New Arrivals
Karoujite
Cristián Alvear, guitar, Seijiro Murayama, percussion. Recorded in Mishima (Japan), October 2016. In this recording entitled Karoujite (a japanese word meaning “scarcely”), Cristián Alvear and Seijiro Murayama are deeply involved in a minimalist and repetitive mode of playing. Each of them focuses on continuously playing same chords on the guitar, and rubbing the cymbal or hitting the snare drum. Listeners are invited to discover a kind of nonlinear and nearly static music. They can feel a sort …
Rapport à une Académie Kafka's Parachute
A “man” tells his fabulous past as an ape, from his capture to his adaptation to the world of men, to the members of an Academy of Sciences. This edition of A Report to an Academy, a short story by the great Kafka, is accompanied by a musical piece especially written by Nurse With Wound (here, Steven Stapleton, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron, Quentin Rollet, and It could be Worse).
Yawar Fiesta
A Spatialized Electroacoustic Opera.“Born in the Baroque period, the opera is making a strong comeback in this late-20th / early-21st century with the emergence of a new form of Baroque, the result of the globalization of information, racial and cultural melting pots, our historical knowledge of the arts, and the cohabitation of styles. This world-as-a-whole, as the synthesis of all other art forms, is a reflection of a society and an era, and it has to resemble our world through the use of mode…
Histoires d'histoire
“Music of Another Present Era” (2013-16), stereo tape. Music of Another Present Era plays freely with our ability to imagine another time and culture. At the same time, it recognizes that this historical imagining is necessarily conditioned by our own time and place. We do not know exactly what ancient music sounded like, as we are left with only inaudible details such as the microtonal scales that were used. This work appropriates a number of these ancient tuning systems to create a sense of th…
Compuriddim
Andreas Tilliander (Mokira, TM404) returns with a plunging set of skewed techno dubs for Joachim Nordwall's iDEAL, his first new release for the label since the Bias Line 7” in 2010, and the Hateless album released a decade ago. RIYL Peder Mannerfelt, Frak, Tapes, Pole, Basic Channel! Andreas Tilliander has gone some way to making his studio a bastion of dub music within his home city, Stockholm ever since emerging with the Cliphop album for Raster-Noton in 2000 and subsequently releasing a whol…
Stack Music
Having felt restrained by the limits of traditional instruments and the techniques tied to them, composer, music producer, and artist Konrad Sprenger (b. Joerg Hiller), spent years developing various algorithms and custom instruments to realize his work. His recent focus has been on rhythmic patterns based on the Euclidean algorithm, using a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar. The unique system can create complex rhythmical patterns whilst tuning the strings during performan…
Kreis Plon
LP version. Includes download code. Almost 20 years ago, Jürgen De Blonde debuted on Kraak with the nowadays unfindable and almost visionary album 1 (1998). It was the starting point for a vital and wondrous exploration that lead him over paths of glitch, idm, shoe gaze, hypnagogic pop, improvised music, straight forward synth music, field recordings, and kraut... In the middle of this ungraspable adventure through contemporary electronic music, Köhn stands as a genuine artist that stayed t…
Crawling Through Tory Slime
The debut LP of this collaborator with Rhodri Davies and Chris Watson, evoking the knockabout, visionary, English humour of Jeff Keen and Bruce Lacy, spiked here with massive, steaming dollops of contemporary political outrage and disgust. "'Sounds are slurpy, runny, fizzy, spongy, hard as rock,' says the label, 'recalling long improvisational sets, floor-sucking dubwise psychedelia, plunderphonics and tight GRM-era electronic sound design.' Released to coincide with BD's summer-long exhibition…
Sine Studies II
Sine Studies II is loscil’s continuation of the challenge set forth in Sine Studies 1- namely, to generate music derived from computer generated sine waves and no other sound source. Sine waves are perfectly pure units of synthesized sound, which alone contain no overtones and a somewhat unnatural sounding simplicity of spectral content. While their abstract purity in its rawest form can seem clinical, unnatural, synthetic and rather void of emotion, loscil takes it upon himself to morph, add, s…
Sine Studies I
The newest release from Vancouver’s Loscil, their first on the Jaz imprint, employs simple sine wave generators as the source for all sounds, transforming and processing some, while leaving others in their original form. Pure math and sonorous clarity on 45 RPM from one of Canada’s foremost ambient composers. Limited release of 300 copies featuring original artwork by Network Osaka.
In The Aura of The Other
Louise Landes Levi has translated & written books, published chap books, broadsides & cards, / played sarangi in concert halls, in radio stations in town squares & railroad stations for some decades & perhaps for some lives. Overland journeys to India produced several interpretive translations/ one of Rene Daumal ( the great Sanskrit autodidact & author of well known Mt. Analogue) RASA originally printed by New Directions (1982), now available through Shivastan, the other, of the legendary poet …
Blurred Genres
Ron Kuivila is a sound artist and composer. He creates instruments of his own design for performances as well as installations. Kuivila's work challenges what one can hear simultaneously. He samples sounds from many different situations, and he is influenced by nature as well as artifice.Prior to receiving his 2008 Grants to Artists award, Kuivila had shown his sound installation work at MASS MoCA (1999-2007); V2 Organization, Holland (2000); and Donaueschinger Musiktage, Germany (2000); WDR Spr…
World Galaxy
''My Beloved Brothers and Sisters: I am overwhelmed with joy to see the entire youth of America gathered here in the name of the fine art of music. In fact, through the music, we can work wonders. Music is a celestial sound and it is the sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations. Sound energy, sound power, is much, much greater than any other power in this world. And, one thing I would very much wish you all to remember is that with sound, we can make—and at the same ti…
Alpha Percussion
Mondo Groove present a reissue of Giovanni Cristiani's Alpha Percussion, originally released in 1985. Alpha Percussion is a cult groovy ambient album of acoustic percussion, pleasant to listen to and full of samples and breaks known very well by DJs and artists like Danny Brown, who used a sample of "Fragments Of Crystal" in "Really Doe", a song off his album Atrocity Exhibition (2016). Giovanni Cristiani is one of the most prepared and complete Italian percussionists. Born in Rome in 1952, h…
Sidarta
Discom's research on unknown and neglected music from former Yugoslavia continues! This time we go deep into the 70’s electronic, experimental, fusion und prog rock and we present you group 37°C with their album Sidarta. In the time when Gary Numan recorded "Are 'Friends' Electric?" in Gooseberry Studio in London in 1979, a group of skilled musicians, also known as Boban Petrovic's backing band, booked the same studio to record an album. These were the first recordings ever of Bebi Dol and Silva…
Space Museum
Issued in a tiny cassette edition during 1982, Solid Space’s sole album Space museum, is an unveiling of the strange world of pop DIY music which grew from the spirit and ethos of punk’s early gestures. Formed by Matthew Vosburgh and Dan Goldstein - a spin off from the British band Exhibit A, the project was an endeavour in sci-fi inspired bedroom synth-pop - falling into similar sonic territory as The Normal, Silicon Teens, Telex, and They Might Be Giants. With original copies selling for hundr…
Lips
'Lips' pairs Roman Hiele — the ultimate Antwerp cocktail karaoke swinger — and Lieven Martens — “dad of the year“, field recordist and English teacher. This outing, the duo’s first, was recorded at the venerable electronic studios of Worm in Rotterdam and at Studio De Ziltige Olijf in central Antwerp, where the stench of salty human bulk creeps into your mouth from about a mile away. During Hiele-Martens’ few concerts one could detect and, indeed, savour a Jiskefet-like attention to detai…
Mahmoud, Hassan Et Younes
A reissue of Les Frères Mégri's Mahmoud, Hassan Et Younes, originally released in 1974. Les Frères Mégri was a Moroccan rock band formed in Oujda, Morocco in the late 1960s. The band consisted of four members: the three brothers, Hassan, Mahmoud, and Younès, and their sister Jalila Mégri. Before the creation of the band, the Megri brothers were popular session musicians, composers, and producers in Morocco, starting in the late '50s. In the early '70s, Hassan and Mahmoud released four sing…
European Jazz Sounds
Alto Saxophone – Klaus Marmulla (tracks: 1-1 to 1-10, 2-1 to 2-15), Peter Reinke (tracks: 1-11, 1-12) Bass – Hajo Lange (tracks: 1-1 to 1-10, 2-1 to 2-15), Wolfgang Lauschert (tracks: 1-11, 1-12) Drums – Heinz von Moisy (tracks: 1-1 to 1-10, 2-1 to 2-6, 2-8 to 2-11), Joe Nay (tracks: 1-11, 1-12), "Eminenz" Roberts (tracks: 2-7, 2-12 to 2-15) Piano – Michael Naura Vibraphone – Wolfgang Schlüter (tracks: 1-1 to 2-6, 2-8 to 2-15) Vocals – Gitta Eilers (tracks: 2-14, 2-15) In the booklet drums for t…
The power of negative thinking
The International Nothing is the Berlin-based duo of clarinet players Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke. The two have been working together since 2000, refining a highly personal language focused on introspective, microtonal textures through stasis, patiently investigating timbre, multiphonics and extended techniques, with a commanding intensity spiced with a dry sense of humor (reflected also in the cover art by Japanese Masae Tanabe). This duo has released three albums on the Japanes…