New Arrivals
Benzedrine Bonanza
Where spring LP Omelette Of Disease was an orgy in painfully hard driven feedback, and the early summer cassette Overdrive focused on rumbling low-end, Benzedrine Bonanza brings a live all-at-once approach. Not unlike Schakalens Bror's earliest cassette excretions, yet now more refined and with the energy of his later live shows successfully transferred to tape. Fully fledged free form guitar noise in a league of its own.
Luminous
Two giants of improvised music Barry Guy and Gerry Hemingway joining pianist/composer Simon Nabatov, for a concert recorded live in Loft, Cologne, Germany on 30-31st October. Simon Nabatov - piano, Barry Guy - double bass Gerry Hemingway - drums, marimba
Standing Waters
The Italian guitarist Maurizio Abate is a rare breed - an experimental musician from Europe working within, and expanding the American tradition of Guitar Soli, an idiom first pioneered by John Fahey. Abate initially emerged within a diverse series of collaborative released over a decade ago, but, as the years passed, a love for his instrument, with inspiration provided by Fahey’s indication of its potential for application as a one man orchestra, prompted to him to embark on a pursuit of solo …
Duo and Trio
This is the 1st CD release commemorating the 6th anniversary of Ftarri, the CD shop in Suidobashi, Tokyo. Seijiro Murayama, who lives in France, is active mainly in Europe, giving truly original performances using drums, percussion and voice. Toshihiro Koike is a trombone player who lives in Nagoya. He is the leader of the trio Fuigo, whose other members are Kanji Nakao and Takero Sekijima; and he is also a member of the Satoko Fujii Orchestra. His improvised performances freely using expanded p…
Tumo Plays Cristián Alvear
Yuma Takeshita, who plays a modified bass guitar that he calls an electro-bass, and drummer/percussionist Yuji Ishihara have established reputations for musical excellence. Takeshita and Ishihara perform improvised music together in their duo project, Tumo. In 2017 Tumo gave a series of four concerts at Ftarri in which they performed composed works. On the occasion of a visit to Japan by Chilean guitarist Cristián Alvear, the duo performed “DosCuatro” [2017], a text score work they had commissio…
Seb-i Yelda
Karl Records is welcomes a new artist on board; R.A.N. is the dark electronic/rhythmic ambient music project by Hüma Utku, and Şeb-i Yelda is her debut for Karl. Hailing from İstanbul and based in Berlin for a couple of years now, Utku has been a prolific artist lately: as R.A.N. she released her debut album Her Trembling Ceased, followed by the remix album Remixed: Stories Retold(both 2015). Inspired by the Ottoman poet Bosnian Sabit Efendi, R.A.N. created four new, very personal tracks, develo…
Cru 4 (Isidore Isou, Orlan, Mats Lindstrom, Jean-Paul Curtay)
Fourth issue of CRU Magazine, the annual magazine of the Berlin art space La Plaque Tournante ran by french composer Frédéric Acquaviva and english mezzo soprano Loré Lixenberg, which states what has happened or could have happened in the last year at La Plaque Tournante. This issue, printed at 500 copies, includes 1CD, 1DVD, 3 playlists of exhibited material, 3 postcards, 3 affiches and 3 catalogues into the form of posters, featuring Frédéric Acquaviva, Isidore Isou, Orlan, Mats Lindstrom, Je…
Bichon Frisé
The cassette release Bichon Frisé features 4 tracks of atmospheric and eerie New Age music, made by Børre Mølstad, Danielle Dahl, Niklas Adam and Anders Vestergaard at the beautiful peninsula "Nesodden" outside of Oslo back in 2013. The sound is both soothing and easy listening but with an underlying feeling of hallucinatory horror; perhaps not unlike the popular dog breed after whom it is named.
Uivo Zebra
When improvisers turn to electricity and imposing volume levels, the results are sometimes as intense as they are tedious, because they forget that it can quickly become a stodgy, lumbering mess that bleeds out way too soon. Not so here, as the musicians of Uivo Zebra have the experience, but also (and more importantly) the awareness that the most enduring results are found when guts, self-knowledge, shared vision and discipline are kept in rigorous balance. Which needn’t imply it becomes safe o…
Swaddling Songs
Classic, highly regarded and sought after acid folk / progressive rock album. Featuring girl singers Clodagh Simonds and Alison Williams, Mellow Candle never achieved commercial success they deserved spawning a legendary psychedelic folk-rock album akin to Fairport Convention or Fotheringay. Touring to support Thin Lizzy (Simonds played on Lizzy's album Shades of a Blue Orphanage) and Horslips, the band had a short lived existence. Clodagh Simonds later went on to play again with Mike Oldfield a…
Learn To Love Solitude
The Verge of Ruin is a research in sound and poetry that started in December 2015 by Stefano de Ponti and Shari DeLorian, in Milan. A view that lives in the present and at the same time is strongly connected with several guides and experiences out of the past. Constantly looking for new vanishing points and responding to creative impossibility which are caused by contemporary collapses of media. The framework referred to, is the one drawn by concrete music and acousmatic art of the XIX Century, …
Before We Were Foam We Were Unbridled Waves
Erasure of the contradiction between real and imaginary. Temporal layers are juxtaposed with different speeds, creating polyphonies of sound spectrums. The time flux is not regular or linear, it's bent."The latest dispatch from Los Angeles experimental cassette imprint Dinzu Artefacts comes from the duo De Ponti / Moretti. Their tape, Before We Were Foam We Were Unbridled Waves, is out now on its own or as part of the label’s July Batch. The clip, a live studio excerpt, provides a glimpse of the…
Mellow My Mind, a Sloow Tapes discography
Chronicling the first 10 years of Sloow Tapes, Mellow My Mind gives an overview of all the tapes, broadsides, lp’s and booklets published so far. From Keijo’s desolate avant/acid folk moves to Fursaxa’s spiked organ drones with a short detour by way of Ira Cohen’s Akashic Records. Fully annotated with detailed information about the tapes, promo texts, reviews and a few texts written especially for this publication by Bart De Paepe, Matthew Parry and Louise Landes Levi.
The Horde
Transistor formed in 2009 when Franck Vigroux was performing in NYC where Ben Miller led several projects. Vigroux was in a creative transition suggesting a stripped down electro-industrial sound with the latter as lead singer. Miller had sung in many bands before but never solely as a lead singer. The new challenge was intriguing. Shows were set up with Vigroux’s sub-bass and extreme frequencies blowing more than one PA system. They struck up an overseas collaboration releasing a self-titled EP…
Swimming in Light
Double bass, bass guitar, analogue synthesizer, vibraphone, piano, percussion, field recordings.It’s the Australian composer’s 6th solo album since his debut, Ink On Paper (2008) and possibly the strongest demonstration of his innovative extended technique, deployed in two subtly contrasting yet equally hypnotic sides. Using rapid bowing technique to paradoxically generate ostensibly static, sine wave-like tones, coupled with analogue synth, vibes, piano, percussion and field recordings, Majkows…
The Maadi Sessions
Limited edition of 200 copies on black vinyl. "I visited Egypt for the first time in October 2016, spending a week there, and I went back for a longer period the next February. Both times I stayed at Sara and Alberto’s place, a couple of friends who have been living in the Maadi district of Cairo for about a year. The first impact with the city and its inhabitants was definitely strong: I had trouble in defining the energy which pervades the streets 24 hours a day and the feeling of perpetual mo…
Anticlines
Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is a volume of bodily and geological substrates within poetic theory and sound. It is a place where skins and minerals dissolve and commingle, where gaseous subterranean leaks inflate lungs, where brain cavities echo interplanetary waves bent from passing through atmospheres. A former geotechnical engineer from Colombia currently residing in Berlin, Dalt’s concern with boundaries and edges shape the lyrics and music of Anticlines, her sixth album. Paying careful attent…
C6 GIG
Charles-Eric Charrier is one of those musicians for whom it is difficult to sum up the career process with just a few lines; there are curves, digressions, great jumps,doubts, daring since his beginnings with Dreta Lorelie, he has never ceased to explore new horizons, to open up to the world, to look behind the scenes, to question his music, and music in general - and thanks to all this, he has drawn the map of his inner world. We will avoid talking about rock, jazz, ambient, contemporary music,…
Framework 1-4
Murmer (Patrick McGinley) is an american-born sound, performance, and radio artist based in europe since 1996. Since then he has been building a collection of found sounds and found objects that have become the basis of all his work. In 2002 he founded Framework, an organisation that produces a weekly field recording-themed radio show, broad- and podcasting around the world. In 2005, he began working closely with the artist-run organisation MoKS in southeast Estonia, relocating there permanently…
Report
You've been carrying this suicide for the twentieth year and for the twentieth year in a row you still don't know what to do about this suicide you've been nestling in yourself for twenty years - and, after twenty years now, you still don't know what to do about the suicide you've been carrying for forty years. You go to the kitchen, you make coffee, you forget where you are, your thoughts concentrate only on the defeat you've been living with for sixty years, that after sixty years you still ha…