New Arrivals
Peace Conference
"Mountain Ocean Sun is a project fronted by His Name Is Alive main man Warren Defever, who collaborates with three like-minded drone artists for an hour-long recording of shruti box, harmonium, bells, gongs and violin. The group's first performance was at a 500 year old Buddhist temple in Osaka, and that pretty much sets the tone for the quartet's quasi-mystical approach to soundscaping. Defever himself continues to mythologise, describing the recording as having been made "on a mountain, in the…
Anyway Your Children Will Deny It
After excellent reviews and endless touring all over the world, supporting bands like Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu and Sic Alps, the Italian weirdos Father Murphy are back with a brand new album titled “Anyway your children will deny it”. It is the latest, boldest installation of an ongoing series of albums investigating the band’s favorite themes: life, death, love, religion and even more death. For this album, the Italian trio comprised of Reverend Freddie (vocals, guitar), Chiara Lee (vocals, keyboards,…
Resume the Cosmos
"Resume the Cosmos" finds the unclassifiable Virginian band Rake performing some of their most diverting and accessible work to date. The five nameless tracks that make up the disc were culled from many hours of studio improvisation, not only on a range of atmospheric instrumentation, but also with studio space and "silence" itself. The elusive membership of Rake play out like reconstructed indie rock fans with fistfuls of Sun Ra/Coltrane/70s Miles/Art Ensemble of Chicago/Henry Cow scattered thr…
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…
Virtuoso Saw
the pure union musician, was the sawtooth performer with the occupation musician who serves the oboe player of the los angeles symphony. it attends the musician of the band companion in the back, announcing the extremity of sawtooth performance with the transcendent tech which is lined to the beauty consciousness and professional ability of western classical music. the elegant solo album 1985 indicates one direction of sawtooth music. the japanese first appearance. the booklet attachment of valu…
Dead Space
Blip is a duo collaboration between Jim Denley and Mike Majkowski: two of Australia's most prominent improvising musicians. They began playing together in 2002, as members of The Splinter Orchestra, and formed Blip in 2009. They have been developing their own approach to the woodwinds/strings duo arrangement, deconstructing and reconstructing this format. Blip music focuses on duration, the subtleties of sound, the pitch within timbre and texture, as well as pulse. Wi
Blueprints
Over the past 10 years 12k has established itself as a label on the forefront of minimalist music and has become home to some of the most important artists of the genre. It is label that time and time again has not been afraid to release debut albums from new artists, drawing on the new energy they interject into both the scene and the label.With the release of Blueprints, 12k presents 2 tracks each from 6 artists new to its roster and showcases some of the new sounds and influences that will ca…
EARR plays a Snare is a Bell
a Snare is a Bell is a solo piece for snare drum, voice and the room in which it is played.Inspired by some close encounters I had with African shamanic/trance musicians and my personal experiences with meditation and music, it also relates to a known-to-many-of-us acoustical wonder of sitting on the toilet and picking up the tone of that little room (often by accident while coughing or talking out loud to oneself) and enjoying to sing that tone and let the toilet become filled with an eno…
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 …
Tourbillon D'Obscurité
Philippe Petit is interested in soundtracks; even if he creates original music he'd rather be introduced as a "musical travel agent" than a composer. Petit uses a Cymbalum, an Electric Psalterion, computer and synths to build up electronic layers, process acoustic and field recordings.
To second the machines he likes to move various glasses,
or percussive objects, and take advantage of vinyl material to fondle released sounds. A journalist for various magazines and radio as well as a musical ac…
Los Autodisparadores
A soft immersion, leaving the surface behind,knowing that on the inside, wide horizons are waiting.In the mines of matter: laboring and exploring, searching and will-o‘-wisping, but always with compass and sextant at hand.Ample discoveries are the prize – never boastfully on display,but tended with archeological care: larger molecular aggregates, atoms, elementary particles; interacting or alone.A journey, seemingly documenting itself through close observation. Land surveying through experiencin…
Mind Ctrl: Psychic
A new label (The Fader) brings a deluxification of 2009's Psychic Chasms, which now also contains the bonus album Mind Ctrl: Psychic Chasms Possessed, featuring nine exclusive remixes and cover versions by Toro y Moi, Body Language, Javelin, Bibio, Yacht, Darby Cicci of The Antlers, Twin Shadow, Dntel, and Anoraak!An elusive new project from composer Alan Palomo, Neon Indian delivers equal parts synthetic nostalgia, dream-pop lullabies, and grinding guitar noise to create something eerier t…
Musics In The Margin Vol.4
Fourth opus of musical art brut, faithful to our precepts, we search out self-taught musicians. That means people who make contemporary music outside the customary production and distribution channels and with the determination and creative gifts that stem from unmistakable artistic talent. Some of these musicians operate in mental or social isolation and make their music in special workshops while others can be classified with the spiritualist or visionary artists. This particular relationship …
Exécution des hautes œuvres
Roro Perrot is acoustic improvised songs by Romain Perrot, aka French master of Harsh Noise Wall Vomir. CD released by French label Premier Sang
Shunt
Strøm are Gaudenz Badrutt, pianist and electronic musician (1972) and Christian Müller (1971), clarinettist and electronic musician. Under the name of strøm the two artists from Biel mix since 2001 various ingredients: free improvisation with conceptual music, contemporary music ideas with free jazz explosions, down to earth, drifty energy with spherical sound. The duo mixes electro-acoustic chamber music skillfully with allusions to contemporary pop-aesthetics. Both musicians studied at …
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…
The Hexagram on Grace
Third soloist album by Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien, Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, Praxinoscope). During the same period of self isolation in the Westrn Alps that brought to life MCIAA's 'Photoelectric Season' double album, Roberto conceived the creation of his new full-lenght album, inspired by the mystic aura of the nature surrounding himself. Focusing himself on his peculiar wordless vocalizations, and using simply a mini-key…
Post
Post is the solo guise for James Wilkinson, who has gleefully cracked the ground between free jazz and punk in Bucketrider and made sonic cinema with the electro-dub-hip-hop fusion of High Pass Filter. He’s also provided innovative sound design as director for the internationally acclaimed Snuff Puppets, and his adventurous spirit runs free through Post’s pop persona. It’s the same ecstatic abandon shared by the likes of Mouse on Mars, Plaid and Caribou. Post’s playful but stirring sense of comp…
Wege
Wege translates as 'path' and it's a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums' four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape. Wege is Belfi's forth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Be…
Civiltà Paleospaziale
Italian minimal synth & drum machine duo, another side project by Ottaven/Canedicoda, abstract dread sounds with elements of clinical drone and throbbing frequencies to a more introspective ambient chaos