★Seance Centre
Ample Habitat
Sophomore release from Toronto dream-duo Joseph Shabason and Ben Gunning, this time a more cosmopolitan affair, mapping fragmented cityscapes from bent electronics and late-night FM jazz transmissions. The boys are back in town. After recording their debut in a remote cottage in Northern Ontario, the duo relocated their jams to Shabason’s Toronto studio where they gained unlimited access to a virtual cornucopia of analog and digital gear and had the time to really push those instruments to the b…
Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra
Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra (Triangles of Light and Spaces of Shadow) is a collection of visionary Mexican electronic music sourced from obscure cassettes, CDs, private pressings, and personal archives, presented by Séance Centre and Smiling C. These works trace an expansive scene of prescient musicians who created a unique speculative cosmology, forging Mesoamerican mythologies with innovative sonic technologies. From the mid-80s through the 90s, a network of Mexican musicians embark…
The Night Of Power (Laylatu'l Qadri)
Recorded in one mystical night during Ramadan in 1982, The Night of Power (Laylatu'l Qadri) is a prophetic tapestry of politically and spiritually conscious poetry and revelatory home-studio electronic jazz.
You Can Can
You Can Can is an echoed affirmation, an album which traces song forms around silence, field recordings, and degraded analog memories. This is folk music transmogrified and mutated, as if recorded and reconstructed in Pierre Schaffer’s GRM studio.
Many Worlds Interpretation
Many Worlds Interpretation is a collection of cosmic Americana for electronics, guitar, and percussion culled from Jon Iverson’s extensive home-studio archive.
S/T
A suite of raga-inspired compositions and improvisations that grew from a fertile collaboration between Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison and John Also Bennett centered around a devotion to just intonation tuning, deep listening, and resonant spaces. Michael Harrison is a composer and pianist who is a dedicated practitioner of just intonation and North Indian classical music. He was La Monte Young's protégé and piano tuner during The Well-Tuned Piano years and a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a…
Le Sommeil Vertical
The first release of Séance Centre's "Speculative Ethnography” series is an EP of Burroughs-inspired analog rhythm-scapes, conjured from the nocturnal Parisian imagination of Shelter (Alan Briand). Recorded directly to cassette 4-track late at night in Briand’s apartment in Paris with a gathering of temperamental vintage gear, Le Sommeil Vertical captures a somnambulant journey into vibrant analog nether-regions. The hazy sonics harken back to ‘80s DIY cassette culture, but refracted through a p…
Kiliwatch
**150 copies** "Jacques Charlier is primarily known as a visual artist, which obscures the fact that he’s been actively multi-disciplinary for the entirety of his career. Born in 1939 in Liège, Belgium, his interest in all forms of art began at a very early age when he aspired to be a poet, writer, musician, comic book artist, actor, and movie director, and in his own eccentric way became all of these things.In the 1970s, inspired by the minimalist sounds of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La Monte Y…
Aunka Ma Kwacha
"There is music that falls right into place, a perfectly articulated expression of a few distinct influences. Then, there is another kind of median music, something more mysterious, the result of time, place, technology, and alchemy. Zambian writer and musician Smokey Haangala’s Aunka Ma Kwacha (The Money is Gone) released in 1976 is an example of this more mystical metallurgy, falling somewhere between psychedelic Zamrock, US folk, Kalindula, and Sundown Beat (music played after dark) from Tong…
Vwayajé
“Stop here!” exclaimed Robert Oumaou as we passed a mango tree on the side of the road just outside of Point-a-Pitre, the balmy capital of Guadeloupe. He filled a plastic bag with ripe fruit, and we set off on our journey across the small Caribbean island in search of musicians he hadn’t seen in years. On the way, we shared stories in broken French and English, stopping at truck stops to eat delicious fried fish. Robert took me to his hometown, and placed a mango and a flower on the grave of his…
Muldrew
**500 copies, DMM Pressing** Like many Canadians, Joseph Shabason and Ben Gunning like to untangle themselves from urbanity and disappear up north a few times a year. Unlike other cottage-goers, Ben and Joseph don’t while away the ur-time on jet-skis and lounge on docks reading pulpy mysteries. Instead, they bring a car full of synths, drum machines, saxophones, guitars, samplers, effects, and recording equipment to jam the days away in a cabin-fever inducing haze of wood smoke, cedar musk, hot …
Plus or Minus Two
Plus or Minus Two compiles 4 songs from Kansas City wave pioneers Short-Term Memory’s first cassette album, Every Head Needs Cleaning, with with a song each from their last cassette release Cinema Mind, and their digital retrospective, Flub Dub and Other Love Songs. This EP focuses on the group’s prescient dance-floor DIN-sync workouts which share sensibilities with contemporaneous early Detroit experiments by Juan Atkin’s Cybotron, Ron Hardy’s visionary Kikrokos tape edit, Shoc Corridor’s exten…
On One Of These Bends
By 1981, after four years of DIY electronics, it was time for a change. For Philip Sanderson that change came in the form of film. At first, requests came from friends for soundtrack work, and by the end of the decade he was making short experimental 8mm films himself. On One Of These Bends is a collection of unreleased songs, soundtrack work and obscure cassette-only pieces from the 80’s which reflect Philip’s shift in focus. It was a departure from the industrial music he had been making with …
Take Me With You
Take Me With You is a revelatory voyage through the captivating universe of voice artist and poet MJ Lallo. The works on this 2LP compilation were all recorded in her home studio between 1982 and 1997, primarily using drum computer, synth and her own voice processed through a Yamaha SPX 90 digital effects unit. They range from wordless harmonizer mantras and primitive drum computer meditations, to psychedelic latin dance-floor anthems and synth-drenched end-of-the-nighters.Lallo has created her …
Cave Vaults of the Moon
Joanne Forman's Cave Vaults of the Moon created in 1987 for an exhibit of sculptures in Taos, New Mexico is a mesmerizing score for voice, Ensoniq Mirage, Juno 106, flute, guitar and effects. The playful extra-terrestrial recording wafted through the exhibit every day for its duration and then lay dormant for nearly 30 years. Unearthed now, Cave Vaults of the Moon sounds prescient and timeless, as if Pep Llopis and Iasos scored a Wicker Man remake set on Mars. Restored, remastered and cut using…
Music Of The Five Elements
Brandon Hocura’s Séance Centre pull out Sam McLellan’s sublime 1982 new age opus Music Of The Five Elements for this invaluable first vinyl reissue. Music is the healing force of the universe. It’s an ancient idea bandied about by Pythagoras and Plato. In the last century, music as medication has been explored by musicians as diverse as Albert Ayler, Spacemen 3 and Pauline Oliveros. Nowhere did this concept gain more traction than in the so-called realm of New Age Music, an entire movement of sy…
Música Para Planetarios
Mexican guitarist and ambient artist Eblen Macari's masterpiece Música Para Planetarios (Music for Planetariums) was originally composed for weekly performances in the Luis Enrique Erro Planetarium in Mexico City. The album, released in 1987 was based around Macari's solo performances using Ensonic ESQ-1, a Korg Poly 800, two guitars and pre-hispanic Ocarinas. The arrangements on the album are expanded to include a full stable of pre-hispanic percussion and beautiful baroque harpsichord played b…
Aeolian Darts
Aeolian Darts is a collection of playful minimal poetry by sound-thinker and garage-printer Michael Klausman. He has been an avid collector of small press chapbooks for many years, frequently posting his obscure finds on his Drifting Lament Instagram, a labyrinthine rabbit-hole of post-Fluxus poets, esoteric private press records & found art. This book is a culmination of his interests in the edges of culture, a space where mimeographed liners, mail art and handmade cassettes rub shoulder…
My Little Life
My Little Life is a collection of short stories by composer, musician and near draft-dodger Vito Ricci about his experiences in New York City, Mexico and Vietnam in the late 60s. An outspoken pacifist, Ricci struck a deal with the US army and ended up as a cook in a US army base, feeling more kinship with the Vietnamese staff who worked there than the American soldiers. The vernacular style of the stories give the impression of a memorable conversation with a close friend on the streets o…
Trespassing / Marilli
The latest release on Canada's Seance Centre label focuses on the work of long-serving Dutch experimentalist Michel Banabila, gathering together examples of his "excursions into otherworldly and imagined realms". The first record boasts tracks recorded between 1987 and 2017, shuffling between humid, percussion-led workouts, exotic ambience, dark and creepy soundscapes and sticky electronic/acoustic fusion. The second record (clips of which are not featured here) replicates the track list of the …