★Moving Furniture Records
Onder/Stroom
Title and concept play against Extrapool's short-lived Zonder Stroom programme (performances entirely without electricity). One bleak winter afternoon the trio decided to do the inverse, using every keyboard, synthesizer and piece of electronics they could lay hands on. The album collects mixes and remixes of that single session: a joyful, dense electroacoustic improvisation with Richard Youngs's experimental folk instincts threading through de Waard's and Nÿland's electronic vocabulary.
Focus Intensity Power
BJ Nilsen's first LP for the label, departing from his field-recording practice. Recorded during a Fall 2017 residency at Willem Twee Electronic Music Studio in Den Bosch, the five pieces document improvised sessions on modular synthesizers, tone generators and laboratory test instruments. The flâneur's ear, normally trained on wind or city traffic, is here turned on machine-generated material: analogue pulse, droning waves and subtle noise arranged with the same patient sense of texture.
Crystalline Tragedies / The Procession - Distant Motionless Shore
An unusual collective release: Comes and Aldinucci composed their two pieces in complete isolation, exchanging neither studio time nor materials, but both worked from the same Nietzschean opposition - the moral codex of the Christian church against the radical surrender to emotion. Aldinucci builds his side from a single field recording of a procession in rural Tuscany; Comes's Crystalline Tragedies traces three distinct sections through the affective dimension of major life passages.
Saxophone Studies
Two long drone pieces built around recordings of improvised saxophone. The first is a seventeen-minute work derived from material James Fella sent Orphax in 2006: multi-layered and roughly cut, with non-harmonic multitones colliding in the room and ear to produce a piercing psychedelic effect. The second, recorded with his father in late 2017, is bass-heavy and centred on baritone, working through multi-layering and phasing into a slow form from which melodic fragments quietly emerge.
Caveman
Caveman is a document of Stamou's live practice: two complete extracts of solo improvised performances using his 'portable electroacoustic studio'. The setup combines acoustic instruments (prepared zither, reeds, recorders, objects) with handmade electronics, modular synthesis and live-processed feedback loops, producing long continuous pieces built on sustained tonal textures and free improvised solos. What the artist calls ritual noise: a slow-burning, immersive electroacoustic atmosphere.
Transmutation
Two long-form pieces forgoing melody and rhythm in favour of pure texture. René Aquarius works in a register adjacent to Thomas Köner's darker drone music: a metallic sheen distributed across slowly shifting masses, gestures held to the minimum, every sonic event magnified by the quietness around it. The result is unmistakably dark ambient, but built with restraint rather than gothic excess, the focus turned to the ghostly imagery that emerges from sustained low-density listening.
Dwaal / Wold +
Originally released by Ghent's Dauw tape label in 2016 and quickly sold out, here reissued on CD with two new interpretations added. The original is a pair of eighteen-minute pieces: Dwaal layers orchestral washes against radio static and erratic noise, while Wold spreads sparse piano notes over a bed of fine hiss, supported by wind and bird recordings from Vriescheloo. The reissue adds remixes by Benoît Pioulard (organ and guitar) and Nicola Ratti (synth sputters and rhythm).
Smelter
Second album by DNMF, the duo formed between Machinefabriek and the Dutch droning free-jazz combo Dead Neanderthals. Across some forty minutes Smelter develops a highly dynamic amalgam of metal, drone and dark ambient, the heaviness of the Neanderthals' instrumental mass folded into Zuydervelt's electroacoustic processing. The result moves between glacial expansive stasis and dense ferrous noise, holding the two registers in productive friction without resolving them into either.
Amsterdam CS
Cinema Perdu turns the spaces of Amsterdam Centraal Station - the roofs, the three access tunnels, the IJ-passage - into compositional material. The everyday sonic vocabulary remains constant (announcements, suitcases, conversation) but is reshaped by the changing acoustics of each space. The pieces are built in a Cagean attitude: not romantic vignettes of the station nor pure documentation, but interpretations of how each architecture stages its own atmosphere.
Peripherad Debris
Second album in Haarvöl's trilogy, picking up where Bombinate left off. Where the earlier work announced its sonic intention (bombinate, to hum), Peripherad Debris turns toward the conceptual periphery and to remnants of what has already been said: away from the centre, toward the outer turbulence where residual materials remain most stimulating. The album moves between quasi-ambient stillness and dense mass-sound nearly turning to noise, holding all positions in the same hesitant qualifier.
You Are The Universe
A remix/recycle project by Preliminary Saturation (Steffan de Turck and Wouter Jaspers) built entirely from Jos Smolders's Textures and Mobiles (CONV, 2004), an album originally derived from a strictly limited palette of DTMF and CCITT telephone tones and pure interfering sine waves. The duo reprocesses Smolders's source material and folds in their own additions across tape, contact microphones, field recording and synthesis. A recursive electroacoustic exercise within a closed lineage.
Kulverzuchter
Bas van Huizen's third album for the label, and the point at which he turns explicitly toward the minimal and the ambient after the visceral noise of Kluwekracht and Waanzintraan. Kulverzuchter is hazy, ambiguous and understated: textures toned down and surface less layered, with most of the activity unfolding just beneath. Track titles are absurd compound Dutch neologisms; the artwork was made entirely from his daughter's first drawings. A study in subtle contradiction within an ambient frame.
1
Mens and Kouw have worked together since 2001, when their first album emerged from the clicks 'n cuts vocabulary via raw mixer feedback recorded to minidisc and broadcast live on Amsterdam's Radio 100. The duo has since migrated into tonal and timbral long-form, combining software, recorded acoustic instruments and modular synthesizer into electro-acoustic drone with audible debts to the American minimalist canon. First half of a two-part album, recorded live in December 2014.
ABC 1-6
Score for indeterminate ensemble by Swiss composer Stefan Thut (2012), here realised by Cristián Alvear, Cyril Bondi and D'Incise. The piece is governed by three categories of sonic material - 0 for faintly coloured noise, 1 for amalgam of noise and pitch, 2 for pure pitch - circulated across six pages and as many rounds in an ever-shifting structure of repetition and turn. A rigorous taxonomy of sound material in the lineage of Wandelweiser and post-Cage indeterminacy.
2.20
Inspired explicitly by Eliane Radigue's Vice Versa..., Orphax records two source pieces in AudioMulch using nearly identical virtual modular settings, varying only a single parameter, and then sculpts the resulting material in Reaper into two strict twenty-minute compositions. The two pieces are conceived to be played independently or simultaneously, the listener encouraged to build their own mix; the album includes a download with both tracks plus a guide mix made with Jos Smolders.
Interventions In A Landscape
Cinema Perdu is Martijn Pieck's solo vehicle for what he calls 'soundtracks without movies': field recording as compositional starting point, layered with synthesizers, contact-microphone material and other electronic sources to reconstitute the feeling of a place at a moment. Interventions in a Landscape unfolds across four pieces drawn from coastal sites where human modification of the terrain sharpens existing contrasts. Place-based composition on the musique concrète-ambient threshold.
Trübhand
Recorded in Bad Zwischenahn in early 2016 as two live performances captured to a Zoom H4 - small Eurorack case, mixer, a couple of guitar pedals - Trübhand is built around long, slow modulations and resonant structures that rise and fall trying to find definition within the flat north-German landscape Fyans was living in. The methodology is patient sculptural patching, allowing time to do the structural work; the affect runs to the muted, modular drone shaped by its making.
Koura
Two pieces of multitrack composition built from sustained tones on solo acoustic instruments - a 'Jubel Töne' zither in the first, a 'Hohner Organetta' chord organ in the second - each extended through real-time electronic processing (feedback looping, downsampling, pitch-shifting, reverberation, oscillator interaction) and extended playing techniques. Part of an ongoing series on layered acoustic-tone composition. The title refers to a sheep-shearing ceremony still observed in rural Crete.
Interrogation Of The Crystalline Sublime
"I hear atmospheres, sound shapes, gestural narratives, spectral trajectories, stochastic rhythms and phasic space when I encounter an environment rich in sonic phenomena. But in order to be open to this meta-sensory information, I must first get my ears out of the way. I don't listen with my ears but with an inner sensory apparatus, what Goethe called "organs of perception," that I have developed over the years. Once opened to this world sound becomes something very different—it's as if one cou…
Divergence
A four-movement work probing the reciprocal interference of sound and space. The source material is reduced to elementary sonic primitives - sine waves, white noise - then physically degraded through tape manipulation to generate pulses, beats and emergent waveforms. From this collision between idealised digital signal and the analogue artefacts of magnetic media, van den Broek builds a heightened spatial perception where pure tone and altered source act on the listening field simultaneously.