New Arrivals
Issue 12. March 2013
the twelve issue in a series of monthly magazines collecting activities and changes in general, this issue is enetirely made of photobooth portrait photos
A Carrot is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond: Captain Beef
A treasure trove of archival articles and interviews with the great one. Hard to find. This book compiles tons of articles interviews, and press clippings about Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. It contains 40 separate pieces of writing, including Lester Bangs original reviews of Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby, interviews and articles from such diverse sources as Rolling Stone magazine, ZigZag, Hot Wacks, and New York Rocker, and transcripts of interviews from Late Night W…
Spaces Speak, are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architectur
How we experience space by listening: the concepts of aural architecture, with examples ranging from Gothic cathedrals to surround sound home theater. We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relation…
Regine Flory
Zak Boerger's combination of fuzz, acoustic guitar & extended downer ballads most immediately aligns him with the New Zealand scene centered around Peter Jefferies & Alastair Galbraith as well as associated international satellites like Flying Saucer Attack & the Twisted Village roster, but there's a lonesome edge to the music that would situate it ouside of any particular historical tradition & closer to the mystery school of regional private press obscurities. The acoustic tracks skirt the fri…
Maria Minerva's Cabaret Cixous
Over the course of a 12", cassette, and a stream of ace youtube vids, Maria Minerva has emerged as one of the most interesting artistes to come into leftfield-pop focus over the last 12 months. 'Cabaret Cixous' is her debut album, a coruscating water-bed of mottled '90s dance-pop memes writhing under blankets of slyly sexy new age synths while her dreamy vocals whisper and croon seductively suggestive lyrics. It's not quite aural soft porn, but there's an inescapably lascivious element to …
The End Of The Empire
Second album for the Brooklyn trio led by guitarist Ninni Morgia (ex White Tornado, ex La Otracina), in this recording with Stuart Popejoy (Bassoon) on bass and Kevin Shea (ex Storm and Stress, Talibam!) on drums. Compared to their first album, that featured Peter Evans on trumpet, “The End of the Empire” is more various and eclectic. The eight tracks open up to psychedelic and ambient music besides free jazz, marked by Ninni Morgia’s visionary guitar, Stuart Popejoy’s pulsating industrial bass …
Close Up
With the saxophonist player Bertrand Gauguet, the trumpet player Franz Hautzinger and the analogue synthesizer player Thomas Lehn, this is a trio with three european musicians who are invested in the improv and new music. Gauguet-Hautzinger-Lehn works to surimpose different sonic spaces : acoustic, amplified, natural or electronic, works to build temporal structures or architectures and works to generate the modulations of an open and combinatory 'chamber music'.
Recyclopaedia Britannica (Selected Works 1992-2002)
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly "topical" audio-jokes at the expense of one's raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being "groovy", the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw m…
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 …
Bag It
After 4 intensive days of recording with Steve Albini (WTF!?! Thought he didn't like jazz) The Thing created Bag It!, a new mastodon of ecstasy music. The Thing is well known for their free jazz versions of rock classics from artists such as PJ Harvey, White Stripes, The Sonics, Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Lightning Bolt. This time the band is only doing two rock interpretations, one by Japan's 54 Nude Honeys & one by the The Ex/ Muzsikás. The rest of the tracks on the album are written by Mats Gustafsson…
Ocean fire
Christopher Willits and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s new release, Ocean Fire, is a sublime soundtrack for the ocean. It is an intense and stirring wash of cascading tones and textured harmony. Willits + Sakamoto surprise with rare form in this collaboration, creating a sound world unlike anything they have produced previously. Each artist has gently pulled the other into new sonic territory. Sakamoto’s gorgeous processed piano sound reflects Willits’ beautiful shimmering clusters of notes, a new aspect of…
Ethnic Expressions
Easily one of the most coveted and sought-after of all jazz LPs is the elusive Holy Grail that is Roy Brooks' Ethnic Expressions. It's not just rarity that makes a record of this nature so desirable, nor is it the compelling music within -- sometimes, like a Van Gogh or a Picasso, it's the personality of the artist himself that's inexorably entwined with the record itself that lends a fascinating, mesmeric and mythical quality that simply can't be contrived. The sixth release in Jazzman's …
Aeral
In working with sound, video, and installation, Richard Garet has made an artform of interference. In previous work, he's employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film. He's flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. And here on AreaI, Garet continues his ongoing research with electromagnetic disturbanc…
(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…
Unter den linden / Und transit
The 'Grundton' of this 30-minute composition is the recording of the concert given at SND Studios Sheffield (UK) in March 2009, entitled 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' by Mark Fell and powered with d&b speakers by Tony Myatt (MRC, University of York). The sounds of planes have been recorded in Mallorca (Spain) in 1987, and in Pilat (France) in 2009. This music comes after HCDC, composed in November 2008 after the death of Daniel Charles Ð his last days were darkened by brea…
Ekhnatòn - Ricerca Italiana Semplice Numero Uno
This compilation, originally released in 1984 as a vinyl LP by Multiple Configuration in collaboration with the legendary ADN label, is finally available again in a completely remastered CD version. "Ekhnaton" collects tracks recorded by the most daring and remarkable bands that were active in the experimental Italian scene during those years. "Simple Italian Research Vol. 1" was (and still is) the subtitle of an album that includes two tracks from each of the following bands: Maze 1066, Tasaday…
Dispositions Furtives
Through the open sound portals created by his compatriot Castiglioni, the Italian pianist Alfonso Alberti first entered col legno's World of New Music; on his second album, he dedicates his sensitive and brilliant musicality to Gérard Pesson's fragile and puzzling fabrics of sound. A selection of piano pieces has been compiled in a joint effort by the pianist and the French composer; in his interpretations Alberti lets us catch glimpses of musical structures as though they were glittering just u…
E Pluribus Unum
a pure mantra: blending North African and Middle Eastern textures within a western context into our experience, regrettably the experience of a small few, but hopefully a wider community of listeners to come. Not only important historically, but musically: a wide range of music genres over the last couple of decades have worked with drone-note principles and it is an increasingly common device, but Sandy Bull was/is a superlative master of utilising the drone sounds;understated but effect…
One-Armed Fiddler
Mid-70’s album of instrumental Appalachian fiddling (with guitar and bass accompaniment) by a guy who, after a grisly gun-related injury, developed a between-the-legs bow technique. Mr. Smith was a repository of would-be lost traditional tunes, and his unique, microtonal playing only makes these gems all the more precious. For fans of the Anthology of American Folk Music and/or Jandek.