★Root Strata
Glare
Brilliant bubbling bedroom fantasy-scapes from Roe Enney with her first proper album of drum machine, bass guitar and vocal DIY pop, a shining diamond on the always-excellent Root Strata label, huge recommendation if you're into Tara Cross, Happy Meals, HTRK, The Cure, Tropic of Cancer, Cocteau Twins. "A somnambulant journey through psychedelic bedroom fantasy-scapes, Glare is Roe Enney’s first proper LP after only a few under-the-radar cassette releases on Phaserprone, Discriminate and Piero …
The Chosen Themes - Program II
Recorded between 2012-2014, Jared Blum's (of GiganteSound, The Talking Book, Blanketship, Vulcanus 68, et al.) Vision Heat project is a laser guided, hyper vintage conflation of early to mid 80's centric production, montage and style. Recalling such luminaries as Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter, Harold Faltemeyer, Craig Safan and such lofty houses as KPM, Bruton and Parry with nods to oddballs from Russia and the Eastern Bloc, Blum still manages to be forcefully yet effortlessly unique. Inspired…
Kietsuzukeru Echo
Kietsuzukeru Echo (which loosely translates to "Disappearing Echo") is Tokyo, Japan stalwart Hisato Higuchi's second offering for Root Strata - his first being an a cappella track for the Tsuki No Seika 7" series in 2011. After over two decades of releases on P.S.F. Records, Family Vineyard, Apollolaan Recordings, and a steady string on his own imprint Ghost Disc, Hisato's latest effort marks a stylistic, yet finely distilled, return to his earliest live sets from the mid-1990s - documented in t…
Aakash
Aakash marks the debut recording of the Portland, Oregon-based trio of Matt Carlson (Golden Retriever), Michael Stirling (a disciple of the late Hindustani master Pandit Pran Nath and a student of Terry Riley), and Doug Theriault. Derived from live improvisational performances, the record finds Carlson's rich analog synthesizers joined by real-time processing of Stirling's lilting voice and Theriault's idiosyncratic guitar work and electronics. Dipping into a kind of liminal void, Aakash isn't j…
Ricochet Screen
Ricochet Screen is the first proper LP from New York based Tint (aka Zane Morris). Encompassed as an overview of his solo recordings dating as far back as 2007, Ricochet Screen unfolds as a storied arc on the obsessiveness of composition, conception and mechanism. Culled from ad hoc recordings in vacant industrial buildings, lunchroom cafeterias and bedroom studios, the record functions as a meditative associative collage regarding a rebounding from omnipresent glass monitors, intrusive s…
Instantanes
Montreal stalwart Roger Tellier Craig (of Le Révélateur and Fly Pan Am) returns to Root Strata under his given name to offer a stunningly abstract pair of compositions indicating a severe departure from his earlier work. While Instantanés might at first evoke acousmatic and musique concrète traditions, the two side-long snapshots Roger presents feel far more spontaneous and rustic than those trappings might suggest, or as Luc Ferrari would say "a concrète music of the poor." A studied medi…
Transmission in an Expanse of Firelight, Hear Me!
A linchpin of Montreal's experimental community for over two decades, Jean-Sébastien Truchy has performed with Fly Pan Am, Set Fire to Flames and Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche among countless others as well as co-running the presently defunct Los Discos Enfantasmes label. After a string of tape releases on LDE, Digitalis, Sic Sic & others, Transmission in an Expanse of Firelight, Hear Me! is Truchy's first proper full length record. Combining elements of Musique concrète, field recordings,…
The Chosen Themes - Program I
ecorded between 2012-2014, Jared Blum's (of GiganteSound, The Talking Book, Blanketship, Vulcanus 68, et al.) Vision Heat project is a laser guided, hyper vintage conflation of early to mid 80's centric production, montage and style. Recalling such luminaries as Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter, Harold Faltemeyer, Craig Safan and such lofty houses as KPM, Bruton and Parry with nods to oddballs from Russia and the Eastern Bloc, Blum still manages to be forcefully yet effortlessly unique. In…
Precipice
Precipice is Byron Westbrook's first long-playing record under his given name. Operating under the handle Corridors for many years, Westbrook has established a reputation for creating immersive, multi-channel, site-specific live experiences using sound, image, and light. Precipice expands upon these ideas as a collection of approaches to texture, landscape, perception of time, and the potential for sound to generate visual space. Like climbing a column that inexplicably leads to a plateau o…
Ten Impressions for Piano & Strings
Realized over a four year period, Sean McCann’s Ten Impressions for Piano & Springs is a document of transition and maturation. Slow moving cloud forms over corporeal landscapes, these impressions whisper of McCann’s imminent & decisive lean towards classical & avant-garde musics, culminating in 2013’s Music for Private Ensemble on his own imprint, Recital. Less a final statement on ambient music, more a meditation on change, discovery and process.
Masque Femine
Masque Femine should be regarded as a total work - much like a film, a ballet, a building, or, an altarpiece - rather than as an album of individual songs. And, its fundamental subject should not be understood to be romantic love. Christina Carter was born in the bayou city of Houston, Texas in November of 1968, and co-founded the group Charalambides there in December of 1991. Ever since then, she has deeply mined her own vein of sound-as-music with voice, guitar (both electric and acousti…
Extreme Events
Airless, ecstatic modular music from former member of Godspeed You Black Emperor. Five years after founding Le Révélateur, Montreal-bred musician Roger Tellier-Craig returns to Root Strata with Extreme Events, a collection of dense sonic studies that betray a futuristic and timeless beauty. Alongside collaborator Sabrina Ratté, who creates the project’s videos and live visuals, Le Révélateur operates at the ideological intersection of audio and visual, analog and digital, nostalgic and anticipat…
Mirage
Primordial moves and stone cold drones from this New York duo of Taketo Shimada and Tres Warren (Sacred Bones Records). Save for a small long-gone edition of CD-Rs, Mirage is the third full-length release by Messages, recorded in 2008 before their first two albums and has remained unreleased until now. This record documents the duo's earliest long-form drone explorations and intonations, most of which were recorded during long sessions in Tres' basement bunker in the East Village. Mixing orbits …
Perhaps
Limited double LP version. Recorded live on December 8, 2006 at a memorial event for James Tenney at California Institute of the Arts, Perhaps is Harold Budd sublimely distilled. Striking in its restraint and simplicity yet profoundly resonant in its depth and message, it is both eulogy to a departed friend and defining statement from an artist at the apotheosis of his career. Originally available only digitally (and only from Samadhisound's web site), Perhaps sees its first-ever and much-de…
Prelusion
The definitive version of this triptych of tectonic drift originally released as a CD-R on Sean McCann's own Recital label in 2011. "Our Silhouette," which blankets the whole of the first side with jewel-like piano runs and distant fading synths, may be one of the artist's most elegant moves. The reverse holds two tracks of long-form organ/string plateaus that float elegantly in space, refracting light and sound in patterns around the head.
Goner
2009 release. Portland, OR. bedroom wanderer Ilyas Ahmed emerges from the shadows and offers up his first new batch of songs in some time. Over a year in the making, Goner sees Ahmed telescoping his previous acoustic wanderings into fuzzed out rockers and a hypnotic set of beautifully tight knit nocturnes. The kick off of 'Earn Your Blood' is probably the most amped up and stoned out Ahmed has ever sounded, a heavy blown out thump of hiss & electric strum. From their Goner really gets los…
Ahh-Ahh: Music For Ed Tannenbaum's Technological Feets
Last copies of this 2012 release. The music on this LP was originally composed by Maggi Payne from 1984-1987 for the performance group Technological Feets. Formed by video artist Ed Tennenbaum in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981, the group combines dance, live video processing and music. This is the first time these recordings have ever been released on vinyl, and aside from the track "Ahh-Ahh (Ver 2.1)," the first time any of it has ever been officially released. Composed on an Apple II …
Forever Falling Toward The Sky
Forever Falling Toward the Sky is the first ever release by Bay Area based Vestals, AKA Lisa McGee. A taught set of haunting electric ballads, these five tracks weave together a number of layered guitars and vocals into a smokey tapestry of blown electricity. Rather than the ephemeral drones McGee has been involved with recently, most notably the group-mind ensemble Portraits & the duo Higuma, Vestals retains the clarity of song, with these hypnotic gyms having been slowly carved out over…
Core To The Brave
Hits w/ a shock & never lets up. Composed of what appears to be blown out bass & spastic drum rhythms, these tracks cascade into shimmering loops of distortion, their weight reaching a critical mass that often feels like it's on the verge of ecstatic collapse. Everything is elevated further in & up by that one & only voice, floating over top like a lush wind come down from the mountains.
Light Cones
Root Strata present the first vinyl release of compelling and otherworldly electro-acoustic improvisation from the adventurous Golden retriever duo. Comprising Jonathan Sielaff's effected Bass Clarinet and Matt Carlson's analog modular synth and digital delay, the duo have thus far stood far out from the kosmische masses with their previous CDrs and cassettes including a beautiful eponymous debut on Root Strata and a stunner for NNA Tapes, but we'd have to say this is the some of the best…