★Schoolmap
Cholagogues (CD)
First and only 2009 CD reissue on Schoolmap of 1977 LP by honourable trio of improvisers playing all kind of instruments and sound producing devices.
Meeting of the Spirits
A small, beautifully strange artefact: a 7" single bringing together two figures from different worlds and decades. On one side, the Berlin techno producer Stefan Goldmann reworks "Theme From Solis Ardor", a piece originally composed by Soviet electronic music pioneer Sergey Rodionov for Vladimir Naumov's 1988 film of the same name. On the other, Rodionov returns the gesture, covering Goldmann's "The Bribe", a track that first appeared on his Lunatic Fringe 12" for Macro.
Rodionov is among the m…
Versprochen
300 copies. Three years after his debut Miniaturen, the Berlin-based composer and producer Konrad Sprenger - real name Jörg Hiller - returned in 2009 with Versprochen, his second solo album and first for the Italian imprint Schoolmap. Where the earlier record traded in short, clipped statements, this one stretches out into a longer, more spatial scale, twelve pieces with evocative German titles given room to unfold across darker emotional registers. The word Versprochen itself sits somewhere bet…
Stunt
Issued in 2008 as the first installment of a three-part series, Stunt marks a striking departure for Giuseppe Ielasi. Best known up to that point for the patient ambient and electroacoustic work on labels like Häpna and 12k, Ielasi sets aside guitars and field recordings here in favour of a single tool: one turntable, and a large pile of vinyl records.
The six pieces collected on this 12" were assembled over three months from short segments, loops, and longer improvisations drawn directly from t…
Hollywood
Few records dissolve the boundary between document and composition with the patience and rigour of Akira Rabelais' Hollywood. A single hour-long work, edited from nearly four hours of location recordings made on a Tascam recorder along a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard - specifically, between the Walk of Fame stars belonging to Betty Grable and Rod Serling - and has long since become one of the more elusive entries in the composer's catalogue.
Born in South Texas and based in Los Angeles, Rabelai…
chry-ptus
The first piece Eliane Radigue ever composed on a modular synthesizer, Chry-ptus was realised in 1971 on a Buchla 100 - the same one Morton Subotnick had recently installed at New York University. Conceived as two simultaneous tapes intended to be played together with or without synchronisation, the work produces, on each new realisation, a different play of sub-harmonics and overtones, slight shifts in amplitude and location altering the surface while leaving the underlying structure intact. Th…
Sweetly Doing Nothing
Few figures within the long, strange arc of American experimental music have occupied terrain quite as singular as Tom Recchion's. Co-founder, in the mid-1970s, of the Los Angeles Free Music Society - the gloriously unruly collective of basement noise-makers, exotica obsessives, tape manipulators, and assembled-instrument visionaries whose lineage runs through Smegma, the Doo-Dooettes, and Le Forte Four - Recchion has spent the subsequent decades assembling one of the most idiosyncratic bodies o…