New Arrivals
Sunshrine
With a mindblowing track gracing this weeks phenomenal ‘Gold Leaf Branches’ compilation, James Blackshaw's brilliant "Sunshrine" album is finally being made available on cd. At only 23 years of age, Blackshaw has already mustered up enough talent on the guitar to put many more renowned acts to shame. His gorgeous finger picked melodies on 12-string guitar are incredibly affecting and a stark contrast to the ragas and ragtimes of peer Jack Rose. Instead of concentrating on replicating a sp…
Remixed No. 1
Moondog's outsiderness ensures an approach to modern composition that doesn't ever establish any single, fixed identity, which is of course what makes this man such an alluring figure in 20th century music. Mr Scruff remix is a post-futuristic-jazz influenced by hip-hop cadences that makes appear how important Moondog has been in the past and how he will be for contemporaries and future generations.
Kataract
This album is a single forty-minute track exclusively made up from recordings of waterfalls within America's Pacific Northwest. The source material was cultivated and mixed over a two-year period and takes the form of a monstrously powerful, ferociously noisy concrète piece. Menche has always situated his work towards the extremes of electroacoustic music and Kataract is no exception, but for all the turbulence and extreme frequency manipulation here there's a level of detail on show th…
A Small Turn Of Human Kindness
Athens weirdcore trio Harvey Milk is a blessedly difficult band to “know.” They frustrate category, aesthetic response, and heavy music scene politics in estimable, admirable ways. On the heels of their feedback-saturated return to recording – first the somewhat tentative Special Wishes and then 2008’s Life . . . the Best Game in Town – they return with A Small Turn of Human Kindness, an album named after the very first track on their 1996 debut. A seven-part dirge, this album continues …
Folk Roots, New Routes
Reissued on Fledg'ling in 2005, originally released in 1965 by Decca. An experimental recording conceived by Austin John Marshall bringing together Shirley's haunting traditional song with Davy's guitar improvisations. Folk Roots, New Routes opened the door for Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and Pentangle's debut. For this carefully remastered edition, Fledg'ling have restored the original artwork, added a new sleeve-note essay as well as previously unpublished photographs.
Kippschwingungen
In 2007, Frank Bretschneider was invited to compose music for the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument developed during the 1960’s at the RFZ, the technical center for radio and television of the East German postal service. Built in a limited edition of eight machines total, only three Subharcords (in Vienna, Trondheim and Berlin) are believed to survive to this day. The Subharchord is, broadly defined, a subharmonic sound generator, comparable soundwise to the Mixturtrautonium. It’s sugg…
Our Prayer
Another previously-unreleased gem from South African pianist/composer Chris McGregor and his cohorts in '60s UK free jazz. Our Prayer was culled from the same sessions that produced the also never-released Up To Earth in 1969 and was produced by Joe Boyd and engineered by John Wood at Sound Techniques studio. The previous year they had signed to Joe Boyd's illustrious Witchseason production company alongside Fairport Convention, John and Beverley Martyn, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Ba…
Sempervirent
I spent two months in protected areas of Costa Rica making multichannel field recordings of the different forest ecosystems of Central America. Armed with a quadraphonic setup (IRT cross), a parabolic microphone, a hydrophone, and a scientist's passport, I went to nine main sites to record: the coastal evergreen forest, the tropical dry and deciduous forest, the mangroves, the wooded riverbanks and floodplains, and the forests altered in cultivated areas. The recordings were made at the S…
Glennascaul
A high point in Konstruktivist's career, "Glennascaul" was originally released on Nigel Ayers' Sterile Label in 1985. Produced and mixed by Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle, it marked a complete change in style for the band towards a beat-orientated rhythmic sound. "Glennascaul" is proto electro at its very best, with Glenn Wallis's unique vocal style on top. For this, the first ever edition on CD, we have remastered the or…
347
'Tim uses several boxes of speakers and Seijiro uses a snare drum as a resonance box, with microphones. They put boxes for their music in another box = the space. They create different levels of universe within the space. From micro to macro. Always with one clear intention: to improvise listening and to organize sonic space together in a very delicate way.Thanks to La Comète 347, Paris. 'Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to i…
Townsville
The Necks in quiet mood recorded at a concert recording in Townsville, Thuringowa, Northern Queensland. Though many Necks' pieces open with - or eventually arrive at - some discernable groove, Townsville just floats in a state of suspension from beginning to end. It's like watching the ocean as wave follows wave follows wave: each the same; each different; assymetric. Bassist Lloyd Swanton who, on this occasion, provides the motif that set Townsville running says he had had no idea where it woul…
Cellos
The association between Ulrich Mitzlaff and Miguel Mira promises an unforeseeable sound meeting. The specific, personal and different ways of their distinguished expression is the base for their very dynamic and interactive music. They create sounds where the improvisation moves with great fluency between the establishing of textures and abstract musical ideas and the switching in the musical discourse to singular, rhythmic and melodic affirmations. They construct the sonar explorations using th…
Live installation at Loop-Line recorded by Toshiya Tsunoda
USW56, USW57, USW59, USW61, USW113, these five hand-made electronics hanged from a ceiling have an ultrasonic wave transmitter, a reciever and an amplifier. Each frequency of the ultrasonic wave is about 40khz but slightly different. And when each instrument swings, each frequency changes a little caused by the Doppler effect. On thier instruments we can hear beat signals between transmitted and received ultrasonic waves changed in frequency. (Manabu Suzuki) Where does art work appear? How do pe…
Uncommon Sense
This is: brass to the power of three, and a lot more besides. John Clark, Dave Taylor and Franz Hackl on French horn, trumpet and bass trombone are not just a brass trio but create a whole cosmos of sounds, styles and techniques. In their musical actions and reactions, each of the three is always also each of the other two, with the voices merging into complex moods and styles. On this album the trio reveal their sense of humor, and a moment later become absorbed in hymnic devotion. Big-band ges…
Sonic brotherhood - DTFP Israel 2009
Improvised music with exception of Irinia-Kalina' solo. Mark Dresser (bass), Irina-Kalina Goudeva (bass), JC Jones (bass), Barre Phillips (bass) and Bert Turetzky (bass). Recorded by Ori Winokur, edited, mixed and mastered by JC at the Kadima Studio, Jerusalem, October to December 2010.
Clivages
"Clivages is Univers Zero's first new studio album in over five years. They have spent the last five years performing at prestigious rock and new music festivals throughout Europe and North America and ever-widening their audience. Founding members of the original "Rock In Opposition" [R.I.O.] movement and the inventors of "chamber rock", Univers Zero have continued to change and grow and develop over their entire career, while still keeping a ensemble sound and spirit that is easily recognizabl…
Trouble In Paradise
Phantom Orchard, the duo of Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, is expanded with 5 performers representing some of the most exciting women in modern creative experimental music, releasing a surprising, riveting, and amazing album.Members of bands as diverse as DNA, Skeleton Crew, Electric Masada, Hemophiliac and Björk, Zeena and Ikue have been leading figures of the downtown scene since the early 1980s. Their fabulous duo project Phantom Orchard is expanded here with five of the most exciting and creat…
Unheard spaces
'Absence and Presence (2006). Absence and Presence was originally written for five musicians and four loudspeakers positioned throughout the site of performance in order to explore the traction between amplified and acoustic space. The performance was predicated on a set of directions that determined the combination of musicians at specific times and the duration of their performance. Within these structural parameters the musicians chose what they played and how they responded to one another. T…
Moondog and suncat suites
By 1956, the early New York street recordings of the great Moondog had reached British shores. His primitive percussive sounds struck a new nerve with many artists and musicians, none more so that fine London jazzman Kenny Graham. So inspired was he by these extraordinary recordings that he decided to bring together a band of top notch session men and pay his very own musical homage. The result is this exceptionally rare and unique 1957 album of Moondog covers (Moondog Suite) and Graham’s…
Five American Portraits
“Ridges and creases / high on the middle forehead / The right temple near the eyebrow / A small ridge under the right eye / The right side of the tip of the nose / The opening of the right nostril / The middle lower lip / The inner ear of the right ear.” Can you tell who it is yet? It’s George W. Bush, of course, or at least part of his head, as seen (or rather heard) in the second of five “American portraits” in words and music by legendary experimental rock outfit the Red Krayola, in collabora…