New Arrivals
Un Coeur Simple
Stephan Mathieu's latest work transforms music made for Gustav Flaubert's titular play. First published as part of the book Trois Contes (Three Tales) in 1877 and translating to 'A Simple Heart', the text, a modern rereading of an old tale, makes for a neat analog to Mathieu's sonic practice - augmenting recordings of obsolete formats - wax cylinders, 78s - and early instruments by computer processes. Using pieces written by early renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474) and performed in…
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…
Shrine Of The Post
Now I've seen the Starving Weirdos play live, which always tends to blur opinions of a band's recorded material. If you see a band play and they are a bunch of obnoxious f*ckwits with no clue what they're doing it can colour your judgement somewhat and make a record seem a lot worse than it is, and if you see a band that are just frankly very awesome indeed and lovely folk to boot, then it can give you a different focus when you hear them on cd. Thankfully Humbolt crew Starving Weirdos fal…
Pharmelodies
A colossal and epic post-ambient symphony in three movements, where echoes of string instruments, deep drones of indecipherable origin, layered synthetic waves, slowed-down and distorted dark sonic masses challenge time with a para-immobility in constant turmoil, in an unpredictable, progressive and sometimes cyclic combination of statuesque sonic forms whose physiognomy is often known and familiar, while at the same time elusive, disturbing, arcane and mysterious... Another highest and …
Live in concert
Denman Maroney (piano) & Mark Dresser (bass). Vision Festival NY - June 11, 2008. This is the third duo album by bassist Mark Dresser and pianist Denman Maroney, after Duologues and Time Changes. In contrast to some of the other material by the two players, this one is fully improvised in three long pieces. The first 30 minute track was recorded live at Vision Festival on June 10, 2008, the two other pieces date from a performance in Chicago in 2001. It's hard to call this jazz, since none of th…
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…
Just before music
Fans of Sun Ra, take notice -- there is a new American original on the scene who hails from Birmingham, Alabama. Lonnie Holley's music is unlike anything ever heard, and these recordings are a welcome addition to the continuum of music. This album marks the first time Dust-to-Digital has taken an artist into a recording studio. Lonnie Bradley Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, the seventh of twenty-seven children. From the age of 5, Holley worked various jobs: pi…
Kontinent
Number 4 of the Salzburg Festival “Kontinent” series was dedicated to Wolfgang Rihm. We have compiled a selection of the works for your conven- ience – including a first recording! Wolfgang Rihm once claimed that the most appropriate statements about his oeuvre are his own compositions. In 2010 the Salzburg Festival adopted this approach. The result was a “Kontinent Rihm” which placed the manifold tone colors and modes of expression created by the former Stockhausen student into a broader contex…
Very Urgent
Originally released on Polydor in 1968. During this year, The Chris McGregor Group were riding high on the London jazz scene, playing and hanging out with all the rising stars of British free jazz. Very Urgent, their eagerly-awaited debut recording, was a joyful call of intent. The album mixes simple but utterly unstoppable tunes and exhilarating horn charts -- immediately establishing a vitality and exuberance that would continue to define the group. Nevertheless, their evident preference f…
Inspirationals
Back in 1988 Arbeit Group label released obscure industrial-noise release by project called TRAIT. A-side of the tape includes several different arrangement for inspiration in battle. B-side included several of those arrangements combined together for temporary unified action. 45 minutes of most primitive analogue destruction, leaving no place for easylistening or relaxing moments. Even with the atmopheric and dark moment, sound is extremely decayed and coarse sound of tape loops, manipulation a…
Ballads of the Research Department
The Boats are a duo consisting of Craig Tattersall (ex-Hood, The Remote Viewer, and owner of the Cotton Goods label) and Andrew Hargreaves (Tape Loop Orchestra) as well a rotating roster of guest musicians and vocalists. While Ballads of the Research Department is their 12k debut, it follows up a string of critically acclaimed and genre favorites such as Sleepy Insect Music (Flau/Home Normal, 2010), Words Are Something (Home Normal, 2009), and limited editions released on their own Our Small Ide…
Drones
In the beginning there was the piano. As soon as he had mastered the basics, Jean-Philippe Goude discovered the spell of melancholy while working on a little musical piece: an etude ringing out in the style of a somber hymn. Not the dead meat smells of somberness that, according to Picabia, serious people emit, but the earthen gravity of an abyss dug by life itself. Everything is the result of this bedazzlement. At 11 years old, Jean-Philippe Goude closed his eyes. When his eyelids finall…
Lost wisdom
The music of Mount Eerie has taken many forms (see: The Microphones) but it is always made by Phil Elverum. Lost Wisdom is an album that finds Elverum in a more collaborative mode than usual, working with two legends of music and kindred spirits, Julie Doiron and Fred Squire. Elverum and Doiron share vocal duties almost equally on the record, making it an album comprised of dark pop duets.This time the songs were recorded quickly and quietly during a surprise visit by Julie Doiron, keeper of t…
Crwth (Chorus Redux)
Through their use of low tech means and focusing on the blending of guitar noise and electronic voice processing, Lovesliescrushing can be seen as the early 'missing link' between the likes of Slowdive and Fennesz. Their output has been consistently and beautifully crafted... works that contain an element of sonic mystery and still sound timeless. Lovesliescrushing is an important, if perhaps overlooked, point in the timeline of contemporary electronic music. - Richard Chartier. Loveslies…
Faint
12k mastermind Taylor Deupree presents his sole solo output for 2012. His lushly realised 'Faint' is themed around those blissful, fleeting moments between waking and sleep, and vice versa, that point where the sub-conscious kicks in after a couple of hypnagogic jerks and we begin to seep between one reality and another. It break down to five extended and beautiful pieces: from the cottony friction of 'Negative Snow', melting to the ringing resonance of air cushioned keys and acousmatic crackle …
Nature Data
Why is the phoneme the most 'ideal' of signs? Where does this complicity between sound and ideality, or rather, between voice and ideality, come from? When I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself [je m'entende] at the same time that I speak. The signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention, is in absolute proximity to me. The living act, the life-giving act, the Lebendigkeit, which animates the body of the signifier and tra…
Grass Openings
After numerous CDs, CDRs, cassettes and LPs, Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood have established themselves as one of the many lights in modern improvised outsider music. Their latest offering, ‘Grass Openings’ sees them continue down this winding path of intoxicated trance derangement. Drawing heavily from psychedelic, jazz and weirdo traditions to create a unique form of mutant sound.
Non Euclidean Elucidation of Shamanic Ecstasies
Winnowed from the polymath, alchemist, “the man who could walk through in-between positionsâ€Â, arch Black Duke of Maknovischina, peripatetic flux ingester haji gutterpup Ustad’s Almanac, his scribblings and tapes spanning 31 yrs, “Non-Euclidean Elucidation Of Shamanic Ecstacies†was hastily transcribed and assembled sixty nadis travel west of Sahiwal by an assemblage of Vamachara hounds and the Abdals of Rum wearing black mantles and animal hides over their shoulders with…
Lost Prayers
Originally released in a tiny pressing of just 200 CD-Rs by Digitalis Industries, this early James Blackshaw release is brought back in print by the Tompkins Square label, who on the back of last year's 'Cloud Of Unknowing' are intent upon reintroducing the guitarist' back-catalogue to his growing legion of fans (of whom there is almost certainly more than 200). 'Lost Prayers And Motionless Dances' is a single thirty-five minute composition, opening with droning harmonium passages and only…
Teem
Olivia Block: field recordings, piano, reed organ, editing and mixing. Kyle Bruckmann: oboe, English Horn, suona, accordion, field recordings, editing and mixing. Bruckmann and Block's creative relationship dates back to the recording of Block's 1999 release Pure Gaze, shortly after both artists entered into Chicago's vibrant experimental music community. Their decision to create a collaborative duo ensued, but remained in the realm of good intentions until shortly before Bruckmann's relo…