New Arrivals
Sol Sketches
Film director Chris Teerink asked me to make the soundtrack for a documentary he would be making about American artist Sol LeWitt. This was in 2009. Chris and I agreed that the music and the images should both be equally important in his film. We didn't want the score to overpower the images, but neither did we want it to become solely background 'muzak'. I searched for a certain openness in the sound, while at the same time keeping a directness to it. Musical references for me were the piano pi…
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…
SID Chip Sounds: The Music Of The Commodore 64
Compilation of music from classic Commodore 64 computer games. The 18 original pieces of music have been remastered for this release. When people talk about "Commodore 64 music," it's easy to forget they're not talking about a musical style: they're talking about a delivery mechanism. What that convenient phrase hides is the sheer amount of originality and creativity that went into creating the music for games on the Commodore 64. Included on this compilation is some of their most celebra…
Thing
This powerful 1972 performance by Arni Cheatham's group provides a unique glimpse of the jazz scene in Boston. The group borrowed the most innovative characteristics of jazz and rock, but never sounded derivative. This is early seventies "jazz fusion" of the highest order, before the term evolved to mean a light, commercially acceptable genre. As with many innovative jazz forms, the recording was made at one of the many local universities, Harvard. The resulting album was pressed in scant…
Of The Body Prone
Mixing improvisation & tightly controlled jump cut compositional complexity, AHLEUCHATISTAS are one of a handful of rock groups that can give the Ruins, Meshuggah, & Naked City a run for their money. Fascinating & powerful, passionately performed & beautifully recorded, this is New Rock Complexity at its very best.
We Who Had Left
Necks pianist Chris Abrahams teams up with electronic artist and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti for six introspective and mysterious tracks that mix Necks like progress with ambient electronics and curious monologs, and one waltz.The piano recital format number one: a pompous italian tenor, his round belly almost exploding inside his tuxedo, stands beside the gigantic grand piano, holding a hand on it while protruding forwards. Outside the stage, an imaginary oceanic audience is seated on hundr…
A Church Is Only Sacred To Believers
Nicholas Christian - Matt Milton - Dddie Prevost - Bechir Saade, recorded on sunday 17th of june 2007 at Atomic Studio London. “Spontaneity is not mere impulse… It does not imply undeliberated behaviour or feeling. Spontaneity is behaviour, feeling and thought that is free of external constraint, of imposed restriction. It is not an an uncontrolled effluvium of passion and action. Insofar as the individual removes the fetters of domination that have stifled her or his self-activity, she or he is…
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 …
Show em the door
Show Em The Door presents the first collaboration between Joseph Hammer and Jason Crumer. The pair come from very different backgrounds and are separated in age by a generation but have found in each other a surprisingly sympathetic and compatible musical partnership. Joseph Hammer has been a fixture of the west coast experimental music scene since the early 1980s. He remains one of the most active and visible members of the LAFMS collective, and has founded a long list of legendary bands incl…
92982
Once again unveiling hidden treasures from his archive of tape loops, William Basinski releases three pieces made at his Brooklyn apartment during one night in 1982, adding a fourth composition (based on the same source material) made earlier this year. You can't help but wonder why this music, recorded so long ago, is only just surfacing. Was the world not ready for WIlliam Basinski in 1982, or was WIlliam Basinski simply not ready to hand himself over to an audience at that point? Whatever the…
Belle De Jour
Klanggalerie are very proud to present you the first full re-issue of this second album on CD by Diana Rogerson with Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound. The CD has the original cover artwork as well as previously unpublished images. Full album, includes bonus tracks not on the Beastings CD re-issue. Remastered by Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter. "'Riding the Red Rag' closes the …
Open Percussion
this CD is an amazing achievement. Kjos Sørensen is a brilliantly gifted performer, but clearly an imaginative and creative one too. A very special issue, continuing BIS’s tradition of opening our minds and our ears.
Silent Partner
There’s probably not much to say about punk’s continued existence. Like jazz or sitcoms or party politics, it just carries on eating and breathing and shitting and propogating. It’s only interesting when someone comes along trying to advance the form. Like “Arrested Development” or Dennis Kucinich, they’re usually forgotten. This would all be relevant if Neptune were a punk band, which we’re not at all sure is the case. They create a sense of undermining the status quo, which is pretty pun…
Catch-Wave
Takehisa Kosugi is an inter-media artist and performer who started his career back in the '60s in Tokyo. With his first band Group Ongaku (free anarchist-conceptual improvisations) he was introduced to the Fluxus avant-garde movement. During the '70s, he was a member of the mystical, psychedelic, droning rock band Taj Mahal Travellers. He co-founded the band in 1969. Since the end of the '70s until now, he has released several solo albums and commissioned works for events and sound installations…
Vacation Music
For a couple of years Ryoji Hojito, together with his wife Yoshiko, were coming to Lithuania for a one week autumn vacation. We've met in the course of their explorative journeys around the country and without thinking too much went to a studio for a spontaneous session and a year later played a concert at St. Catherin's Church in Vilnius. Both of us were happy about the music we've got on tape and today we want to share with you seven impro peaces!
Aum air
Meeting of 3 guitar players. Recorded live at Penguin House, Tokyo on January 22nd, 2005.
Malaikat dan Singa
Arrington de Dionyso is a multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, synths and bass clarinet, does Tuvan throat singing and generally sings with the intensity of a madman. And despite being an America, on Malaikat dan singa he sings in Indonesian, which, thanks to his idiosynchratic singing style, makes him sound particularly demented. As it happens, the lyrics are adapted and translated lines from poems by William Blake. Not that you would understand a single one of them unless you know Indonesia…
Cracked Refraction
Cracked Refraction ties its complex knots with infectious vigor and a predilection for playfulness. Wrack’s melodies are slithering and serpentine, and the music is built of smaller segments assembled in what can seem a slapdash manner, with all sorts of jutting ends and unexpected collisions. What Bruckmann’s done, though, is intentional, placing his players on different planes, with straight lines failing to meet, runs of notes ricocheting at impossible angles, and expected avenues folding in …
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…
Clivages
"Clivages is Univers Zero's first new studio album in over five years. They have spent the last five years performing at prestigious rock and new music festivals throughout Europe and North America and ever-widening their audience. Founding members of the original "Rock In Opposition" [R.I.O.] movement and the inventors of "chamber rock", Univers Zero have continued to change and grow and develop over their entire career, while still keeping a ensemble sound and spirit that is easily recognizabl…