New Arrivals
Lips
'Lips' pairs Roman Hiele — the ultimate Antwerp cocktail karaoke swinger — and Lieven Martens — “dad of the year“, field recordist and English teacher. This outing, the duo’s first, was recorded at the venerable electronic studios of Worm in Rotterdam and at Studio De Ziltige Olijf in central Antwerp, where the stench of salty human bulk creeps into your mouth from about a mile away. During Hiele-Martens’ few concerts one could detect and, indeed, savour a Jiskefet-like attention to detai…
Mahmoud, Hassan Et Younes
A reissue of Les Frères Mégri's Mahmoud, Hassan Et Younes, originally released in 1974. Les Frères Mégri was a Moroccan rock band formed in Oujda, Morocco in the late 1960s. The band consisted of four members: the three brothers, Hassan, Mahmoud, and Younès, and their sister Jalila Mégri. Before the creation of the band, the Megri brothers were popular session musicians, composers, and producers in Morocco, starting in the late '50s. In the early '70s, Hassan and Mahmoud released four sing…
European Jazz Sounds
Alto Saxophone – Klaus Marmulla (tracks: 1-1 to 1-10, 2-1 to 2-15), Peter Reinke (tracks: 1-11, 1-12) Bass – Hajo Lange (tracks: 1-1 to 1-10, 2-1 to 2-15), Wolfgang Lauschert (tracks: 1-11, 1-12) Drums – Heinz von Moisy (tracks: 1-1 to 1-10, 2-1 to 2-6, 2-8 to 2-11), Joe Nay (tracks: 1-11, 1-12), "Eminenz" Roberts (tracks: 2-7, 2-12 to 2-15) Piano – Michael Naura Vibraphone – Wolfgang Schlüter (tracks: 1-1 to 2-6, 2-8 to 2-15) Vocals – Gitta Eilers (tracks: 2-14, 2-15) In the booklet drums for t…
The power of negative thinking
The International Nothing is the Berlin-based duo of clarinet players Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke. The two have been working together since 2000, refining a highly personal language focused on introspective, microtonal textures through stasis, patiently investigating timbre, multiphonics and extended techniques, with a commanding intensity spiced with a dry sense of humor (reflected also in the cover art by Japanese Masae Tanabe). This duo has released three albums on the Japanes…
Ghost
“The story of this album began with the idea of composing my response to Melodie – one of the Louis Andriessen’s pieces dedicated to Frans Brüggen. At first, I searched for information on the circumstances in which Louis Andriessen’s specific composition was created. As it has quickly turned out, however, I’m not so much interested in these circumstances any more. I have realized that this piece is a presentiment but also a goodbye. A farewell to the spirit of community. The community whic…
Sometimes
“Sometimes (harmony series 1)”, realization for female voice and three electronics players by Colectivo maDam. This piece was, as the title indicates, the first of the 34 pieces that would eventually become the harmony series. in this and all the other pieces in the series, i attempted to create the conditions for a harmonic situation without giving any actual notes. the main stimulus for this was swell piece (for Alison Knowles) (1967) by James Tenney (one of the postal pieces). i had reaso…
Plays Henry Purcell
Raphael Roginski, guitar. Olga Myslowska, voice, synth. Sebastian Witkowski, synths. “I feel a very intimate relation with English culture thanks to my admiration to the music of the 60s. But then there is also William Blake’s Albion, Benjamin Britten and the myths. I have been puzzled by why do I constantly hear the same thing in the music of Bert Jansch and Led Zeppelin, Joy Division and Dead Can Dance. And then in the music of PJ Harvey and Traffic. And in Henry Purcell too, and in John …
More Chamber Events
Antoine Beuger (flute), Christoph Nicolaus (stone harp), Burkhard Schlothauer (trumpet, bass drum). Before starting the event series in 1995, I had been occupying myself with nonrepresentational minimalist painting, in which, rather than representing anything from the objective world, the artwork itself becomes an entity, an object of the world. Would it be possible to realize such a degree of abstraction in music? In this series of compositions for solo instruments each sound by itself is c…
Seven Miniatures on El Hadji Sy
Alienated voices. Crackling noises. Abstract sounds of unidentifiable origins … these are just some of the sources that Zorka Wollny, visual artist / composer from Krakow (whose work a.o. has been presented at CTM Berlin or ICI London), and her Austrian partner Christine Schörkhuber - freelance sound artist, video maker and musician with residencies in St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Valparaíso, Buenos Aires a.o. – apply to create seven acoustic miniatures that are based on and inspired by pai…
Ssingggg Sschlllingg Sshpppingg
Our favorite shaman comes back with a new solo album. This awesome full length album by Charlemagne solo has been recorded especially for idiosyncratics. It has been brilliantly engineered by our long term associate Fredéric Alstadt (Angström Studio) and mixed by maestro Aymeric De Tapol. The artwork is an original collaboration between Charlemagne Palestine, labelboss Yannick Franck and Frau label designer Helena Dietrich, immortalized by photographer Laurent Meurice. It comes with a colo…
Listening to the Footsteps of Living Ones Who Are Still on the G
This is a duo album by Toshimaru Nakamura, a mixer player based in Tokyo, and Martin Taxt, a tuba player living in Oslo. Instead of a conventional tuba, Taxt plays a custom-made “microtonal tuba” capable of producing microtones. In this album, Nakamura incorporates Taxt’s tuba sounds in his mixer through a microphone instead of playing his usual instrument, the no-input mixing board, which does not take in external sounds. The project started with the concept of Nakamura processing the tub…
Organ Sonatinas And Drones
'Sonatina no. 1' (2016). 'Sonatina no. 2' (2016). 'Sonatina no. 3' (2016). 'drones' (2014). Carson Cooman, organ. Eva-Maria Houben has been performing works for the organ for more than 30 years. As she is related to the “wandelweiser-group” of composers, her compositions are published by “edition wandelweiser”, Haan. Her list of compositions up to now includes works for the organ, piano, clarinet, trombone, violoncello and other solo instruments, works for voice and piano, for wind and chamber e…
A Hint Of An Emotion
Beat Keller (Electric Guitar) Philipp Bowee (Electric Guitar) Recorded in Mellingen and Winterthur, Switzerland Recording: Philipp Bowee All tracks are composed (2014-2016), mixed and mastered by Cem Güney Special thanks to: Antoine Beuger, Sylvia Alexandra Schimag, Beat Keller, Philipp Bowee, Gil Sansón, Jeremiah Runnels, my wife and mother and to everyone who made this possible. 'a bas relief of a talisman' dedicated to Charles Ives 'soft kill incubator' dedicated to Sylvia Alexandra Sc…
Sublunar
Presented live in Los Angeles. Source material originally developed as part of mas gestos y mas caras, a collaborative performance with Rafa Esparza and Yann Novak, presented at the Hammer Museum on July 8, 2016. Robert Crouch is an artist and curator whose work encompasses sound, performance, and technology. As an artist, he locates his work with the intersection of post-phenomenological listening practices, conceptual sound art, and contemporary electronic music. At its core, his wor…
Removed
In 2000, The Wire wrote of Richard Chartier’s work: “it’s worth stretching the ears in search of Chartier’s sequences of exquisitely sculpted sonic events, as gorgeous detail bodies forth out of the shadows”… the same holds true today. Formed over the course of 5 years, Removed was a process of removal/erasure. Only trace elements appear from what was. Their interactions merely a ghost of a composition - subtle echoes across the sound spectrum. A glacially paced progression of discreet relat…
Liminal Studies
Wojciech Blecharz is somewhat an exhibitionist. An emotional one, of course. With his music, he doesn’t create a vision of the contemporary world burdened with disasters, being neither a “digital indigent” nor a fan of algorithmic passages. He’s not even recognized as a political rebel who discloses his outlook on life between the notes. In the centre of his interest remains what’s closest to him – the human psychological condition in the context of experiencing crises and break-ups, trauma…
Besando El Tiempo
Besando el Tiempo is a piece that was composed in 1995 in the space of four days. It was written in an automatic script that Maria de Alvear uses for many of her pieces. The work was originally composed for the flautist Caren Levine, who also gave it its first performance in Salzau in 1995. 'besando el tiempo' has now been performed several times worldwide by different interpreters. When Maria de Alvear heard the performance by Antoine Beuger, she asked him to give her a recording for herse…
Ephemeral Constructions
University of South Carolina experimental music workshop, Greg Stuart (director). Kallam Ashmore (objects), Brian Bethea (saxophone), Erik Carlson (violin), Eric Dennis (objects), James Easteppe (guitar), Jürg Frey (clarinet), Michael Halbrook (objects), Timothy Hall (guitar), John Kammerer (horn), Aj Karp (objects), Logan Mclean (voice), Lauren Phillips (objects), Brooke Rosenberg (objects), Chris Ruggiero (objects), Jessica Russell (objects), Nikil Sairam (violin), Bailey Seabury (percussion),…
Video Salon
The transcontinental collaboration of Arcata shoegaze abstractionist Brian Pyle and spectral Russian songstress Galya Chikiss began in Berlin, where the former was on tour and crashing with the latter, then finished in Northern California. Despite such distance, the duo’s debut feels symbiotic and seductive, shimmering nocturnal mirages of devotional drone and processional dub. Named after the site of certain of Chikiss’ formative teenage experiences (“trashy rooms with old anonymous TV sets and…
Sleeper
Daniel Menche is best known for his assemblages of visceral, industrial-strength noise. In such head-rinsing recordings as Vilké (2013), Deluge (2003), and Fields of Skin (1997), Menche's compositional directives instigate and exacerbate the physiological properties of anxiety -- increased blood pressure, blurred vision, claustrophobia, panic, disorientation, etc. In the hands of a talented composer such as Menche, noise can be demonstrative, cathartic and even communal. But after three decades …