★Moving Furniture Records
Less Is More
Recording of Orphax's live performance at Factor-IJ, Amsterdam in August 2021, part of the programme curated by Moving Furniture Records to accompany the Polderlicht-organised exhibition Less Is More. The full set is reproduced as recorded, without edits. The performance brings Sietse van Erve's recurring interest in minimalist aesthetics into conversation with his own drone practice, producing warm, organic atmospheres in which the listener's sense of time and place deliberately disintegrates.
Additive Inverse
* Stunning collaborative work of field recordings and electronics by Jos Smolders and Jim O'Rourke * What if sounds were to fold in on themselves? Quite quickly after being 'born', even. Only to be released back into the 'normal' world of linear projection and moving waveforms from a resonant source to the ear drum to hearing and listening, some album length later? Through a looking glass of sorts, as if emerging from an anechoic chamber through the backdoor. From absolute silence into all heari…
Orphax Reworked (4CD Box)
Four-CD box collecting reworks of Orphax's 44 Sketches of 44 Seconds, in which Sietse van Erve handed forty-four short source sounds to friends with an open brief to take them outside their usual practice. The contributing artists - TVO/Ruaridh Law, Modelbau, Fani Konstantinidou, Machinefabriek, Jos Smolders, Elif Yalvaç, Siavash Amini and Orphax himself - produce over four hours of new music, each retaining their compositional fingerprint while submitting to a constrained shared palette.
Field Reports
First collaborative album by Philipp Bückle and Martijn Pieck (Cinema Perdu), grown out of their shared track for the Moving Music compilation. The vocabulary fuses field recordings with heavily treated modular synthesis to construct what the artists call a fictitious urban landscape on the other side of the door. Seven pieces unfold as a soundwalk through a city that does not exist - landmarks, brief encounters, machine sounds, muffled hallways - shot through with provisional sparks of light.
Rat Licker (7")
*300 copies * 2020 has been one of the worst years in recent history: a global pandemic with deadly outcomes, hateful police brutality leading to cold-blooded murder of countless black people and a wack conspiracy theory about a satanic, pederast network of the elite which further derailed society. These circumstances have been a direct inspiration for the Rat Licker 7” by Dead Neanderthals. Rat Licker is a scorching 12-tracks-in-9-minutes record that not only reminds us of the early days of De…
48 Hours
Third release in the MFR Contemporary Series. The Vonnegut Collective combines a recording of Thomas Adès's Piano Quintet (2000) - a dense, time-warping work requiring forty-eight hours of rehearsal - with a new commissioned piece by Tullis Rennie built around that process. Rennie's score interweaves rehearsal recordings and player interviews with improvised realisations of his own graphic score for the quintet, plus trumpet and electronics. Contemporary classical with embedded documentary.
Choosing Freedom
Second solo album by Gagi Petrovic, mastered by Jos Smolders. The pieces are performed on GEST, an instrument Petrovic designed himself with STEIM: a light-sensor interface that translates hand gestures breaking light beams into commands for a granular-synthesis environment built on audio recordings. The album frames itself as an exit from arbitrary expectations of what music should be, foregrounding intuitive performance and indeterminate structure within a precise compositional architecture.
Recalcitrance
Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has studied the operations of states and their mobilization of technical practices to serve a presupposed general interest, which involves the production of rules and norms. Such rules and norms are blind to forms of knowledge that are denigrated as ‘local’ and ‘traditional’, and feature the correlative elimination of what does not conform and cannot be standardized – in other words, what is recalcitrant to objective evaluation. Anything that resists subs…
Vauville
Debut album by the young Belgian composer Ryan Van Haesendonck, mastered by Stephan Mathieu. The pieces grew from a week spent on the quiet beaches of Normandy, then continued in Brussels after his move from Antwerp. The vocabulary combines field recordings of church bells, improvised organ sessions, urban recordings of the new city and saxophone passages by Silke Bull, layered into eight short pieces. Cinema-informed ambient on the theme of solitude and self-preservation.
Soleils Noirs
First in a series of collaborations between artists already on the label. Bruno Duplant on church organ, Alfredo Costa Monteiro on synthesizer, composing remotely a single long-form piece. The vocabulary moves between mass, flow and slow combustion: tonal accumulation that the artists frame in alchemical terms as an athanor of doubt and dream, a continuous sublimation that renews itself. Slow drone built across the organ-synth axis, mastered by Duplant.
Continue
* Edition of 200 * With his new album “Continue” Richard Chartier presents four minimalist compositions with a focus on deep drones and apparent silences. The music is subtle, delicate and at moments fragile. Full, with details, like delicate patterns that unfold like ripples on water.
With a keen eye on details the compositions reflect Chartier’s earlier work, but also asks new questions. When is the creative process done? Is art ever finished or does it continue to develop? And how does the li…
Foliage
Foliage is a long-form graphic music score by Elliott Sharp, consisting of eighty risograph prints offered as abstract instructions open to any number of realisations by any instrumentalist or ensemble. Sharp works in the lineage of post-1945 graphic notation but with a contemporary twist: the score was produced by routing his own conventionally written music through graphics editing software, distorting, layering, inverting and blurring it until notation explodes into retinal artwork.
Worn Tape
Imanishi's first album for the label, presenting eleven miniatures built from small sounds drawn from his immediate environment: paper, objects, radio, field recording, microphone. The work is abstract in vocabulary but warm and slow in effect, a deliberate counter-position to bombast. Its strength lies in the precision with which discrete, unspectacular materials are placed within reduced frames, locating the music in the lineage of Japanese onkyō and post-Schaefferian micro-concrete.
Paranon
Two compositions built on what van den Broek terms parameter canons of sine wave generators. The canon, classically a counterpoint device producing imitations of a line after a temporal offset, is here transposed onto pure electronic material: custom-programmed sine generators allow exact control of phase shift, interference and frequency drift between initial wave and successors. The resulting beats, difference tones and spatial events expose the physical richness of pure sound.
Dedans / Dehors
An exercise in musique concrète in the Luc Ferrari sense: not soundscape, not reportage, but the deliberate assemblage by montage and superposition of recorded sequences drawn from disparate origins, composed into a continuity that functions as sonic narrative. Meirino and Duplant arrange and contradict their sources so that the listener has to construct the story: recognition of materials and interpretation of their succession become themselves part of the compositional event.
Paintings
Final work in a trilogy (Sketches, Drawings, Paintings) marking Philipp Bückle's return to music after closing his Teamforest project. Recorded in 2014 across Copenhagen and Dortmund, the album combines a visually organic sensibility with experimental composition, the titles functioning as discrete sound paintings spanning warm September evenings, rainy days, a seascape, a wedding. Mastered for vinyl by Stephan Mathieu. Ambient drone abstraction grounded in figurative diaristic detail.
Nobody Ever Escaped From There
Follow-up to There Was Hardly Anybody There (Spina!Rec, 2016). Belorukov moves once again away from improvised saxophone toward electroacoustic studio composition. A central role is taken by Boris Shershenkov's reconstruction of the Variophone, a 1930s photo-electrical instrument by Evgeniy Sholpo that produces sound from cut-out discs recorded as optical film tracks, prized for its instability and colour. These are layered with field recordings, samples and synthesis, weighted to the low end.
Moving Music - Sounds From the Rocking Chair
Compilation that grew out of the label's December 2019 crowdfunding campaign. Twenty-four musicians contributed across sixteen tracks, mixing solo pieces with ten new collaborations (TVO & Jos Smolders, Radboud Mens & BJ Nilsen, Kouw & Petrovic, and others). The set holds together with surprising consistency across modular composition, minimalist ambient drone and electroacoustic experiment, functioning as a cross-section of the label's network at a precise moment.
Ridge Of Humming Spoils
Final volume of Haarvöl's trilogy. After the noisy beginning of Bombinate and the move toward the periphery of Peripherad Debris, the trio arrives at the frontier as a psychoanalytic empty signifier: an edge that holds both interior and exterior. The album is built from what they call 'whispering remains', material left behind by previous compositional decisions, here treated as a vantage point looking both backward and forward. Drone microsound at the limit of the project's own grammar.
Various Weights
First collaboration between Frans de Waard and Martijn Comes, deliberately built without an underlying concept. Each artist supplied the other with a pool of source sounds: de Waard sent Comes Korg MS20 and Koma Field FX recordings and field material; Comes sent de Waard a processed stylophone, a loop and recordings from the University of Twente's web Software-Defined Radio. Two epic pieces result: Comes's harmonic deep-sonority drone, de Waard's quieter acousmatic-minimalist hover.