★Sofa
House of Gold
Sofa is proud to announce the debut album of Montreal-based band House of Gold, a very special group playing American composer Isaiah Ceccarelli’s songs and compositions. House of Gold is a quartet that blends quiet melodies and songwriting, chamber music, minimalist folk song, improvisation, jazz harmony, and early music influences into an immersive and embracing sonic experience. Composer, drummer, and singer Isaiah Ceccarelli has built a repertoire of songs around his original texts and intim…
Triple Music
In the spring of 2020, Muddersten did not go to Japan. Nor did the trio collaborate with alive painting artist Akiko Nakayama as planned before the global lockdown. Instead, a video triptych was made by Akiko and sent to the trio serving as a score for a musical performance. The piece was commissioned by Muddersten and had its first performance at the Periferien Festival in Oslo, in August 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic. On this release the trio uses sonic ready-mades as a method for i…
Alloy
In 2015, Lemur started a collaboration with German pianist Reinhold Friedl. Friedl is the leader of the international ensemble Zeitkratzer, working at the intersection of improvisation and composition. In this respect, Friedl's experience and working method have much in common with the ideas and working methods Lemur uses. Not least through an interchange between work with large and small ensembles.In collaboration with Reinhold Friedl, we focus on the use of extended playing techniques, form ex…
Hereafter
Sofa is proud to mark its 100th release with the stunningly beautiful double album Hereafter, a new major work from guitarist/composer Kim Myhr, written for the 15-piece Stavanger-based ensemble Kitchen Orchestra. “Hereafter can be seen as a meditation on mortality and transience”, Myhr explains. “It was written at a time where the prime minister of Norway told the country’s population that ‘you have to be prepared to lose someone dear to you’. It was like taken out of Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice”. T…
Fear Of The Object
Tip! These 4 CDs comprise a three-year time span of work between video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen and percussionist Chris Cogburn. The initial concept informing the project is to examine the differences between the resonant frequencies and wild harmonics of physical objects and the exactness of sine tones and just-intonation. An additional layer of video is produced live using audio signals as raw video voltages, thereby transforming sound into video in ways far beyond the classic parameters of vo…
Lineaments
Tip Tip!! 140gram LP with printed inner sleeve. Sofa is proud to release a new solo album from Fredrik Rasten, following his fantastic Six Moving Guitars (released on Sofa in 2019). Lineaments consists of two long-form solo pieces performed by Rasten, for an extended instrumentarium of guitars, voice and sine waves. Lineament I and II proceed from two different plucking patterns played on one acoustic and one electric guitar, both sharing a specific tuning from where the two pieces explore diver…
Trending
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to welcome a new project on board. It’s Propan, a duo comprising the two Norwegian vocalists; Natali Garner and Ina Sagstuen. On their second album Propan continues its research within the frameworks of the song form and presents a psychedelic, and more delirious landscape than on its first, somewhat more electroacoustic album, Baby. The duo explores the meeting point between improvised music and studio production, and builds the album around Propan's well-estab…
Out of the Playground
Sofa Music is proud to add the powerhouse flutist Alessandra Rombolà to its ranks with Out of the Playground, documenting Rombolà’s latest commissions and collaborations for solo flute and electronics with composers Daniela Terranova, Jan Martin Smørdal, Ingar Zach, and Lasse Marhaug. The album’s five contributions, drawing on Rombolà’s polyvalent musical background, are united in their mission to venture “out of the playground” of scenes and genres, as Rombolà puts it. Across these incisive, ex…
Musica Liquida
*In process of stocking* Ingar Zach’s new album Musica Liquida is the first audio document of his ongoing artistic research project at the Academy of Music in Oslo. The project is called The Vibrating Drum and focus on vibration of the membrane, activated by vibrating speakers in contact with the drumskin. Musica Liquida is Ingar Zach’s 7th solo album, and we find him diving into an ocean of sound and orchestrating the complexity of interfolded layers in the impressive acoustics of Emanuel Vigel…
Kraftbalanse
*In process of stocking* Sofa Music continues to release the work of the extraordinary Norwegian composer Jan Martin Smørdal. Recently he was awarded the prestigious Arne Nordheim Composers Prize for his creative work. Kraftbalanse is a a composition for piano, alternating current and strings, written by Smørdal in collaboration with artist Øystein Wyller Odden. The piece is based on Wyller Oddens prior investigations on the sound of the electrical grid and was part of Oslobiennalen First Editio…
Threads
The new solo album, threads by the California-based trombone player Mattie Barbier is a multilayered personal investigation. It was recorded in The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangley, Colorado in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
a feeling of place. a calm space to be present in during a space of chaos. of quarantining in a very conservative place as a non-binary person where your welcomeness is tenuous. of uncertainty of where non-binaryness fits as a parent- of still being a dad? or treat…
Swagger
Limited LP edition. In their new composition, Swagger, Oslo-based vocal duo Propan augment their customary sound palate with the aid of an eight-strong ensemble of strings, winds, percussion, voices, and electronics - an ensemble by the name Propanions. Combining pre-scored and improvised content, Swagger moves between the soft sound of tuning forks, odd beats, curious text, playful melodies and textural noise, resulting in an eccentric piece of definite character - an eclectic manifestation of …
Second Room
Limted LP edition. Second Room is Martin Taxt’s second album in a series of works investigating possible relations between music and architecture. In this work written for alto saxophone, two microtonal tubas, double bass, church organ, hand bells and modular synthesizers he is inspired by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, and his ideas on different concepts of living. In a lecture at the Harvard University in 2011, Fujimoto sets up a comparison between the nest and the cave, as two fundament…
Sonic Drift
Sofa Music continues to release Microtub’s unique research into the microtonal tuba. The music on Sonic Drift achieves an even greater depth and leaves the listener sucked in to the trio’s extraordinary complex band sound. Sonic Drift is Microtub’s fifth album since their debut in 2011. Whereas the first four albums were recorded shortly after the music was composed, the music for Sonic Drift evolved considerably through the process of playing live concerts throughout Europe. Initially developed…
First Room
*2022 stock.* First room is the debut solo album from microtonal tuba player and composer Martin Taxt. The album is the first in a series of works investigating possible relations between architecture and music. First room is a tribute to the Japanese tearoom and the tatami mat. The floor plan as shown on the cover has been used as a foundation for the musical score, performed by Inga Margrete Aas on viola da gamba and double bass, and Martin Taxt on microtonal tuba and sine waves. The album is …
Musique Pour Deux Corps
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music and Full Rhizome-Sonoro are proud to present the new album of Ingar Zach/Michele Rabbia – Musique pour deux corps. Born with the same passion for sound, "Musique pour deux corps" brings together the duo Ingar Zach/Michele Rabbia for their second release. The two percussionists present an album full of invention, research, and development of a new percussion-music, using an unlimited and inexhaustible material that only percussion can offer. The skins are used as surfaces…
Works for Listening 1-10
Tip! *2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to present the solo debut album of Norwegian composer and sound artist Tine Surel Lange. Works for Listening is a series of spatial electro-acoustic works developed at Notam (NO), MISC (LT), and EMS (SE). All the works are made in 5th order ambisonics but have been presented in many different formats- as in this stereo decoding of the works.In Works for Listening, there is a strong focus on listening-aesthetics and our psychological categorization of sound.…
Sonic Drift
Sofa Music continues to release Microtub’s unique research into the microtonal tuba. The music on Sonic Drift achieves an even greater depth and leaves the listener sucked in to the trio’s extraordinary complex band sound. Sonic Drift is Microtub’s fifth album since their debut in 2011. Whereas the first four albums were recorded shortly after the music was composed, the music for Sonic Drift evolved considerably through the process of playing live concerts throughout Europe. Initially developed…
Floating Layer Cake
Over the course of the last few decades, Ingar Zach has been an important force in contemporary and experimental music. Through his solo percussion music, his regular bands Dans les Arbres, Huntsville and Mural, and countless other collaborations, he has redefined the role of percussion and expanded the possibilites of his instruments in a highly personal way. In his four solo percussion records, starting with Percussion Music released on Sofa in 2004, one can sense a clear material and formal d…
Undulate
Sofa Music is thrilled to invite a new artist on board the Sofa catalogue with the adventurous album Undulate from the danish, Oslo-based artist Niklas Adam. When the Sofa team first heard Adam's music, there was no discussion about including the album in our catalogue. His music deserves to be heard: it's an album that grows on you with its complexity of beautiful and genorous sounds. It's a concert. It's a lecture. It's a drum solo, a homage to Tudor, an opaque invitation, it's a conversation …