★Mikroton Recordings
A Quartet For Guitars
Can you say something about a quartet for guitars?
Hmm. Where to start?
Well let’s start with why “Affetuoso e sostenuto”? And what about those track tittles: “Ineptitude”, “Awkward”, “Gaucheness”, “Underwhelm” and “Failing”?
Google “Affetuoso e sostenuto” and probably a reference to Haydn will appear on the screen, a nine minute section from his String Quartet Op. 20. No. 1 ( the third movement). For the musicians on this recording after an examination of the score their very first instruction …
Why Is The Sea So Blue
In Why Is The Sea So Blue Margareth Kammerer continues to explore songs in experimental music contexts, elaborately interweaving lyrics into nine wistful soundscapes. Originally recorded in 2006, with the band consisting of Christof Kurzmann (voice, saxophone), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Burkhard Stangl (vibraphone), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), Big Daddy Mugglestone (percussion) and Marcello Silvio Busato (drums), the album’s final shape emerged with the production of Valerio Tricoli in 2011, …
Vtoroi
The first Mikroton release featuring Russian musicians Ilia Belorukov, a saxophonist from Saint-Petersburg, and Kurt Liedwart, an electronic and computer musician from Moscow who also runs the label. It’s their second longplaying work following Obwod which was released on Copy For Your Records. On the new CD the duo goes even further into the realm of unknown contriving to work with silence, space and chance with their traditional means like sinewaves and saxophone’s long tones. Saxophone prepar…
Shifting Currents
The recordings for the piece were gathered over the course of a year from Huddersfield, Stirling, Aberdeen (United Kingdom), and s’Hertogenbosch (The Netherlands). These were used to create an installation consisting of over 100 tracks that were remixed in real time during each performance. The set up varied from show to show, sometimes playing through 6 speakers and 3 subs, and at other times, through 12 speakers etc. The performers were positioned at the centre of the audience, who in turn, we…
Bloody Imagination
Ten years ago, a week before Christmas in 2002, Teruto Soejima, a Japanese experimental/avant-garde music critic, organized a festival at a small live venue called Knuttel House, located in the east side of Tokyo. Named as “Independent Underground Music Festival”, it was held with the following message by Mr. Soejima:
“Today in the advanced improvised music scene, new artists keep coming up one after another. In there, free jazz, contemporary music, techno, prog, traditional music, experimental …
A Floating World
The French WPB3 trio explores areas between abstract minimalist contemporary concrete instrumental improvised music and energetic noisy free jazz with an uncompromisingly totally free approach.
Nusch Werchowska has been involved in improvised music since she met Barre Philips in 1993. A pianist who is able to translate a conversation between Debussy and Cecil Taylor as well as John Cage using all kinds of prepared techniques. She played with numerous musicians in the field of improvised music su…
Limmat
Limmat is the second CD from Günter Müller, Jason Kahn and Christian Wolfarth, following their first album Drumming released in 2005 on Creative Sources. Recorded during one afternoon in Kahn’s Zürich studio, “Limmat” features three unedited improvisations melding microsounds, percussive mastery and swaths of noise and static into a mesmerizing whole.
Originally from Los Angeles, Jason Kahn has lived in Europe since 1990. He has performed or recorded with musicians such as Günter Müller, Norbert…
Planes
Over three decades Jason Kahn developed his unique sonic language, now exploring the interaction between sound and space using a compact setup of percussion and analog synthesizer. He has performed and recorded albums with Günter Müller, Norbert Möslang, Kim Cascone, Arnold Dreyblatt, Steve Roden, Dieb13, Richard Francis, Ryu Hankil, Jon Mueller and many others. He ran his own Cut label from 1997 to 2008, releasing 25 albums.
Asher is one the most interesting new composers in the United States, …
Palmar Zahler
It is now 5 years that I travel to Latin America. My home base in Buenos Aires; and from there to almost all the other countries. When I arrived there first, I did not know much about the music scene, especially about any scene committed to “New Music” or “Improvisation”, but with the time i encountered a lot of movement, a lot of interesting music (of any form or genre) and I encountered musicians, that if they had been born in the so called “civilized West” would be within the most important p…
Cym_Bowl
Cym_bowl is Günter Müller’s fourth solo CD. On cym_bowl he follows even more consequently the idea he already realized on his last album reframed; focused on the sound of one cymbal and one singing bowl; he feeded his iPods with dozens of variations of processed sounds. Afterwards he conceived with recorded material from sessions he improvised with processed cymbal and bowl sounds only the 4 pieces for his new album. cym_bowl could easily go as a symbol of getting lost in time.
Boundary Scan
How secluded can contemporaneity be? Is every art aimed at an inherent center? Are sound waves soft boundaries? Pack a bag, a sky and a bonfire log to join six exceptional musicians on their expedition to the rough and mellow edges of electronic sound. Periferiya is a Russian-swiss collaboration between Boris Shershenkov (St. Petersburg), Kurt Liedwart and Mikhail Myasoedov (Moscow), Thomas Korber (Zürich), Christian Kobi (Berne) and Christian Müller (Biel) which took place in the remote Vallée …
Bangalore
Bangalore marks MKM’s fifth release for Mikroton. Recorded in concert on February 2, 2019 in Bangalore during a tour of India, this LP documents the group’s plunge in the ebb and flow of India’s intense energy. In visiting India the group found a social space which mirrored their own approach to music. Or in the words of David Tudor:
Resonance is the condition whereby a tiny input autonomously cascades into a much larger output. It occurs when a small vibration interacts with the internal struct…
Falls
Eryck Abecassis and Lars Åkerlund started their Falls project to investigate the possibilities of achieving instability with synthesizers and electronic instruments. With only one dramatic change in their strategy: they employed both the same branded instruments to do that and it worked.Eryck Abecassis is a French musician who has been working in diverse areas of music production: producing his own albums and works for chamber orchestras, theaters, installations and cinema. He got commissions fr…
Jardin Des Bruits
Burkhard Stangl and dieb13 live and work in Vienna, both being long time protagonists of the local scene as well as travelling and collaborating with musicians from all over the planet. Many of those collaborations and connections have been documented on the double-CD compilation klingt.org: 10 Jahre Bessere Farben [mikroton cd 5 | 6] commemorating the first ten years of existence of named online platform, which was founded and is since being run by dieb13.Burkhard Stangl needs no further introd…
Disturbio
Angélica Castelló is a Mexican and Austrian composer, sound artist, performer, curator and teacher. Her sound work and compositions concentrate on fragility, dreamworld and the subconscious. Performs continuously solo or in cooperations everywhere between Mexico City and Vienna. Numerous compositions for ensembles, radio works as well as installations that operate at the interface of music, performance and visual arts. Several releases on labels like Mikroton Recordings, Interstellar records, Mo…
Consuelo
2018 release ** "“score” or inspiration for this CD was a solo concert of Burkhard Stangl at the Reheat festival at Kleylehof in 2014. The theme of the performance was the song Bésame Mucho by the Mexican composer Consuelo Velázquez. Chesterfield then took the recording and recomposed it, and composed new pieces mixing everything with old and new recordings, home recordings, accidental recordings, live performances ... all Chesterfield from 2013 till now... a Chesterfield diary of songs, of noi…
Borderland
Cilantro is the duo of multi-instrumentalists Angelica Castello on paetzold, ukulele, organ, tapes, & electronics, and Billy Roisz on electric bass, organ, tv, piezzo, computer & electronics, scrutinizing the activity in bordering areas between noise and silence, tenderness and rudeness, beat and drone, inner consciousness and outer awareness, control and freedom.
"Cilantro presents a world full of enigmas, labyrinths, sometimes abrasive, sometimes ecstatic, a complex and delicate subjec…
Five Lines
The meeting of heavyweights of electroacoustic improvisation from Europe and the Pacific United States happened during MKM trio tour in Northern America. This recording, at CalArts in 2010, yielded interesting results: a nervous displacement of noises and rich sonorous timbres. Casey Anderson, from Los Angeles, works with sound in a number of media from composition and improvisation to installations. On Five Lines he played a combination of digital and analog instruments of his own design…
We Who Had Left
Necks pianist Chris Abrahams teams up with electronic artist and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti for six introspective and mysterious tracks that mix Necks like progress with ambient electronics and curious monologs, and one waltz.The piano recital format number one: a pompous italian tenor, his round belly almost exploding inside his tuxedo, stands beside the gigantic grand piano, holding a hand on it while protruding forwards. Outside the stage, an imaginary oceanic audience is seated on hundr…