New Arrivals
s\\t
"This project started with a commission from [performance group] eighth blackbird and Ben Broening to create a multi-channel composition for the University of Richmond's Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival. I wrote out a set of instructions for each musician and recorded them separately from the rest of the group. The first sessions were with Molly Michael, Nick and Lisa. I started to work with their sounds, layering processing, adding and eliminating elements until I found something t…
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…
Joy Shapes
To say that the words "unique" and "singular" are over-used in describing music is to state the obvious. To apply these words to the sounds created by the various duo/trio configurations of the Texas group Charalambides over the last decade plus would be understatement. To be sure there are numerous antecedents to their music; to deny this of any artist's work would be akin to saying that they are deaf. But they have surely broken new ground in the primitive/folk/mystic/improv/psych valley in …
Live One
Michael Bullock (contrabass & feedback), Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet), Vic Rawlings (cello & surface electronics). “Mary Staubitz emailed me asking, “do you and Vic want to play with this guy from Lebanon?” Mary was booking a series of noise shows at the Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, MA, and had been contacted, apparently out of the blue, by “this trumpet player from Beirut.” She wanted to help him out but wasn`t sure what to do, since none of us in Boston really knew anything about him. Vic and I hav…
Homemade Gloomy Pop
Finally available as a double CD, this collection is dedicated to Endless Nostalgia, one of the cult-band par excellence of the Italian electronic New Wave of the Eighties. Better known for the single "Me & My Alter Ego" released in 1984, this electro-pop duo from Verona, Northern Italy, produced a large number of cassette releases that have become very sought-after items nowadays. This generous and well-structured collection is a testament to the quality of the formation that was centered on Lu…
Tengu et Kitsune II
Taku Sugimoto : metronomes, mandolin... Taku Unami: computer, mandolin... Recorded live by Taku Unami at Loop-Line on May 2 and October 16, 2008. Mastered by Taku Unami.
Litany Of Echoes
It was once easy to think of James Blackshaw as an inheritor of the Takoma tradition, a school of searching acoustic guitar playing pioneered by John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, and others in the 1960s. But listening to the English guitarist's new album, it's clear it's not that simple. While echoes of those three and some of their contemporaries are still present in Blackshaw's music, these days you can hear just as much Terry Riley and Philip Glass in his work. His synthesis of acoustic e…
Night within
Guest contributions include David Sylvian, Daniel O'Sullivan (Miracle and Ulver), Duke Garwood and many others with the two creators, Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters, both taking a directorial role. The album was sculpted in Reykjavik by Ben Frost, enhanced by his signature aural physicality and visceral sub bass. The album is a vast collision of sound, from free brass and woodwind to "geometric" bowed cymbals and metallic percussion.But more than simply music, the multidisciplinary L A N D draw o…
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.
Ex 30: 30 Years of The Ex
30 years of The Ex - a double album compilation featuring songs from all Ex albums from 1980 until 2006, absolutely compehensive. All songs remastered for this release by Colin McLean at OT301, Amsterdam.
Sentielle objectif actualite
CD version. This recording contains seven remixes by UK-based artist and electronic musician Mark Fell of the first three 12" singles released on the record label Sensate Focus in 2012. These were called 10, 5 and 3.3.... The first of these, 10, was itself a reworking of materials from an earlier project by Fell and Terre Thaemlitz, released on Comatonse Recordings in 2012. The seven remixes were written and recorded in June 2012 at the Upper Lounge, Chatham Street (UK) using a MacBook Pro ru…
Notturni
In the fall of 2011 the pianist Marino Formenti performed four one-hour solo concerts hosted by the Wien Modern festival. The so-called “Notturni” series was centered around the piano oeuvre of Friedrich Cerha. To celebrate the occasion Cerha wrote his first piece for solo piano in twenty years and dedicated it to Formenti. The pianist extraordinaire’s main objective in these performances was to contemplate the music jointly with his audience, to analyze and reanalyze the sounds of the in…
s3d (Ear & Eye)
s3d presents a world of fresh sounds from invented and unconventional instruments with names as curious and evocative as the sounds they produce: mothics, shimsaw, kyurukyuttsu, gloopdrum, corrugahorn, sprong, sundrum and many more. An international collaboration. Twelve experimental instrument builders/improvisors in an inspirational world-first.
Cristallisation
Over 4 hours of improvisations were recorded over these two days in april 2010. We then trimmed the sound sequences and the silence, while keeping our specific interactions and phrasing of sounds between us and with the location. But sound is a flexible material and what remains of this session are frequencies that are like vestiges to be reinvented. To help this there is some 'presence'. The acoustic character and the intense immobility that fill the air of the chapel of Las Planques, in the da…
From here to there
The Preservation label presents From Here To There, the debut album from San Francisco’s Ben Swire. While From Here To There can sit snugly in the canon of electronica, it’s played out with expansive vision and immediate warmth. Woven together with a deft sense of minimalism and melody using double bass, interlocking guitars and crisp percussion, the use of live instrumentation against densely layered field recordings finds great balance between elasticity and deep ambient underpinnings. The acc…
Centralia
Mountains’ music is defined by slow builds, and subtle transformations, textures and melodic lines that evolve in a variety of ways to create grand soundscapes and acutely detailed compositions. For Centralia, the duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg wrote and recorded in a way that mirrors the pace of their music. While the current trend in experimental music is towards hyper-prolificity, Mountains have taken their time on Centralia, resulting in an album that is as precise as it is boundl…
Chikatetsu - Sax Solo
Fushitsusha Tokyo underground legend Tamio Shiraishi in solo alto saxophone solos from different subway stations in Queens, NYC, a unique voice interacting with an extreme urban environment. "Alto saxophone - Tamio Shiraishi. A set of unique site-specific live recordings from one of the true legends of the Tokyo underground, taped at a number of different subway stations in Queens, NYC. Tamio Shiraishi is one of the legends of the Japanese underground. For over thirty years he has continued to …
Birds in a box
Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist. CD releases include “Bright and Dusty Things” (New Albion Records), “Listening to Donald Judd” (Sub Rosa) and “The Gorilla Variations”, with Molly Berg (12k). Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented internationally, including exhibitions at the Cartier Foundation, Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in NY and the High Line, also in NYC. Originally from NY, Stephen is now based in Richmond, VA.Rutger Zuydervelt records as Machinefabri…
Perdition Hill Radio
2nd full-length from self-styled black ambient guitar overlord. Like Earth's seminal "Hex" before it, this invokes the ghosts of a lost America & drags the rotting carcass of country music through a swamp of noise & drone. The chugging, blown-out treble & isolated darkness of Xasthur is all present & correct, but there are also echoes of William Basinski & Deaf Center hidden amongst the clouds of radio static.
Mort aux vaches
Pete Swanson (electronics, vocals) and Gabriel Mindel Saloman (electric guitar, electronics). Produced and recorded for Dwars by Berry Kamer, Amsterdam, May 17th 2007. Packaged in a 3-panel cardboard relief sleeve. Artwork & concept by Staalplaat. Limited edition of 500 copies.