Sound Art / All styles

Bruno Ganz reads poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, framed by texts by René Char, Johannes R. Becher and Paul Celan, with short instrumental sound pieces; recorded in Berlin in March 1984 and produced by Manfred Eicher for the ECM New Series.

Specially re-mixed material Francisco Lopez created for the dance work, Geography, by the The Ralph Lemon Dance Co. which premiered at Yale in New Haven. At the time Francisco already had established himself as an important new composer working with huge pools of silence that then build in time stretching waves of sonic purity. This work is certainly in the vein but there’s also subtle percussive elements woven in, drawn from an African percussion ensemble that performed live during the perfor…

On the new Untitled (2005) CD the Spanish composer Francisco López presents four recently composed pieces which span a broad dynamic as well as stylistic range. Together these constitute a fascinating and intense research exploration into the deep essence of sound. From sizzling jungle atmospheres to rumbling subterranean drones and microscopic details, this is a Francisco López tour de force. In addition to three pieces based on environmental recordings, Untitled (2005) features also an instrum…

Six radio texts by Ferdinand Kriwet in a beautifully designed 3 LP Picture Discs Luxury Box. Ferdinand Kriwet (born in Duesseldorf in 1942) is a multimedia artist and poet who has produced many seminal films and sound works for radio and television, in particular throughout the 1960's and 1970's. His works 'Apollo Amerika' 1969 and 'Campaign' 1973, rank today as outstanding artistic documents of these spectacular events in the history of mankind. Kriwet created the work 'Apollo Amerika' whilst i…

Five installations by Ernie Althoff

The legacy of radio and the arts has spawned forms of radical culture, from early Modernist notions of the “Wireless Imagination” and its subsequent vernacular tongues to Acoustic Ecology’s call for “Radical Radio” based on removing the DJ, transmission and broadcast media upsets and redistributes understandings of place, corporeality, social exchange, and the politics of information. Such instances of radicality find their current expression in radio networking and streaming, which seek to coun…

*2025 stock* "My listening project (about controlled mechanical ventilation in new buildings) is multiple : it can function as a sound study, a sonic data bank, a CD of environments, and finally as a music. This CD isintended to be an object without distinctive function. This is precisely what interests me: the question of listening, at home. "  "As his installations have repeatedly demonstrated, Eric La Casa has a keen ear for those phenomena of regular (or less) occurrences whose musical chara…

"Stratosfera" offre in cd tutta la sua produzione per la Cramps con ben cinque album raccolti in uno splenido box deluxe ["Cantare la voce", "Metrodora", "Le milleuna", "Recitarcantando" e "Concerto Dell'Elfo"] Awesome deluxe 5 CD box set documenting one of the most important artists in Italian musical history. As lead singer for prog art terrorists Area, the Greek-born Stratos used his voice as an instrument in ways never heard before or since. Some of the weirdest purely vocal music ever made …

This historic recording features the first-ever release of the two earliest surviving recordings of David Tudor's seminal work, Rainforest. Sandwiched in between are six keyboard works by Gordon Mumma in recordings featuring the composer and his close collaborator, Tudor. Together, these works constitute a fascinating and historically important document of the 1960s avant-garde in America. In early 1968, Merce Cunningham created a new dance whose apparent impetus was Colin Turnbull's The Fore…

This historic release of a simultaneous performance by David Tudor and John Cage of Rainforest II and Mureau, recorded live by Radio Bremen on May 5, 1972, preserves the only surviving performance of the second of Tudor’s "Rainforest" series. In addition, it documents one of the precious few recorded collaborations between these two visionaries. In 1970 Cage composed the piece called Mureau, in which phrases from Thoreau’s journals (in particular, passages which touch on the subject of music) ar…

 "David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as 'England's Soldier-Poet.' He had a reputation both as a war hero and …

A very nice book brings together a diverse collection of Cornelius Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography 'Cornelius Cardew a life unfinished', Copula, 2006 (ISBN 0 9525492 3 9) it provides essential material for the study…

Vex consists of three sections, each section features a different collaborator: Michel F. Côté, Louis Ouellet, Gregory Whitehead.  Vex is a meeting place which is divisible by three: Erik Satie, Gilles Deleuze, Antonin Artaud. Vex is a series of accidents, problematic strategies, absurd tactics and misunderstood languages. Communication between two persons becomes a third. This other is the territory where the two coexist and translate each other. It is a junction where collisions abound, a site…

New CD from German sound artist Christina Kubisch on Semishigure, a similar exploration of sound & silence as the first one, Diapason (SEMI 002). On Twelve Signals Kubisch used original miner bells from a German mine to produce an hour long piece of bell tones. Several electrical bells were hit with small hammers each giving forth a sequence of clear bell tones that hover in the air. This live recording was made in the St. Matthaeus-Kirche in Berlin: halfway through the recording the original ri…

Germany most famous sound artist with a new album recorded exclusively with tuning forks. A meditative album that takes on a different meaning, feeling and association with every sound, in places almost microsound-ish and in others like a heavily delayed gamelan set. CD comes  with a beautiful 16-page colour booklet with shots of the tuning forks and the installation where this is piece is taken from. Last copy available

The second Christina Kubisch CD on RZ, from one of Germany's more important sound composers. This features is a composition for the clocktowerof the MA Museum of Contemporary Art. All the sounds derive directly from the original bells from the MASS MoCA clocktower. The sounds have been pitch shifted and attack shaped, but have not been electronically altered. The result is a CD of ultimate installation drone and a must for fans of the Het Apollohuis aesthetic, sound artists like Bill Fontana, et…

Four pieces from arguably the most cited sound-sculpt of our time, recently fêted via an exposé in The Wire (October 2001). 'Vocrolls II' (1988) consists of recordings of a glass sphere coming to rest in a Tibetan metal bowl, processed in physics-defying fashion through an early desktop port of the now-prevalent phase vocoder algorithm. 'Mouse Ware' (1998) is the soundtrack to an installation (10 different makes and models of computer mouse are preserved in alcohol, accompanied by 10 user-friend…

Since 1979 Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records. His interest in records, both as objects and bearers of sound, is expressed through sculpture, performance, video and music. In performance, he mixes a wide variety of records on up to 8 turntables, fragmenting, repeating, altering speeds, playing the records backwards, etc. More Encores was originally released as a 10" vinyl record on No Man's Land (Germany) in 1988, composed entirely of recor…

extremely limited LP by the artist/turntable god Christian Marclay’s ‘Guitar Drag’. The piece was originally a video, shown in 2000 at London’s Hayward Gallery, following an electric guitar lashed to the back of a pick-up truck in dusty San Antonio, Texas. The guitar was dragged by the truck for 15 minutes and the sound recorded, which resulted in otherworldly rumblings, hissing, buzzing and crunching – even the odd chord strangely enough, and of course, the soundtrack quickly achieved cu…

Private edition limited to 200 copies "A documentation of Charlotte Moorman activities as a performer is generally available only on the iconographic level in various catalogues which documents the crucial intersection with the work of Nam June Paik or the association with events connected to the Fluxus movement. One of Charlotte Moorman's more substantial merits is having consciously reversed the traditional role of the virtuoso performer on her own instrument, uncovering by this overturning on…

2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal person…

Negative Sound Study was composed in 1969 directly on a historical Buchla 100-System experimental synthesizer available at the Intermedia Centre of the New York University. Charlemagne Palestine was dreaming of an expressive continuous evermoving, everchanging sound form; an enormous sonorous, 3-dimensional sculptural canvas in mid-air using electronically produced sounds. The first experiments were done with simple sine tone generators emitting the purest sound waves without any overtones. With…

Originally released on the Barooni label and sold out since a long time. Charlemagne palestine and Alga Marghen have decided to make the two cds available in a new 2cd set edition. The cds are a new print of the original ones, both included in a newly designed slipcase. Godbear. Flying. In the stratosphere of the overtones. Turn out the lights. Close your eyes. Trance out. Into SONORAMAGNIFICATALAND. Pushed by Remy Martin cognac, the piano would replay the encoded performances exactly in three p…

First time available 2CD set art-edition of the Charlemagne Palestine performances at Sonnabend Gallery, New York City, 2001. Privately issued by the composer in collaboration with Sonnabend Gallery and issued in an edition of 300 signed copies in large silkscreened gatefold folio in 2002. This art edition was never officially distributed and after 10 years a limited amount of copies is now exclusively available for the first time from Alga Marghen. The first contact between Charlemagne Pa…

“Charlemagne Palestine made recordings of the Jamaica Day parade in New York City - where people from Jamaica, Guyana, Cuba, Haiti and other places come to dance, sing, eat and drink. These field recordings of shouting people, passing parade floats and helicopters hovering overhead are interwoven with the electronic sonorities. Together they give a completely new dimension to Charlemagne’s work: Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn is colorful, exciting, trance enducing and it slowly unfolds into a mag…

'Autumn 1982, Brixton, London, Brion gysin, the eternal accomplice of William Burroughs, renews the methods of performance by reciting texts, hastily brought together: Tessa, a member of Slits, Steve, of Rip, rig and panic, Jail, of Penguin café orchestra and Ramuntcho Matta on guitar. Ramuntcho, in the style of Brion, called this session 'white funk'. Most of the texts were written upon meeting Burroughs, at the time of the invention of the cut-up. The influence that Brion gysin has had on cont…

His record presents some of the most important experiments in cut-up and recording technique by the famous poet and artist, Brion Gysin. Originally recorded in 1958 at the histori- cal Beat Hotel in Paris: ‘Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March, 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature …

Site Specific Sound documents a series of sound installations from 1998 to 2002 by sound-artist and writer Brandon LaBelle. Each installation was created as part of the Beyond Music Sound Festival in Los Angeles, an annual festival on sound practice at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center. Functioning site-specifically, and drawing upon the architectural structure of the building, the installations explore the relationship between sound and space by staging social and spatial interventions. In do…

50/70 presents a set of fantastically stirring performances by sound-poet and heroic cultural activist Bernard Heidsieck. Fantastic verbal anarchy sure to appeal to anyone who has ever ventured deep into the margins of free-thinking labels like ESP, United Dairies, Come Org. Features '”Poème-Partition ‘B’”' (1957), for Bernard de Pontcharra, killed in Algeria; “Poème-Partition ‘M’”, suggested by a comment made by Henry Miller about “Déserts” by Edgar Varèse; “Démocratie II” (1977) and “Publicité…

one of his best and inspiring work, along with a huge book documenting the CD's vocal poems.

reissue of the self-released 3lp box set from 1976... as two cds nestled inside the covers of a regular-sized paperback book... considerably less expensive than the original (which sonic tiger still has for $300 if you’re interested...).this and the other book/cd editions from al dante are among the most legendary artifacts from the canon of this pioneering french sound-poet (see other editions of alga marghen), who, along with arch nemesis henri chopin, laid out the groundwork for text-based so…

Second regular-size book/disc set in this reissue campaign of heidsieck’s seminal self-released sound-poetry work from the 70s. this edition covers the “passe-partout” series (“nº 10 à 21”) written & executed between january and december 1972...

the third title in the heidsieck “singles” series, released in april 2005 & consisting of a single piece from 1967/1968. of the three “singles” mixing found-sound-effects against a high edit-per-second ratio of heidseick’s ululations...a part impossible to circumvent of bernard heidsieck in a book which in offer also lcoute via cd. uvre proclamation made up in 1968, couper is not to play proposed the theoretical bases and the practical application of writings of assembly using the practices dins…

Majestic triple-disc and book from mssr. heidsieck containing a 3+ hour piece from 1978 - the third and final installment in the regular-sized book/cd trilogy of heidsieck’s 70s work (along with “le carrefour” and “canal street.”) again: essential listening for the student of outsider yalp...

zonked 1974 recording of an extended “sound-letter to brion gysin” by pioneering sound-poet Bernard Heidsieck, here aided on voice by françoise janicot, laurence lacina, ricky stein, and recently unearthed musician ariel kalma (via beta-lactam ring’s reissue of his “osmose” lp) on saxophone.The levels of insanity get pretty damn high on this one (listen to the sound sample!) with un-related sound-events firing off in each of the stereo channels for the duration. Parts echo the spiritual highs of…

Edition of 200 signed copies.

One-sided LP in an edition of 345 copies. "The new Ben Patterson piece, issued on Alga Marghen's VocSon series, is based on the basic principles of the polyphonic music of the Bantu tribes of West and Central Africa. First principle: the practice of interlocking individual pitches or tones performed by one person into spaces between other pitches or tones performed by another person, thus alternating pitches or tones of one part with those of another part to create a whole. Second principle: use…

2002 release. Alga Marghen proudly presents the first record ever produced by Ben Patterson: "This is not only my first CD, but also the first recordings of these works available to the general public." Starting as a virtuoso double-bass performer of classical music, Ben Patterson was one of the very first founders of the Fluxus Group in Wiesban. This digipak CD will introduce you to some American neo-avant garde music classics, a crossover between John Cage's exploding influences and the experi…

"'Surveying Western Philosophy using China Tools' (33'45"): Western philosophy is thought to have begun along the Ionian coast of Asia Minor in the sixth century B.C. Chinese astrology is thought to have begun in China in the thirtieth century B.C. Would a survey using the tools of an ancient Chinese imperial science give us new and fresh reading of Western philosophy? The year in which a person was born is of singular importance in Chinese astrology as each year is governed by an animal sign. I…

2 limited edition CDs on Fluxus artist Ben Patterson's own label, distributed by Alga Marghen. "'The Liverpool Song Lines' (22'57"): for many year Ben Patterson has been fascinated by the so-called 'song lines' of the Australian Aborigine. Musically, these songs for solo voice, sometimes accompanied by 'beating-sticks,' are not especially stirring for Western ears. Rather, for the artist, it is the concept underlying the text which is remarkable. These songs describe flora, fauna and places whic…