★Unsounds
(Amsterdam) Memory Space
*2024 stock* The openness of Lucier's instructions belie the difficulty in dealing with the idea of how one can translate a sound from one medium into another and what kind of transformation of information takes place in that exchange. While interpreting this work, a musician becomes intensely aware of the processes by which one listens, both consciously and subconsciously; how one is constantly decoding sounds in one’s environment, filtering out essential and non-essential information, discerni…
Music For Safe Piece
*2024 stock* Music for Safe Piece is the result of an artistic experiment that lasted for four years, where Andy Moor was creating a live soundscape for a performance of a unique nature. Choreographer Valentina Campora has created a series of semi-private events where she and Moor, new parents of a baby boy, were performing for a small audience with the young child. Campora was dancing with her baby, Moor provided a sound world that supported and harbored the performance. As the boy grew up and …
The Body Imitates The Landscape
The music on this album originates in the interactive sound installation The Body Imitates the Landscape by artist Adi Hollander: she designed a collection of ergonomic objects that are meant to transform music into vibrations felt through the entire body. Hollander was inspired by the Japanese book Karada by Michitaro Tada about the ‘school of the body’. Hollander and Claudio F. Baroni made a live version of the installation where Baroni’s music, performed by Maze, was experienced live by the p…
Fragments
The album Fragments places Gabriele Tinti's poems and Roger Ballen's images in the context of Massimo Pupillo's sound world, where the inevitability of suffering is expressed through Ballen's uniquely dark recitation.
Ice In A Hot World
Thermal (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn) formed in 2001, three musicians from different musical backgrounds, evolving along their personal routes to meet in free improvisations. For twenty years they’ve been taking their subtle and explosive music throughout Europe. Unsounds released their first album Thermal in 2003. In 2023 the trio of quiet giants comes back with Ice in a Hot World, a new album recorded live in Avignon. The Thermal powerhouse has become highly confident but spontaneit…
I Don't Want To Be An Individual All On My Own
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* I Don't Want To Be An Individual All On My Own relates the powerful yet incomplete impressions of a childhood memory. The story takes us to a garden party where Genevieve, turning 8, and her mother, are celebrating their birthdays with friends and family. Various characters will come into focus during the evening as young Genevieve moves between her childlike world and that of the adults. We discover the people around her as she experiences them in a new ligh…
Unprotected Sleep
Tip! *In process of stocking* Christine Abdnelnour and Andy Moor have explored the notion of hypnagogia or ‘Unprotected Sleep’ to drive their process for this improvised album, delving in their own experience and memories. Unprotected sleep is commonly defined as an altered state of consciousness that occurs beyond the proper or intended time of waking up, not sleeping in your own safe bed, or even sleeping without a blanket. Being slightly out of phase, one is vulnerable, fragile, but the mind …
Amiandos
Yannis Kyriakides evokes memories of a site and of the workers of the mines of Amiandos, reflecting on a past not that far gone. In 7 pieces he tells profound stories of loss, and of the fascination for a magnificent and malignant stone. Amiandos is Kyriakides 8th album on Unsounds records.
Clap. An Anatomy of Applause
Clap. An Anatomy of Applause is a compilation of original works by a group of musicians and composers brought together by Andrea Stillacci and Unsounds. The project goal is to highlight the radically different forms and meanings that the sound of applause can take according to its context. The principle was to work from original recordings of each artist’s choice, with sources ranging from the thunderous applause celebrating Maria Callas’ last public appearance to the crowds cheering at the fall…
In Otherness Oneself
Kaja Draksler states that “as a person who speaks and understands different languages, I have an impression that my identity is multifaceted, I have to lose something in myself in order to let the “spirit” of a new language inside me. So in this way I am constantly becoming in otherness myself.” In building this album pianist and composer Kaja Draksler worked on developing specific musical languages for each piece. She attempted to restrict herself to maintaining each language although as she po…
CyberSongs
CyberSongs is a 'transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices' by composer/artist Barbara Ellison. She delves in this work into the sonic intricacies of voice avatars and the ‘musicalisation’ of TTS (Text-to-speech), a type of speech synthesis application that is used to create a spoken sound version of raw text in a computer document. In the 13 tracks of this album, she creates hypnotic textures of vocal utterances through the intensive and extensive use of repetition, as tools and mate…
Pavilion
Andy Moor (guitar) and Yannis Kyriakides (electronics) made a recording In at Xavier Veilhan’s ‘Studio Venezia’ at the French pavilion, Venice Art Biennale. They were in residence there for a few days in October 2017 recording and performing in an open environment.
Face
* Beautiful gatefold vinyl designed by the studio Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam with 12 page booklet featuring the photographic work of Johannes Schwartz and text of Maria Barnas used in the multimedia production of the work. * Face is a multimedia composition for voice, violin, piano, recorders, live electronics and video, based around the use of facial and emotion recognition software. Performers: Electra, Diamanda Dramm (violin), Susanna Borsch (recorder), Michaela Riener (soprano), Saskia L…
RAW
Unsounds is proud to present Anne La Berge’s new piece: RAW. Originally from Stillwater, Minesota and based in Amsterdam, the avant-flutist, improviser and composer has written an open-ended work for ensemble and electronics made up of fragmented gestures and shards of skeletal speech. Ensemble MAZE, of which Anne is a founding member, is performing the piece which was recorded at live at Splendor, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.“Play noise. Do not play at all. Play melodically.”RAW embraces the …
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…
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…
Everything But The Beginning
'The first release from Andy Moor and Colin McLean since they disbanded Dog Faced Hermans 13 years ago. A collection of live recordings of improvisations over a period of three years in collaboration with several dancers that took place in Amsterdam at OT 301. Andy's unmistakable guitar blended with live sampling and electronics from Colin, creating a dark filmic atmosphere.'