★Mappa
Open And Closed Circles
Mappa invited me to make a work for cassette release. At the time I was putting finishing touches to a work for CD that was the result of 3 years of collection, distillation, presentation and consideration. I had made a conscious decision to stop composing in favour of making work for installation and performance.
However, the idea struck me to make a ‚format-specific‘ piece. For many reasons the cassette didn’t excite me in the same way as vinyl or CD. But then I considered the compact cassette…
Dilo
** Gatefold sleeve, incl. extensive 8 pages booklet (photos, notes, lyrics) ** I first discovered khroniky – Ukranian folk songs – in the Highlands of Scotland. I was watching a screening of Bajka, a mesmerising documentary made by the filmmaker Lucia Nimcová and sound artist Sholto Dobie. I knew nothing about these ballads beforehand, but I was fascinated by these odd, beautiful songs, especially the easy way in which they mixed misery and levity, where gentle melodies blend with tales of dark …
Schism
** Edition of 150 ** Life through the computer. We all have had to grapple with it over the past year, as we attempt to wring as much meaning, intimacy, experience and variety as we can from our shiny boxes of electronics. Concerts, plays, ballet, meetings, dates, dinners, coffees and conferences all became just a click away. Some of us cocooned ourselves in soundscapes lost, from old streams from noisy bars, to recordings of natural locations we could no longer get to. It was by turns revelator…
Stand Closer When You Have Something to Say
Stand closer when you have something to say documents two separate elaborations upon a single physical space: a studio in Los Angeles, California with concrete floors and large, wooden firehouse-style doors that face a moderately busy street. Tasting Menu—a trio of multi-instrumentalists Tim Feeney, Cody Putman, and Cassia Streb—give attention to the room by rubbing its surfaces; opening and closing its portals; allowing its natural resonances; and moving about it spatially, left to right and fr…
Face First in the Entangled
‘Face first in the entangled’ is Infant’s illustration of the “organic internet” between different lifeforms built by mushrooms. These mycological structures see wild fungi coordinating and operating in a decentralized yet organized fashion, leading to dramatic ‘social changes’ without the need for leaders. The music follows a similar path, with Detroit-based Patrick Miller working over a year-and-a-half to forge a mimic of such systems, eschewing lead elements in favor of co-mingling patches of…
Apex
**Risograph printed j-card** As a project, Line Gate has been undergoing a slow, steady transformation, much like the longform drone works that have come to characterise it. What began as a band in 2010 and most recently surfaced as a solitary hurdy-gurdy resonance on 'Den' in 2017 has now flourished into ‘Apex’, Michal Vaľko’s latest album. 'Apex', simultaneously an album about perceiving the beauty around us, about sacredness, and a meditation on a state of timelessness and seeming non-action,…
Sotto
‘Sotto’ is Andrew Oda’s attempt at world building in sound. Meshing method, mind, metaphysical and mundane into massive murals, its triptych of vivid compositions seem to wield electronic sound like a magic paintbrush. Inspired by the paintings of Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Ljubomir Popović, and Nicole Duennebier, ‘Sotto’’s three parts inhabit environments bursting with explosive internal ecologies of synthesized pulsations, yawning drones, tinkling imaginary chimes, and abstract noisy rumblings…
Bow Down Thine Ear, I Bring You Glad Tidings
* Limited Edition * Among the musicians whose work closely reflects the reduced forms in experimental music, perhaps the most interesting is Cristián Alvear, a Chilean guitarist performing formally radical post-Cagean music, as well as Laurent Peter aka D'incise, a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer, one of the key figures of the eclectic scene in Geneva. The numerous projects in which they participate prove their strictly defined artistic vision and active involvement in networking th…
Creepy Crawly
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…
Natursymphony No.1 - Spring Music
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…
Televize
"The joyful, tender, almost too tender, but at times extremely intense album entitled Televize was made by the inflamed, wholly focused, at times completely scattered, dissipated and organically chaotic ensemble called the Roman Radkovič Collective. It throws at the listener a threshold music and a poetic experience of the world. If one record can mediate otherness, a music which can never be imagined without first-hand experience, it is the LP with the magical title Televize.It sounds like a ga…
Mustikoita Ja Kissankelloja
**200 copies** From the crystalline sources of the stony rivers through the waves of 5G networks to the blood stream of yellow plasma. Mustikoita ja kissankelloja is like a chaotic sonic sedimentation of new weird Finland music revitalised and flowing through different waste channels, protected habitats and clogged veins. You can scan the microview and listen to the pointillistic murmur on a petri dish or try to stalk the tectonic movements.Do you remember the pure electronic ocean of the Pacifi…
Autofictions
**70 copies** Mappa editions presents a special duo project by Bruno Duplant and Pedro Chambel which connects field recordings and Duplant's photographic project emerging from the same concept.Bruno Duplant is sound enthusiast, composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist living in the north of France. In his work he is creating new fictional universes and uncharted territories using many field recordings collected in different parts of world. Architecture and culture of these sonic environmen…
Pampa
Mappa editions introduces a debut release of the duo, which connects their creative powers, microtonal oscillations of saxophone and minimal vibrations of an electric guitar. Fluid changes between silence and noise, between isolated strings details and raw distortions, which on Pampa coexist in harmonical relationship on the background of wavy scenery. Pampa is a representative example of the vital experimental music scene in Buenos Aires and invites the listener to its deeper exploration.Sergio…
I Love This City and Its Outlying Lands
"Panelák. Fenced square garden at the entrance. Tree limbs, dried skin of snake, snails with cracked shells. Once upon a time there were plants. Soaked orange peel in front of the door. Buzzing of door bells. Elevator drone. You count the floors while you follow the picture instructions. Capacity and weight of three-dimensional space. You are entering the apartment. Horseshoe above the door. A wooden mask next to a whistling kettle. Seashells in plastic box. Phantom signal. Sheep fur on the couc…
Lignes de Fuite
"It is raw material rather than tool. Polished metal body or beslavered tube. Just tenor sax at the end of its pilgrimage. It is sculptural object - assemblage without original function rather than a museum artefact of musical viruosity. Heavy metals flowing through the sewer from the concert hall. Small scrap dried by sunlights. Bubbling, squealing and rustling. Circular breathing - as if you have been blowing glass. Objects shaped by breath. Sébastien Branche as a sculptor and a bricolier."Séb…
Collision and Coalescence
**200 copies, clear orange vinyl** The missed seed of cryptobotany music. Jani Hirvonen (Uton) and Johannes Schebler (Baldruin) reconstruct the mesmerizing world of the Grykë Pyje swamp tribe. Vinyl in your hands is a ceremonial sonification of the sacred herbarium, painted myths of the animal kingdom and voices behind the thicket. A return to the time when the forests, tree crowns, soil, thickets and heaven were full of continuous murmur. Or, on the contrary, a vision of a future in which the c…
Conversaphone Plus
We announce the joyous return of the spacecraft known as IQ+1 to Planet Earth. After more than six years, which its members spent on experiments, improvisational side-missions, solo excursions, and hunting for material, we can finally welcome a third mission, following on from the highly acclaimed Tváří v tvář (2011) and IQ+1 (2013).The current line up – George Bagdasarov, Veronika Hladká (Pio), Jaroslav Tarnovski (Gurun Gurun, Wabi Experience, Jipangu), Petr Vrba (Rouilleux, Poisonous Frequenci…
Sisters
Sarah Hennies new album! 40 minutes of incredible music for solo vibraphone, performed by Lenka Novosedlíková in a 700-year old church in Kyjatice, Slovakia. "We discovered the church in Kyjatice three years ago during our irregular wanderings across southern Slovakia. We were completely enchanted by this well hidden medieval building standing over the village, surrounded by sunny fields and dense forests. We asked ourselves how we could bring life again to the church, how we could fill it with …