and tones, but by its very nature - something free, when practiced with faith, it is elusive - constantly shifting and reforming in the hands of those who call the art form their own. Of the improvisers emerging from the remarkable European contexts over the last …

Lucky restock, few copies available. When speaking of most artists, critical value is generally gauged by evaluating contributions to existing fields. Bruce Nauman is different. His influence is singular. The change his ideas provoked, unequaled. Since the mid 1960’s, he has laid the groundwork – in thought, context, practice, and materiality, for nearly every fine-artist that has followed in his wake. He is the towering pillar of conceptual thinking. Even those who do not directly draw on the g…

In collaboration between Christian Marclay and the London Sinfonietta, some of the world’s most renowned contemporary musicians have been invited to stage performances, including new compositions and live improvisation sessions inside the White Cube. Each performance over the course of the exhibition will be recorded, pressed and screen-printed live inside the gallery. The second performance is with David Toop.David Toop is a composer/musician, author and curator based in London who has w…

In collaboration between Christian Marclay and the London Sinfonietta, some of the world’s most renowned contemporary musicians have been invited to stage performances, including new compositions and live improvisation sessions inside the White Cube. Each performance over the course of the exhibition will be recorded, pressed and screen-printed live inside the gallery. This performance is from Rie Nakajima.   Rie Nakajima was born in Japan and lives and works in London. Nakajima works wi…