★Erstwhile Records
Green Ways
Green Ways documents a collection of live recordings, drawn from in situ performances given in Doon, Dungarvan, Plaistow, Shoreditch, Singö and Stratford across 2018 by Graham Lambkin and Áine O'Dwyer. It celebrates the filíocht of rural and urban acoustic environments with a playful economy of means, and offers a special salute to the rich heritage of Carnahalla.Áine O’Dwyer and Graham Lambkin are multi-disciplinary artists whose work explores the nexus between music, text, illustration, theate…
We are everyone in the room
"Two improvising laptop trios, Stilluppsteypa hailing from Iceland and Chicago's TV Pow, met for the first time in the fall of 2000 and embarked on a week-long tour, captured in part on this recording. As in most successful examples of this genre, the musicians mesh into a whole wherein individual accomplishments are impossible to quantify. The range of sounds and depth of detail produced by this sextet are remarkable, from the quietest clicks and rattles to deeply sonorous hums and ratchetings,…
Where Are We Going, Today
Christian Wolff, piano, objects, charango, flute. Antoine Beuger, voice, whistles, EWR recordings (1995) of Christian Wolff’s “Stones”.Antoine Beuger started composing music in 1990 and has released on his own label, Edition Wandelweiser Records, as well as Erstwhile Records. Beuger’s work is best exemplified by two releases, his first, Calme Étendue (Spinoza) and A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger. Calme Étendue (Spinoza) is an album that attempts to take the 17th century philosopher Spin…
Wovenland
Serie of recordings made by Toshiya Tsunoda & Taku Unami in different locations and then processed through different playback speed, noise gate or parallel editing.For 15 years, the Yokohama based artist Toshiya Tsunoda has been releasing remarkable acoustic works into a world that he seems to hear like no one else. His CDs are the most idiosyncratic and rigorous to be found among the many field recording releases of recent years, though his work is just as easy to place in the sound art frame..…
Mosquitoes and Crabs
Chulki Hong, turntables, guitar, electronics. Will Guthrie, drums, percussion, electronics. Recorded by Taku Unami, Mullae Arts Village, Seoul, South Korea, 20-22 October 2016. Mixed and edited by Taku Unami.Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer/percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics. Born in 1976, Hong Chulki …
L'âme Est Sans Retenue I
Swiss composer Jürg Frey's six hour long electronic tape piece L'àme Est Sans Retenue I was recorded and assembled in 1997/98 and is now being released for the first time. It is the longest piece Frey has ever composed in his over 40 year career.In this piece, Frey utilized the sounds of field recordings he made in Berlin in 1997 as the source materials, alternately inserted between long stretches of silence. Frey was particularly focusing around that time on how the dynamic relation between sou…
Extracts
"The first word that came to mind on playing Extracts was understatement, with an almost oriental minimalism and profundity on display. At times I was forced to check whether sounds were coming from the speakers or from outside. However, this is a far cry from the Radu Malfatti school of implied music since it is very much about close group interplay. Simon H. Fell's sonorous bass is of particular note, underpinning, colouring and giving the proceedings a kind of still, stately authority. Likewi…
13 Thirteen
Keith Rowe and Michael Pisaro: 13 Thirteen | On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one’s perception of time itself. On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one’s perception of time itself."On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and…
The Whistler
A year ago, Graham Lambkin continued the ErstSolo series with "Community" (in conjunction with Keith Rowe's quadruple "testament"), while the even more prolific Taku Unami appeared in duo with Devin DiSanto on the live performance recorded at the Fridman Gallery in New York in 2015. The material reworked for "The Whistler" comes from two days of field recordings in gardens, streets and parks adjacent to St. Peter's Cemetery in Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as some recordings made by Lambkin at…
Taku Unami/Devin DiSanto
A collaborative CD between Devin DiSanto and Taku Unami, a recording of a live performances that took place inside AMPLIFY 2015: exploratory at Fridman Gallery in Nyc. "Devin DiSanto lives in Brooklyn and develops performances, actions, and audio recordings that revolve primarily around the material attributes of a sound, particularly the plurality of its signification. His projects start from the premise that space is listened for as much as seen and heard before it comes into view. It doesn't …
The Room Extended
"I first noticed the tremor in Keith Rowe's right hand on a visit to his home in Vallet in the summer of 2014. Presumably it had existed for some time although while I was in Paris (from February 2013) we saw Keith several times a year and I hadn't picked up anything before. When I returned to Vallet in November for two concerts in honor of Christian Wolff's 80th birthday, Wolff at one point asked him directly about the shaking and Keith replied that they were having examinations but it might we…
Community
Erstwhile is proud to announce the release of Community, the new solo release by Graham Lambkin, his fifth solo record, following 2011’s Amateur Doubles. “Community is a music steeped in sociological review. It sits as a keen barometer, taking the temperature of the world around it. Community is both willing servant and social mirror - it performs its basic civic duty without fuss, then shatters.” (José Perez)
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and designed by Lambkin, Community arrives in a delux…
The Earth and the Sky
Erstwhile is proud to announce the first release on the new ErstClass imprint, an epic collection of Michael Pisaro's work for piano from 1994-2016, 11 pieces totalling 223 minutes. The pieces are performed by the brilliant Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt (Current 93, Walter Marchetti, Robert Ashley, etc.) with close oversight by Pisaro as well as his own musical input at times. The gorgeous 8-panel digipak was designed by Yuko Zama (also the lead producer), and the 8 page booklet features liner…
Looking Around
Christian Wolff, prepared piano, whistles, stones. Michael Pisaro, electric guitar, harmonica, stones. Recorded in 2014. Chistian Wolff (1934), American composer of avant-garde music. Michael Pisaro (1961), guitarist andcomposer, member of Wandelweiser. The album was mastered by Joe Panzner and designed by Yuko Zama
Earnest Rubbish
After a solo on Kye, the Australian writer Matthew Revert comes back with the American sound artist Vanessa Rossetto. Together they mostly work with field recordings, editing and mixing them in a narrative form, adding some texts and voices. Whereby two of the cutest cabbages in the cot create a soup unlike any other.
Amorphous spores
Unusual sound work from the Japanese duo of Takahiro Kawaguchi and Utah Kawasaki (Astro Twin), using self-made instruments and electronics to create unexpected sonic emissions that follow curious paths that are separated by periods of quiet or textural sound.
Takahiro Kawaguchi was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1980. He works in Osaka and Tokyo in various electroacoustic genres, using field recordings or creating sound installations, or presenting sound live. The common concept of all his works is: "…
Busman's holiday
This album is a meditation on the inner mental environments that one encounters and endures during times of work-related travel. The music contained herein should be well suited for headphone distraction in airports, bus stations, train stations, subway terminals, and in the confines of the seats related to these methods of mass transportation.Recorded, edited and mixed by Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet in 2015.
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"Busman's Holiday opens with audio taken from an iconic scene in John Boorman's…
Parazoan Mapping
With fifteen untitled vignettes and varying source material, Parazoan Mapping often feels like an aural scrapbook. And when looking through any scrapbook, the different photos and pieces of ephemera always point to something bigger: a sort of unraveling of the people contained within. The pictures of your family’s vacation from several years ago may not explicitly show it but you very well understand how then compares to now that feeling of joy when you conquered your first wave after hours…
Matterings
Field recording artist Jeph Jerman and percussionist and sound designer Tim Barnes are finally out with this fantastic collaborative work - here’s a certain patience that’s required to fully engage with Matterings. It’s a good twenty minutes longer than the other recent Erstwhile releases but it goes beyond album length—when your source material is different aspects of nature, the process of recording, editing, and compiling tracks feels like excavation. It’s with these slowly unfolding tracks t…
Schwarze Riesenfalter
An evocation of “Nacht,” Graham Lambkin and Michael Pisaro’s chilling, malefic collaboration directly references Giraud’s collection of poems, Pierrot Lunaire, and Arnold Schoenberg’s melodrama of the same name. Despite the continental subject matter, Schwarze Riesenfalter isn’t an academic act of re-rendering a historical text. Their use of verse comes across as the result of warped poetic fascination and fixation, where a text crawls underneath skin, finding ways to subtly influence the mundan…