New Arrivals

CD version: Leon Dufficy is primarily known as guitarist in the hippie-jam outfit, Hush Arbors, but now he steps into his own as the driving force behind Winter Drones. Sounding like the perfect combination of fuzzed-out ambient drift, shoegaze swirl and propulsive pop sensibilities, Winter Drones have slowly gained attention in their native U.K. with a handful of obscure CD-R/cassette releases and compilation appearances. Earlier this year, the band's debut album, Blood In The Coffin, ca…

No guitars and fuck two-second gaps. A collection of six 7"s (Gutter Splint, Fortune b/w The Eyes Of Men, Epistasis, Vacuum, Vanishing Point, and the split with Agathocles). Performed by CHARLIE MUMMA, CORYDON RONNAU, JOHN WIESE. The only band to make a Milton and a Mentors reference on the same album. Typically I think noisecore is best in small blasts, but for those who can't find or play the records, this collection is still pretty terse, don't worry.

'Two musicians from very different backgrounds finding common ground. The first half consists of studio duets on guitar and viola recorded in New York City without any electronics, but they are not what one would expect from these two instruments. The second half is very different - recorded in concert in Geneva with a liberal amount of electronics.'

Now this a strange one. I never would've thought I would be paired with Jaap Blonk... it seems an unlikely combination. But when Tijs van Trigt asked us to perform at his AMPsnacks event in Arnhem, we had such a blast that we decided to do some recording together. This cd is a selection of three hours of improvisation we recorded at STEIM in Amsterdam. Quite a rollercoaster I'd say!

Winterreise is the audio soundtrack to a series of photographs with the same name produced by Atom TM. The series was exhibited during 2011 in Tokyo and Frankfurt (excerpts included in the packaging of the Winterreise CD edition). The Winterreise soundtrack may be considered a sequel to the Liedgut (R-N 099CD) album, in the sense that the resulting photo series was conceived as a consequence of the contextual framework which Liedgut both initiated and provided. Winterreise, though, is a far m…

Israeli bassist and Improvised Music pioneer Jean Claude Jones revisits eleven musical pieces recorded live and in studio over a period of ten years, performing, what he calls recomposition of the pieces. In his own words: 'As opposed to mere editing, recomp involves the deconstruction, subtraction, rearrangement, and reconstruction of the material. It not only changes the sequencing, but it radically affects the feeling and the flow of the music. It also changes the texture of the weave, the vo…

Liquid Architecture 13: Antarctic Convergence has been conceived by the curators as a way of investigating the philosophical, social and environmental ramifications of the growing human presence in Antarctica through the activities of a diverse set of artists who have produced works from first hand encounters of the continent. Specially curated by Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis, this program draws on a range of Australian and international artists who have undertaken fieldwork in v…

This cd documents a series of 3 sound installations originally presented at the Schindler house / MAK center for art and architecture Los Angeles in 2001. Garden was placed near the back of the lot facing the house in a bamboo grove via 8 small speakers. A quiet flexible background for a harmonious life was placed in a small hallway of the house on headphones. Pathway was placed along the front path to the house on 4 larger speakers. The outdoor works were set to relatively low volume lev…

'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.'

Sublunar is the first full-length release from Kane Ikin who is also known as one half of the duo Solo Andata. Sublunar follows Kane’s solo debut Contrail (7”, 12k2022) picking up where that EP left off and pushing the boundaries outward in every direction into denser, deeper, wetter and more decayed terrain. The word “sublunar” can be read to contain many conceptual layers important to the album. It is music about moonlight, darkness, the faintest hint of light and shadow.... Moons locke…

Rutger and Stephen sort of accidentally met through e-mail. A simple note regarding an ordering question for a CD led to an enthusiastic e-mail conversation and climaxed in a musical collaboration. This all happened in a very short period, both musicians being very inspired by the concept of “exchange,” as a means to cross space and time -- Rutger living in the Netherlands and Stephen in Virginia. Most of the time, when (electronic) musicians work together it’s a matter of swapping digital files…

1st live album by Norway's Geir Jenssen - recorded in 2007 by Chris Watson & mastered by Touch stalwart BJNilsen. In the early 1990s, he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic & enduring. Here, he incorporates samples of field recordings by Jony Easterby & trumpet by Anders Karlskas, invoking a sparser, more arresting sound.

Esoteric, modal and deep jazz from the European underground, 1963-1972. At the end of the '50s, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue heralded the revelatory arrival of modal jazz. As the vibrations of these giant steps resonated across the world, European jazz musicians reassessed their bearings and began to steer a new course. Across the continent, they sent roots down into the rich soil of the European folk and Christian liturgical traditions, extended their music along ancient routes of communicat…

David Chiesa - double bass. Jean-Sébastien Mariage - acoustic guitar. Recorded by Pierre-Henri Thiébaut at école Britten in Périgueux.

The Preservation label presents The Baroque Atrium, the second full-length album from Seattle's Panabrite. Panabrite is the solo recording project for Norm Chambers, who over a short time has grown a catalog of works showcasing a natural empathy for tapestries of sound that are eclectic, intricate and immediate all at once. Marking new ground in pursuit of pre-digital synthesis, Chambers' work as Panabrite is a shining light among those currently finding inspiration connecting sound explora…

"Umbra was recorded in 2010 in Barcelona. I used a modified  AM radio and a home-made oscillator. I found the radio in the street the previous year, discarded outside a huge warehouse full of electronic ‘garbage’. I took it to my studio and modified it using circuit-bending techniques. Umbra is comprised of ten short pieces. In most of them I played only the modified AM radio, in others just the oscillator, and in some both.”Juan Matos Capote is an artist from the Canary Islands living in Barcel…

Through the open sound portals created by his compatriot Castiglioni, the Italian pianist Alfonso Alberti first entered col legno's World of New Music; on his second album, he dedicates his sensitive and brilliant musicality to Gérard Pesson's fragile and puzzling fabrics of sound. A selection of piano pieces has been compiled in a joint effort by the pianist and the French composer; in his interpretations Alberti lets us catch glimpses of musical structures as though they were glittering just u…

Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web details on The Books are sketchy, but I have ascertained that they're a duo consisting of guitarist Nick Zammuto, who lives in North Carolina and has released some solo material under his surname, and cellist Paul de Jong, who lives in New York and has composed for dance, theater and film. After that, the pool of Books information dries up fast. The music is similarl…

Vladimir Nabokov: the master of "chamber music in prose" (literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki) and composer of crackling word sonatas. Franz Koglmann: a commuter between jazz/avant-garde and literature, and writer of intimate sound novellas. It was only a matter of time before Koglmann would create "Music on Nabokov," and transform literary motifs and characters into music. Together with his Monoblue Quartet (Tony Coe, clarinet/saxophone, Ed Renshaw, guitar, Peter Herbert, bass) the trumpeter K…

The Complete Works for Flute and Clarinet: In both original works and transcriptions, the Ebony Duo explores Scelsi’s use of special sound colors and his coloring of sound. Transcriptions especially prepared by the clarinetist (and pianist) Michael Raster provide the basis for some of the works on the present album. Yet Scelsi’s original intentions incurred no damage as a result of this recrafting. To the contrary! “The formidable technical demands that playing on two strings with in part opposi…

Spend any amount of time in the company of Keith Rowe and the names of certain painters will arise in conversation with some frequency. Caravaggio, Twombly and, among others, most definitely, Mark Rothko. Just as, long ago, he'd imagined what the guitars in Braque's cubist painting might actually sound like, so, I think, he did with Rothko, often referring to the way the "tinged" the space in which they were hung. For some time, in the early oughts, Rowe tried to place his music in a similar are…

WhisPers for WoLves is the solo pysch/noise/folk project of Melissa Moore. The musician, experimental instrument builder, installation/sound artist, and sculptor based in Baltimore,MD. "Language of the Dards" is a multi-part series of pieces developed around the text/teachings/songs of Indian Yogi, Milarepa made of three long recordings of voice/finger-pickin guitar, nepalese oboe, and electronics. The album comes in a hand-assembled gatefold sleeve.

'When dealing with female interpreters of the art of advanced vocalism, four personal favourites come to mind : Diamanda Galàs, Meredith Monk, Shelley Hirsch and - more recently - Non Credo's Kira Vollman. I'm afraid that I'll have to add a fifth chair at the table. I had already met Ute Wassermann in a great CD on Creative Sources, Kunststoff, a duo with trumpet player Birgit Ulher; yet, Birdtalking is one of those records that immediately raise all aerials, a top-rank effort in which a single …

Kraut-rock at heart, this is a brtual, cosmic melange of sound & rhythm, where Terry Riley-like keyboard motifs entwine w/ intense Battles-esque drumming, clouds of audio detritus, gamelan gongs, rewired synthesizers, & clashing feedback guitars. Oscilating between pools of crystal-clear ambience & miasmic clouds of dense noise, it spans entire decades of musical exploration: the fractured psych dreams of The United States of America, the dense weave of Stockhausen's Hymnen, the intensity of Con…

The trio of pianist Aki Takase, guitarist/daxophonist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, and trumpeter Axel Dorner in an exploration of informed and exquisite dialog in acoustic and electric improvisation. This trio's musical inspirations give birth to an amazing, extraordinary, mind-boggling mandala of sound. It's an extreme sound that could only be achieved by people engaged in the ultimate sonic and musical explorations. Surrender yourself to the joyful sounds coming out of the left and right speaker…

A "classic" minimal ambient album; just one long track, a bit obscure, of a static nature but unarrestable as a matter of fact and slowly developing, built with layers of soft and “round” sounds, heavily processed and effected, whose origin seems to be an organ... "Atypical" for sure, if confrontated with the huge and widely diversified productions of Maurizio Bianchi, this new album is probably one of the last and not to be missed releases signed by “M.B.”, since he has already announced his de…

"Ghost Surveillance is Algernon's third album and is their first on a label able to reach a wider audience. Their music brings a lot of influences together in surprising and entertaining ways. A quick listen to the download sample will show you why we have such great enthusiasm for this band, as they manage to be quite accessible while pushing stylistic boundaries and exploring new paths. Algernon are one of Chicago's fastest rising young bands. All instrumental, they feature a unique line-up of…

The first thing this CD reminded me of was Tape...then I checked out the press release and it turns out that Tape's Johan Berthling (also very recently sighted on that Fire! with Jim O'Rourke record) is in fact one-third of this band, the other two being Andreas Soderstrom (Ass) and Per Eklund on drums. It is, as you would expect, gently paced instrumental stuff, slightly pastoral-sounding, with intertwining guitars and a some subtle Hammond organ and trumpet bits. This is a mightily rel…

The Preservation label presents Beeswax Ephemera from Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller. With one eye on the future and one on the past, his playing has considerable technical and abstract expanse, though retains a wonderful melodic sensibility upfront. Evan’s experimental leanings give Beeswax Ephemera an idiosyncratic quality that mark an inventive new talent in the world of artists taking guitar music into exciting new directions. These nominally earthy compositions take flight with the undenia…

First collaboration between Maurizio Bianchi and Akifumi Nakajima, the second one being the Mectpyo Saisei on Para Disc. Four long tracks of drowsy noise ambiance.

"Produced by Centre international de recherche musicale, Nice, France. Project involving 22 instrumentists featuring Pierre-Yves Artaud (flutes), Alexandre Ouzounoff (bassoon), Daniel Kientzy (saxophone), Vinko Globokar (trombone), Elisabeth Chojnacka (harpsichord). Puzzle 1999 (14-17) commissioned by INA-GRM." (Discogs)"An extension of the 'virtual orchestra' in which composer Pascal composes music out of gathered individual instrumental tones and lines (with the musicians never having met …

A Chilean band living in Paris, who do a really fuckeded up punk rock influenced equally by Captain Beefheart, Os Mutantes, and Caroliner. Limited to 300 copies.

An inspired fusion of Middle Eastern rhythms and psychedelia resulted in this the gorgeous album by accomplished oud player John Berberian and his troop of skilled musicians. First released on Verve/Forecast in 1969 this exotic album features music based on traditional themes from Turkey, Armenia, Greece, Arabia and North Africa blended with the terrific improvised energy of psychedelia. So what you end up with here is bustling bazaars and scorched sands passed through the prism of the lysergic …

One of the pioneers of laptop electronics, Ikue Mori has been breaking new ground on the musical frontier for three decades. From her early days in the landmark no wave band DNA, to her years as a regular in the downtown improvisation community and more recently as one of the epicenters of the international laptop electronic scene, Ikue has become an underground hero -- yet her work is still sorely underappreciated. This newest solo CD features Ikue's idiosyncratic take on contemporary dance rhy…

Reissued by Fledg'ling in 2007, this is a classic title from 1971 by Chris McGregor's magnificent big band -- Brotherhood Of Breath. Arguably one of the most influential albums to emerge from the London jazz scene of the early 1970s, the Brotherhood of Breath was an exuberant big-band created by South African-born pianist and composer, Chris McGregor. In South Africa, McGregor had formed the racially mixed Blue Notes in the early 1960s. By 1964, finding it very difficult to work at home, t…

'My role in bringing together this group was to provide a new context for the diverse talents of these musicians. From the outset, the aim of the group was to explore the range of possibilities at the intersection of jazz and computer music.' Adam Linson. This is a terrific CD with this stellar line-up: Axel Dorner (trumpet, electronics), Rudi Mahall (bass clarinet), Adam Linson (double bass, electronics) and Paul Lytton (drums, percussion). Recorded on 14 January 2008 in AL's studio, Josetti Hö…

Four exotic and talented women doing the Book of Angels. A capella. “Mycale” is definitely not my favorite entry in the already 13 albums long series (even though I only have half of those yet), but it is an entirely new approach to the material and therefore about as fresh and original as I suspect it can get after versions over versions of these kind of compositions. But mainly it’s just a lot of fun.

Collaboration between Canada's prolific neo-doom duo (NADJA) & New Zealand's pitch black droners (BLACK BONED ANGEL - featuring Campbell Kneale of BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL). These two 20-plus-minute instrumental tracks have a less accessible vibe then the Jesu-like track on last year's Christ Send Light EP. They are comprised in equal parts of Nadja's fuzzed-out, lurching, hazy dream-doom, & Black Boned Angel's razor-sharp, metallic riff-shards. Eventually, the whole thing collapses under the weight…

Fantastic all-electric three way that sees Bruce Russell of The Dead C (on analog electronics) joined by Richard Francis on modular synth and computer and Jason Kahn on analog synth, radio and mixing board: recorded live on January 28th 2011 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, this is a single 38 minute improvisation that feels environmental in scale but with a heady synthesized aspect that makes for a ghostly metal machine music. Three distinct voices make for a bafflingly beau…

Composed and produced by Marc Behrens in 2007-2008 in Bergen, Oslo and Frankfurt am Main. Basic material recorded in Gloppen, Bergen, on Utvær island, at Brenndalsbreen glacier and close to Rosskleivvatnet lake, Norway. Sleppet originated from a sound art project in 2007, when six renowned artists (Natasha Barrett, Bjarne Kvinnsland, Steve Roden, Chris Watson, Jana Winderen and Marc Behrens) recorded sounds on a 10-day trip through the Norwegian Westlandet region and used the nature exper…