New Arrivals
Trax to Trax
Here comes Gianluca Becuzzi’s fourth release on Silentes. This electronic / electro-acoustic composer and sound-artist boast an enviable curriculum: active since the first half of the ‘80s as founder of the historic Darkwave / Industrial project Limbo, since 1999 his artistic production is characterized by a strong experimental imprint and by a clear tendency toward abstract aesthetic forms and micro/macro noises/sounds. Among his recent artistic production - in addition to what he has pu…
(Old school) Alvin Lucier
The internationally acclaimed 'hilarious releases' [vital weekly] of zeitkratzer records go on. This is the third release in the new series [old school]. The first two CDs, dedicated to the music of John Cage [zkr0009] and James Tenney [zkr0010] have been highly acclaimed. London's Wire Magazine wrote: 'The rigour and discipline they collectively bring to this compositions make both discs utterly enthralling, from start to finish.' The new release is dedicated to the music of Alvin Lucier. In 20…
Spiritual/Mental/Physical
‘Spiritual-Mental-Physical’ is a collection of wild early Death demos, presenting the three young Hackney brothers consolidating their powers as they embark on a trip into pure rock and roll music. The album comes with liner notes from Bobby Hackney Sr. explaining the genesis and meaning of the songs included.
Love Comes Close
Love Comes Close is the debut full-length from Cold Cave. Synth-pop, post punk, new wave, atmospheric industrial... Edition of 1000 copies.
Four Aims
The Four Aims is the much-anticipated second full-length by the long-running duo of Mick Flower (Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sunroof, Michael Flower Band) and Chris Corsano (Flaherty/Corsano, Jandek, Bjork, Sunburned). In the couple years since their debut, The Radiant Mirror (Textile), the two have toured and recorded frequently, expanding their range to include a mind-boggling array of free sound. "I, Brute Force" kicks off the record with their signature-- one of the most original in rock/free/…
Beeswax Ephemera
The Preservation label presents Beeswax Ephemera from Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller. With one eye on the future and one on the past, his playing has considerable technical and abstract expanse, though retains a wonderful melodic sensibility upfront. Evan’s experimental leanings give Beeswax Ephemera an idiosyncratic quality that mark an inventive new talent in the world of artists taking guitar music into exciting new directions. These nominally earthy compositions take flight with the undenia…
Everything's A Love Letter
Saddleback is the solo project for producer Tony Dupé. In many ways, with its warm and exploratory craft, Everything’s A Love Letter is the culmination of the varying strands in Tony’s musical life.Tony first came to notice in Glovebox, who put an ethereal, ambient twist on the indie-pop scene as far back as the early ‘90s. Glovebox’s swirling sound has been as unhurried as its release schedule, though no matter how spare their output, each album has always found a warm reception. The group were…
Strings.Lines
Created between September 2008 and February 2010 in the artist's studio. Viola da gamba: Pierre-Yves Martel. Violin: Chris Bartos. 'strings.lines' came to life from an obsession for old and forgotten object-matter and the desire to produce music that exists in between the new and the old. The starting point to the composition of this work were acoustic tuning forks. In 2007 Nicolas Bernier became fascinated with this object/instrument of particularly beautiful design, and started a collec…
Daydreaming
Debut album by Seattle's Rafael Anton Irisarri, released in 2007 on Deaf Center's Miasmah label. A splendid but pitch black album based on long piano melodies, distant drones and even more distant glitches, "Daydreaming" is a particularely sad and introvert CD, which takes the most emotional and melancholic side of the other Miasmah releases, but expresses them in a very direct and stripped down way. Splendid.
Burnt Offerings
The Preservation label presents Burnt Offerings, the fourth album from Brooklyn's Padna. As Padna, Nat Hawks initially made his name in the cassette underground on the revered Stunned label with two works of pop experimentalism displaying a bustling -- often boggling -- and vivid imagination. Veritable joyrides in sound and style, these releases were in line with the DIY aesthetic, primitive songcraft and eclectic sonic stew pioneered by the likes of Tall Dwarfs and forwarded by Olivia Tremo…
Black Ohms
An edition of 500 numbered copies. Thank Expo ‘70, O Lord, for the drones you are about to receive. A deep quivering of transcendental electronic mantras pulsates to the patient beat of the third Bardo. Slow, shape-shifting ambiences expand like groaning baritone crystals crawling out from sub-oceanic ooze. Psix pstring psychedelic pspews bisect the curve of extraterrestrial buzz with a surprising terrestrial fluidity until bioluminescent fish gather to choke out quiet hymns around the th…
Harmony Series 11-16
In the 'Harmony Series 11-16', very small events are happening in every nook and cranny of the music, and these subtle changes give magical effects to the music. This is in fact not magic at all - all the events are due to the theoretical structure of the music, but the way Pisaro incorporates them into his compositions is so subtle and natural, that the whole impression on his music becomes poetic. When I listen to each piece while carefully paying attention to the details, I feel that the nuan…
The Last Recording
Final solo alto sax blasting from the late legendary Japanese underground hero Kaoru Abe. Abe was an inspiration to free/jazz and Japanese noise lovers world-wide, lived a fast and hard life and ripped his guts inside out on each and every of his many releases. Extreme music for those who need it.
The state we are in
The first thing this CD reminded me of was Tape...then I checked out the press release and it turns out that Tape's Johan Berthling (also very recently sighted on that Fire! with Jim O'Rourke record) is in fact one-third of this band, the other two being Andreas Soderstrom (Ass) and Per Eklund on drums. It is, as you would expect, gently paced instrumental stuff, slightly pastoral-sounding, with intertwining guitars and a some subtle Hammond organ and trumpet bits. This is a mightily rel…
Inexistence
A brand new album of minimal, cryptic & static sounds. The inexistence is the aplanatic condition of what is not existing, therefore doesn't subsist in the shot reality. Transferring this entomologic concept to radical music, we're consequently asking: inexistent sounds for existing people or existing sounds for inexistent people? Without schizoid presumption, "Inexistence" is replying to this existential question
The Wraiths Of Flying A
A three-way collaboration by Chicago based sound artist and renowned researcher in the field of Electronic Voice Phenomena Michael Esposito, Hamburg based operator of the Fragment Factory label Michael Muennich and long-time conceptual/performance artist, filmmaker, writer and core member of The Haters GX Jupitter-Larsen from Los Angeles. The origin of this project was a field investigation conducted by Esposito at American Film Studios, Santa Barbara, CA, additional sounds recorded by Michael M…
Sights
Back in stock. Take two collaborators, one a German sound artist noted for his painstaking micro-engineered computer compositions, the other a New Zealand noise terrorist with a reputation for making albums over his morning tea breaks. Put them in a basement studio in Karlsruhe for three days in February 2003, feed them on coffee and apple juice and let them out to walk in the woods once a day. What do you get? Sights, a dramatic collision of two very different but complementary approaches to th…
La Sala Dei Cristalli
Using selected sound materials from Sonorous stones, Stalactites, Bat calls, Flutes, Field recordings collected by Mariolina Zitta in different caves in Liguria a Sardinia, Italy, processed and edited by Alio Die. In "Lithos" the drones are played by the authors on a set of long stones that goes in resonance, caressed by a bathed hand, by the same principle of the crystal's glasses. A very immersive and obscure traveling, an underground meditation with a ritual touch, in accord with the "natur…
Notturni
In the fall of 2011 the pianist Marino Formenti performed four one-hour solo concerts hosted by the Wien Modern festival. The so-called “Notturni” series was centered around the piano oeuvre of Friedrich Cerha. To celebrate the occasion Cerha wrote his first piece for solo piano in twenty years and dedicated it to Formenti. The pianist extraordinaire’s main objective in these performances was to contemplate the music jointly with his audience, to analyze and reanalyze the sounds of the in…
Simple Psychedelic Pleasures
I love the Tadpoles, a quintessential American psych band, so chances are I was going to be all over David Max’s solo platter when I heard about it. And I am. I don’t want to go on and on with endless comparisons with his work with the Tadpoles because much of that is obvious. Let me just say that maybe its sort of another tentacle from the body of the Tadpoles; sprung from it, indebted to it, but operating with a mind of its own. And name-checking all of David’s influences, though tempting and …