New Arrivals
musique noire
Julia Purgina’s works tell musical stories. Abstract stories, which usually initiate her working process. It is her goal “to write works that are clearly located in the present through their musical language and by speaking of the present, but which both touch people in their innermost being and force them to reflect. In a way that would be ultimately timeless,” said the composer in an interview for the Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung. Through the musical description of mysterious characters, clouds …
Works for Amplified Piano(s)
With this album, Yoshiko Shimizu presents a second outstanding recording of works for amplified piano(s) by American composer George Crumb, being the only pianist who has created ‘solo’ realizations of his compositions Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), Zeitgeist and Otherworldly Resonances. George Crumb praised her superb 2018 Kairos release (0015029KAI), declaring, “I consider her to be one of my very finest interpreters. Bravissima!”
Propagation of Uncertainty
"Olivier Messiaen once said that all you need to make music is a note and silence. For the composer Arash Yazdani, born in 1985 and raised in Isfahan, Iran (and now based in Tallinn, Estonia), a slightly adapted adage applies: All you need to make music is two frequencies – though Yazdani has a clear preference for notes extremely close in pitch. His music is full of tightly coiled beatings, both stationary and set in motion. These beatings function like black holes in his works, drawing other s…
All The Way Down
Limited Edition "Snapshots, pictures, glimpses of life and notes on a crumpled sheet. Framing memories to keep them, mostly remembering those that are less important. Unconscious moments, instants that didn't have attention that unexpectedly resurface in a recurring dream. Some faces transfigure, other images lose definition, leave the frame for a few seconds and lean on a desk covered with notes and drafts. Matteo and Stefano offer a really personal and felt contribution to Torto Editions and R…
Der Einsiedler
*50 copies limited edition* Kapsel magazine presents »Der Einsiedler« by Liu Yang from Sichuan and a soundtrack composed by Peking based synthesizer experimentalist Meng Qi. In this story a successful business man encloses himself in a bunker deep under the earth. Disconnected from the world starts a journey that leads him to the end of the universe and beyond. The story is read by Berlin based actor Lukas Hoffmann. You can find the story in the latest issue of Kapsel, published in March at Maro…
Signs and Accuracy
Big Tip! *Limited to 70 hand-numbered copies.* "Signs and Accuracy" is the first collaborative work between Jon Wesseltoft and Niklas Adam and the austere title sets the mood from the start. The composition process as well as the interaction between the two artists, constitutes something new for both of them. The signs possess accuracy; they are a unified whole, materialized and executed within a singular and unexplored surrounding space. "Signs and Accuracy", out now on Coherent States, is musi…
Inauspicious
*200 copies limited edition* In a recent interview, the california artist Jim Haynes was asked to name his top five noise albums. In quick fashion, he listed Off Kill the King, Send, Desnos, Persona, and Carcinosi. Since then, he's equivocated on which albums to choose, but the artists behind such works remain as the adjacent signposts and landmarks to his own constructions of industrial noise. How those records connect to the output from haynes is found in their unique combination of smoldering…
Lamin Fofana And The Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family
Epic, grooving, dazzlingly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics.
The God Bear Archives II
*90 copies limited edition* During the year 2021, Charlemagne Palestine entrusted us with numerous archives recently found on audio cassettes dating from the 70s and 80s. After a long process of listening and selection, we are pleased to present the second volume of these archives to you.
Trad, Gras Och Stener: A Collective History (Book)
Huge Tip! 400 pages, 387 Images. The story of the legendary Swedish psych rock band Träd, Gräs och Stenar is also a defining story of alternative culture. Across multiple incarnations, the musicians of this iconic group (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass and Stones”) have drawn on their roots in jazz and the avant-garde, the iconoclastic art and theater of the 1960s, and the back-to-the-land “green wave” movement to blaze a pioneering trail across fifty years of endlessly improvisational, r…
Bricolage Archive 2 - Discs 1-4 (Special Edition)
Edition of 50 copies, in a special spray-coated box edition. The second release from the archive of the series “Bricolage” by music critic Agi Yuzuru (of Vanity Records fame)who passed away in October 2018. The latest “cutting edge music” was transformed by Agi’s original interpretation. This edition includes the complete set of four discs recorded at four events in 2014. Mastering by Kentaro Hayashi, highly appreciated by Agi in his later years. In outer bag with the same file hole as the 0g se…
Stolen Scars
The five-channel sound installation "Stolen Scars" by Eiki Mori was exhibited in the "Takamatsu Contemporary Art Annual vol.10 There Is No Boundaries Here./?” at the Takamatsu Art Museum from February 11 to March 21, 2022. And this is the documentary soundtrack of that work.
“There is a boy who has been deeply hurt, heartbroken and has not recover yet. You can’t talk to him or rub his back. Instead, you can only ring this bell for him.”
When Mori created "Stolen Scars,” he first sent a handbell …
Three Glasses
Composed by Takahiro Kawaguchi. Performed by Shinjiro Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kanda, Kanako Kawaguchi and Takahiro Kawaguchi. Droplets of water are set to drip from three infusion containers suspended from the ceiling, each at a different speed. Each of the three players produce sound by rubbing with their fingers a wine glass that catches the droplets from one of the containers, with the scale changing according to the amount of water that accumulates. The first track documents this process for te…
Piipiipii
**Very few copies available. Edition of 20 copies. It comes with waterproof mp3 player, headphones and cable. Includes several photos taken as a diary during the performance** Salad is a collaboration between Tsume, who makes background music in Niigata Prefecture, and Masami Baba, who accumulates environmental sounds in Hyogo Prefecture. Using the environmental sounds flowing in the place and improvised sounds, we change the sound pattern. The change of sound will take place all day and will co…
After All is Said and Done: Taping the Grateful Dead, 1965-1995
If any one musical act of the rock and roll era can be said to have transcended the simple categorization of “band,” the Grateful Dead is it: by the time they stopped performing in 1995, the Dead had become an international institution with a vast backing organization, a massive and devoted fanbase, and archival recordings both official and bootlegged. The cultural significance of these bootlegs—live concert cassettes which solidified the Dead’s legendary status even as they occupied a legal gra…
Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives
How can thoughtfully and intentionally listening to our world inspire our creative practices? What insights can we gain when we delve into the immersive world of sound, which permeates our every moment? In Transcendent Waves, sound healing practitioner, meditation teacher, and artist Lavender Suarez outlines how listening can unlock moments of creative spark, self-awareness, and mindfulness in a work that is equal parts how-to guide and contemplative artist’s workbook. Suarez's illustrated medit…
Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest VIII
* 2023 Stock * Exhibition catalog published by Mela Foundation presenting Jung Hee Choi’s Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest VIII. It features large-scale multimedia installations including Environmental Composition 2014, an installation version of Color (CNN), and a sound environment, Tonecycle Base 30 Hz, 2:3:7 Vocal Version with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi improvising over the 77 sine wave frequencies that are imperceptibly changing. The relationship of their improvisatio…
Black Creek
*102 copies limited edition* For anyone who's spent real time in the heavier quarters of the many-chambered underground in the last three decades, Andrew Nolan is a recognizable name. "Black Creek" represents an early entry in his most recent strain of solo work, which draws on dub and hip hop filtered through a studied lens of industrial dread (or maybe vice versa). Originally released as a cassette in 2021 by Seith Communiti, it's now presented as a limited LP in screen printed covers. The mus…
India Vibrations (Revisited)
Tomáš Niesner has been making a name for himself in recent years by way of his solo ambient/drone excursions and the intricate melodicism of his collaborations with Jakub Šimanský. But it was “India Vibrations,” a digital self-release of lo-fi manipulated field recordings captured during a trip across North India, that really caught my ear: the cacophony of street festivals juxtaposed with the solemnity of houses of worship, all recorded on an “obsolete cellphone” and then looped and layered, ab…
Brown Wardle Hill
Brown Wardle Hill stands as an imposing yet noble hill on the South Pennine Moors of Whitworth, Rossendale, Lancashire. Regarded as a site of prehistoric importance due to the overwhelming amount of mesolithic flint scatterings discovered during the early 20th century, the hill also boasts an incredible amount of lore and legend. In 2019 David Chatton Barker spent a year walking and researching into the hill and its surrounding moors, the material gathered formed a series of performances, culmin…