New Arrivals
Tetralogy (1978-1982)
'A 2-CD set containing four very different settings all featuring Paul Rutherford (trombone & euphonium): two festival solos - one with electronics and the other without; a festival brass quartet with George Lewis (trombone), Martin Mayes (french horn) & Melvyn Poore (tuba); and a studio trio with Paul Rogers (double bass) & Nigel Morris (drum set). The electronically enhanced solo and the brass quartet are unlike anything else in Rutherford's discography. All previously unissued.'
Llum moll
Llum Moll is a multilayered composition made with a manipulated AM radio receiver subjected to interference by LED lamps. The combination of the lamps in tandem with the radio tuned to certain frequencies creates a phantom organ' sound, turning the receiver into an instrument with a peculiar timbre and pitch. The composition was made in two parts. The first was to record and then select fragments with different lengths, pitches and textures. The second was to readjust the pitch of the chosen fra…
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…
Celeste
Another Tompkins Square reissue of early James Blackshaw material, and this is about as early as it gets: Celeste originally surfaced on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon a full five years ago and set the blueprint fr just about every solo recording he's made since. While the first part of the album finds Blackshaw in solo 12-string mode, the second deviates from the well-trodden Takoma-styled path and heads into an effects-laden drone composition. This sort of style-melding approach would come to…
Hyste
A sequence of six duo improvisations on tenor saxophone & church organ recorded at St Peter’s, Whitstable in 2009.
Gayageum Sanjo
Sub Rosa presents a release by composer/violinist Baudouin de Jaer. Gayageum Sanjo: compositions for 12-string gayagrum, Prelude, 5 sanjo and 10 studies. According to legend and to recent archeological digs, the gayageum is a millennial zither-like instrument featured in all Korean traditional repertoires. "Sanjo" is usually translated as "scattered melodies." This style of music was informed by southwestern shamanic music (Sinawi) and the great epic songs (Pansori) from the same regi…
Miniatures - Songs recycle
Pierre-Yves Macé is a young French composer, he was born in 1980, but has already released four albums on respected labels including Tzadik and Sub Rosa. Miniatures - Song Recycle is his second album for the Parisian imprint Brocoli, following the acclaimed Passagenweg. Miniatures - Song Recycle, as the title suggests, alternates musique concrète studies and songs in the form of lieder, where the voice is made of recycled, chopped and transformed a cappella vocals from YouTube, accompanied…
Helbzeit
We enter an open landscape, rich in impressions, and then leave the beaten track. Here and there we notice something that merits closer inspection. After a shorter or longer pause, we venture a little in another direction. We might simply take the day as it comes and without concern let everything that has been and that we have experienced go to the winds. Or perhaps perceive the singular aspects shown by this landscape with an acute awareness. Use them to recall past events and experiences, thu…
Book of Beyond
"Ben Reynolds is one of the newer voices from the same UK scene that includes Ashtray Navigations and many of the VHF celebrities (Sunroof!, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Richard Youngs, etc.) It should be of little surprise then that Book of Beyond fits very nicely among the recordings of those other artists -- noise/junk drone. As in his previous recordings, this at times dissolves into more acoustic offerings, but the Fahey influence appears to be mostly gone, and what remains in the quie…
Somethingtobesaid
Specially written for the John Butcher Group, this is the first full performance of somethingtobesaid - recorded live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival in November 2008. Chris Burn (piano), John Butcher (saxophones & pre-recordings), Gino Robair (percussion), John Edwards (bass), Thomas Lehn (synth), Dieb 13 (turntables), Clare Cooper (harp-guzheng), Adam Linson (bass & electronic processing).
1934-1935
More than seventy years since his death in 1937, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan retains his reputation as one of the greatest singers India ever produced. Possessed of an elastic, honied voice that poured out like mercury, he influenced generations of singers including Mohammed Rafi, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and Pandit Pran Nath. Born at the end of the 19th century to a family of musicians that extended back in time for centuries, his art was formed in the culture of the courts of the maharajas under Briti…
Krewton the Knewtron
'Previously unreleased material by the legendary Rick Potts of the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), to commemorate his solo tour of Japan. Raw, lo-fi avant-garde experiments with field recording, improvisation and tape music, recorded in the late seventies when Rick was in his early twenties. Featuring contributions by Le Forte Four and Doodooettes on one track, and two recently recorded unreleased tracks. " In 1977 I wanted to make an animated film filled with the strange creatures…
Fire And Frost Pattern
“The cold ice burns like the hot fire” wrote Max Beckmann in 1948 in his letter to an imaginary female painter. The extremes of fire and ice have always been a popular metaphor for the opposites of ardent passion and unfeeling frigidity, of flux and torpor – extremes which, for all our polarizing way of perceiving them, are very similar. This is also true, especially so in fact, in the acoustic field: in terms of their behaviour and dynamics, the sounds we associate with fire and ice – as create…
The Last Recording
Final solo alto sax blasting from the late legendary Japanese underground hero Kaoru Abe. Abe was an inspiration to free/jazz and Japanese noise lovers world-wide, lived a fast and hard life and ripped his guts inside out on each and every of his many releases. Extreme music for those who need it.
Tidings / Amesthyst Waves
Trying to put the last 15 years of music into context, you’d be hard pressed to get anyone to agree on a single thing. If anything, this period has been a collective convergence of all things cool-sounding: naïve experimentalism, academic composition, art-rock synthesis, electronic nihilism/flagellation, and, well, everything else. Mark McGuire could muddy anyones interpretation of the contemporary canon with his buddies in the triadic mega-unit, Emeralds, his collaborative outings in Sun Wa…
Time & Motion
Radio Massacre International is a British trio of Steve Dinsdale (keyboards, electronics, drums), Duncan Goddard (keyboards, electronics, bass) and Gary Houghton (guitar, synthesizers). These three musicians have worked together in various configurations since they were 16 year old students in the 70s and formed R.M.I. in 1993. After nearly 20 years together as R.M.I. and over 30 albums and hundreds of concerts, you might think that there might be no surprises left, but like their undulating, fl…
Fower
Ernesto RODRIGUES (viola), Neil Davidson (acoustic guitar), Guilherme RODRIGUES (cello) and Hernâni Faustino (double bass). Recorded in Lisbon 18-11-07. Neil Davidson has taken his acoustic guitar on many fascinating sonic adventures, forever pushing the language of sounds possible with this instrument to new places. Here he joins a group of musicians from Portugal led by the rather legendary Ernesto RODRIGUES on viola and also featuring his son Guilherme RODRIGUES on 'cello and Hernani Faustino…
Reception
The Sons of God: 32 amplified iron plates. Mats Gustafsson: live electronics. Recorded by Olof Madsen on the 5th of March 2006 at Frgfabriken, Stockholm, Sweden. Reception was a sound installation at Frgfabriken (February 18 - March 5, 2006). by the Sons of God and Emanuel Swedenborg and a part of the festival Place and Space, Stockholm New Music. The festival was curated by Magnus Haglund and Magnus Andersson. During the installation period, the following guest-artists were invited for performa…
The Wraiths Of Flying A
A three-way collaboration by Chicago based sound artist and renowned researcher in the field of Electronic Voice Phenomena Michael Esposito, Hamburg based operator of the Fragment Factory label Michael Muennich and long-time conceptual/performance artist, filmmaker, writer and core member of The Haters GX Jupitter-Larsen from Los Angeles. The origin of this project was a field investigation conducted by Esposito at American Film Studios, Santa Barbara, CA, additional sounds recorded by Michael M…