New Arrivals
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 …
House
CD edition, 'House' is the 2nd official full-length offering by Cleveland, Ohio duo MIST featuring Sam Goldberg (of Radio People) and John Elliott (Emeralds, Outer Space, Imaginary Softwoods etc) after 2009's self-titled debut effort on Amethyst Sunset. A suite consisting of 7 complex, layered compositions shows new progression in composition and melody from the duo. From the lightning fast, bittersweet crescendo of 'Twin Lanes' to the dramatic chord progressions of 'I Can Still Hear Your Voice'…
Live In Leugen
In December 2009 Zebra (Roel Meelkop & Frans de Waard) were invited to play a hommage to Martin Hannett, the legendary producer of Joy Division, A Certain Ratio and Section 25 (to mention Zebra's favorites). This was the start of a long Factory Records weekend in Brussels. Zebra picked their favorite Martin Hannett productions and sprinkled them some further with their extraordinary electronic means to create a groovy, dense slab of music. This album is called 'Live In Leugen'. Leugen is the dut…
The finishing line (Film music volume 2)
Second full-lenght album from rashomon (aka Guapo founding member Matt Thompson). Inspired by public information broadcast The Finishing Line (1977), the record is a sonic re-imagining of the film as haunted meditation on the power of memory, drawing the listener into a claustrophobic sense of unease and mounting horror. An amalgam of library music, 1970s prog soundtrack, musique concrète and spectral jazz
Sounds Like Silence
In 2012 the world celebrates not only the centenary of John Cage’s birth, but also the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of his ”silent piece” 4’33”(four minutes, thirty-three seconds) on August 29, 1952. This composition in three movements without intentional sounds is the composer’s best-known work today. As an ”art without work” (John Cage), it takes up and renews the impulses of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, notably Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, which the artist h…
Reflectors
The Preservation label presents the second album from New York's Nickolas Mohanna. Also working as a visual artist, Nickolas draws unique forms from the wealth of sounds found in New York's complex sprawl and imbues them with feeling and subtlety. The sounds on Reflectors buzz with rich detail and rhythmic interplay for a work alive with beauty and mystery in its atmospheric reach. Previously living in San Francisco for a number of years, Nickolas studied with noted electronic composer Bob…
Rare Material
Totally essential two cd collection of some of the most elusive Moondog material of all . When the "Viking of Sixth Avenue" single volume compilation was reissued, we pleaded that here was truly a taste worth acquiring. Louis Hardin somehow managed to find the musical continuities between Bach, native american Sundances, be-bop, Stravinsky and yet still pursue his own musical paths and sound utterly unique. Strong claim, but the music truly bears it out. Drawing the entire disc one from the ultr…
Michelangelo Antonioni
The third (and perhaps final) project in the film director series which began with Andrei Tarkovsky - Another Kind Of Language and Yasujiro Ozu - Hitokomakura. Michelangelo Antonioni - Trilogy And Epilogue focuses upon the Italian auteur's landmark 'tetralogy' of films L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962) and IlDeserto Rosso (1963). Antonioni was known for not being very keen to use music in his films, partially because he wanted the films to tell their stories free from 'add…
The German Years 1977-1999
The first disc is an anthology of the music Moondog made in Germany, after moving there in 1974. The second is a recording of his last concert, on 1 August 1999. Both are excellent and amazing examples of Moondog's skills. Excellent notes and photographs.
Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978
"The Koeln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through "the complete continuance of creative music," and on towards the next millennium. The "success of the future" is not a lost cause as long as there is music like this in the air."-Graham Lock"Although Anthony Braxton does not play on this double CD (whose contents were released for the first time in 1995), his presence is certainly felt. He conducts the band through a fairly free improvisation and five of his compositio…
Trio
The expansive length of Morton Feldman’s Trio (1 hr., 45 min., 22 sec.) requires a new approach to listening, which takes scale, the physical experience of sound, and novel uses of musical memory into consideration. With his delicate manipulation of musical materials, Feldman blurs the listener’s sense of time as their musical memory struggles to distinguish between past and present sounds - listeners are free to lose themselves in the beauty of each musical moment. Aki Takahashi and Rohan…
Tom&Gerry
“In June of 1997 Thomas Lehn and Gerry Hemingway came together for a duo tour in Germany that had originally been planned as a quartet with Mats Gustafsson and Barry Guy. But the budget was meager and salvaging the tour seemed the best option and so the tour went on as a duo. Thomas recorded all of the concerts and the extensive recordings were recently compiled into this double CD, which was painstakingly edited, sequenced and mastered to provide the best possible showcase for this superb…
Exp
Raster Noton's rhythmic auteur, Frank Bretschneider, presents his first album in three years, a "music-visual project based on the idea that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music". 'EXP' is an attempt to assimilate the qualities of music, namely rhythm, movement, tempo, mood, intensity and compositional structure within the visual aspect. The music for the project is arranged from an array of generated and selected waveforms sourced from pure electricity, magnetism, light an…
W2 (1998-2008)
"We think that we « make a journey » but soon enough it's the journey that makes – and unmakes - us." (Nicolas Bouvier, "l'usage du monde"). When I listen today to these pieces, I hear, of course, a geographic inventory of all the places I encountered. Above all, though, and as if by default, I hear the sonic journal of twelve years spent recording sound.My relation to the sites wasn't based on a desire to « document » but it is worth noting, however, that a « sound story », more trivial perhaps…
Songs About Nothing
Stunning double disc collection of mind-erasing loops, avant classical drone and minimal cold wave threat from Jason Lescallett, presented as a back-handed tribute to Big Black’s notorious 1992 album Songs About Fucking: Songs About Nothing is the sound of pure entropy, moving from ear-scalding feedback sculptures through nod-out minimal synth repetition through scrambled choral works and widescreen soundtrack drones. The first disc unfolds in a series of stately movements linked by a form of ob…
Null II & Null III
Null II and Null III are the second and third part of the well-known Italian/Swiss composer’s massive electronic work on the theme of “nothing” (Null), whose first part saw the light with the 2010 Die Schachtel “Null” edition in ZeitComposers series.In this pieces Archetti’s thick sound drones borders on the edge of tonality as their many layers develop with a sort of “geological” pace. The work is in fact intended as a musical research on the “interior” of sound, obtained by large masses of sou…
Falls Of Time
Ahead of their time, the enigmatic Italian band A.t.r.o.x. were one of the first bands to move beyond the new wave styles and introduce strong electronic elements, an abstract-minimal heart attack in the best possible way. Lovely double CD set with their entire production.
Forbidden Planets, Volume 2
Subtitled: More Music From The Pioneers Of Electronic Sound. "Further to Chrome Dreams' enormously popular first Forbidden Planets CD comes this superb second volume of music from the pioneers of electronic sound. Compiled and annotated once more by music historian Alan Clayson, and featuring his extensive sleeve-notes, the two discs here, featuring 142 minutes of some of the strangest sounds ever recorded, will again delight fans of this most intriguing and previously un-compiled genre." …
Macbeth
The unspeakable evil in three nameless acts: We proudly present Salvatore Sciarrino’s Macbeth, recorded at the 2011 Salzburg Festival, released for the first time as an audio document!The infiltration of microorganisms of sound, restless reticence, ephemeral slitherings, whisperings, whizzings ... – and all of it develops a kind of intensity only the great Italian master is capable of creating. Salvatore Sciarrino’s opera Macbeth was presented in the fifth, and final, year of the Kontinent serie…
Mal des ardents / Pantonéon
eRikm, turntables, electronics, live sampling. Catherine Jauniaux, voice, bird call, cupule, cazoo. In the beginning, there are stories, sometimes dark, told by Catherine Jauniaux. With stunning ease, she invents imaginary conversations where several protagonists spring from deep in her throat, like rabbits out of a hat, like actors from Japanese Noh theatre. eRikm's electronic sounds fuse and infiltrate hers creating an unsettling environment Ð clearing the way or tangling it up in a so…