★Unsounds
A Family of Three (Band Photo)
Alessandro Bosetti, lyrics, voice. Kenta Nagai, fret-less electric guitar. Tony Buck, drums. “A Family of Three (Band Photo)” is the fruit of urgency and sediment – a vibrant story bringing together sounds, images and texts that have emerged over time in Alessandro Bosetti’s imagination, in his life experience and through live concerts. Tangents, ideas and themes revolve around cautiousness, desire, Italy, ways of doing, uncertainty and longing. Without definite focus on one subject, these all f…
Subvoice
Subvoice is a collection of nine recent works by composer Yannis Kyriakides for various ensembles ranging from single instrument to large orchestra, that represent an investigation into ideas of voice and language. The music is built on traces of voices and texts that seem to speak or sing in an intimate form of dialogue, either as text that is directly encoded into music, or in traces of voice that are embedded and dissolved into the musical fabric. Performers on this double CD include: MAZE, H…
Heretics
Heretics is a series of portraits of radical heretical figures found throughout the history of schismatic thinking.Heretics like Caravaggio, William Burroughs, Jose Mujica, Marquis de Sade and Johnny Rotten, fascinated the artists. These influential figures are presented here in the form of poetic texts and catchy melodies combined with experimental noise.With the addition of ex-Sonic Youth guitarist, singer and songwriter Thurston Moore, Anne-James Chaton and Andy Moor’s more than a decade long…
Lunch music
Lunch Music by composer Yannis Kyriakides is a set of pieces for voices, percussion and live electronics, inspired by the 1959 book Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. On this recording the virtuosity of percussionists Slagwerk Den Haag (recently heard on the recording of Michael Gordon's Timber) and contemporary vocal specialists of Silbersee are embedded in a rich sonic environment of electronics, modulated voices, grinding pulses and hallucinatory noises.The concept of the music revolves aro…
Experiments with a Leaf
John Butcher and Andy Moor have shared a stage many times since their first collaboration in the trio Thermal with Thomas Lehn. Even though they hail from very different corners of improvised music, their musical horizons have meshed through the time into the distinctive duo that it is now.“Experiments with a Leaf” is a live recording from October 2013 in Berne, Switzerland, where the duo was playing in a cathedral. The large natural echo in the great space somehow glued the sounds togethe…
A Heart That Responds to Schooling
"A Heart That Responds to Schooling" is the second album recorded by italian composer and performer Alessandro Bosetti and Australian pianist Chris Abrahams. The album is a chest of intimate and oblique sonic explorations that span both improvised fragments and original renditions of compositions like Steve Lacy’s Esteem (with Bosetti’s lyrics) and Milton Nascimento’s Bridges (Travessia) in the english version with Gene lee’s lyrics. It was Recorded in Berlin in November 2013, and is following t…
Delicate paths - music for Sho
Music for shô by Sarah Peebles with Evan Parker Nilan Perera Suba Sankaran. 'In the 80s, while I was studying music composition in Japan, I was intrigued by the seemingly esoteric role some traditional musics played in contemporary Japanese society. I was given the opportunity to study the shô-the mouth-organ used in gagaku, ancient Japanese court orchestral music and dances-at a small Tokyo shrine, Sendagaya Ward's Hatonomori Hachiman Jinja. Via this shrine I became familiar with basic g…
12 clarinets in a fridge
This was a project a long time in the making - Xavier Charles is a not a person you can rush; he has very clear objectives that need the time that they take. When he took interest in the sounds of the appliances in his kitchen, daily sounds that remain unnoticed to most of us, he was to explore listening and perception as part of his music making. Typically, Xavier has worked here with the ambient noise in his recording environment, something he has been exploring and refining for many years now…
Things That A Mutant Needs To Know
A collection of fifty-five short tales and fifty-five brief musical works composed by a momentary collective of eighteen musicians. Reinaldo Laddaga has created the fictional second volume of an anthology that Argentinean writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares published in Buenos Aires in 1956. The result is an enchanting and somber collection of very short texts, where the most diverse authors (from Lucian of Samosata to Virginia Woolf, from Emmanuel Swedenborg to Blaise Cendrars) te…
Live at Area Sismica
Ken Vandermark, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, clarinet. Paal Nilssen-Love, drums, Terrie Ex, guitar, Andy Moor, guitar. 'Live at Area Sismica' is Lean Left's fifth live recording, the second released on Unsounds, and by far the best, most versatile and exciting yet. Recorded live at Area Sismica in Forli Italy, September 22 2012, the final date of a long tour with thousands of kilometres behind them: the band at this point have played enough dates in a row to have become a very tight unit…
Epiloghi
Epiloghi brings together two important sound works by Lithuanian composer and sound artist Arturas Bum teinas; Epiloghi. Six Ways of Saying Zangtumbtumb and Night on the Sailship. These are highly inspired pieces combining layered historical references with a captivating sound world. The first composition is a multiple homage to Luigi Russolo's manifesto 'Art of Noises' (1913), René Descartes' philosophical treatise 'Passions of the Soul' (1649) and Jacopo Peri's opera 'Dafne' (1598). Each of it…
Three vertical swells
Three vertical swells' (2010) consists of three nine-minute movements for Hammond organ, amplified ensemble and sinewaves. The piece indirectly takes its title from an analysis of the Leslie loudspeakers used in the piece. Two significant elements - the speed of the revolving Leslie horns and a curious, glissando-like fuzz which seemed to emanate from the loudspeakers - were subsequently translated on to the music as a whole. Both of these elements served as a direct source for the sine-patch, w…
Resorts & Ruins
In “Resorts & Ruinsâ€Â, a set of three recent sound works, Kyriakides deals with several themes in both a physical and narrative sense. All the pieces use source material that highlight specific vocal traditions, namely Turkish pop music, Cypriot epic song, and Baroque opera, but they also all make extensive use of other forms of speech and vocal acts. In “Varosha (Disco Debris)â€Â, a narrating voice is our tour-guide in the ruins of the Cypriot ghost town Varosha; the many fragm…
Live at café Oto
The Ex guitars meet Nilssen-Love & Vandermark duo. Lean Left throws together two explosive duos - the sax-drums collision course of Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilsson-Love with the piledriving guitarists from The Ex - to make up a positively apocalyptic quartet: an elemental musical force featuring Grade A international players zoning in and scrambling together rock, jazz, noise and blistering free improv into a highly-charged onstage assault, each member taking their sounds and bodies to th…
Myriad
Mayas frames her instrument not as 88 keys arranged in tidy scales, but as a sonorous tangle of wood and wire, she produces sounds with a wide dynamic range, playing the whole piano, inside and out, including dramatic percussive effects from banging and scraping the frame of the instrument and the strings. Abdelnour has developed extended techniques and complex patterns of sound production, exploring the microtonal aspects of the saxophone and its high-pitched tones. she employs subtle tonguing…
Kraakgeluiden
Series of improvised music-performances involving acoustic & electronic instruments, was started in 1999 by a group of musicians in Amsterdam. They perform in combinations, which include musicians w/ whom they have never performed before.
Narratives1: Dreams
"Narratives" is a series of "music text films" that centre on the experience of music mediated through animated text. Kyriakides has developed this form over the years, encompassing about 15 works ranging from orchestral, chamber, to electronic music. In the next year Unsounds will publish the whole collection in a series of DVDs. The first edition: "Dreams", collects the large scale ensemble works - "Dreams of the Blind", "The Arrest" and "Subliminal: The Lucretian Picnic" performed by E…
Medea
"Medea" by Calliope Tsoupaki is the first in a series of chamber music compositions focusing on drama; a "melodrama for 8 instruments". The composition is written for Ensemble MAE, that distinguishes itself for its colourful, direct, physical and improvisatory character. Tsoupaki uses the ensemble's palette, composing solos, duets, trios, wrapped in larger sonic fields, with a strong associative and visual impact. Further there is no story-telling for the listener to be led into the piece;…
Transfer/1: Departures
'Available now - the first release of the Transfer series, one of four seven inch singles by Andy Moor and Anne-James Chaton, based around the themes of transition and transportation, side A constructed from factual information and side B from fiction. Comes in a lush folded sleeve. 'Departures' takes us on a worldwide tour; The text material in 'Dernière minute' (side A) is based on information found on the French Foreign Office website, indicating the level of safety and current political clim…
Play robot dream
Trumpet virtuoso Marco Blaauw, known for his pioneering performances of contemporary classical music has been working with composer and sound improviser Yannis Kyriakides in numerous projects including a multi-media perfomance 'co-inc', and several projects for the ensemble musikFabrik in Cologne. 'Play Robot Dream' is a set of improvisations for trumpet(s) and computer. At times playful, at times meditative, they fuse a haunting melodic tendency with a provocative mix of drum machines an…